New Developer discussion posts and some shots of new armour sets

James Casey has posted a discussion thread for feedback on current developments in a general sense, you can find the thread here. In there he has posted 2D screenshots of a few of the new tier 7 armour sets, which I've posted below. Intricate and quite showy as you can see..

Bright Wizard

 Chosen

 Engineer

Shaman

Hopefully we'll get the other sets to post soon. I particularly liked the Orc ones when I saw them at the Mythic visit thing.

Elsewhere Steven Engle has posted a thread for discussion on upcoming Shadow Warrior and Squig Herder changes; link here. Initial thought is I like the changes for my Squiggy (not sure its got enough damage still mind you...), but that doesn't mean they're great for the game as a whole. No that I'm saying they're a bad idea either, it's just I'd like to see what improvements the Magus and Engineer get alongside this, as the range reducing ability is quite a potent thing and life is crap enough for those 2 careers as it is.

Anyways, go get your feedback in and have you say.

Dispersing the zerg with... a Fortress???

OK so yesterday I posted about Mythic basically confirming the ORvR lakes will stay small, which while disappointing (for me anyway) is not all bad news because at the same time Mythic also confirmed that they are going to be doing something to disperse the zerg:
“We have a lot of plans for the future and dispersing the zerg, in a mindful way, is high on my priority list”

Now regardless of if you sign up to any of my previous posts on how this could be done, I think most people would agree that it should be done. Zergs breed lag, emphasize the over dominance of AoE, seriously punish outnumbered realms and generally spoil the game. So what other solutions could Mythic have in mind? Pondering on this got me thinking about something that may hold the answer and is also something we do know is coming; the return of Fortresses.

At present the campaign’s only purpose is to lock zones with the ultimate aim of laying siege to the enemy city. So everyone is zerging the zone closest to lock with no real need to go elsewhere, other than the occasional quick zerg and back if somewhere else gets close to locking. However, if the Fortresses did return, but with Dark Age of Camelot style relic raids, this could provide a set of alternative goals for the campaign.

I know I've posted about relic raids before, but just in case you’re not familiar with them, this is how they work. Each Fortress has a “relic” inside and each relic provides a realm wide buff for the owners of that fortress. Fortresses cannot be captured like keeps, they are always under control of their original realm, but they can be raided and the relic captured... If you manage to successfully raid a Fortress and capture the relic, you then have to escort it all the way back to your fortress and place it there. This then means you get that relic’s realm wide buff in addition to buffs from any other relics you control. It’s pretty much a game of capture the flag, albeit on a monumental scale.

Getting a screenshot of this zerg cost me a "solo WAAAAGH into them looking like an idiot" death.

So if WAR had this, with relics being captured and escorted between the 2 fortresses in each pairing, then each relic would provide an alternative target. If Order are zerging and pushing the campaign in the Elf pairing, what happens if Destruction start pushing for relics in both of the other pairings? If the relic buffs were enough that they can’t be ignored, perhaps this would break things up a bit.

Obviously there are a lot of details that would need to be sorted out and I’ve no idea if this is anything like what Mythic have planned, but it might just work…

Crazy day, Fortress idea from Biggsie and other stuff

Well today was a bit mental. It was too damn hot, I had heavy meetings sorting out procedural explosions thanks to other people’s muppetry, a daughter desperate to fly a kite in almost no wind (that went well, not) and then trying to keep up with the WAR developments in-between all this and ninja a blog post in was a bit manic. Attempting to gather up the rumours didn’t quite work out so well, but meh I can’t nail it every time :P


Thankfully there are other bloggers on better form and fellow KFer Biggsie has posted an interesting idea for bringing back the fortresses. It’s essentially the same basic concept, but tweaked to make it more of a big fight between players. I would be concerned about lag mind you, but then I guess it depends if we’d still all cram into one fort or not. Suppose that depends on the campaign around it. Loving the Engra idea, that guy looks crazier than Lady GaGa.

As for my own thoughts on the big news of the day, I’m told we’re not going to get much further official comments until next week, so I think I’ll reserve judgement until then. Rather than go off half cocked again.

Competition time over at Shadow-war

As the title says, Shadow-war is hosting a competition and he's giving away a really nice prize for those that missed out for whatever reason, a collectors edition of WAR. I've got the collectors edition myself and can say it's probably the best collectors set for a PC game I've seen. Well worth a punt.

The competition is about ideas for how to re-introduce the Fortresses to WAR.

Go check it out folks here.

There and back again

City sieges are quite probably WAR’s weakest point. Which in my humble opinion makes it rather strange for Mythic to use the 1.3.2 patch to put such massive focus on them. Yes, city sieges are MUCH improved from their past (almost) pure PvE incarnation, but they’re still not exactly good.


Limited gameplay
The cities limit your gaming options far too much. Unless you’re there at the start of the siege, you’ll find yourself stuck with either PUGing the 48v48 instance (which is almost always a terrible experience), or having to log off for hours, because there’s simply nothing else to do. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the tedium of joining a guild warband that’s already inside a city and then having to sit outside alone for ages, all with the vain hope that a spot in the instance will become available… That’s not fun in anyway or form and I’m simply never doing it again, instead I’ll just log off and go to a lower tier, or play a different game. We need more things to do. Scenarios perhaps, so that if we do get online a bit too late and can’t get in our guild/alliance warbands, we will at least have a chance to do something.

