Fortress Fights & Zone Domination

With the recently introduced zone domination system (ZDS) slowly more and more people feel compelled to jump to their capitols rescue. One aspect of the system is to make it easier to flip zones if no defenders show up. In addition to me it looks like it makes it also easier for smaller forces to play a vitale role in defending a zone. Of course if you're getting steamrolled by a huuuge zerg, there is not much you can do against it. But walling yourself into a keep/fortress you can prevent a takeover for quite a while even with a smaller force, if done right. If you want to read a good sum-up for the ZDS, read How To: Zone Dominate at lagwar.

Part of the intended change was so there would be more capitol city raids and players could experience the "endgame content" (quotation marks as Mythic still needs to work hard on this) more often. Well.. this change did it, there are city sieges happening much more often. On Karak-Azgal they are happening more frequently as well now. But one major problem was not adressed by Mythic with the latest changes: What happens on the servers where there is a huge faction imbalance (talking about active RvR, not player numbers) due to whatever reason? With the capitols now losing city rank, some server factions are basicly locked out of the rank 40 city instances six days a week. The capitol needs rank 2 for guild tavern and lower of the two rank 40 dungeons (in IC thats BWE) and rank 3 for the higher rank 40 city dungeon. How would you feel if your capitol gets bombed back to Stone Age and the assaults keep coming so you can't rebuild it fast enough? Doing a lot of city PQs just to be able to get rank 3 again to enter the dungeon, next day your capitol was attacked again. Reads nice on paper, but try to imagine how you'd feel about that with only very few options to access proper dungeons for endgame content. This needs to be adressed. Every time a city is pushed into a contested state it loses a rank is a bit too much if the enemy is inside your city every night and the city dungeons are the only shot at Sentinel gear. My personal focus is Lost Vale, so I'm not bothered that much about it - but others are. Read: The Darker Side of Zone Domination at Knights of the Feathered Hats.

Interesting tidbit i found on the US forum: Victory Points from empty city siege instances are worth less to overall Zone Control. Reads to me like more power to small organized teams that beat the crap out of an instance full of n00bs. Question arises tho: With this change, what happens if no one would show to defend their own capitol, could the attackers gain zone control at all? The zone control system is another example at how Mythic fails to communicate such details to the players. I know people should read patchnotes & forums, but they don't. There needs to be a proper RvR guide at the official websites to spoon-feed peeps those important systems.

On Monday (?) evening we were defending the Inevitable City against a larger Order force. Not really the city, but the Maw fortress. Despite having much smaller numbers, we were able to fend the attackers off by walling ourself properly in, inside the fortress, and preventing another zone lock. While the whole thing was fun, there are a few things that are still not working like they should. The lag was awful again, seconds until your skills hit, sometimes attackers not rendering properly on your screen, etc. When my respawn timer went out it took a minute or longer until i did respawn. I know the EU servers had some trouble these days, so hopefully this was the cause and will improve fast, but others say their RvR performance went much worse with 1.2 patch. One more thing *very* annoying was that the fortress lord was constantly jumping between upper and lower floor. Mythic said they fixed the lord pulling down, but apparently they did not properly yet. If Order could pull him down by intention or his leash was just wacky, i can't say. In addition the guards he spawned behaved in a similar way, teleporting up & down and also were behaving pretty braindead, their AI was a major fail.

Like i wrote in another post already, I'm a bit disappointed to see many guilds only running certain combinations (3-4) of classes as they can use their skills together to a rather overpowered combination. IMO that's something Mythic should look into as well, feels weird not only from the immersion standpoint.

EDIT: Just saw a good recap at the US forum about some of the primary complains concerning AoE is out of control.

Because it fits the context somewhat, also read Things To Do and Not To Do in Scenarios at Wizard & Wenches if you haven't yet. Now read it again.

Ragbag

Last update has been a few days ago, as i was busy creating a new space for our guild alliance Inevitable Destruction. But now that's done, lets check what happened over the last days...

