Patch
Below I will discuss what I think will be amazing for the game, and what I think will be very damaging.
"A minimum level of 37 is now needed to participate in Fortress assault/defense."
This I think is a huge step in the wrong direction. I understand that Mythic is trying to fix performance issues with fortress assaults, but this kills a lot of people who are in T4. More over these people, 32-37 are helping flip the zone to go to the fortress then are being left out of the fight. This is not fair and far away from the vision that was sold to us in the beginning of the game. Performance issues start at the server and propagate from there. Instance your fortresses away from the zone node, and put a lot of hardware behind it. Putting artificial caps on a fight does not give it an epic feel, it makes it feel smaller.
"Players will now get a 10-second warning before being teleported back to their war camps if the Fortress has reached its population cap or if they are below the Rank restriction."
This is a great change for forts current form. I think letting people back up and start preventing others entry is a good idea.
"Using the Scenario auto-queue feature will no longer occasionally place players into a Scenario that is associated with a locked zone."
"The value of Scenarios towards City Capture has been reduced. The value of Battle Objectives and skirmishes towards City Capture has been increased."
Both of these tie together. Great step in the right direction. RVR objective should be the most important items towards flipping zones and going for Forts. Take scenarios and PQ's our completely.
Posted by
Enslaver
on
9:18 AM
Posts
5 comments:
"This I think is a huge step in the wrong direction."
I'd disagree. It's a temporary measure as they try to do what they can to make it as accessable as possible without instancing it, which I think would destroy the fortress feel. When a fortress gets opened up, everyone shows up, it will still feel epic. I can see maybe lowering it to 36, so that the people with multiple lesser wards at least can join in. Before that though, anyone 35 and under is basically just going to die a horrible death.
"Take scenarios and PQ's our [from zone control] completely."
I think that would also be a poor decision, if only because then there would really be no point at doing the scenarios other than for RR farming. There needs to be some incentive other than that for them to be there, otherwise, why have them at all in T4?
In the first instance, although I have taken the position of instancing it in the past I think that you are right it pulls away from the epic feel, but I do still think they need to put it under its own hardware separate from the zone instance. So when you reach a fort you are going onto a separate clustered system away from the main body of the zone. This would get rid of lag caused by people just being in the zone.
The second issue...I still think that it would be good to pull them from zone control. People will use them for RP farming no matter what you do so by removing them from the equation it is all about leveraging a zone. Really they should be used for more of a skirmish style combat instead of zone control mechanisms.
I think the minimum level of 37 is either largely irrelevant or useless. If the total number of attackers and defenders at a fortress is still limited, then it's going to end up being a solid group of rank 40s, anyway. All lower ranks will be teleported out as the rank 40s filter in, anyway. If Mythic doesn't limit the number of players in a fortress, the lag will shoot right back into the realm of the unbearable. Putting a level requirement on entering the fortress is a waste of everyone's time.
As for reducing the worth of scenarios - I'm all for it. I hate scenarios with a passion. I wouldn't mind if they were completely removed from the game (I know that will never happen). Some players adore them, however, so I'll grudgingly compromise and propose that they be worth a maximum of 5 points, but also that they NOT be required for zone control.
Putting them on their own hardware would be an amazing idea, anything to fix the massive lag. It's been a while since I was in on a Fortress Battle (my server is too well balanced), but last time, it was difficult to do anything.
As for scenarios, I agree that they are skirmish, but I see it as still being battle between the two sides, and each scenario IS tied to a zone, so it does corelate, it just doesn't feel that way because we can queue from anywhere.
Like I said, I don't know the topology of their server environment, but I would love to since I work in a data center, but it is just my speculation. I will be posting a lot more about this today based on what all I have experienced the last couple of days.
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