Counterpoint on Warhammer Online's Fortress siege population caps

by James Egan Jan 10th 2009 at 5:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Game mechanics, PvP, Warhammer Online, Opinion

We reported earlier this week that Warhammer Online has been having some issues with Fortress sieges, and opted to implement a solution -- population thresholds. That solution has led to fewer Fortress-related crashes and overall improved performance, but not everyone is as enthusiastic about the changes Mythic has made to Warhammer Online.

A good example of this type of dissent among the WAR ranks can be found at MMOCrunch in a criticism written by Paragus. He takes aim at the Tier 4 campaign changes to Fortresses and states that imposing population thresholds diminishes the very thing WAR bills itself as -- a massive realm-vs.-realm game. He doesn't pull any punches when he states, "The fact that they are trying to spin this by saying 'to allow even more players to participate' by capping population in a given area only makes me feel better about pulling my guild out of this game. I'll be waiting for the flames from Warhammer fans."

He's got some strong viewpoints, and it might be a good idea to hear Paragus out in his "Rant: Warhammer RvR Population Capped!" post at MMOCrunch. If he's either struck a chord or struck a nerve with you, why not weigh in with your comments at MMOCrunch?

WAR has gone 1.1! Check out our full coverage of the 1.1a patch, along with our interviews exploring upcoming content and the open RvR changes. Plus, don't miss any of our ongoing coverage as Massively goes to WAR!

Tags: fantasy, fortress, fortress-siege, game-mechanics, mmocrunch, mythic, mythic-entertainment, opinion, orvr, paragus, pop, population, population-cap, population-threshold, pvp, realm-vs-realm, rvr, war, warhammer-online

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Holgar said on 5:26PM 1-10-2009

This blogger makes some VERY good points, the wallpaper pictured above and a real seige are nothing alike.

I particularily love his discription of "PR monkeys" and fan boys making excuses. (Abrieal this is YOU). In all honesty it stikes me as lack of forsight. Unfortionatly human kind has yet to come up with servers that are immune to lagg.

Mythic for unknown reasons did not realise this MIGHT affect the large scale RvR they have been hyping from day one.

However I really don't see any other options there really is NO other way short of instancing keep sieges.Which would utterly distroy the whole "Open RvR" concept.
So have fun Warhammer players I'll be off in Lake Wintergrasp which while far from perfect is a hell of a lot better than Lagging it out in WAR.

Abriael said on 6:41PM 1-10-2009

Oh, what do we have here? I actually didn't even bother, until now, to answer to the trolls that tried to spin the news as a terribad thing, but since we have a pathetic excuse for a wow fanboy that goes as far as openly ASKING me to school him around, so be it.

First of all, it's pretty easy to see that you haven't the slightest idea of what Warhammer is. You don't even know the difference between a keep and a fortress. We're talking about fortresses here, so your idea of "instancing keep sieges" doesn't even apply. keep sieges never had the slightest problem.
Second, no one at mythic talked about instancing. They talked about a level-based population cap, which is a MUCH different thing. What they did was simply to weed out those MANY lowbies that went to fortress sieges just to leech xp and rps, and that took as much server resources as a level 40, while not contributing at all to the fight. I've been in several fortress sieges, and the amount of level 20 (or lower) people you see leeching during the siege is a very sizeable percentage of the total. A sizeable amount that the battle can definately do without.

Does it take away from the "massiveness" of the battle? Not one bit. The caps are still very high, and let in a number of people in that can be easily defined "massive".

It's fun how the poor sod that wrote the article accused others to be "PR monkeys", while he's the one that tries (and fails miserably, it seems, looking at the comments on his blog) to spin around the facts.
As James not very smartly quoted, he tries to point down a lack of coherence between "capping a zone" and "allowing more people to partecipate". Too bad that the idiot evidently and purposedly cut the sentence, warping it's meaning. The complete quote qould be: "allowing more people to partecipate to capital city sieges", not to fortress battles.