Major news from Mythic on the fortress fight front. They'll cap fortress fights and teleport players out that can't get in anymore. The cap is a dynamic one and will raise the needed player rank in steps. Lower rank players that are at the fight from the start won't get ported out as it will only affect players trying to enter the area, as clarified by Andy. I think i speak for many if i say the player base hopes its only a temporary fix and the code/hardware will be adjusted further in the future. While i don't think its the best way to go, at least Mythic works on making the fortress fights more stable. A hotfix on the US servers apparently also fixed the bugged city siege PQ contribution, where the same people did win the gold bags every time. The contribution system did build on the contrib you gained during the first PQ done and did not reset - so now we have a few lucky people run around with nearly full Invader gear they gained in one night. EU should hopefully get the fix tomorrow then.

BTW, you got a Wii? Well, looks like there are some folks that try to play WAR with the Wii-Mote. While i doubt its very effective playwise, maybe something fun to try if you're bored.

There has been some buzz of blogging (1,2,3, etc.) about the WAR ward system recently. Some initial misinformation shows that Mythic/GOA should inform players better about the ward system and how it works, *inside* the game. If even some of the regular bloggers don't know 100% how it works, how should the average gamer? Why not have a special tome unlock, explaining in detail how it works and where to find stuff, once you gain your first piece with a ward? This would close the info gap many players have. Of course it's annoying to have to obtain certain gear items to progress, but then again so far no MMO i played was able to abandon a certain gear grind at the endgame, as else players will get bored with the content faster and there is no need to run certain dungeons over and over, resulting in a huge unsatisfaction about content. I'm not saying i enjoy the gear grind, but some sort of endgame grind is necessary i think as else the content will run dry rather quick. I DO think Mythic needs to adress the dungeon drops to create a better system via tokens or such. And NO, i don't think you need to be able to use ALL the drops, but running eg. Lost Vale and not being able to use any drops at all is frustrating. I had to run the city dungeons a gazillion times to finally get my Sentinel chest piece and i know others are in the same boat. Of course dungeons per se are faster in WAR then in many other MMOs, so once you mastered the content its not such a pain as running Molten Core all over again. As far as i recall city dungeons usually take us between 35min and one hour, depending on group and speed approach.

There is a lot of critique about the ward system, but IMO people tend to forget one thing: The ward system enables Mythic to make the high-end set pieces not to overpowered in RvR while still create a PvE content progression in "power". In other games the high-end sets are so powerful, those wearing them will trash everyone with only high-rank blues. This is not the case in WAR. While i do think there is not much variety gear-wise and Mythic needs to adjust eg. the droprate in Lost Vale (only one piece per wing boss, should IMO be two at least) of course they could have achieved the ward system also by means of extra slots like talismans for all high level gear - that way you could have at least used more variety depending on play style. In some departments the itemization is still lacking (eg. no "real" tanking weapons) and like i mentioned before, the new Bastion & city dungeon drops are way better then most things in Lost Vale.

On a sidenote, i catched another person "borrowing" a map from me, editing it and posting it as their own. A site called PlayerQuest used my Bilerot Burrow map and just deleted all the other info stuff from my map and threw together their own version. How can i know? Well, especially the BB map needed some editing due to the different levels and i had to use some editing tricks to make it look properly. The impudent part is they have a Creative Commons License on their blog as well. If they know what that really means, they should have realized they are breaking mine in not giving credit and using a different license. Ah well, i left a comment asking them to at least point to the original. Like i mentioned before, I'm very relaxed in letting people use my stuff, but if people just take your work, don't ask you and post it as theirs, it annoys me big time.

Karak-Azgal: Altdorf Ablaze - 1st City Siege

Friday night Destruction managed to lock down the Shining Way fortress, tho i heard some rumours about a door being missing. I was not online during that time, so no idea if its true. Afterwards we tried to lock down another fortress, but the server did not hold and the connected fortress T4 zones crashed repeatedly reseting the campaign back to the last zone before the assault. Our alliance decided to withdraw and try again after midnight, hoping that less people (and I'm not talking about defenders tbh) would be around and we can take the fortress before the zone crashes. When we attacked Reikwald fortress we moved rather straight on to the fortress lord. There still was a shitload of people around and when his health was going down, we were counting his last 15% health loud out on vent while expecting the zone to crash any second... surprisingly it didn't and we locked down the 2nd fortress. Altorf was open for an assult, the first capitol raid on Karak-Azgal! Once you take the 2nd fortress a timer starts and Altdorf will be contested for 6 hours (the timer does not show minutes and jumps immediately from 6 to 5). If you manage to accumulate enough victory points doing the PQ & scenario (doing quests seems not to yield any VPs) you'll lock down the city and the defenders can't enter anymore. If the defenders win the whole T4 campaign will reset.