The 3 BO capture, 48vs48 instance
Actually this first large scenario/PQ is quite good. The scenario’s simple objectives provide an entertaining and at times even tactical challenge. So why am I listing this as a problem? Well, continuing from the issue of limited gameplay, the problem is that it’s a bit shallow when it’s the only thing to do. The simplicity is great when you don’t do it often, since it lets you get straight into the action and it is fun, but as a regular event it lacks longevity. Same 2 cities, same 3 flags, every night… Familiarity plays the field a bit, then breeds with contempt, only to end up marrying boredom.

The stage 2 PvE raid content
It’s buggy and there’s a problem with the whole concept. As every MMO veteran knows; PvE raid bosses that require tactics to beat, also require practice and a united warband working together. On a competitive server like mine neither side gets to stage 2 often (plus the victory points are often bugged anyway), so the practice does not happen. Also because of the whole city instancing experience, by the time you get to stage 2 it’s very likely you will no longer have a full guild/alliance warband left online (if they got in with you at all). Sods law now decides that you end up with some random bastards who are determined to ruin everything.

Now Mythic, if by chance you read this, please do not see this as me saying we should get to the advanced stages of city sieges more often. We shouldn’t. It should be rare and be a big deal (more on that shortly). Likewise I don’t think the raid itself should be dumbed down. It should be challenging, but it needs to be fair, it needs to be something realistic for people that don’t farm the instance every night. Is that careful balance too much to ask for? Regardless, whatever happens it should be completely bug free. Getting to stage 2 and then have bugs ruin everything is utterly unacceptable. Plus any bugs in this part of the game are a sure way to generate bad feeling.

And further more, does it have to be PvE? When you look at all the buggy instances, PvE hasn’t exactly proven to be Mythic’s speciality. Maybe some sort of more interesting PvP based Public Quest would be better?


There and back again, and again, and again, and...
However, the biggest problem of all is not the city itself; it’s the path to getting there. WAR’s campaign system as a whole is the worst thing about cities…

A while back zone locks became much easier, which was both good and bad. Then with this latest patch and the removal of forts, the game has taken a huge step towards all sense of drama being removed. City sieges are now the norm, something you’ll get to do multiple times a day, every single day…. Getting to a city used to be an achievement, a moment that actually meant something. Alas this is no longer the case and now the whole feel of the game has changed. A friend of mine summed it up well the other day when he said, “they’ve turned the campaign into a death match”.

He’s completely right. WAR needed changes and the forts were almost universally hated, but they did add a speed bump, something that gave the campaign at least a bit of longevity. Without them and with no change to the campaign’s core system, there are no stumbling blocks. A dominant faction becomes more so and more balanced servers turn into a game of table tennis. It’s kind of like the campaign isn’t really a campaign anymore. If you think about what you expect from the very word “campaign”, it implies something long term, something that requires planning, thought and effort. Unfortunately that doesn’t quite work when we ping pong back and forth through the ENTIRE campaign structure in an afternoon. All of the “epic” has gone.

Now this post may have seemed very negative, but I’m not trying to be, I’m just trying to be realistic. In their attempts to improve the campaign experience, Mythic have actually weakened the whole concept of it. This is most definitely not what I wanted, nor is it wanted by anybody else I’ve spoken to. Perhaps that’s because of the server we’re on, but seriously, who wants to play WARlite?

Having said all of that, perhaps Mythic aren’t a million miles away from something great. With some tinkering they could slow the pace right back down, add/change a few things to provide more variety and give us the “epic” we're missing (and add a third faction! HAH Got it in there!). The game today feels small and for me this is mainly down to the small RvR enabled areas and how we blast through them so damn quickly. As I’ve said before, I really think Mythic need to expand the size of the oRvR zones and stop wasting so much space. That’s probably quite a lot of work to do, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done and there are easier to implement short-term solutions in the meantime.

The easiest and most obvious is to make it so you have to lock all 3 pairings to access a city. This can still be quickly zerged through, but it would make it a little bit more difficult at least.

A more entertaining way would be to make all zones active at once. Allowing people to attack in different places and apply some more involved strategies and tactics. Each BO and Keep would be worth a certain amount of “control points”, if you want to lock a pairing you’ll need to capture 75% of those control points in that pairing… Now that’s more like it. In fact, I think I’d be happy with this. It could even lead into a system for reintroducing the other cities, hah!

In the end
I’m glad forts are gone, they sucked royally and I have to say that the decision to remove them is not the only factor in the watering down of WAR’s campaign, but it is a big contributing factor. I’m kind of surprised to find myself saying this, but I miss the days where locking a zone took hours and getting to the enemy city would take effort over many days. I don’t miss what we actually had to do to lock them, but I do miss the feeling of zone locking being an achievement. Actually, that’s not correct. I think I’m missing any feeling of achievement in WAR’s campaign. It’s just too damn quick. All too often lately when I log in, if we’re not already in a city, it’s only an hour or so before we are. And then, the moment a city becomes available, people start logging off.

It's a real shame because right now I'm really enjoying the combat in WAR, but the campaign is total meh.

