For Order: Scenarios > Public Quests

I've noticed that some of the concerns people had about public quests are starting to come true already. Not that they are anti-social or encourage any other type of negative behavior. Instead it looks like a lot of them cannot be finished because of the wild population imbalance on some servers. Several notable bloggers had expressed doubts that public quests would remain fun as Warhammer Online got older and less people were leveling characters. I had expected this to be the case eventually, but thought it would be a couple years. However, after leveling several human characters through the chapter 1-5 areas I've noticed that a lot of the public quests areas are permanently empty.

The problem is that the faction imbalance has become so great that on most servers the Order faction has almost instant scenario timers. Players are thus flocking to scenarios since they can quickly earn both experience and renown points. Not only does this quickly level a player, but the renown points basically give double rewards. Ranks of renown not only open up access to powerful armor sets, but they also can be spent to boost character stats. Public quests on the other hand often have lesser rewards that take much longer to earn. Also they do not give out the renown points which play such a crucial role in improving your character.

As a result the rewards are clearly in favor of players doing scenarios to the exclusion of public quests. About the only ones I've seen with any players participating have been those near the major towns. Now in the Tier 2 area I did notice that the rally master offers a blue quality item for maxing out influence. This might encourage some people to do public quests, but from what I've seen the renown gear offers complete sets of items of better quality. It might have been better if Mythic had designed the system so that rewards for certain item slots couldn't be earned through RvR. Then again Warhammer Online is supposed to be PvP oriented so I could see some players complaining if they were forced to do public quests.

The problem only really exists for the Order at the moment, so a player could always re-roll if they wanted to level by doing public quests. Destruction may have hour long scenario queues on some servers, but they also have mass numbers on their side. I've seen them dominate the open world RvR areas and I'm sure they have more then enough players for all their public quest areas. After all it makes sense to move between each public quest in the same chapter since they have different rewards in their loot bags. Hopefully, over time more people will roll Order and the scenario timers will start to balance out. If not I'm already dreading trying out the end game RvR battles. The funny thing is I just wanted to play a squig herder, but after playing WoW I refuse to do long queue times ever again.