Whatever happened to sieges?

From the towering Wilhelms Fist to the underground Badmoon Hole, keeps are impressive pieces in the lakes, surrounded by the battlefield objectives and are central to taking control of the zone. So what happened to them? Where did the siege warfare go? I cannot speak for each server, but certainly over in Karak Norn (EU) the keeps are simply a time sink for the attacking force. Very little actual warfare takes place over them now. Before the addition of the extra ramp you could defend a keep at the lords room with a wall of tanks, now with the addition of an extra huge ramp up to the key, vital, heart of the keep (yeah, because it makes sense to have your local architects design that) a tank wall is all but useless due to it being stretched so thin and a mass of players will just rip through a keep without the chance of a smaller force being able to hold back the mass tide the keeps fall quickly now and without much incident.

Siege weapons have remained an absolute joke for the last year. Sod all damage, too expensive and completely ineffective at contributing anything meaningful to a siege (rams not included). The guards, even as champions are nothing more than a passing thought as they disappear in the aoe. Rewards for defending the keeps are pretty much pointless as you gain more tokens from general RvR than a slim chance of defending a keep and getting a reward bag, not to mention getting the part you actually need.

The battling over a keep which would have me on the edge of my seat as I sat in the tank wall waiting for the surge, or the breaking down of the final door to charge in to meet my fate or find my glory has gone, keeps right now seem to be nothing more than a time sink. What once was a possibility of a small force holding out against massed ranks has now descended into a glorified battlefield objective.

It's not about rewarding people for taking or defending keeps. It's about making the sieges enjoyable yet tense, defendable with smaller numbers but takable with the correct tactics and having players feel they are contributing to the siege on an impressive structure rather than standing about in a flimsy cardboard box.

Five things I wish Warhammer had...

There's a lot of good features and ideas out there in various games, some are just 'fluffy' some are truly great for adding depth to a game. I'm going to look at five things that I have seen in games and would be good in WAR. This list is in no particular order, just a oooh that's gud!

1) Weather effects. (see Oblivion)
I've already touched on this subject before and still would like to see it. The world can feel quite static with no sense of weather or natural events happening. Would a downpour of rain be that hard to put in? A flurry of snow in Kadrin Valley or the dust storms in the land of the dead... Even Ultima Online from over 10 years ago had the weather changing...

2) Epic Encounters. (see DAoC Dragons)
Yes.. yes.. It's an RvR game... But still, 200 people raids on Dragons and other monsters are just epic.. Seriously, imagine a Daemon Prince or Emperor Dragon on an instance that takes an alliance to kill, drops a couple of bits of epic loot and of course is within reach of the other side so you have to risk going into say Order lands to take it on. one eye on the dragon.. one eye on the approaching Order...

3) Improvable Banks (see World of Warcraft)
Oh to have a smaller bank space on start.. BUT to be allowed to purchase more spaces for the gold we save up. I'm a cultivator, apothecary and tank.. I have multiple sets of armour (rvr, dps in pve and tanking) so my bank is full of stuff, not to mention tokens, trophies and bits and bobs from live events. I seriously need more bank space and I hate making bank alts... Gief more space!

4) Truly destroyable and upgradable keeps (see Medieval: Total War 2)
There is one point of attack at keep in WAR.. The door. That's it.. Nothing else, no strategy involved in assaulting a keep. Just zerg it until you break down the door or give up because the defence is too heavy. Let us truly siege the keeps, break down walls and towers and give us multiple choices in what we do. Though to counter this, give the defenders more upgrades, more powerful siege weapons and towers that would protect them from aoe and snipey ranged DPS. Finally, when you take the keep, whoever claims it has to rebuild it depending on the damage done. So if you destroyed all the towers then let the claiming guild repair them or leave them as basic platforms on the walls. A keep which is taken with the minimum of fuss (IE, through the doors with no damage done to the walls) would only need the doors to be repaired and upgraded as the claiming guild could then keep the existing upgrades (barring NPC's of course). Speaking of NPC's, how about allowing us to purchase wall defenders that can shoot arrows down rather than just trashy NPC's that disappear in the aoe. Don't punish guilds after they have upgraded and taken a keep, make the initial cost expensive but the maintenance lower, and once a zone is captured then there is no cost for maintenance.