1.3.2 Fortress changes = Relic raids?

I wouldn't bet my house on it, but wouldn't be surprised either.

For those that missed out on Dark Age of Camelot... it used to have Fortresses that had a special Relic inside, having that relic in your faction's fort gave a realm wide constant buff, damage increases that kinda thing. If I recall correctly, relics from different Fortresses gave different buffs. You could assault the enemy Fortress, capture the relic, then escort it back to your Fortress and then your realm would get the buff for as long as you kept the relic safe. More relics you had, the more buffs you got, but the more of a target they became.

Something like that could be a nice side line to the main campaign. Or do you think they have something else planned?

© 2008 - Bootae's Bloody Blog

Fortress attack? Hmm nah...

It seems a lot of people didn’t notice this, but a hot fix a few days ago brought in reductions to the population caps in Fortresses. When this was discussed on my guild’s voice comms, the topic was met with groans of frustration and people were quick to voice their irritation at the whole thing. Generally we’re a pretty positive bunch, but in this case negativity was hardly surprising.

I’ve posted before about the problems with Forts and what could be done to improve them, but with this latest change and other recent issues with forts, it’s time to talk about them again.

The population caps were first introduced to stop the zones crashing. Prior to this going live, a reliable (but lame) defensive tactic was to flood the fortress with players of any level and crash the zone. Of course even without purposefully trying to achieve this, zone crashes were extremely probable on almost every fortress attack. The introduction of the level limit (37+) and the population caps (limiting how many players could get into a fort zone) dramatically reduced the frequency of zone crashes, though it didn’t eradicate them by any means. Thankfully the 10-second delay lagfest of the past was gone, but busy fortress attacks remained far from lag free and their playability was debateable. As such whilst things got better, they still hadn’t actually become good enough. Unfortunately the population cap also introduced us to some new problems, problems that this latest hot fix is likely to make worse.

When trying to lock a zone prior to a Fortress, lots of people will camp on the very edge of the zone so that they can be sure of claiming one of the limited spaces before the cap is reached. Likewise some people on the defending side will not bother trying to stop the zone lock and will just camp inside the Fort, which of course stops other players on the defensive side getting in. You could of course argue that both are valid strategies if you want to launch a quick attack or a solid defence. Alas, with conqueror crests, loot and renown up for grabs, it’s an argument that in some cases isn’t always convincing. Then of course there’s the argument that you want your best guilds/alliance in the defence/attack, but however correct that might be it just leads to accusations of elitism and forum shit-storms. Plus there’s no guarantee it won’t be them getting shut out anyway. End result is always a truckload of people being left out with little to do for a while.

The other big problem is it’s delivered a steaming box of apathy, something that I myself have suffered from. Why bother going to a fortress? We probably won’t all get in and our warband will get split up. Which if you’re a guild that likes to play together, well, that buggers things up good and proper. If you do get inside what do you get? A laggy, dull experience that is nothing more than a keep with a bigger wall. Ok so what about the loot? With the game having been out 10 months or so it seems most of us have at the very least full Sentinel, so Conqueror is just a novelty for a lot of people. And that lot of geared up people are often the ones you want in the fight...
Yea gawds you negative git Bootae! What about the renown?!?!
I can get more renown from 1 scenario in 15mins. Or a whopping 2 scenarios if they’re bad ones. Check out this screenshot from a friends scenario:


Ok that’s an extreme example and I’ve not seen renown that high before, but I regularly see 3-6k, for a mere 15 minutes work. Add that and the previous together and we see that fighting in a Fortress is a bloody uneconomical way of progressing with your character.

Of course if you don’t take Forts you don’t get to siege Cities, but it’s an issue of motivation there. Do you want to spend up to an hour not having fun in a fort with the only carrot being that IF you win, you’ve now got to go through the whole crap again (and the zone locks before hand) and still could fail at the end of that? I sure as hell don’t. I think like most people, I don’t mind losing in a game as long as the game itself is enjoyable.

So what has lowering the population cap done? Well, it HAS made fortresses more playable. I’m now running with full spell effects on and for once it’s actually just about playable, but (as I’ve already seen today) people just aren’t bothered. Yes it will run better but we’re now less likely to get in, the rewards are mediocre and it’s still AoE hell, so why not just let someone else go through the tedium? And what about when Land of the Dead arrives, will anyone attack a defended fort again?

Attacking a fortress is just a waste of time.


Update: I've been on 2 fort takes today where the attackers were outnumbered by the defenders, despite there being plenty of Destruction around. People just aren't interested in Forts.
The last attack was a total classic. We were hitting the inner door when one of our guys on comms says something like "uhm, look behind us, everyone is running away". I turn and... yup, after basically just looking at the door everyone simply left. It wasn't even a wipe, people just couldn't be arsed with it. I don't blame them either.

Land of the Dead does not replace the main campaign

Land of the Dead looks awesome.

All very exciting and it’s going to totally turn the game on its head. However what exactly it will mean for the vanilla WAR campaign is not really clear. It’s not been made redundant that’s for sure, as access to LoTD is reliant on the vanilla campaign, but will people drop it the moment LotD access is available and jump into an Airship? When one faction gains access, will the faction left behind spend their time RvEing until they too can get into LotD? Will we see attacks on undefended Fortresses and ghost town cities?

