First visit to the new Altdorf

I’ve been a bit worried that the last few days might have been somewhat disastrous for WAR. This patch was another of those where it really needed to be good; it needed to be Mythic making a statement, showing us that they CAN produce quality goods. That the naysayers were just that, naysayers. But due to a myriad of bugs it proved to be the opposite. Instant ressing, poor performance, random teleporting, broken campaign, broken dungeons, and the list goes on…. I know quite a few people that are “taking a break from WAR until the campaign/my class/whatever is fixed”. So it’s fair to say that up to now this patch has done nothing but piss people off and highlight in BIG RED LETTERS that Mythic’s quality assurance/testing/whatever is not good enough. Right now it’s as bad as Funcom’s patching and as an ex Anarchy Online and Age of Conan player, I don’t say that lightly. Though in fairness Mythic do hot fix much quicker and better than Funcom did.

The big saving grace would have been the excellent on paper city changes, but thanks to the fortress lords becoming un-attackable, on Karak-Norn at least, we didn’t get to see the big new changes. It has been impossible to take down a second fortress, which of course meant no city sieges for us. However, last night we discovered they had been fixed and despite some determined defending by Order, we made it to Altdorf.

And now I find myself really torn on what to say, it could be “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it” and it could be “this is bloody awesome”. City sieges are now much more about the RvR. The first stage of the initial PQ is a giant Nordenwatch where you gain points by holding the 3 objectives and killing Order. The next PQ stage you can kill the Lord PvE style, or you can continue the fighting. There’s more of course as the city state changes, but I’ve not seen that yet. On entering the city it’s immediately obvious that this first PQ/scenario/thing will work brilliantly; we have now got what we asked for and in city sieges the focus is on killing enemy players. Great stuff I think. However, as you’ve no doubt guessed, he comes the “but”... But what about if you’re in an instance with no enemies?

Oh… bugger... We got to Altdorf late last night and with Karak-Norn Order having a much larger daytime than night presence, it meant some of us had empty instances. There just wasn’t enough Order to go round. Unfortunately for me, I was in one of those instances. So this meant we spent 15 minutes sitting at an objective doing nothing, then killed the PQ stage 2 lord, PQ resets and it’s back to sitting at the objective. Not overly exciting for me, but I heard from people in another instance that was packed with Order, that for them it was absolutely bloody awesome.

I’ve just heard that the daytime dominating Order are in IC right now. Having been online during the day before myself and witnessed the low Destruction turn out, it’s a safe bet that many Order have spent their afternoon in empty IC instances.

It’s quite amusing really, prior to this patch people would try and get into empty city instances so they could farm the PvE PQ for loot, but now everyone will want to be in the full instances because it’s actually a lot of fun. Mythic have turned the whole thing on its head and mainly in a good way. It will mean late night city sieges are less appealing (which is no bad thing in my book), we’re not reliant on dodgy PQs and are less likely to be shafted by low level characters, the poorly geared or bloody ignorant (I’m not implying that they’re one and same ofc). However to make the most of the change, for everyone in a city instance to have a good time, then we really need both factions to be equally active at the same time.

With whatever real life factors defining when we can or can’t play, is that going to happen? Let’s hope.