Zone locks double in WAR after release of new Zone Domination System
by Brooke Pilley 
Mar 19th 2009 at 4:00PM
Filed under: Fantasy, Game mechanics, Warhammer Online, News items
We heard early reports that the ZDS was working as intended, but had no hard numbers to back up the claims. Now we do. Nazgum, an avid MMO gamer and new WAR blogger, has been collecting zone capture data from the official Realm War site for the last 30 days and has come up with some interesting results.
Zone captures have doubled across all servers with the new ZDS. Order and Destruction are roughly even in number of zone captures if you average them out across all servers as well. One concern players have with the new system is that zones can be more easily "ninja'd" during 5am raids. Nazgum's charts show that the majority of zone locks occur between 2 and 6am (in North America). Finally, he compares activity on the two role-play servers to address Ostermark's envy of Phoenix Throne.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
JP said on 4:42PM 3-19-2009
Very interesting. I've heard from my WAR guildies how much better the balance feels (lol @ Destro crying b/c they don't win everything, all the time now) so that's good.
I'd like to know about strictly T4 though, as T1-3 have little effect on the game over all anyway.
But, I like how things are looking up. Hopefully, Mythic sees the same results internally, and doesn't cave to the nay-sayers from the forums.
1.2 still hasn't done anything significantly good for White Lions though, so I still have little interest in playing.
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moo said on 10:35AM 3-20-2009
The problem I found wasn't that it was too hard or took too long to capture a keep but there wasn't any tactics. It was all about the Zerg and ranged classes. All that happaned was you got two groups of ranged classes with healers in the mix keeping everyong healed and they were all attacking each other in a constant back and forth. The melee classes if they stepped out of the group got instantly picked off even with like 4 healers on them. If they ever managed to make it into the large group of ranged then they'd all just instant kill you cause they would all target you. So fights were just a constant boring back and forth Zerg.
Also the defending team spawns outside of the keep which means the attackers are sandwiched between two groups. So they often just got kicked back 200m to their spawn and it was this back and forth from the spawn by the keep to the keep and never ended unless the attackers were the Order which had far fewer people and they'd tend to be always on the defensive.
It's like if theres a 1 vs 3 then the 1 would always lose, unlike in WoW where if he was good enough he'd win. However WAR's classes are all just really bland and wtared down and have nothing to set them apart in their archetypes. Everyone has the same basic skills but the difference comes in where they do the dmg. So really the only way to win is having more people... hense the Zerg.
It's a problem that wont go away unless they revmp the class system.
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Kdolo said on 11:59AM 5-06-2009
Another thing that would fix the Zerg is if the doors to the keep were closed when an attacking faction got within a certain range. I find it absurd that you can be using a battering ram on a door and an engineer can hop out, drop a turret, and run back inside. If that door opens, it should open for everyone. This would also have to be true for the postern.
They also need to add a ramp to the Keep Lord. Concentrating an attacking force on one ramp, in addition to the issues caused with collision detection, make it exceedingly ridiculous to get a substantial force to deal with both the Keep Lord AND the defending Warband, who's numbers will likely be high with the addition of Guild-held keeps and the rewards you receive for retaining them.
Also, the keep lord. The need for a keep lord, or at least his four guards, is lessened as more players defend keeps. At some point, the strength of the Keep Lord and/or his entourage should be lessened the more players defend the keep.