In the first few weeks I would say most definitely. We’re all going to be desperate to get in LotD and sample the wonders of the ancient world, but the novelty will wear off. When it does the big question will be; Is the vanilla campaign interesting enough to draw us back or will it become just a chore whilst waiting for LotD again?

I think potentially the answer is a positive one, but it will need some livening up to avoid feeling stale compared with LotD and it’s full on RvR. LotD is going to open people’s eyes to the joy of Darkness Falls style zones and I think going back to the segregated PvP/PvE will be a disappointment. How then, can Mythic reinvigorate the vanilla campaign?

Cities
Guess what? Bring back the missing cities! Come on, you didn’t think I wouldn’t drop this one in eh? ;) Seriously though, if the entire campaign wasn’t locked down, we’d have the option to go fight elsewhere if we can’t get into Altdorf or IC. A huge topic this and one that I’ve gone into a fair bit lately, so I’ll move on.

Aside from wanting the extra cities, the current city instances need lots of work. They’re not enjoyable enough and the queuing system we have now is annoying. It’s got to the point now where I’m sick and tired of our groups being left outnumbered in instances with the uber opponents that nobody wants to bloody fight. Even our enemies have acknowledged this happening to our guild. I have to admit over the last few sieges I got so sick of it that a few times I just changed instance myself and went to one where people were farming Invader. I hated doing that, but I couldn’t face another hour of being farmed at our spawn by 3 times our number.

There's all sorts of things that could be done here, but just sorting out the lag and how you get in to the instance would be a great start.


Fortresses
They need a complete revamp. They need to be separate zones entirely to the one leading to them and on different servers (or however it works) to help prevent lag./crashes. The forts themselves need major changes to improve game performance and make them more than just another keep take with a bigger wall. I’d say these should be almost like RvR enabled dungeons, with various objectives, capture points and things to spread people across the fortress. Maybe including instanced areas, scenarios or even RvR events like Altdorf or IC. Certainly it would be better than the current glorified keep with a player limit.

Whilst I’m here, a few words about the player limit teleporting people to warcamps.

It’s very frustrating to travel all the way north through Kadrin Valley, only to get ported back to the warcamp in the far south and have to repeat this journey over and over again until a spot comes up. It’s also causing problems before the fort where people refuse to guard the Battle Objectives & Keeps furthest from the Fort. This can make zone locks a pain and causes friction between guilds. On my server guilds reputations are being tarnished because some players mysteriously ALWAYS decide to guard the BO nearest the fortress… Of course if they then whinge at other people for not defending the further BO, well… it does provide some comedy in region chat when it all kicks off. :P

However putting that comedy aside, it’s the game mechanic at fault, people just want to get in the fort, but they won’t be able to if they do the decent thing and guard the more distant objectives. This is wrong. We shouldn’t be penalised for fully defending the zones. The player limit has reduced the frustration from zone crashes and it sure is better than it was, but it has brought new frustrations with it.

There’s so much that could be done with a Fortress. It doesn’t have to be just another keep with bigger walls. I would seriously consider separate zones, more objectives and instancing.


Tier 4 zones
Once you hit 40 you’re effectively stuck in Tier 4 forever, so why is half of each zone irrelevant to a level 40?

The current RvR lakes limit our movement too much, which puts emphasis on zerg mentality. More options and routes around the zone will dramatically improve small scale RvR. If you travel through the PvE areas of any tier 4 zone, you don’t see many (if any) people. So do we really need all these empty PQs? Perhaps if Mythic changed some of these PQs to have more of an RvR slant and more relevance to the campaign, they could then enable RvR over a much larger area.

Considering how fast it is to level in tier 4, keeping such large amounts of the map for safe PvE XP grinding is a poor reason to have such small RvR lakes for the main game. Yes, the PvE areas cater for people that only want to do PvE, but I’ve not seen any of these people myself. Anyone really interested in pure PvE would be playing something like Warcraft, Everquest 2 or Lord of the Rings Online. WAR’s end game zones should be totally built around the game’s focus of PvP and RvR.

I suggest Mythic should seriously consider making all tier 4 zones fully RvR enabled and adjust the PvE elements accordingly. LotD is bringing us full RvR zones; maybe WAR should embrace that concept and apply it to the rest of Tier 4.



Land of the Dead looks brilliant. I’m really looking forward to it and I’m expecting pant-wetting excitement. But it doesn’t replace the traditional WAR campaign; it’s an addition to it. We will still have to play the vanilla campaign. So if WAR is to reach its true potential (a slice of epic pie, with custard, served by a naked Kelly Brook and you’re wearing sex panther), then we need more than flashy live expansions, no matter how great their content maybe.

Oi! Mythic! Spread 'em!

No! Not like that you dirty perv :P Or maybe that's just me... Anyways I digress.

A little while back I was posting about a time when it felt like the entire Order faction arrived in Caledor’s western keep. One of those “OMFG 10+ warbands!” moments... As previously discussed this crashed the zone big time. Now, I’ve no idea if it really was the mythical 10+ warbands, but it was by far the most Order I’ve ever seen in one keep. As such I don’t think anybody should be surprised the zone crashed. To be honest, I can’t see this type of MMO ever being able to handle that many players in one small area. So assuming there’s an element of truth in that statement, the question is what could be done to stop so many people congregating in one keep?

