How to Fix the Warhammer Open World RvR Problem
While I don't play Warhammer myself, I do spend a lot of time reading Warhammer blogs (don't ask me why). The general consensus is that scenarios are killing open world RvR.
Personally, I think there is a solution to this. Having never played the game myself, I could be completely wrong but I figured I'd throw in my own opinion. Also, since I have no idea what kind of numbers certain things actually account for, I'll be making a great deal of assumptions.
From everything I have been reading, people are saying that there is very little open world RvR and people doing PvE questing because running scenarios (or battlegrounds as they're called in WoW) is just too time to experience efficient.
On the PvE front, I think Warhammer should stick to its bread and butter of RvR and leave PvE as something of a nice distraction to do when there isn't a major battle going on (but if everything worked out properly, this would be never because remember, War should be everywhere). Public quest, while very neat in concept, I think are better left for a game like WoW which has more of a PvE focus since the more people you have going PvE, the less people you have doing RvR.
Now on to how to deal with scenarios. Let's say at level 20 it takes you 200,000 experience to get to 21. Let's also assume that every person you kill gives you 200 experience and every scenario you win gives you 10,000 while if you lose, you gain 5000 experience. We will assume that a scenario takes roughly 30 minutes to complete, you're winning as many as you lose, and in each scenario, you're getting 30 kills (one kill a minute). Now I know that these numbers are completely off from what is really in the game, but I'm going to show how I would balance open world RvR based on these numbers.
If you had instant queues on scenarios, on an hourly basis you would be gaining 15000 experience just from scenarios (one win, one loss per hour) and 12000 experience power hour from kills. This would give you a grand total of 27000 experience per hour, allowing you to gain a level in just under eight hours.
So if you are going to make open world RvR important, you're going to have to make it so people can do purely open world RvR and level faster than this. A good goal would be one level in every six to seven hours as well as offering additional benefits.
I think the best way to get people out into the field is offer very rewarding quests for attacking and defending keeps. With this situation, I'm going to make the assumption that a keep siege will last one hour, within this hour, you will get 60 kills at 200 experience per kill. The way to get people out there would be offer a quest at war camps for people to overtake keeps. The problem with this however is people would just go to abandoned keeps, so the quest would have to be something along the lines of "Go kill the Keep Lord and get 40 player kills as well" with a reward of about 25000 experience.
Now you need to offer a quest given from the Keep Lord to defenders that is something along the lines of "Get 60 kills of attackers within the Keep" with a reward of about 25000 experience. Both of these quest would be infinitely repeatable. Killed 60 attackers? Go turn in the quest and get it again to go kill 60 more. Hold them off forever!
Assuming you're always victorious, you would receive 37000 experience per hour (25000 from quest, 12000 from kills). So people would be gaining a level in just under six hours if always victorious.
While these numbers would need some serious tuning based on how long keep sieges and scenarios last, this would move the cheese from the scenarios and into the open world. People who have a longer time commitment (at least an hour) would be doing keep sieges while those that don't have much time (about a half hour) would do scenarios, so you know those wouldn't be barren.
I would also suggest two more things:
1 - I think that controlling the keeps of a tier should give a buff to all members that fall in that tier (i.e. tier 1 keeps give buffs to all those 1-10 no matter where they are in the world, and so on and so on). For each keep your faction controls, you gain an extra 5% bonus experience, renown and gold and your enemy loses 5% of any bonus experience, renown and gold. Not in the way that they lose from their regular 100% of gold, experience and renown, but in that they can't receive a buff from a keep. For instance, if each side only controlled one keep, no one would be receiving any bonus. If one side controlled two keeps and the other controlled zero, the side controlling two keeps would receive 10% bonus. If one side controlled two keeps and the other side controlled one keep, the side controlling two keeps would be receiving the 5% bonus. If Order controlled 6 keeps in a tier, they'd be getting +30% experience, gold and renown. As Destruction, if you took one keep, you wouldn't be gaining any bonus but you'd be getting rid of the bonus Order got. They would have gone from +30% to +20%, that is something that will get people out to keeps to viciously defend.
2 - Notorious Killers. Let's say that killing someone at level 20, gives someone 200 experience. Set a threshold, say 10 kills. Once someone gets 10 kills without dying, they become a "notorious killer" and every time that person gets another kill, the value of killing them goes up by 20%. So if you're at 15 kills, you're now worth 400 experience to people. Also, to make notorious killers easier to spot, make them grow in size (of course have an upper limit on how big they can get). So now whenever you're in a battle and see some huge dwarf, you know they're worth more experience than everyone else around them. It'd add a little spice to the mix.
Whew... this actually ended up being a lot longer than I initially expected. Anyway, let me know what you think. Am I completely crazy or would a system like this work. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to implement. It's just a couple of quests coding in a buff.