Warplot in Wildstar. Was this a good idea? What went wrong?

MMOExposed

Warplots are described as a custom 40 vs 40 PvP mode. Seem as if you could potentially put together some interesting Faction PvP gameplay concepts. So what went wrong?

iixviiiix

I think if you want to talk about something , you need to go detail . For example , i who never play wildstar don't even know what you are talking about .

snoocky

Wildstar is dead?

Scot

Yep

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

cameltosis

MMOExposed said:

Warplots are described as a custom 40 vs 40 PvP mode. Seem as if you could potentially put together some interesting Faction PvP gameplay concepts. So what went wrong?

I'm a bit late to the party and never got far enough to experience warplots directly. But, im always happy to speculate!

For those who don't know what warplots were, they were a bit like guild housing designed directly for PvP. Your guild would build up their own base, placing turrets and doors wherever they wanted, on their own instanced warplot. Then, you would challenge another guild and your warplots then became joined. You then had to destroy your enemy's base (get to a central point?) whilst defending your own.

It wasn't a new idea, more like an extension / next step of this sort of feature. In SWG, you could build a PvP base inside your cities in order to stoke up some PvP action, but it was very limited. I believe Age of Conan also had some form of instanced keep battles where one guild defended and another sieged? I don't know if there was any customisation involved in AoC.

My guesses as to why it didn't really work:

- High barrier to entry - I got the impression that it took a lot of time and resources to be able to build a decent warplot

- Difficulty organising - you not only needed to make sure you had 40 players to defend your warplot, some other guild also needed to do the same thing at the same time. Getting 80 specific players together is a big challenge!

- Very niche feature - being a PvP feature means you're already targeting a small proportion of your playerbase, but the way warplots worked means very few people are ever likely to participate

- Imbalanced gameplay experiences - given the high degree of organisation and committment needed, it is highly unlikely that you'll end up with anything remotely like balance between the teams. The top guilds would just smash the newer guilds, effectively driving those new guilds away from the feature.

- Lack of variety - I've only participated in ranked PvP in a couple of MMORPGs, but I found that I kept getting matched against the same teams and would be able to predict the outcome just from who I was facing. So, if there were only, say, 5 guilds on your server who did warplots, I imagine it'd get very boring very quickly.

I think the core concepts involved in Warplots were great! Allowing guilds to build something unique to themselves is a great way to increase attachment to the game. Then, giving those warplots a purpose makes it even better.

However,

I think the feature would have done much better if they had introduced a PvE mode - select a difficulty, then get attacked by randomised enemies. That would give it a tower defence or horde-like feel, protecting your base against waves of increasingly difficult enemies. A bit like a create-your-own-raid type feature! Good for testing out your base design, fun raid training for the guild, and it would help build confidence for engaging in the PvP mode.