One sad thing at the fortress raid was that we could see a few players doing nothing else then spamming standards and trying to lag/crash the zone on purpose.

The server stability during fortress fights is definately something Mythic/GOA needs to work on more. While large scale RvR performance indeed got better for many with the last patches its still not enough. Crashing zones while doing a fortress assault is not acceptable, the promised large scale RvR part of the game needs to work flawlessly for WAR to have a long term attraction to the players. It already does work much better then eg. in Age of Conan, but nontheless its not enough yet. I can't compare atm if its the network code from Mythic or the GOA servers that are causing the problems on the EU servers but maybe some folks from the US can enlighten us if they still got crashing zones during fortress raids. During the large scale RvR around the forts the performance seems to be okayish for most, its just that at some point the zone simply crashes and it might take more then one try to log back in. The question if Mythic/GOA can iron out those last technical problems will make or break the game as many more people approach T4. In a worst case scenario they need to close a zone if too many people are in there, preventing more to enter. This would cause balancing issues again, therefore i hope they can fix the existing system or use better servers.

Many warbands made their way towards Altdorf on Karak-Azgal that night. I don't know exactly how many people were there, as we were all too excited to be able to raid Altdorf. Once you reach the maingates of Altdorf you knock down the door and there is a large portal you can enter. I just assume the backdoor will have a portal as well. Best let your warband leader go in first and then the rest of the raid will zone into the same instance. If it applies to you, there is an instance selection screen to choose from - this screenshot is from 6:30am or such, therefore the few people. It looks like the city instances can take two warbands on each side, so the max amount is 48:48 per instance. Some people had the problem to be in a queue for a very long time. This seems to be a bug and one guild mate just relogged after being queued up for one hour or something and got in immediately. So it might be worth a try should that happen to you. From what i read on the forums it seems the siege inside the capitol is limited to six instances. Ergo only 576 players, 288 each side, can enter the capitol and the rest has to queue or try to fight in front of the gates preventing people to reach the portal. I've no idea if the game will open more instances under certain circumstances, but so far i never heard of more then six and read about people standing in front of the doors and being queued.

Edit - Clarification: Should your warband enter an Altdorf instance that's already full when you try to enter, you'll be placed in queue. Seems the queue system for city sieges is bugged and does not work properly - thats why you get stuck in queue for a long time. What you have to do is, leave the warband and approach the portal solo. Now you'll get the selection screen and you'll be able to see if the instance (your warband is in) is full still or if you can enter manually. If its still full (48 destro), either wait and retry every now and then or join another instance.

Once you enter Altdorf you'll zone into the Destruction "starting area". There is a healer and a bunch of NPCs that will hand out some quests to you. The quests are nothing special, you have to kill players or certain NPCs and also use a few orbs in specific places to solve them. One quest was on a timer of 1 hour. Some of the quests will yield Defender's Sign & Defender's Mark tokens. If people are interested i can write more in detail about the quests and what to do, just leave a comment. Should you die inside the city siege instance you'll respawn at the starter area. There is one large PQ going on inside the whole city. The advice: Destroy Altdorf. Take no prisoners. The first stage of the PQ Altdorf - Slaughter in the Streets! involves to take two battle objective type POIs (Temple of Sigmar & The Docks) inside the city, kill 150 Defenders and start 50 Fires. The fires are started by using tents, crates, barrels, bookpiles and everything else you can touch to burn. The 2nd part is on a 10m timer and involves killing four Ogre Bodyguards and General Leighton. The overall PQ is rather easy, were it not for the fact that Order has a mirror PQ and will try to kill attackers as well as trying to extinguish fires. I think their 2nd part involves killing some Destruction Corruptor with four Firewyrms. The contribution for those PQs is not fixed yet from the looks of it btw. I heared many people complain its still bugged and the same people getting the golden bag every time. This really need to be adressed. The loot bags yield some wierd rank 30+ loot (most of it was crap for a rank 40), but more importantly the gold bags yield Invader set pieces. I've only seen (did not win a gold bag myself) chest pieces from this PQ, no idea if you can get other pieces as well from the initial one.