There’s always the option Mythic have gone for with the Fortresses. This is where the zone has a limit to the amount of players that can be inside, but in my mind at least this is as much a pain in the arse as it is a benefit. When all the action is in one area, but you’re not allowed in, that’s just no fun. There’s also the new idea to teleport people out if the zone is going to crash, which is fine in that it stops the zone crashing, but rubbish for anyone actually playing the game.

In fact this new Winds of Change is worth a few words. Firstly:

I can not stress enough how terrible this is as a main solution to the end game lag and crashing. If I've worked towards a keep or fortress take, only to be teleported out and basically told "Bugger off you can't take part", I will be absolutely bloody livid. I've encountered this in games before and always loathed it. They had similar things in Asheron's Call and even Ultima Online (if you remember the warping when the 2nd age went live and everyone rushed to place new housing) This may mean Mythic can do the whole positive spin bit and say how they've reduced zone crashes, but it will also piss a lot of people off and generate more bad press if this is alone is the solution to zone crashing and lag.

What Mythic need to do is give us much better reasons to fight over multiple zones. If I log on and see Fell Landing is under siege, that shouldn’t effectively cancel out all oRvR because everyone is rammed into one zone and everywhere else is dead or lagged to crap as a side effect. There should be multiple oRvR things we can choose to do at any time. It should be a war on multiple fronts, with multiple goals and not so focused around Inevitable City/Altdorf or when it arrives the Land of the Dead. If we can’t fit everyone into one zone now, are Mythic really confident that Land of the Dead will stand a chance? Keep in mind this zone starts at level 25, so there could potentially be even more players there… I do not want to be all doom and gloom about Land of the Dead, but it does make you wonder.

Obviously we don’t know the details of how LotD will work; perhaps there are things in place that will prevent it being a sandy lag pit from hell or perhaps by it’s very nature it will spread players across the other zones too. However I would suggest that Mythic need to go further and also implement some of their original plans for WAR and put in the 4 missing capital cities. This is something they said could well happen, way back in the early days after launch it was mentioned and again, if I recall correctly anyway...

Think about it, if you could capture a fortress and you then siege it’s relevant city, but without locking down the ENTIRE campaign and focusing every bloody player to one area. So say Order take Fell Landing, then they get to siege the Black Ark, but crucially the Empire/Chaos and Orc/Dwarf campaigns remain open should players prefer to do them instead. Genuine options to push multiple zones, but this time it doesn’t lead to one giant clusterfuck as everyone is rammed into IC or Altdorf.

Extend the city downtime after a successful siege, bring in realm wide buffs for each enemy city you control (say 20% renown/XP bonus per city), sorta like we used to have in Camelot and yay! A proper campaign, that has players fighting over loads of different areas at the same time. And crucially, tangible benefits not just for winning in one zone, but for controlling the campaign as a whole.

Kinda like what WAR was meant to have in the first place.

WAR's siege warfare needs attacking

One thing many others and I would like to see improved in WAR is siege warfare. Within this are a wide range of topics including things like; better access to keep lords, the role of melee, risk vs reward and much more, but I’m going to have a ramble about siege engines and how I think they could dramatically improve keep sieges.

At the moment we have the following siege weapons:

Battering Rams

Boiling Oil

Ranged AoE anti-player weapons

Ranged Single target weapons


Of these by far the most effective are boiling oil and battering rams. These two are very much the lynch pin of attacking and defending keeps respectively and also highlight one of the main problems with sieges. It’s ALL about the main gateway and getting that door down.

Rams themselves work ok. I think perhaps we could have more options for battering rams, maybe expensive ones that give protection against oil, but in their current state they are still very effective. Also I think the interface and method for using rams is awkward and a bit dull, but generally they work pretty well. It’s not something that needs urgent attention. The same goes for oil.

The ranged weapons however are not so hot. I love the look of them (for what that’s worth), but they’re just not cutting it performance wise. Even after the damage improvements in 1.2, they’re still not effective enough to be important. Very rarely will you see more than a couple deployed by defenders and even less often for attackers. I think they need dramatic improvements in their effectiveness, not just so they can kill players, but more importantly so they become important to players. I want to see both attackers and defenders actually giving a toss about siege engines other than oil and rams. We should be hatching cunning plans and launching sneaky raids to destroy enemy siege engines. If the enemy has deployed cannons we should be living in fear of the bloody things, not ignoring them as irrelevant.

However, if ranged siege engine damage were increased without other changes, we’d just end up complaining about Cannons being the new Bright Wizards/Sorcerers. To prevent this and solve the zerging one doorway bit we need to encourage the battle to spread out a bit and give both attackers and defenders more options. This would benefit keep related RvR generally, as it would reduce the effect of AoE, possibly reduce lag and importantly give melee and tanks a bit more to do. So how do we this?

Easy! Well, easy for me to say anyway... It's not exactly new, but is of course siege towers, ladders and tunnels!

