Jeff Hickman open letter highlights Mythic's top 5 priorities for WAR

Let me pre-face this by saying that I really like this game, A LOT, and it breaks my heart that it isn't living up to its potential. I love the art and the feel of this game, and the many RvR skirmishes that I've been in have been my favorite MMO experience to date. However:

1) Population: too much empty space as it stands. This game needs action across all tiers to be consistently fun. I have no idea how they could address this issue. Maybe only one pairing per tier open on low pop servers, two on medium, all three on high pop... Merge a whole bunch of servers so that they're all at least med-med population? Scenarios NEED to be popping when you want them.

2) Tier 4: I loved the game until T4. I quit for a few months after the keep swapping became utterly monotonous. The game needs to focus on ways to make us want to kill each other, not avoid each other. Never made it into a city, our server never had a high enough population to do it... But from what I've heard, I haven't missed much. I think they basically need to re-design T4. Get rid of Fortresses? Completely re-design the city sieges?

3) Crowd control: Seriously remove a good half of it. Tanks need it, and if they were the only ones that had it, they'd be gold in RvR.

4) Mob AI: There is PvE in this game, and it should be better. Mobs should have an aggro radius so that if you attack one with a buddy right beside him, his buddy should attack you, too. They should heal themselves, and have something remotely interesting about them. The first PQs in every starting zone are AWESOME. Others become cookie-cutter and "meh". Do something with the mediocre ones. "Easy PQs" was a great idea, a step in the right direction.

Anyways, I really hope that Mythic gets their act together like Funcom did and turns this game around. It's the MMO I want to play. Stylistically, I love it, and the main ideas behind it are great. It needs population, though, and in order to get it, they need to improve a bunch of stuff. I'll be re-subbing for LotD. I really hope that they use the time that LotD buys them to inject the fun factor into so places where it's needed. Good luck, Mythic!

You know I hear what the PVP players are saying ..this is WAR it was designed form the onset for PVP...the thing is there isn't enough PVP players who are interested in it to make it a viable product. I mean lets face it their big Expansion Land of The Dead is a failure...no one even wants to go, and those that do won't even bother with the Zone flip. To make matters worse Mythic put in a half assed PVE game, so not only do people not want to RVR they don't want to PVE...it all adds up to a great big pile of fail, which sucks because the IP is awesome.

Mythic is going to have to offer the Non PVP player something and quick, because if people want to play a FPS they will load up Halo, and I’m not the only one who says this you hear it constantly in region chat. LOD was suppose to be the turning point, if they can’t recover from this latest fail fast EA will Earth and Beyond their asses.

Scenario grinding has been solved... quite some time ago in fact. Those "top 5" are pretty close to what I'd list.

1. CC, I can't really speak to... it doesn't seem to out of line to me, but then if it doesn't involve getting my warband/zerg AE mezzed, stun-locked and dismantled without even getting a chance to fight back... I'm good.

2. My performance is pretty good even in keep defense, but there is still a bit of control lag on spells and abilities. Still... this should always be in the "top 5". Period.

3. T4 "experience", LotD will go a long way toward fixing, I think. Ultimately tho', adding in the missing cities is what is needed here.

4. Pop balance is always going to be an issue... because it's more than just the number of players per server. It's also a matter of ACTIVE RvR participants on any SPECIFIC night. There is always going to be someone griping about a perception of imbalance. There are obvious instances of one side "losing heart" after a long period of eating dirt every night... but there is a limit to what Mythic can and should do to address that. (I'd suggest googling an article by Myndpyre Ryche of fabled Tallon Zek called "EQPvP101".) Short of offering free play-time for transferring T4 characters OUT of an overpopulated realm... I'm not sure what more would be appropriate. Maybe expecting players to "man-up" and fight is too much to expect these days.

5. Itemization and rewards are another of those perpetual "top-5" items that they should never NOT be tweaking. The Sigil system goes a long way toward solving my biggest issue: the PvE gear-grind required to get to the top of the PvP power-curve. With that solved, the rest is just polishing rough spots, in my opinion.

I love this game. =)