Edit - Clarification: The initial quests you can take inside Altdorf, won't be repeatable even after another capture. So you really can only do them once.

The whole contested capitol content seems to have a few major flaws in my opinion: One major problem is instance balance. You can join an instance with zero attackers/defenders in it and kill spawning NPCs for the 150 attacker/defender part. My estimate (from what i hear about respawn times) is you could do around 4-5 PQs in one hour if you have enough people with you inside the instance. This is a double-edged sword, on the one hand you want all the people to stick around to enable the city siege content to as many people as possible, on the other hand it should not be possible to farm the PQs too easily. In my opinion this system needs to become smarter and more dynamic. Of course you need to enable people to do stuff on their own without any attackers/defenders in it. If the instances would just close down and collapse with too few people in them players will eventually leave the capitol as there is nothing to do for them... if 10min later another warband from the opposing side shows up, the other warband just left. To keep as many attackers/defenders interested there needs to be stuff they can do. The spawning NPCs should a) be stronger and b) use a dynamic system that "fills" empty instances with strong mercenary NPCs (an AI improvement could not hurt as well) that don't count for the PQ. If a full 48:0 instance can do 2-3 PQs in one hour that should be enough to keep people interested, but make it more difficult to farm (which defenders can do as well) the city siege without resistance. The initial PQ works but its to static, the General always spawns at the same place, add some more random factor to that. Like needed with normal RvR BOs i propose to make POIs more meaningful by giving them some purpose. The defenders are able to hold the Temple of Sigmar? Awesome, why not reward them with a group of Warrior Priests spawning every 15min to aid the fight? The attackers hold the Docks? Strategic advantage! Let some reinforcements arrive. The whole PQ & PvE content inside the capitol needs to support a more exciting RvR experience, that's what people want.

Another thing are those quests in there: I hear that the defenders can't do any quests beside the ongoing PQ... is that true? If so, that sucks and needs to be changed. Quests add more to the feeling you contribute something inside there. Let the defenders bandage some people, transport supplies, whatever. During the siege its very hectic/chaotic with all the fighting inside the streets so of course those quests can't be too complex and should move people around the city. The quests are not repeatable, but right now the work vs reward is pointless, why bother? The quests we could do inside Altdorf were rather boring. Kicking in doors is fun but two similar quests to use an object all over the city? *yawns* If Mythic wants to give the impression you pillage & plunder the enemy city, why don't the quests reflect that more? There are several small houses i can enter, why not let me steal valuables for a quest? Why not hand me some dynamite and let me blow up the safe inside the Altdorf bank? Create some supply/reinforcement quests that have a mirror part on the other side to support more places with constant RvR inside the city. When we were inside Altdorf the three major places to fight at where the two BOs and the market place. Create some more strategic points inside the city worth taking/holding and make those POIs actually do/trigger something. And talking about quests & rewards from there: Get someone on the quest rewards. Some quests were yielding nothing beside some XP and silver (and very low amounts) others gave the Defender's Sign (can get four from the quests) & Defender's Mark (can get two from the quests) tokens... Mythic, those are *worthless* at the moment. You took out the token system to buy armor but left those in the game. Let me buy something with them! I don't really care what it is as long as its unique and somewhat useful. I'll be very pissed if they just delete the stuff... you got the system, give it a purpose again. Right now it feels like a bad joke to get a "reward" thats of no use for you... big let down for the epic "endgame" feeling. Same goes for the armor models from the loot you get in there... same old crappy models all over again. This is supposed to be part of the endgame, make the stuff look different.