How then could these work? I’m sure there’s loads of different ways of implementing them, but here’s some ideas:

Siege Towers
These should be both expensive and bloody good. Requiring say 12 people carrying a component each to create, so that you would need 2 full groups working together on the battlefield to construct the tower. Then you’d push it towards the walls, with the defenders first challenge being to try and destroy it before it gets in place. It would need loads of hit points and be something to be feared; if it gets deployed then the shit has truly hit the fan. Once in place, attackers could rapidly climb up and onto the walls. Defenders would need to rush to the block off the enemy’s path, clear the walls and destroy the tower, or risk attackers swamping the walls.

Ladders
A simple mechanic for a simple tool, attackers can place them against walls and climb up. Defenders can click the ladder to knock it off the walls with a chance of destroying it totally. This would mean defenders would actually need to properly man the walls, not just if you are a ranged class. Defending melee DPS and tanks could fight to keep the walls clear.

Tunnels
Ideally we would have the option to undermine walls and make them collapse like in medieval sieges. If we can’t have that, then being able to employ some Skaven or Dwarf miners to dig a tunnel into the castle grounds could be cool. To prevent tunnel spam, like the siege tower it would need to be expensive and/or difficult to create. For the defenders, perhaps attacking either entrance to the tunnel with some kind of explosive (purchasable from the Quartermaster NPCs) could destroy it.


I would love to have destructible walls and I’m puzzled why we don’t since Camelot did (not at launch mind you), but I’m assuming that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. However the above suggestions would spread the combat around the walls, making things much more interesting and without needing us to blow walls up. They would also provide real tactical choices for both attackers and defenders. Attackers would be able to get into the keep by multiple methods and from different directions; feints and attacks on multiple fronts really would be possible. Defenders would need to take all this into account and have at least basic defensive plans in place to deal with the various types of attack they could be facing.

Look at the size of tier 4 keeps and their surrounding walls. How much of it do we actually use? If you’re not in tier 4, the answer for you is; bugger all. We’ve got all this space to play with and instead we’re huddling together round a single bloody door. Of course there are melee DPS classes sneaking in postern doors with pick lock, but since they can’t get healers in with them and we’re only talking about 2 pre-set entrances, it’s not proving to be as dramatic an option as I’d hoped for.

Spread the fight around, give us options and make keep sieges the slice of awesome pie we hoped for.

Not a lotta choppin and does the new AoE of doom cause the lag?

Not had that much spare time last few days due to a mixture of real life stuff and having the damned pox. Which has resulted in not much progress with my Choppa. What little time I have had online when not on my Chosen I've just used to grind out quests with Gashface.

Doing a chapter at a time in each 3 pairings, seems to work quite efficiently. So far I'm up to level 24 with very little time put in since I left tier 2. Though obviously this has meant bugger all renown gains, my renown rank is lagging behind at 21.

Maybe I'll get stuck into tier 3 RvR a bit more when I get more time, but it's kinda tempting to just hammer straight through and get into tier 4.

Though with the way tier 4 is at the moment, I'm not so sure I'd be wanting to use an undergeared alt in RvR there. If my pretty well geared Chosen can die in literally 1 second with the AoE spam of Doom, it doesn't bode well for a squishy choppa :P No joke, had this at a recent fortress attempt, walked anywhere near the gate it was instant death with just a wall of numbers filling my screen. Dunno how many Bright Wizards they had stacking rain of fire, but ouch... Same would happen to Order when our Sorcerers stacked pit of shades I guess. Literally impossible for healers to do anything, especially when combined with the horrific lag. Hopefully it'll get fixed soon.

Interestingly that night we noticed that soon as we managed to get the Order off the walls and the Rain of Fire spam stopped for a bit, instantly the lag got better. Like a LOT better. I had spell effects turned off, so RoF shouldn't effect my PC graphic wise and everyone in alliance chat was talking about the lag reducing. So it wasn't just me.

Is it the calculations AoE makes the game do or something that shafts the server performance? There's a link for sure it would seem.

The pain of daytime Fortress/City sieges and AoEhammer

Lately its become fashionable for Order on Karak Norn to do fortress and city raids during the morning and afternoon on weekdays. Something which has been very depressing for those of us with normal 9-5 jobs, as by the time you get online for normal prime time gaming at say 7 or 8pm you're already at least one fortress down and Order are about to cap a second or even worse, you log into an IC siege.

How Order manage to have so many players that are students, school kids, unemployed or working night shifts I don't know, but you would presume Destruction would have a similar amount. I've read before that younger players tend to pick the goodies in fantasy genre games, but even if that's true it surely wouldn't be that many more players and they'd still have to be at school until like 3 or 4pm. So without any census data to go on and nothing but shit throwing flamewars on forums, I can only presume that the Destruction players that are on during the day times are on alts and not bothering to defend. Unless Order are actuallly recruiting at a local job centre :P But I walked past it this morning and didn't notice any pointy eared tree hugging gits...

The daytime raids are a problem, but not because the players on at those times are taking forts and sieging cities. Certainly not in fact, as there's no reason why those guys should be exempt from parts of the game. Maybe thats the only times they can play after all. The problem is those events that happen whilst the majority of players are at work can then bugger up the game for the majority of players, whose only option when they get online at more "normal" times is to either defend in a lagpit or suffer a city siege. At present its a bit like the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

This could perhaps be avoided if the lock down timers for fortress and city sieges were smaller. That way the poor sods working nights could come online in the morning, take forts, cities, etc and then by the time the rest of us get on we'd be able to do the same. Or at least have the option to try. I know I'm sure tempted each time to just go play an alt, tier 1-3 doesn't have these issues and has been epic fun lately.

