Family Name: Dasov

Region (NA/EU): EU

Suggestions/Comments: 

The team did a lot of great work on NW revamp. There are great changes coming. Sadly I don't think it will end well for the NW scene.

A little background on me - I've been playing for just over 3 years, 2.5 PvPing and doing NWs for about two. I've seen two revamps in the past. I'm the chill PvPer prioritising good fight and community over the hardcore performance. Part it's what I like, part I don't have the time and energy to tryhard. I still enjoy PvP!

The feedback is based on what I see in the PvP community as the game changes over the years. Guild League is great example of success - smaller fights in more controlled envorment seems to work the best and from what I hear. It's what people enjoy the most. My feedback/suggestions will revolve around it.

The new system's game loop critique

The current NW game loop forces a fight. Only one stick has to stay for someone to get node. Guilds and alliances must constantly fight to get the node. No matter how strong the guild is.

In the new system there is a very little incentive to fight after capturing the strick. When you capture one you AFK and wait for others to show up with very little scope of defending yourself. As the NW progresses and the guild to ratio increses you get attacked by more and more guilds and that leads to zergfest.

Something that Throne and Liberty struggled. They've changed their "NWs" it to guild vs guild because players hated the zerg vs zerg that the previous implementation allowed. In the new system it's even worse as zerg will kill each other in the process and it will be complete mess.

Furthermore if a strong guild captures the stick the others will know and they decide if attacking them even makes sense. Often don't. So the NW will end for many guild even before it started.

For others who want to fight and win they will face the choice. Go for 10 min stick and possibly win but forfeit the fn of fight or fight and not get the node. It's a lose-lose choice.

Overall it also removes 99% of the content for the macro players. In current system the strenght of the ball matters but there is a way of outsmarting opponents. You can win by forse but there is a lot of potential to fight stronger opponents with brains. The new system, sad to say, turns the NWs into RBF style of fight where the bigger and stronger can always bully the weaker guilds without any counterplay.

Feedback on the new stick system: It's a miss

What can be done better:

If you'd like to keep the RNG placement - let people sign up what tier of the node they want to fight for, assign guilds to node ttiers att random in 1v1 matter and if there is more than 10 guild for tier for region add them to saturate the nodes. You can have preset stick positions of just allow build after assignment and let us build defences so worst case we can turtle and have a fight.

Even bettter and removing RNG placement - fragment the nodes as you did so the big bullies can't mess with everybody and let peole have smaller fights as the guild will disperse on different nodes. Similar as previous iteration. To stop snipes keep the K/D as requirement of getting node and rewards. If it's not met the node will get liberated. It will force guild to place on nodes where the fights are happening.

Diplo

That leads us to the "evil" politics. I understtand they are problem in KR but they are amazing in EU. Yes, it takes some effort but hundreds of people have more or less balanced fights working together and against each other in the effort to win the war.

Even the new system will have diplo, more hectic, but there will be alliances. Guilds screening sticks for each other and farming weaker guilds for content lettting others take sticks.

I'd say instead fighting it, as we're in a sandbox game, enable it. Let people know who placed already so we can choose if we want to fight them and/or ally with other against them. Put dimplo in the game rather than it happening on Discord.

Kepe the horse respawn and tent

Those are amazing changes and I don't think any NW player would disagree that saving time on repair / getting horse out of suply is the best QoL for NW that can be. Tthe choice of zone respawn I think is great as well as it adds more to the fights where there is no flag enabling even better macro outplays.

Making it easier

One of assumend reasons of rework is the sttrain on leadership for placement and building bases.

Possible solution could be prebuild bases on preassigned sticks. Get an experienced base builder and let them create a build for each stick that is set by default. This let everybody have tthe same level of base build, no pressure on leadership to build and even the newcomers will have high quality base build from the start.

NW elo rankings

Assuming there are smaller fights and more fragmented environment assigned by the system there is an opportunity to track who wins nodes. With that information the system could rank guilds in ownership and K/D and during assignment use it to match fights between similarly strong guilds. Kind of like Guild League functions today. This will also put the KR bully aliances against each other rather than letting them mess with other players. The waeaker guild will be happy to fight each other.

I remember in the previous system I was a part of Iron ELo guild, we sniped and then we transitioned to fighing with other guild who had no idea what they're doing on nodes that nobody wanted. It was a lot of fun. ELO system could bring the good fights and fun to everybody no matter the skill level. Sometime tthe matchmaking will give tough opponent but I believe we can live with one tough fight here and there.

Product/Dev team

I've spend over 20 eyars making software. PA as a whole does a steallar job in iterative improvement of the game. I can't find an example where a game would delive 2 patch notes with changes every week. I'm seriously amazed and impressed.

That being said - the PvP team feels like a "project squad" work or waterfall all along in contrast to the rest of company. I base this assumption on infrequent changes to PvP content - NWs reworks every 1-2 years, RBF haven't changed ever. New PvP content coming once in a while and then being unchanged for the longest periods of time.

You, PA, do great job improving the game already. Maybe the best for the NW/PvP communit is none of the tactical ideas I presented but a strategic change in applying what you do great for the PvE part of the game and use the same methods o iterative change for PvP.

Thanks for reading :)

Dasov