5) Quick Start (see Star Wars Galaxies / DAoC)
Can't find a picture of this and have to admit it's been a long time since I played SWG but I'm pretty sure they had the quick start option as well (know for sure DAoC did). Quick start basically gave you the option on the login screen to go straight to your character. You have your username and password, then you just pick the character you want to go to and it would immediately load you into that character. No loading up the full character select screen, or anymore rubbish you don't actually want. I only play one character so I know who I want to play when I login, I don't want to 'make sure' by having to hit play once I've logged in.. Just let me log straight in and smush stunties!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So that was my five things from games I'd love to see in WAR, how about yours?

And so, the winds of chaos have blown away.

So Mythic have apparently scrapped the Winds of Chaos 'fix' for laggy zones. If you haven't bothered to read up about it then don't worry. It basically came to... Too many people in zone = Random people get teleported to another zone.

Basically it was an utterly pants concept (learn from Ultima Online... They implemented the same when Trammel opened up and it wasn't popular then either, only it was called Telestorming) which deserved all the rage threads due to it being an absolutely pathetic idea to punish the players for the piss poor server performance. But hands up to Mythic and they all but admitted that yes.. It was a bad idea... And pulled it from the server that it was being tested on. Gz Mythic on listening. Negative Gz for actually thinking we'd be happy to see this implemented because of your fault.

So what could Mythic have done to prevent the lag and crash pits (we had a keep siege last week on Norn that crashed the server two or three times) that we have been suffering from. Well my immediate thought to the lag in the capital cities is "Well, aren't we really supposed to have a choice of which city we siege when the fortresses goes down?" But of course, we're still missing 2/3rds of the endgame with no sign that Mythic will implement it any time this year. Spreading the player base onto more zone servers would make sense as you could have a bunch of warbands attacking Altdorf and the others attacking the Elf city (forgotten name :( ), all these players would be on two different servers and not interfering with each other, instead we are cramming them onto one server which clearly can't take the load.

For fortresses you could have possibly split it into a couple of instances balanced over a couple of servers, but instead of it being a duplicate fort - which lets be honest, is just a glorified keep take - we could have two instances, one for building siege weapons and breaking down the walls into the keep and the other could be based on disrupting the enemy garrison/reinforcements (I'll leave the details to your imagination). In affect making them into large scenarios where the side that has the most points after an hour from the two will win the keep and the attackers can then assault the inner keep with minimal enemy defence or the defenders drive back the attackers resetting the campaign as it currently stands.

While having mass RvR is what the game is about is very clear that the game cannot handle this number of players in one zone. If you make new servers you risk spreading people about too thinly making it PvE. It's a tough balance. Worrying also when you realise just how many people will be packed into the tomb kings zone. If a fort or mass keep siege can get laggy, imagine what will be happening the first few days (weeks?) of Tomb Kings.

And here's a though to end it with.. Surely all these addons that use chat channels to communicate data must be causing a portion of it. 200 players all sending the status of a keep every 15 seconds or so must be contributing to server load, add in players DPS/HPS and anything else that gets communicated and I wonder how much of the lag is actually self inflicted...

Urgh... 10% to go....

And I'll escape tier 4 for the joys of tier 1 again.

10% until I reach my renown rank target I set myself pre 1.2 and I'll hopefully get there tomorrow. Once that's done Lokax will be sticking with PvE and cultivation for a while I think.

You can only take so many zone crashes, suffer so much lag and watch yourself get rolled constantly by war bands as your tier 4 zones are captured during off peak hours leaving yourself staring at a screen of white (or black) coloured zones as "yet another fort is under attack". Fort defences lose its appeal and novelty factor because it happens so frequently now. Is the Dominance zone system to blame? Making it too easy to get to forts whereas before sides had to really work for a good day to push to a fort and couldn't send out the night shift to cap them all at 3am when the rest of the world sleeps. I'm hearing stories about servers that basically are all but empty in tier 4 for certain sides as the city gets destroyed daily as people can't defend the zones during the awkward hours.

Put it this way, I'll give it another MMO analogy. If you joined a guild with your max level character to raid instances and dungeons. Would you stay in them once you realised that every morning, while you were at work, they'd take there own level 40's out and do the instances themselves, leaving you with either going into the dungeon on your own to face overwhelming odds, or rolling a new character to join the lower instances. That's how it's starting to feel... Make an alt or just give up in sheer frustration at tier 4.

Or maybe everything is working as intended and I'm just needing to get used to being on the losing side for once in WAR?

10% to go....