Thank you all for your patience as the team too the time to discuss all the feedback and put together a comprehensive write-up.
Issues Raised in CDP:
Seasoned veterans pub-stomping newcomers who are not equipped with Best in Slot gear
A desire for separate PvP ability balance and gear that can be used
Complaints about artifacts and Mount Powers.
Pay to Win Complaints
More game Modes requested: Deathmatch, Capture the Flag
Solo Queue and Group Queuing
Rewards from playing PvP are bad outside of the season rewards, and do not help a player get better gear for PvP
Matchmaking does not take class into effect. It will sometimes create a team of only healers and tanks with no DPS, or put a bunch of DPS without any tanks.
Respawn timers need some looking into. It feels random.
Overall Problem:
Our current PvP approach doesn’t work for the majority of our audience which results in low PvP populations. Some of the concerns raised in the CDP are a direct result of this. For example, our PvP queues already try to match players by similar item levels, but it will only try that for a certain amount of time before matching together a random group. In the past this timer was longer, but due to the PvP community being small even with that longer delay we got the same imbalanced matches so we shortened the timer to reduce those waits.
This in turn results in newer players being put into matches with highly geared PvP veterans which is not a good experience. That bad experience makes those new players decide PvP isn’t as fun as they’d hoped it would be and they move on.
Even more geared and skilled players still struggle at times as they aren’t at the very top of how strongly they can be geared. This creates the call that PvP is “Pay to Win”. While we don’t feel that is quite an accurate statement, we do understand where the frustration is coming from.
One last side note since respawn timers came up. Those are a rolling respawn which means they aren’t your personal respawn timer but are instead your team’s. This is so that instead of players respawning one by one and trying to get back in the fight before others die, the team members who are dead can spawn together and do a coordinated attack. We should do a better job calling this out and displaying it for players.
Potential Solution:
Even before we had made April Fowl’s we had discussed moving PvP to a style of preset characters. It was an idea we would discuss on and off over time as we weren’t sure if it was the right move to make. During that time, we continued to grow the PvP audience by working on PvP balance, improving rewards, making a better campaign, and adding PvP Seasons.
While each of these steps would result in short term growth of PvP, it wouldn’t take long for the number of players participating in PvP to drop back down to low levels.
That fact combined with the strong positive reaction to April Fowls PvP has renewed our interest in approaching PvP in a new way with preset characters. Here is a rough outline of how that would work and how we might be able to roll it out.
Stages:
Alpha: Our first stage of development would be a simplified version of this concept that we would release in an Alpha state. This means it wouldn’t have all of the functionality and polish but would have the core gameplay for early feedback.
Alpha would have the following items:
The existing domination maps would now have a contact in the starting area which players use to choose their character.
We would strive to make 11 preset characters:
1 Henchman – the basic class you spawn in with that is weak. This is just to make sure players are not themselves and that they know to pick a real class before jumping into the action
7 Standard – these are different monsters/characters from Neverwinter that are free for all players to use
3 Premium – To make sure PvP doesn’t feel pay to win at all, we are going to approach it with the goal of having premium
characters/premium costumes instead of paying to have better gear. This is where more iconic Neverwinter characters would show up such as: Knox, Celeste, Makos. These shouldn’t give any statistical advantage; they are simply a different option and play style.
These preset characters would have their stats all set to fit their role/function and would have one set of powers on the power tray – 3 encounters, 2 dailies, 2 at wills.
That is all the Alpha build would have. This allows players to try out the new PvP right away and start giving feedback.
Beta: This stage is more about putting the polish on the existing functionality we’ve built, providing more class options to keep PvP fresh and the matches more varied. We would want to create the first aspects of progression (such as a campaign system or boon tree system). What the progression system is specifically will depend on both feedback and how we can leverage our existing tech.
Official: This is the stage where we call the feature fully released. For this stage we should add at least one new PvP match type. Either something like capture the flag, or a more involved match where a bigger group of players are in the match and there are a mix of PvP and PvE objectives to allow a wider range of players to participate.
By this stage we should have our progression system and UI setups finalized.
Future: Beyond the official release we will want to continue to add new classes and new costumes for existing classes. If PvP is proving to be particularly popular then we should continue to add a few different game modes and potentially bring back competitive seasons with a 3v3 death match smaller map style.
All of this is a proposal and can change in many ways. None of the call outs in this feature are a guarantee in any form or something we are locked into at this point.
Thank you to everyone who participated in the PvP CDP.
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