Cat fight!!!!!

Last night my plans were to play LotRO, and I was messing about doing a mirror run with a friend (I’m still loving “mirrors” and “Moria” said together – but it’s really pretty sad that we’re that keen to level our legendary weapons we’ll run around looking at mirrors!). Due to circumstances beyond my control, though,  I ended up back on Warhammer, firstly playing my Knight – until the guild kind of reminded me it was Order’s Fortress attack and they were already well into the Fortress by Caledor.

So I went back to my Rune Priest, kind of stagnant at rank 40 while I rediscover the joy of the lower tiers. I flew to Caledor, that was the easy bit. With some directions given on guildchat, I still couldn’t find the fortress before they took it. Let’s say they were pretty fast on taking it  once I logged on – to be fair to my navigation. But it did point out to me that it’s not THAT intuitive to know where fortresses are. I don’t think anyone had previously taken a fortress on the server, or certainly not in my memory, so there was a collective ‘yay’ from Order, and I left the warband in a grump and went to Black Crag to look for the next fortress myself…

…and I ran into two people from my guild who were in a warband with a space and told me to sneak in and just follow them as I’d found them! The rest of our guild were at the other end of the map checking keeps. To cut the rest of the story short, we attacked the fortress, the server crashed and I went to bed at 10:45pm.

Meanwhile, in the house we had a big delivery yesterday and left a giant empty cardboard box in the kitchen for the cats to play with. We have two cats, a 4.5 year old male who’s a bit of a wimp, and a devilish 1.5 year old female, who finds naughtiness where no-one else can. Let’s just say we had our own fortress battle rampaging in the kitchen for hours. One cat would get into the box, only to be attacked by the other. And it changed hands a number of times. I like to think it was a philosophical battle between describing the box as a fortress or a fairytale castle, fit for a princess – but let’s face it, it was just as real to the cats as my fortress battle on WAR. And they were probably a LOT more invested in their little war than I was in mine – and their fight is still going on this morning…

Sod fortresses

There’s been a lot of talk about changes to fortress battles in Warhammer Online. And let’s face it, what the game really needs at the moment is for someone to successfully attack Altdorf or the Inevitable City and to get as near to the King battle as possible. Why? Because that’s the given endgame of WAR, and the players want to know progress is being made. Now, I’ve only made it to a couple of fortress battles, myself, and despite what some people think about the changes, I think they’ll work out for the best in enabling players to progress towards the City fights we all want to see.

However, let’s not forget that if the three racial cities were in, we wouldn’t need fortresses at all. These problems have stemmed from the cities being reduced to one per faction, and having to come up with some reason to attack in the Elf/D. Elf or Dwarf/Greenskin pairing at all. So one fix is to get rid of fortresses and give us the cities – not a quick fix, by any means.

I’m not that enamoured with how the fortresses have worked out, I have to say. I find it fiddly and confusing for the the majority of players who’ve encountered nothing of such a fiddly nature until they hit Tier 4. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – players need to spend the entire game learning how to make the final attacks, and the game needs to train them towards this.

I think it’s becoming given knowledge also that Battlefield Objectives are a little.. underwhelming, that they’re simply capture the flag type objectives that are passed between Order and Destruction often, for the realm points, sometimes at the risk of an all out oRvR battle. It was touched on in the last Chaos Cast, and I agree.

As I was listening to No Prisoners, No Mercy it struck me that I disagreed with Julie and Fran over the fortresses. I don’t think the level 40s should be elsewhere, I think they should be attacking fortresses and cities. But they’re not wrong, those under 40 also need some solid objectives. And at the same time, I found myself wondering why there’s nothing like a fortress battle elsewhere in the game to practise on. Maybe the battlefield objectives in Tier 4 need to be meatier, or throughout the game, in fact. That way the 33-39s could be out on the battlefield objectives, helping in the big fight when they’re locked out from the fortress.

And from there, I started dreaming of attacking a village, something I’ve read in quite a few Warhammer novels. Without the epic scale of Praag, or the quick focus of a keep fight – why are there no villages we can take over. Surely these would be more interesting battlefield objectives? A little pillaging goes a long way in times of war! It’s certainly not an easy fix for Mythic, but I think it’d add a new dimension to the oRvR with more varied fights, and a reason to stay in the village to take over the blacksmith for an armour buff, etc etc.

As you can see, it’s not a very well-formed idea. But I like it. Who knew I was a pillager at heart?!