What's the point on Blackreach?

Kwoung

For weeks (months?) now AD has held pretty much every resource on BR. Every time some small group tries to take something back, an AD zerg logs in and wipes you out, AD literally jumps from 1 to 2-3 bars the second you flag a keep. Other than the Friday night DC zerg that simply runs around the lake taking the keeps unmolested, and lets everything get taken by the EP team following behind them, there is nothing going on... and after the EP crew is done, AD takes the entire map again.

How is this fun for anyone, including any AD who are not part of the map domination team, since you more than anyone are completely blocked from gaining AP due there not being anything left to take?

Just to be clear, I am not griping about earning AP, that is especially easy with so many AD resources everywhere, just wondering what the fun is in this for anyone? Are a few purple rings really all that important, or did someone make some AD guild mad and they decided to ruin the fun for everyone out of spite?

VaranisArano

The point of Blackreach is that its not faction-locked, thus supposedly allowing players to swap to the outnumbered team in search of good fights when the map is taken over by the dominant faction. Theoretically, this should be a prime time to see that happen.

Now, what we see more often is that non-faction-locked play also allows for players to swap en masse to the winning side, which may account for some of AD's apparent dominance. Since their players don't actually want good, outnumbered fights, they stick with their only chance of making AP: zerging with AD to crush whoever touches their stuff.

If they really wanted to maximize their AP and were willing to do so as a group, they'd do the other thing that non-faction-locked campaigns allow: log onto another faction en masse and go sweep the map for easy AP. That's not exactly good for the health of the campaign either, though, so maybe we can be glad they don't?


Now, to be fair, faction-locked play has its problems! And faction-locked campaigns can run into exactly the same problem of groups taking the whole map and zerging any offense when there's a big enough population disparity in favor of one faction. But then again, one of the criticisms of the faction-locked campaigns was that "well, then players can't swap factions to have outnumbered fights and rebalance the campaign"...so I find it a little darkly amusing that, apparently, players in the non-locked campaigns don't do that either even though they have the choice.

Kwoung

Yeah, I have played both and was in a fairly large DC guild on GH, but for my own guild, most of which the members had never set foot in PVP and hated the thought of it, we chose BR as it was considerably less intense previously (ie: no ball groups) than GH and a great place to learn basic PVP and get your toes wet. Most of them actually ended up loving it and want to go out all the time now. Unfortunately, the 6-12 PVP newbs don't stand much of a chance against even equal numbers, never mind a complete zerg steamrolling you over a resource... hehe.

Anyhow, it used to be really well balanced a couple months ago, map changing all the time, close scores, etc... but ever since those tests started, no one but AD plays and they just insist on steamrolling everything now. I was literally soloing a resource the other day up in DC territory and 15 AD rolled in to mow me down just as the flag flipped, so I left Cyro and their chance to earn AP ended, as I was literally the only game in town.

You would think they would at least let the other factions take their stuff back, so they could recapture it and earn some AP, maybe even take defended keeps for some action, but nope. They only seem interested in complete domination of the map, AP be damned, which boggles my mind, as it makes no sense.

Ackwalan

Remember the old PC sim game where you build up a city. After awhile godzilla would come along and wreck the place. Perhaps, if a map is mostly one color and the population is low for an extended amount of time, instead of the hammer a dragon spawns and wrecks Keeps. The dragon would be a real dragon (Smaug) and Keeps he took over would need to be recaptured. He would also be extremely difficult to kill, but have no special loot to prevent farming him.

Kwoung

Another thought would be, that unless the realms are at a certain population, the scoring stops. The whole log in a few people at 1am, take the entire map and go to bed while your faction rakes in tons of points, just puts people off IMHO.. and makes it so no one wants to play when one realm pulls 30K ahead. Sure, you can personally earn AP, if there is something left to capture, but your realm doesn't disproportionately pull ahead just because you have some late nighters PVDing for you.