[QUESTION] How would you fix City Siege PQs?

[rynnor]

Imagine that you were designing the game - you have come up with the zone locking system and the forts.

Now people have captured the forts and an enemy city lies open - what next?

Your only restriction is that you cant have more than 50 from each side in the new city zone - otherwise go crazy

One possibility I considered would be to literally invade the city - actually fight your way through the regions of the actual city and attempt to kill the various leaders in that city while fighting off the enemy.

Second Idea was to replace the PQ's with a set of special (and hopefully fun/well designed) scenarios (15 minute ones as per usual) and have city defense based on scenario wins - if one side has 10 more sc wins than the other then the attack/defense moves on a stage.

Anyone else thought of replacements/fixes for the current system?

 

[GReaper]

Remove all the fortresses for a start - it's a choke point which doesn't work well. Adding limits to the numbers who can defend/attack was supposed to be a temporary fix, however I can't see them solving this one. All the defenders want to defend, all the attackers will want to attack, so removing this awful lagfest is probably the best solution.

Add the additional capital cities back. Adjust the zone capture to be more difficult - but not impossible to achieve, at the moment zone capture can be a bit easy with the fortress being too difficult.

Once a specific capital has been opened, turn it into a purely PvE scenario. The capital siege RvR instances are awful, tedious and boring - remove them. After about 2 or 3 attempts at doing the PQ you realise just how shockingly boring it is. If the reward for opening a capital city is just PvE then it might not be so bad. It would be obvious that opening up a capital city gives a reward - PvE instances, instead of forcing people to do more low quality RvR just to get to the next stage.

Adding the other capitals and allowing each realm to only open a single enemy capital at a time might allow the underdog side to open up a different capital whilst the dominant side is busy inside farming loot.

 

[mooSe_]

I'd want to put in this which I suggested before. Although I agree that the forts suck so maybe just change it to when 2/3 of the zones have been locked instead of when 2 forts have been taken.

Rather than splitting the city into identical instances, the city could be split into sections, for example there could be one instance for the north gate and one instance for the west gate etc. Each of these city sections would be unique in some way and have a limit of 50 vs 50 and if you tried to join a full one it could say "you are needed elsewhere" or something like that and give you a list of the areas which could use your help.

Each instance would be like a siege, with the defenders behind a wall and the attackers on the outside of it. As well as having a gate which you can ram down I would also add the option of siege towers. The siege tower can say fit 2 full parties in or something, and the person who originally bought and deployed the tower gets to control it; they move it up to the wall and lower the ramp and bam! you have another way of fighting in a siege that doesn't involve zerging through a door and up a ramp. The defenders would obviously need some kind of defence for this; such as catapults/ballistas. Alternatively/Additionally there could be ladders/ropes for climbing the wall.

Once/If the attackers get onto the wall then they can get into their section of the city, however the defenders would still be in the streets. The attackers would then have to kill a boss like a keep lord but called "Western Gate Commander" or something. He could be located in the "Western Barracks" and function similarly to a keep lord.

If the attackers kill the keep lord then they get access to the special PQs and instances for that part of the city.

After all the city section battles have been resolved then the winner would be decided based on how many sections they won or lost. The defenders could win by holding their instance for a certain time period or by the attackers giving up.

If the attacker won more then it would count as the capital being taken and the whole city would become open for the full time limit. This would represent the fact the even if the defenders held some parts of the wall then there was still too many attackers inside the city, who would eventually overwhelm them. This would unlock the king fight and all the other things.

If the attackers lost more than they won, then the people in the instances which were successful would get a limited time (shorter than a full city capture time) to complete PQs/instances before they were booted out of the zone. This would represent the attackers having some time to loot the areas of the city they had taken before the larger amount of defenders forced them out.

If the attackers won no zones at all or the timer for attackers to loot the city runs out then the campaign would reset.

I realise this may be a little ambitious but I tried to keep it within reason while still being more enjoyable than what we currently have.

 

[TheBinarySurfer]

My suggestion is this:
1) Remove VP's on the capital altogether.

2) Remove all PVE content aside from the King.

3) Have the entire city seige aside from the King done in scenarios (say up to 10 running at a time, all with 2fg in them).

4) Have 3-4 different scenarios - examples: (backstreets of Altdorf: objective - take and hold. war quarters: as now, temple of sigmar : order has to protect the reliquary and High Priest of Sigmar (bomb run similar to reikland hills), Bright College take and hold to shut off the flow of magic, Gates of Altdorf - king of the hill.

5) Each of those scenarios then has an effect on the winning side - albeit a small one - meaning you can "gather momentum" (e.g. temple of sigmar gives a constant weak healing effect to all order server-wide (for example giving 600 hps a minute, or 10 hp per second, bright college gives a low-value damage-add, backstreets gives a attack speed buff, gates of altdorf could give instant respawn for x minutes for the winning side.

6) Have a counter of number of scenario wins you need to lock the capital. Once it's reached, scenarios stop and then you get to attack the king.

For the love of god retain the content for players that are mid-run during a city seige in the city dungeons (e.g. you have started but the city seige trips halfway thru the run), or else reset all the players lockout timers.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Sorry, I still think cities should be oRvR. An entire tier divided into maybe 4 zones, 3 with forts, 1 with a castle. There should be tiers so that players of every level can join in.

Safe routes to instances for those that only want to PvE with access to those instances being unlocked by achieving tasks in the oRvR areas.

It should be like Praag on steroids with actual house to house fighting, skirmishing in back alleys and streets as well as a few setpiece battles at key objectives.