The fluff could be more again as well: While a full instance is fun and a lot of cool street skirmishes are happening there needs to be more stuff that makes it feel like a city under siege. Add some exploding barrels & windows to the streets. Create some more ambient NPCs that flee the streets in panic from time to time. When i plunder the enemy city i want souvenirs! Why not let me take some unique grey trash items? Make some of the "official working NPCs" like bankers, barkeepers, etc. drop unique looking (order models maybe?) clothes. Those can be total crap stat wise, just make them look cool. Also enemy Defenders could drop special loot inside the capitol fights.

Don't get me wrong, the city siege was a lot of fun... BUT parts of it were just too static so when we go back for the next city siege I'm afraid it could become boring to "grind" the city. One thing that added a nice flavour to exploring the city: You could unlock some of the history/lore tome unlocks inside the city. I had no time to really search for them, but there were some i found while running around. One or two achievment unlocks i found as well, like the grave of Konrad Hirtzel. In one cellar there was a "bookcase hidden door" with a small portal behind it, but we could not use it. Anyone knows where this leads? Or what is the deal with Jerue Zeinbach standing around in the burning city? Inside the bright wizard college there are a bunch of Aqshy cubes you can destroy, but it didn't look like this does anything at that stage. Maybe the college will only become active once you captured the city. Two PQs and the PvE dungeons (will those drop different loot then the own city dungeons for the other side?) will open up after a successful siege with a city capture. Once the two PQs are defeated the king encounter unlocks.

One more fun thing we discovered during the siege was the Screaming Cat tavern near the Docks. Inside the tavern were the two infamous heroes Gotrek Gurnisson and Felix Jaeger. They did put up a good bar fight, but were no match for us. Felix did drop special belts with three empty talisman slots. I don't want to spoil the fight by telling to much about it, but we found it had a nice wrinkle to it. By far the best item i won during the city siege is my new shield, the Insurrectionist Blocka, followed by the three talisman slot belt. I gathered some screenshots from loot we found here. On a sidenote, all the Insurrectionist jewelry is broken and lacks stats, making them absolutely useless epic trash items.

We did not manage to lock down and capture Altdorf, after the timer ran out the whole war campaign did reset. Was it the epic fight Mythic praised city sieges would be? Hmm... not yet. It was really exciting to siege the enemy capitol and we had a lot of fun, else we would not have stayed up until 7am and try to burn down Altdorf. Being part of the endgame i feel tho the city sieges need to be pimped more to provide fun even after you did siege the city a few times. More fluff that immerses you further into the pillage & plunder and the PQ plus the quests need to focus more on supporting the RvR inside the city with contrary goals and also add some strategy to the city fights. The flaw that BOs don't really have a meaningful/tactical purpose is a general one in WAR and will hopefully be adressed also for the city sieges.

Everything was very chaotic in the beginning of the Altdorf siege as not many had a clue what to do and where. So maybe this summary will help others when the time has come. Waaagh!

EDIT: Just got some more infos. Apparently after you manage to gather enough victory points to "lock" the first stage of the city siege, the 2nd stage unlocks. In Altdorf its two additional PQs (Bright Wizard College & Sigmar's Temple) which you have to beat while a timer of one hour runs. Only after you beat both PQs, the city instances and also the king encounter unlock, while the city becomes captured. Without any Invader/Darkpromise gear the PQ lords hit a tank in full Sentinel gear for about 20k damage. After the six hour timer runs out there starts a two hours city rebuild timer, which seems bugged atm. IMO its supposed to work like that no attackers can zone into the city anymore and when you die inside the city instance you would not respawn inside the city. After the two hours all attackers get teleported out of the city. But yday night apparently it was bugged and did not work like this, a CSR had to reset the zone to kick invaders out.

The Maw Fortress under attack on Karak-Azgal!

