Players question WAR systems

There's trouble brewing in the Warhammer Online community. The Mythic MMO is facing criticism from players that its "contribution" system, which is supposed to reward players according to the contribution they make to large-scale battles, is in fact purely random.

The contribution system comes into play in WAR's Public Quests and player-versus-player Keep battles. These open-world events can be joined at any time. When they're over, a combination of a "contribution" score and a random dice-roll decides the quality of the reward for each player.

However, the bloggers at Wizards & Wenches and players on the Warhammer Alliance forums argue that the contribution score is no more than a random dice-roll itself.

The argument is that this roll is persistent for the zone you're in, and your contribution to successive Keeps or Public Quests in the same zone will remain the same unless you move on or log out. A player can make a significant contribution in one battle and none at all in the next, and get the same score both times.

There's plenty of debate on both sides on Warhammer Alliance and the VN Boards. The critics' hypothesis is hard, if not impossible, to conclusively prove, but the weight of evidence seems to be with them so far.

Mythic, normally quick to defend its reputation on the internet, hasn't commented on the issue yet.