Another change coming in WAR 1.1 is the tweaking of some mid-range Public Quests, allowing one quest per chapter to be done either solo or with a small group. Drescher explained the rationale, noting that PQs were one of the most-talked-about features that WAR offered, and that they didn't want new players to be stuck. "As the game matures, as the population finds its way into the higher tiers, we wanted to make sure that you as a new player who may have heard about PQs, will be able to do them and not get stuck because you can't find a party ... they shouldn't be impossible tasks; we don't want it to be like raiding where only 25% of the population can ever do it. "
However, there weren't any plans to add further incentive to the quests. "We're not looking to provide incentive because they have incentive by design," he continued, and Gershowitz agreed. "Easy PQs are focused on giving the PQ experience to small groups ... the rewards are appropriate for that; we don't want to take away for the medium-difficulty or harder PQs."
Formerly, the Influence system in WAR was limited to PQs - participating in the quests was the only way to earn Influence for the current Chapter, but 1.1 will add further Influence options from engaging in open-world RvR. Brian Wheeler elaborated, saying that the change was made "so that RvR guys could keep pace with PvE guys in terms of itemization. A lot of players who purely PvE'd and quested were getting items a lot quicker than the guys who were out there doing RvR, doing keeps and objectives." The aim was to give better rewards from open RvR instead of Scenarios, he said. "Scenarios are their own reward. We wanted to make sure oRvR had the same return in terms of time investment. If you do oRvR you can itemize your character a lot better than you could pre-1.1 through grinding and killing."
RvR Influence differs from PQ influence in that it's spread all across a Tier instead of divided into chapters. But the problem with that, said Gershowitz, was that it encouraged players of all levels to come join the fray, so the designers had to figure out what level to make the rewards - too high and low-level players don't get rewards. Too low, and they aren't worth it for high-level players. The solution they found was to offer two rewards per stage, one for lower-rank players, and a better item for the more seasoned adventurers.
Still, for all the attention paid to open RvR in the patch, we asked the team what they were going to do to curb the unfortunate phenomenon of "keep swapping," where large guilds on opposite factions would agree to take each others' keeps and switch on and off for large amounts of renown and other rewards. Wheeler said that they'd been looking through the data and had realized that the renown reward for actually defending a keep was far less than it should have been, meaning that there was little incentive to defend something once you'd taken it. In 1.1, he said, "defenders are going to get a lot more renown and influence in RvR by defending a keep. I think we'll see a more doggish mentality where you go out, take a keep, and dare others to attack it."
There were other things in the works that would work towards eliminating keep swapping, he said, though they couldn't discuss it yet. The big change, though, would be that there would hopefully be much more incentive to take a keep and work to hold it.