Yesterday evening came down a well planned attack from the Order forces who took two zones in a short time span and then moved over to the Maw. The good news is, zone locking works - we have been trading zones back and forth for some time now on Karak-Azgal. The way it works:
a) Take control over Battle Objectives & Keeps, b) Grind the PQs in that area, c) Have people win scenarios connected to that zone, d) Kill people in open RvR inside that zone

The zone control system is not working very well atm tho. Why do you have to grind PQs? I can cope with the scenarios as they offer a balanced environment, but PQs? c'mon... its also a problem right now if a) no enemies show up (no idea how long the victory points over time mechanism will take) or b) if you have some unorganized idiots from your realm feeding the attacking realm "free" kills. If the fight is very balanced it's a problem as well, you have a full evening of nice RvR, but nothing is happening in the end and you don't have the feeling of accomplishment. Should there be maybe a very small attacker advantage of some kind? At least there should be something happening... and be it some kind of big ass Commander spawning when you fight the zone for several hours - does not need to be too powerful but at least give you a show, if you know what i mean. RvR is fun, but after hours and hours of it and nothing happening... you will get bored.

The bad news: Right now the servers can't handle large scale RvR. That simple. My guess is we had around 250 players fighting in the same area yesterday and it resulted in a very instable server. The lag at times was immense, you could not use your mount or any skills as the delay was around 20secs. There was a bunch of players standing in front of the Fortress door, as the lag prevented us to use it. One time i was alone and de-synced from the server... could run around wherever i want but not interact anymore. Frequent crashes were there and when you tried to log back into the battle zone the game kicked you back to the character selection screen - not once, but like 10 times in a row. Also the campaign was acting a bit crazy, resetting zones back and forth and also resetting the defense timer. Mark Jacobs announced Mythic will try to implement some fixes that should help with the Fortress fights and large scale RvR. Well, they better deliver and not just talk about it. If Mythic won't be able to fix these issue during the upcoming month, IMO many more will quit WAR. It's a crucial part of the game - worst case scenario, if they can't fix their server/software to handle it, they'll need to instance those fights. But let's hope their technicians were able to find some solution... a few people from beta say it was running better back then. So maybe its not due to limitations of the game and can be adjusted.

Especially for tanks/melees a lag zerg fest is not much fun at all. Beside all the "ghost" players (they are not there anymore but the server still renders them at their old position) you try to attack, if you charge the enemy often the enemy player rendering kicks in again and what you thought were just a few Order standing there ends up being a full warband - with you right in the middle of it. It's a trap! Overall i have to say Order did very well on the attack and without all the server problems they might have posed a real threat. As we had the shorter way into the battle zone and got organized quickly we could utilize that due to crashes and such their warbands got split up. We made a large excursion when we saw our chance and it worked, we annihilated their attacking forces in the end. But kudos for that attack, very well done!

Our alliance had a bunch of warbands going and beside some minor communication flaws defense worked very well. Once the Maw went under attack and the call to arms went out people did abandon *everything* they were doing and came to help - even the lower level ones to eg. pour some oil and such. It was quite cool to see the guild chat/system messages... once the situation went serious everyone jumped on their mains and were riding into battle. The atmosphere really felt like something big is going down and everyone was eager to participate. That's the feeling Mythic need to capture for those large scale events. Thirst created a warband together with our friends from Rigor Mortis and we had a lot of fun during the evening. We laughed a lot on vent and in the end, when the fight cooled down we started some tactical training to run in an arrow formation and charge the Order warcamp, like you can see on the picture. We also tried to write Order some messages, but did not have enough people to write in a way that could be seen. ;)

How exactly to take the enemy capitol - like the guys on Volkmar server did

Looks like Order on the Volkmar server did take a field trip to the Inevitable City (1,2) and were grinding the PQs there. They did not kill the Sub-Bosses and could not advance to the King tho. Since we got some trouble with advancing the campaign on Karak-Azgal and had some clarifications from MagnusK, the latest Grab Bag explains more in detail how locking zones work. Basicly even when you took over all BOs and Keeps in one zone you still need to queue for the attached Scenario (and win it) or do quests in that zone to completely lock it down.

About the current timers involved for city capture:

#Once the zone right before the fortress gets taken, you have 1 hour to take the fortress.
#After the first fortress is captured you have 36 hours to take a second one.
#Once the 2nd fortress falls you then have 6 hours to do all the PQ stuff vs your opposition and lock down the city.

