When I posted Not tonight Josephine I was worried about city sieges happening so often that it wouldn't take long before people started getting bored of them, no matter how good the new city is.
Well, shock bloody horror, it's taken roughly a month for the apathy to start. Personally I'm still enjoying them and it's not yet at big problem stage, but the rumblings of discontent have started in region chat, forums and elsewhere, plus you can see the effects in the city itself as the number of sovereign smothered players flies up and the motivation of loot is no more. The thing is, whilst its the early days of apathy right now, it won't get better, it can only get worse.
By the time 1.3.6 arrives the city siege will have been so overplayed that people will no longer care that its a million times better than the old city or that's its the end game WAR should have had from launch. As I've said before, familiarity breeds contempt.
Will Mythic do something quickly enough? No. They will do something and eventually the campaign will get sorted out, but it takes too long between patches and by then it will be too late and the city siege will be merely for gearing alts or roleplaying volcanoes. And that's depressing, because the pace of the campaign is something I and many others have been complaining about for a very long time.
Don't mistake this for negativity, it's once again just me being realistic. Bloody hell, I'd love to be wrong, but I'll be right, again. *sigh* Posting this is just so familiar, reminds me of an old post that came true about Fortresses... Uncanny.
My only complaint about seiges thus far is when desto pug pulls out and is "surprise surprise" replaced by a premade.
ReplyDeleteYawn farm mode.
They just need to tweak the mechanic about joining a "city scen" to encourage people to jump right in rather than playing a meta game.
The campaign is too fast and given the size of some of the keep seiges on norn I think it is clear that the hardware can now cope with 200+ players battling it out on a fortress. We have keep seiges that would cause server shut downs in the past.
If they bring back fortresses I would like to see something like a "guided campaign" like the city seige, with scripted events or stages and maybe characters running around. These work very well in the city seige and are a lot of fun.
Vonplinkplonk
I can tell you for a fact mate that isnt being coordinated, far from it. It's just the premades finishing their previous instance and rejoining, or just joining late as the PuGs are chain quitting.
ReplyDeleteI have to say though when I do join solo, if I immediately see 3+ Bright Wizards with 1 million+ damage, it's not exactly enticing to stay :P
That's a really good idea btw, taking the concepts of the new city siege and introducing that to the wider campaign. Very interesting... hmmm
I think after the first week and having done about 6 sieges I was getting a bit bored. I log in for some oRvR action and I can't because there's another city siege going on.
ReplyDeleteWhen you get inside you spend 15 mins waiting for phase1 timer to go down because everyone has left on the oppposition side. You win a bag, great replicated piece that you cant use. No chance of getting that purple gem, I've gotten a gold again!
Shouldn't defending a fortified city be easier than attacking? It seems more in favour of the invaders - phase 1 has only 1 choke point where you can actually fight warband to warband. The gun placements can be taken down pretty easily even with a warband alive and defending them. Their HP compared to the invaders NPCs is too low!
The sappers respawn instantly, and have far too much HP when a whole warband targets them they should go down almost straight away. At the moment they barely need defending. It is far easier to just defuse the bomb when it arrives. They need a longer respawn timer to at least give the defenders a bonus for killing them.
When you eventually get a catapult and the NPCs down at the gates, zoom they're back again, at least the champion harbinger/dragons have a reasonable mechanic.
When phase 2 comes round, defenders again at a disadvantage because their NPC stops to pick up all the BOs. And due to the way ph1 is set up that means all of them generally. Even if you manage to hold the choke point it is near impossible to hold the first two objectives unless you spawn into the instance first.
It's not all bad, I've had some very enjoyable fights but I would like to see a bit more tweaking going on.
One of my big gripes is that they should remove the 4 min lockout grace, join an instance you are stuck in it. Leave it you get City Quitter and can't join again. It's a joke the amount of different instances you can jump about into.
I do think the first stage favours the invaders (not necessarily a bad thing), but it has the unfortunate affect of knacking the defenders for the second round.
ReplyDeleteI would probably set one of the objectives indoors. For example the library in Altdorf would be alot more interesting if one of those cannons was actually inside the library on the ground floor. This creates quite a nice bottle neck later in the stage because at the moment everything hangs off the circle - which seems a little early in the stage.
I think the idea for scripted events is a winner because the RvR lakes as they stand now are small, random and unstructured. They are also not a sandbox environment under player control. Its the same keeps and BO's every time. When the realm war is really going and BO's are being stolen or Epic Keep defences are under way - it is really cool but they also feel superficial because there is no background - just VPs.
My suspicion is that this red plague will add the skaven as an NPC faction to the game and maybe some of the RVR lakes will become PvPvE.
As for PUGs being replaced by Premades, it might just be an unfortunate side affect of the way the siege works.
vpp
The city sieges is getting boring and now where back to what it was before. From 800k sold copies down to 200k active accounts has to be considered a horrible drop. Losing 75% of a buisness monthly income isnt good at all and took EA 15 months to react isnt good either.
ReplyDeleteThe last patches has been a improvment and i like it except for the city sieges which novely has worn out.
On a fotnote id been running with another alt of mine with Bootae in t2 and had a blast. To have the funniest pvp in ages happening in t2 where both sides are closest to balanced is just damned sad to see despite the laughs.
And if anyone from Mythic reads the comments: FFS start talking about things to come BESIDE the next patch...
A semi-quick fix for the campaign woes could be that you cant lock to Alt/IC if one of the zones is lock by the other side. So lets say order have locked Elf and is pushing empire (as usual), but destro have locked dwarf, now order cant lock CW before dwarf unlocks. If this is implemented then both sides have to focus on all zones or risk getting stuck and there will be more fighting in the dwarf zone.
ReplyDeleteI'm enjoying the new city seiges, but that's because I don't get to do one every day. If you thrash the ass off something it will get boring.
ReplyDeleteWithout a doubt, we need to see the Warhammer MMO's road map.