Having just been on a primetime fortress attempt and having first hand experience of the ridiculous power of Bright Wizard AoE now (I'm sure the same applies to our Sorcerers), I can perhaps understand why Order are reluctant to push for 2 fortresses in prime time. Monstrous AoE spammage that can take my 9k hit points away in under 3 seconds, can not be healed through when your healers are suffering with 4+ second delay cast times due to lag. This is meant to be Warhammer, a predominately melee based game, not AoEhammer.

Mythic please do something fast with this whole situation. It's spreading rampant negativity at a delicate time and not all of it is an over reaction.

EDIT - found some census data from tonight:
Order: 966 total, 236 rank 40s
Destruction: 960 total, 202 rank 40s
Interestingly there were 112 BWs - more than any other class, including Slayers.

Nuff said tbh

State of the game malarky

In Mark Jacob's state of the game address the other week he listed the following as their priority list:
1) Client/Server performance in RvR
2) Bug & Polish
3) Open RvR in general
4) Keeps in general
5) Keep Defense
6) Battlefield Objectives
7) Zone Capture
8) Zone Capture rewards
9) City Raiding for fun and profit
10) Career Balancing
11) Scenarios

I was looking at this list and thinking about what I would prioritise myself and I've realised it's almost exactly the same.

1) The thing that is most frustrating at the moment is most definately the server stability and performance in large scale RvR. When you've got 200+ (my guesstimate...) people crammed into a small area like we regularly see in Fortress takes (daily on Karak-Norn), the server starts to cry. It also has a knock on effect onto the surrounding areas as masses of people rush around reinforcing attackers, intercepting the enemy, etc. Rest of the time the game performance is fine for me, but everytime this happens its a disappointment. Not a surprise mind you, every MMO has this problem, other than Eve, but then that doesn't have the same sorta of terrain to deal with and is many years down the road of development (though with everyone on one server there are probably technical lessons for developers to be learnt from Eve).

2) Second to that is bugs. This is nothing like as buggy as say Age of Conan, but it does have plenty of bugs particularly with PvE content and I know a lot of people get all het up about bugs and expect WAR to be as bug free as WoW is 5 years after release :P So for the sake of all our sanity it needs sorting.
The biggy bugwise for me since patch 1.2 is guild and alliance permissions. People at random not being able to talk in /as is a real hinderance and is very frustrating. This needs to be hot fixed like now.

3-8) Mark has this down as basically improving the whole RvR scene. Fair enough, whilst RvR is pretty cool most of the time and pisses all over the lame PvP in most other MMOs, there's lots that could be improved further. Keeps are high in that list, but Fortresses in particular need big changes. Combine the bad server performance and the fact that a Fortress is nothing more than a keep with bigger doors and a harder Lord, and you end up with a rather underwhelming event. Mythic need to do something drastic with Fortresses. Change the layout and the whole single Lord thing. Maybe have multiple areas that you need to control within a properly HUGE fortress, like an armoury, barracks, towers, etc. Just get the bloody lag sorted and make it more interesting. It needs more than just a bloody extra ramp ;)

"We also want to put in more attacker options, more attacker abilities, and experiment with new types of siege warfare."
Siege towers? Lets hope ;)

"We want to make BOs more relevant and necessary for the Keep take to Zone Capture progression."
Battle Objectives need spicing up, I'm very intrigued with what Mythic have planned here.

9) I've not done a City Raid since 1.2. Prior to the patch it was crap, but I hear its a bit better now.
The City Raid experience that we currently have in the game will also get some additional work. Our primary goal is to add more RvR opportunities throughout the entire Raid. We are looking at a number of options and possibilities under consideration for more “RvR” and less “PQ action”
Good :P

10) Career balance, also known as a poison chalice.
"1.2.1.......will give some extra loving to the Archmage, Shaman, White Lion, and Marauder"
When asked about the 1.2 patch a Witch Elf gave this response :


Add Witch Elves to that list pls. I can't cope with their misery any longer. I know they're a bunch of previously overpowered semi-naked emo sluts, but come on they're a bit shite now.

11) Scenarios, like whatever :P I know, I know some people love them. So I'm sure this is good news.

Tank wall crushed, the Fortress Lord in sight... Character screen?? GAH!

People got all excited when it was announced Dawn of War 2 had Tyranids, but tbh if you want to fight some Bugs, try a Fortress take :P

Tonight on Karak-Hirn Destruction guilds & alliances, big and small, worked together and Operation Snotstorm went into action. It had been planned it in advance, our faction's leaders had worked hard to get everyone involved and still keep it secret. Unfortunately it started a bit too early for me, but soon as the sprog was sparko I grabbed a particularly good bottle of Merlot, a comfy chair and got online for an evening of pixel death and mayhem.

I logged in just after the Reikwatch Fortress fell to our forces. Awesome result this, being the first time Destruction have taken a Fortress on our server and possibly the first time one's been killed on Hirn without the Lord being bugged down to the lower floor.