Phase 1: Both sides doing PQs fighting for victory points (VP).
If VP are won by the attackers:
Phase 2: Defenders pushed out, Second set of PQs switched on. Defenders inside can stay, but cannot zone in from outside. You then have 2 hours to complete the 2 tough PQs.
Phase 3: If you lock down the city due to finishing the last two PQs, you'll gain access to the King Instance encounter.

If the PQs are not completed
Phase 3: Martial Law, 2 hours of rampaging the city
After 2 hours: 15 minute rebuilding Phase, defender can zone in but attacker cannot. The ones inside can stay. At the end everything resets.

People already complain that it's not really possible to have a real break due to the timers. Once you approach the final steps you'll need to stick to it or you'll lose all progress. If you don't have enough peeps to get involved for around 10 hours, it might be difficult. The times listed by the player from Volkmar differ a bit from what some Mythic people posted, but maybe it was changed recently. Would be nice to get an offcial list from Mythic about the timers involved.

From what players tell, they got eight gold bags per PQ inside the main city. So it's possible to win some pieces of the Invader set (boots drop from rr50+ players) during them.

Altdorf burns... again! (Averheim server US)

After the first raid on Altdorf, where players supposedly used some bugs to get the deed done, yesterday happened the first large scale raid that managed to control Altdorf (1, 2). Apparently around 300 members of the alliance Retribution (guilds: PRX - The Professionals, Cadre Quietus, Xen on Onslaught, Dusk Till Dawn, Isolated, Sinners and Misery) started at 7am EST to take keeps and around 12am they were fighting in Altdorf. Most of the alliance were organized very well with voice communication from the looks of it and the whole raid was setup a week in advance. During the five hours of preparation to raid the capitol, they did not meet much resistance. While on the one hand it was early hours and less people online, there are also voices from Order players that complain - again - that not enough people care about what's going on in open RvR. When it comes to the "important" fortress raids, every player gets an onscreen message once the battle moves over to a fortress and also gets notice of one is captured. At least then people should start to move towards the battle zone quickly.

On a sidenote: On Karak-Azgal the Maw was under attack by Order yesterday night. It was a battle 50:20 in the beginning and from those 20 defending Destruction around 50% was from Thirst. When i noticed what was going on i headed over as well (and I'm only rank 28), but the battle had moved on already. It was nice to see that a few more Destruction showed up at the Maw to help to defend it. When one of the fortresses is under attack, do care! Shout inside the capitol for more people to come and defend. If the capitol is under direct attack there is a bottleneck and it's harder to help defend the city then to help defend the fortress before.

From what the participating Destruction players said, it was no cake walk as the upgraded NPC defenses can't just be zerged but also require some tactics. Most participating players were around rank 30-34, they took the T3 keeps and also guarded the altdorf gates later on as only approx. 40 players from each side could enter the city instance per scenario. They took down the head priest of the sigmar temple, but the master wizard (Lord, rank 48, 4 skulls) in the BW college did provide some serious pain. Quote: "He oneshot me (a chosen with 600+ toughness, 700+ elemental resist, 8500+ hp) with a crit for 8721 damage (1962 mitigated!)."

The Destruction players never made it to the Altdorf king tho. The PvE content inside the city seems to be rather challenging, at least players should be rank 40 to have a better shot. Looks like Mark Jacobs announced some tweaks to the zone capture system, that will make early morning raids much harder to pull off, when he commented on the first siege (on KEP) earlier, but MJ said he'll look into all the data from the raid and will announce his finding about system working vs. needs more tweaks later on.

When the players are done plundering the city i hope we get more info and pictures - the warband was in Altdorf for about three hours, should have gotten plenty. Check Dusk Till Dawn for some more pictures. In addition i found a video from the raid on the last T4 Dwarf keep. I also found a photstream by Isphet on flickr with pics. The most interesting part of info from this so far was a sidenote from Mark that how well your raid is doing with the PvE stuff inside the city determines the length of the city capture. So there is no such thing as to capture the city and leave it alone for 24h. Just saw that Andy clarified the capture process here:

