Conversational Leech

Because sometimes it's fun to take something someone else said and go, "Hey, I wanna talk about that too!"

Anyway, there's been a conversation bobbing about, like a tête-à-tête on the high seas, about what to do with Battlefield Objectives.  It's not that anyone has anything against BOs, personally, other than their unfortunate acronym and the fact that they exist to be farmed and farmed and farmed some more.  It's an "objective" just because it's there on the map, not because it does anything for your side other than give you a few renown points, contribute a bit toward capturing the zone, and adding guards to the keeps -- which seems like a lot when you put it down on print, but it's most certainly not that impressive when you've spent what seems like half of your time in oRvR sitting at these objectives waiting for the "cap" (Captain Crunch?  Kirk?  America?).  There's, frankly, too little to do with them, and very little reason to fight over them.

In our last ChaosCast, Keen just wanted to see them gone.  Arbitrary wants to turn them into villages you can plunder.  In between changing his blog layout for the 5,261st time, Regis wishes we could take warcamps instead.  So what do I say?

I don't want to see BOs go away, because then we're just left with Keeps and a vast expanse of oRvR wasteland.  There's a great potential to do SOMEthing with BO's and give players a reason to diverge from their normal schedule of keep zerging, the question is what?

Arbitrary's idea has a lot of merit, especially if you expand that idea to include not just little villages, but anything that you can (a) deface, (b) burn, (c) loot and (d) manipulate.  What if you captured a BO and then everyone would immediately go on a frantic easter egg hunt looking for little clickies that could give you random loot?  Or the longer you held a BO, the bigger a "defense bonus" would appear in your inventory when it finally fell?  What if you could tear down the walls of a building, or put fire to the roof, or plant a flag for every guild that took the BO that time around?  What if BOs gave you tools that you could wield in oRvR elsewhere -- summonable NPC guards, siege equipment, ladders, one-shot abilities, maybe even a two-minute buff that would show all of the enemy forces on your map?  What if by capturing a BO, you'd extend the respawn timer on killed enemy players in the zone by 15 seconds, to slow them down?  The possibilities really are endless.

In addition, I'd like to see BOs come into play as being very helpful for keep defenders to send out a detachment to conquer them in order to help out in some way -- repair the door, add more defenses to the keep, bring in a fresh squad of NPC troops and so on.

I do think we'll see movement and work on BOs these next few months, especially since open RvR is such a high priority at Mythic these days.  And I can't wait.