The sieging itself could be an entire mini game with players trying to lob munitions at parts of the city as quickly as possible. The faster they siege it, the faster access is given to the invaders to certain parts of the city. And make the siege weaponary a target for the defending side.

Fixing the PQs is not in my opinion the way to fix city sieges. They're only a secondary part of a poor design and throwing a band aid on them won't make city sieges much better. They need to throw city sieges out completely and redesign that shambles.

 

[Loneliness]

Imagine that you were designing the game - you have come up with the zone locking system and the forts.

Now people have captured the forts and an enemy city lies open - what next?

Your only restriction is that you cant have more than 50 from each side in the new city zone - otherwise go crazy

One possibility I considered would be to literally invade the city - actually fight your way through the regions of the actual city and attempt to kill the various leaders in that city while fighting off the enemy.

Second Idea was to replace the PQ's with a set of special (and hopefully fun/well designed) scenarios (15 minute ones as per usual) and have city defense based on scenario wins - if one side has 10 more sc wins than the other then the attack/defense moves on a stage.

Anyone else thought of replacements/fixes for the current system?

Cant think of an idea without including pq's, scenarios etc which would basically be the current system in a different order and that idea would suck also. id have to quit my job as the designer if i came up with forts/locking system anyway.

The war theme suggests this is all out war not maximum amount of defenders/attackers but WAR, 50 from each side only is a battleground not a fort/city. So dont FIX what isnt broken leave the design sort the servers.

If i was to go back to the drawing board id just be making artdorf/IC into a mini emain with no lagz

 

[mooSe_]

Sorry, I still think cities should be oRvR. An entire tier divided into maybe 4 zones, 3 with forts, 1 with a castle. There should be tiers so that players of every level can join in.

Safe routes to instances for those that only want to PvE with access to those instances being unlocked by achieving tasks in the oRvR areas.

It should be like Praag on steroids with actual house to house fighting, skirmishing in back alleys and streets as well as a few setpiece battles at key objectives.

The sieging itself could be an entire mini game with players trying to lob munitions at parts of the city as quickly as possible. The faster they siege it, the faster access is given to the invaders to certain parts of the city. And make the siege weaponary a target for the defending side.

Fixing the PQs is not in my opinion the way to fix city sieges. They're only a secondary part of a poor design and throwing a band aid on them won't make city sieges much better. They need to throw city sieges out completely and redesign that shambles.

I like

 

[civy]

Mythic devs give retards a bad name. From what I can tell dest didnt win any city pq's but got to stage 2 on the back of level 29 sc wins which account for 80% of vp's. As a guildie said. A mythic dev sits next to his mother brother sister and uncle. Bunch of inbreds.

I'm wel beyond caring about this game. Just waiting around to move to another game.

 

[rynnor]

It was pretty easy but tbh there wasnt much opposition - lots of 28s etc amongst the order v hardened 40s - once we broke out of our WC at the start of the instance they pretty much stayed at the docks giving us free reign in the rest of the city.

We took the temple and were gaining vp's from our big advantage in kills (every 10 kills = 1vp) - we split our forces to defend temple while we tried to take docks but order werent even trying to win and just camped the docks even when the scenario vps meant they needed to do something if they wanted to stop us winning.

We would still have won even without the big assist from SC's it would have just taken longer. Once we completed section 1 we wiped the order at the docks and they never came back leaving us to do section 2 as pure PVE - we literally didnt see a single order in there.

I dont think any changes will help if noone bothers to defend their city.

 

[GReaper]

Maybe they could just remove the contested city PQ and let the attackers start with PvE once they're in the gates?

City siege PQs don't work in my opinion. Take two sides which are mostly even in numbers, get them to do an insanely big PQ which takes a lot of co-ordination - it just fails. Especially when you've got a second part of the PQ which involves killing rather difficult mobs whilst you're trying to fend off a huge number of attackers.

If you've failed to defend two fortresses it should be game over. Tough luck - you failed to defend so the enemy gets to spend some time in your capital.

 

[civy]

fatel flaw in game design as demonstrated tonight on norm. Order had 1 fort, Dest had another and there was 1 keep left to take in teh one zone stil open.

The whole T4 server was funelled to that 1 keep. 15 seconds of lag followed by a server crash when 400ish dest hit the keep.

 

[civy]

Booooooooooommmmmmmmm. There she blows again.

I blame roo. bet he organised this

 

[rynnor]

3 zone crashes in a row lol - and yes this is the fatal flaw that in the end theres only 1 zone for everyone who's rvr'ing under the current design and the architecture cant cope.

Blade servers arent bad but they arent built for this and it shows - it seems like collision detection is what kills the server.

As everyone rushes into a keep and gets knotted together the server must be going crazy trying to work out anti-collision - they need to code it that this gets switched off in extremis?

 

[civy]

3 zone crashes in a row lol - and yes this is the fatal flaw that in the end theres only 1 zone for everyone who's rvr'ing under the current design and the architecture cant cope.

Blade servers arent bad but they arent built for this and it shows - it seems like collision detection is what kills the server.

As everyone rushes into a keep and gets knotted together the server must be going crazy trying to work out anti-collision - they need to code it that this gets switched off in extremis?

Ive bveen thinking maybe they should only give CD to tanks as a buff on a 5 min ish cd to stop exploiting letting their side past.

Who else really needs it. All it does is get in the way of other classes.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

I think I've now beaten my WoW record for the number of events I've organised where the armies raised at the time have crashed the zone/server.