Adventures of Taas

Last night after a round of Left 4 Dead with Evan and Chris (Will of course had afk’d and dropped out) I popped on to the Aureus Knights forums to see if anything was going down and was floored when I saw a thread titled “City Defense – Altdorf”. Surely our Capital City wasn’t under attack?

I didn’t think I’d be seeing Altdorf under attack until the 1.2 patch changed the way zone control works but there it was. So I scarfed down some dinner and made my way to Altdorf.

For those not familiar with the process I’ll give a quick summary:

• The enemy must “lock down” two pairings (four zones in total) and take over the Fortress in each pairing to open up the final Fortress siege
• The enemy must capture the final Fortress before the capital city to unlock the city for siege
• Once the city is open for capture two fronts essentially open up:

A scenario named Altdorf War Quarters where you have to capture and defend 5 control points. I did this once during the defense and it was hectic, battle heavy fun.

The main defense takes part in the city proper. Instances auto-create that pit 48 destro against 48 order players. The city basically becomes a giant public quest where you have to kill X number of the other side, put out Y fires and control two control points within the city.

• I believe there is more after this but we never got to see it because we managed to push Destro out
• This whole process runs for 6 hours

All and all it was a lot of fun but not without its problems.

The Good

• Street battles felt epic and dirty. If you could imagine what house-to-house medieval warfare was like the game really felt that way
• The Altdorf War Quarters scenario was fast paced and fun
• Well coordinated teams could win the day; skill was definitely a factor. The population caps on the city instances and scenarios worked out very well.
• Renown gain was great

The Bad

• Population control was well thought out, poorly executed. Above I gave Mythic a “good” for this but the actual execution of population control was bad. How was it bad? You could decide which instance of the city defense you entered which meant you had groups farming gear on both sides in instances where there were 0 of the other side.
• Experience gain was next to nothing. Well you could get some good renown gains XP was no where near where it should have been
• Defenders who were losing received very little in the way of reward. The end-game gear only comes from winning the defense Public Quests – there should be some sort of Attacker / Defender influence system to give some auxiliary rewards.

Suggestions to Make it Better(TM)

• Remove the ability to select which city attack/defense instance you enter. You either join your warband (if you are in one) or you get assigned to the most active instance with a space for you
• Add Influence rewards for City RVR
• Change the kill the other side objective to players only. Destro was getting very good at setting up the battle in a position where they could just farm our NPCs and fly through the PQ
• Add better information on the status of the war. The victory points bars are rather ambiguous. Let us know how each city defense group is doing… how the scenarios are breaking out. This is the big show, we need to know what’s going down.

All and all I had a lot of fun. This being a big part of the end game of WAR felt a little underwhelming (many on the forums are now QQing that they are leaving the game because of this) and I hope Mythic continues to improve City Siege.

Came across this video today on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I was tempted to post this to my personal blog but I figured it had a nice gaming side to it – so why not! Check it out – is Azeroth a Red or Blue state?