It's pretty evident how cutting down the lag (which favors the defenders a lot) and removing the crashes problem makes successfully attacking fortresses much more viable and doable (even for the underdog realm, numbers-wise), and increases the number of city sieges considerably, thus making them much more accessible to more people.

The conclusion is even more laughable, as he compares warhammer to age of conan. Too bad that in age of conan ALL sieges are limited to 48 vs 48 people. In Warhammer the limits are a ton less restrictive and ONLY applied to fortress sieges. All things summed up, the only result he attains with his pathetic attempt to a PR spin is making a fool of himself.

In the end, Holgar, feel free to stuff yourself in that pathetic attempt at an RvR ripoff (which in the end is just a meaningless minigame, not to mention absolutely laggy) that is lake wintergrasp, if that floats your leaky boat. If you ever feel the need to be scooled again, gimme a call.

Mr Angry said on 1:23AM 1-11-2009

I marked the above post down, because it was too long and boring

Abriael said on 1:26AM 1-11-2009

Or more probably because it proves wrong just another of your silly, ignorant, warhammer-bashing mates.

invertman said on 5:32PM 1-10-2009

Why post this guy? He basically has done nothing but complain about MMO's for over a year now. He has a point that pop-caps do sort of defeat the purpose of RvR, but as a reason to leave the game? Boo Hoo! It's criers like these that made WoW hold your hand so much. Now his guild's gearing up for Darkfall. I give them 2 months on that before some patch comes and a whine-fest ensues.

My own thoughts are that hopefully this popcap solution will only be temporary. We'll see if that happens, but I for one haven't given up on WAR.

Calvin said on 5:34PM 1-10-2009

This guy is a big toolbag. At least now fortresses can be capped, and Mythic is doing all they can to fix this issue as fast as he can. If he leaves WAR good riddance.

InfamousBrad said on 6:28PM 1-10-2009

I don't know that I agree with his particular analysis, but as of this week, we've reached the point where even Mythic is admitting that it's mal-designed. Just announced: "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. This might also allow us to get slightly lower-level players into the action, either directly in the fortress sieges, and/or in supporting roles around the main action. However, we won’t move the sieges into their own zones unless we are sure that we can get either some design and/or performance improvements by doing so." ("Fortresses...and a little more," Warhammer Herald, 1/9/09.)

Population-capping the current Fortresses and nerfing Fortress Lords is just a stop-gap measure so the war can go on in some fashion while they decide how much to invest in a replacement design. Even they know this. They even admit this. So it's only a reason to quite Warhammer Online if you don't trust them to do a better job in a timely manner, or if that one exact feature (specifically meaning Fortress sieges, as opposed to the battlefield captures of tier 4 that precede them or the capital city sieges that follow them, and not meaning PvP in general) is why you're playing the game. Which is silly. I don't know of anybody who signed up for Warhammer Online just so they could fight their way all the way to one zone short of the enemy's capital and fight them there.

Dread said on 8:23AM 1-12-2009

Paragus is a well known knob and I pity anyone thats in a guild run by him. He's been bitching about various MMO's for ages now because he's a useless whiner. You know the type of player when you logging and you see region chat spammed by some tool whining over and over again - thats Paragus.

As far as Fortress changes go, as long as it boots the moochers I am 100% fine with that, I hate with a passion those that don't contribute and only show up to leech xp/renown, I'd be even happier if they were banned.

Hardy said on 9:29PM 1-10-2009

Server stability > game plan.

Would you rather play the game gimped till they fix an issue or would you rather not play at all due to constant crashes?

DrunkenPandaren said on 2:01AM 1-11-2009

If anyone has played EvE before their new 64bit servers would understand how much suck it was when you'd have massive fleets fighting each other with nearly everyone lagging out or getting D/C.

Same thing here, just too many for the zone to handle server side.

Abriael said on 2:24AM 1-11-2009

Eve is still massively laggy in it's most traffic intensive areas, actually. It can take up to 3-4 minutes just to undock from a station in Jita or in Amarr...