The attack then moved to Kadrin Valley, for a mixture of big fights and then sitting around doing nothing for ages. Same mixture of excitement, lag and then boredom as with all with lock down attempts, at least until the patches come in. After a while it became apparent we werent going to get KV (stuck between 90-96pts for like 2 hours), so the order was given for us to move on to Etaine. We switched zones quickly, Order were on the backfoot and in no time at all, blam! We had the zone locked. With a coordinated large scale attack on Shining Way Fortress, we quickly battered down the doors and got ready to hit the Order tank wall by the keep room.

Our mob smashed into their tank wall, our DPS raining pain on them. Order put in a good attempt at holding us, but it didn't take too long to break their wall. We started moving to clear all the Order from upstairs and then...

You are bloody joking me... Everyone gets kicked back to character screen.

But ok, we'll cope, we can get back in quickly and continue. Loading... come on... Yes! We're in! Hmm, loaded in at the warcamp, but ok we can still do this! Oh wait... No we can't. Not only are the Fortress doors back up, they are now UNATTACKABLE. lol :P

It had been a cool night, the moments of boredom were being forgiven due to the big chance of our server's first City siege being in sight. But it turned into a massive anti-climax when, first the game couldn't take our numbers in the fortress choke point and then the game bugged the forts to make any futher progression impossible.

On our server the vast majority of Fortress attempts have either bugged out, zone crashed, lagged to hell or been captured through cheating (accidental or not). Tonight I've logged off mildly peeved, but still positive as I'm confident Mythic will sort things out. However I saw a lot of people who were logging and were very pissed off. Understandably tbh too.

The next patch needs to bring some serious improvements to oRvR. Fortresses don't need sorting in a couple of months, they need sorting out right now.

Fortresses and a little bit more...

I mentioned a couple of days ago that Mark Jacobs posted about their plans for fortresses. In case you've not seen it here's the key info and a link to the source.



Over the next few weeks, we will be working on a number of initiatives that I can now talk about.

First, the team will tweak the settings for the Fortress Lords to make sure that their power is in line with the current numbers of players expected to participate in the siege. Second, the team will continue working on optimizing the code’s performance in large-scale battles so we can increase the population cap over the next few weeks. Third, the team is looking at additional tweaking of the pop cap to ensure that it is where it needs to be in order to allow these battles to be as well-balanced (from a design perspective) as they can be.
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Most importantly, the team will also be looking at moving the fortress areas out to their own zones to allow an even a greater of number of players to participate, while also maintaining a high level of performance. While they are doing that, they will also be looking at ways to enhance the fortress areas to take advantage of having their own dedicated zone.
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However, we won’t move the sieges into their own zones unless we are sure that we can get either some deign and/or performance improvements by doing so.
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Oh, and expect a major announcement from us at the end of the month regarding our plans for the next few months and beyond. It’s going to get even more interesting around these parts soon.


Source: http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/109912617/p1/?0
If you have read this already and it's old news, sorry, have a picture of the world's sexiest Orc.
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Orc artwork created by the genius(?)of Durtbocks...

Fortress battles, lag and server crashing no more?

Your faction’s guilds pull together, Keeps fall, Objectives are claimed and scenarios are won. The tier is locked and the enemy fortress is there for the taking… You battle inside, slowly of course because the 3 FPS lag has kicked in, but the Keep Lord is in sight! BLAM! Zone crashes. Doh!

Mythic’s original plan for Fortress takes didn’t work out. Hardly any (defended) fortresses have been taken, on our server it’s only happened once I believe when the Keep Lord bugged down to the lower floor. It’s been a big disappointment for a lot of people and as one of the big sells for WAR, quite understandably. However, people (Mythic included) should have realised this wasn’t going to work straight away. It was always going to need testing in a live environment before it could get sorted out. You simply cannot get 500+ players in a small area like that without making servers and code cry. I can’t think of any MMO that’s done it successfully yet.

For me it’s been a bit of a let down, but not the OMFG WAR EPIC FAIL crap spouted by some. For a start it was no shock as I’d played things like DaoC and Planetside from beta/launch and I was expecting it to take a good few months for it to stabilise or for an alternative solution, but a big factor is because the server I play on is very active. Keep takes don’t happen very often because both sides aggressively defend to stop the enemy getting to that point. Whilst this means it’s probably a bigger disappointment when we get to a fortress and it crashes, it also means I’m having a great laugh in the rest of the oRvR (Open Realm vs Realm combat), which actually takes up the vast majority of my game time. Though I’m sure given time it would become more annoying…

Thankfully Mythic are acting. Their interim solution has gone live and they have confirmed they are throwing everything at a long term solution and have also apologised and acknowledged the problem. They certainly put more effort into communicating than I ever saw from Blizzard, SOE or Funcom to name a few. Of course now they have to deliver on what they’ve said…

It’s going to be an interesting few weeks as we see how this interim solution pans out.

Just found some more news too. Check this link out :)

http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/109912617/p1/?59

Sounds promising for sure. Also the "Oh, and expect a major announcement from us at the end of the month regarding our plans for the next few months and beyond. It’s going to get even more interesting around these parts soon." is more than a little intriguing...