# You must capture two fortresses in tier 4 within 12 hours of each other.
# To capture those fortresses, you must seize and hold the neutral tier 4 and your opponent’s zone in two of the three racial pairings (after which you only have 60 minutes to capture said racial fortress).
# After all of this you fight in a contested, not captured, Altdorf/Inevitable City for control of the city, much in the same manner as a regular zone would be. In the case of Altdorf, after you have secured the city and the defending force is ejected from the city you have one hour to complete the Bright Wizard College and Sigmar’s Temple public quests. In the case of The Inevitable City,The Monolith and The Sacellum. Should you fail to beat these two Encounters within the hour, the city will be reopened to the defenders and they will be allowed to wipe out any attackers left in their City.
# If you complete the two Encounters as an attacker however, you lock the city down for 20 -24 hours and get access to the King Instance..
# Contribution points towards the capture of a city are scaled based on the population of both sides, not just one lump sum. This ensures that a defending force with smaller numbers has a fighting chance to hold off the invaders. However, you can overcome the scaling with a sufficiently large force.

Raid on Altdorf Capitol (on Karak Eight Peaks)

Wow, while reading some other blogs, Book of Grudges pointed me to the fact that on Karak Eight Peaks (KEP) there was a raid on Altdorf main city (1,2) going on tuesday. That's pretty fast, after we heard it would be such an epic expedition to gain control about the enemies capitol. O.o
Apparently around 19:00 Destruction players started to raid T4 Keeps and did not meet much resistance, either because not enough higher rank players were online or simply because still too few people care. The taking of keeps continued until around 23:00 and after midnight Altdorf was open for an assault. Some people claimed that there was a bug that did let players enter the last fortress through the postern door, while some say a few classes (anyone know more about this?) will get skills to use these doors later on. Apparently it's enough to capture two racial pairing, so taking over two T4 Fortresses is enough to be able to move forward on the opponent's capitol.

From what i could research the following happens once a capitol is under assault: The city becomes contested (which will result in the loss of one city rank!) and invaders can enter it. The whole city becomes an RvR zone and everyone inside collects victory points. The points are collected by participating in one of the two public quests (with opposing goals) that show up inside the city, involving killing enemy players & citizens and burning down tents and stuff (for the attacker). A new scenario will open up as well - in Altdorf it's called Altdorf War Quarters - plus there are battlefield objectives inside the city to capture as well. During these activities, both sides will collect victory points. Once one side can accumulate enough points to tip the scales, one of two things happen: If the defenders win, they attackers are pushed out of the city and all T4 resets to neutral. If the attackers win, the capitol is captured (will result in an additional city rank loss!) and the opposing side is pushed out of the city and the winner locks it down for 36 hours. During this time the PvE content (PQs, dungeons, King encounter - if the king is killed the city will lose two additional city ranks!) are open for the attackers to enjoy. After the time is up the city and T4 will reset.
We pillage, we plunder we rifle and loot Drink up me hearties, Yo-ho.

One important thing to note: Apparently you need to be rank 32+ to be able to help defending the capitol! If you're lower rank, you can't enter the city in a contested state. While the city is contested your new "hub" for bank, etc. will be some black market at the border of the city. Question remains, if Altdorf is only rank 2 at the moment of the raid, would it be possible for Destruction to raid the king's quarters as the leader's hall is not open before rank 3? I assume you'll need to conquer the PQs & dungeons inside the locked down capitol before you can attack the king? The decrease of the captured city rank will not affect the current capture and only take effect after the city resets.

Some issues stay with the attack on KEP... the attackers did not capture the city as apparently the control bar was barely moving. Was this a bug or because the defenders did better? As there were so few defenders before, this seems doubtable. The question in the first place should be: If one faction manges to level up faster then the other (two hardcore guilds would apparently be enough), there is little the defending realm can do if they got not enough players rank 32+ online during that time. I know this will even out later on, but at the moment it poses a problem. I also hope this city raid will raise awareness for every player to bother should there be T4 keep attacks going on. I know many don't bother as renown points are better in scenarios - at least that's the impression i gained when i see how few bother to travel to an assaulted keep quickly. As a last sidenote: Once the enemy city becomes contested you can pick up a quest at the T4 warcamp to capture the enemy city - reward 3k XP and 30s. Yay!