The fall of Altdorf, take two

There is something wrong with your game if a capitol city can be overrun and captured in less then a month from launch. All this will do is further fuel the fire that Destruction outnumbers Order. The house of cards begins to tumble.

First Altdorf raid happened on Volkmar last week. Yes it was during non peak hours, aka 5 am EST. We broke through the gates to altdorf, and supprise! Not a single order in the city. Came back a day later and it was still going on, this time with a lot of order to defend there city.

Altdorf still didn't burn to the ground. Destruction did capture the city due to virtually no defenders being around in the wee hours of the morning, but they were unable to seal the deal and sack the city. They captured it for a bit, but then got pushed out without really accomplishing much else.

I assume that when more players get to level 40, it will not be easy to capture. It's the same in WoW... if you try to kill a PVP boss, it would be extremely easy if there was no opposition... but throw in a few defenders and it's nigh impossible.

People in another article are complaining about the potential of having micro transactions for character customization in WoW? I'd rather pay a bit to make my toon look different than win the game in weeks :)

This article really calls into question the longevity of WAR in my eyes, regardless of the level of success or imbalance, this was the end game content. It's not a case of comparing the two games against one another directly, but the problems with WAR do seem to be fairly significant for those wanting to invest large amount of time into a game, so I hope they can sort those and reaffirm that it is a substantial and worthwhile timesink.

I myself resubbed back to WoW when I first heard about this, just to cover my bases if WAR proved to be a little anemic and lacked substance. I think Mythic need to carefully outline why this happened, what they learned as a result and where players can expect to be challenged longer term, to keep the hard core happy.

I don't want to WAR bash, but however you look at it, it was a bit of a screw up, and for the first time gave me the smallest echo of AoC on what otherwise is a fun PvP game.

People are being stupid about this. As another commenter mentioned, even without being defended, the raid couldn't sack the city.

And this isn't "WoW" style endgame that is going to be the same encounter every time you go in; this is RvR and the encounter will get harder and harder as more and more players are able to defend the city.

The attack started at 7 am ET. By the time I logged in for the day, the attack had fizzled, the King still lived, and Altdorf was back to normal.

All this has done is send a 'wake up call' to Order on Averheim that maybe we need to step up the leveling a bit and pay more attention when keeps are being attacked.

Im in Dusk Till Dawn.

By "wee hours", we started the raid at 7am pst on a weekend morning. This was because we knew it was going to be a all day deal. This was NOT done at 3am, 4am etc. Unless of course your in europe or something. I don't know about you but I quit sleeping past 8 when I got out of college and my hangovers got spread further apart.
We encountered very little resistance, although there were plenty of higher level order on at the time, they couldn't be bothered to leave their pq's and scenarios apparently. It took over 7 hours and a TON of organization so its not like we went sight seeing with a couple hundred people. And since we didn't hit altdorf till later in the morning, and still didn't face any organized defense, well, no amount of game design will fix apathy on the part of the defending realm.

It's amazing how Mark Jacobs always gives too much information and comes off sounding like a dick. Seriously, read that post he wrote. I like that he addresses things, but he always makes sure to pick at fans.

The sky is falling, omg!

Fall of Altdorf? Not quite... they invaded the city, yes, but never killed the King and were thrown out by the defenders eventually.

I'm in XoO and I can back up danarchy. I think more than anything it's a wakeup call to some players on that server. While Altdorf was controlled, it didn't fall. It'll take more than what we did to kill the king and now, thankfully, I think now that people see the effectiveness of a well organized raid they'll be ready for another attack. All this is really going to create in the end (I hope) is a more competitive atmosphere when the rest of the population gets closer to the level cap.

WAR was built around the idea that the game would always have a healthy, full population. Everything from RVR, Scenarios and Public Quests all require a full population to really make them worthwhile. Questing in general is not what this game was built around. The problem is...there are too many servers..not enough people. This is just another example...a city should not be "taken" just because its off hours...there will never be a time when this game will have a full population late at night.

I hope they can figure out how to deal with the lack of full population. THe game is quality...but so much content is ignored or skipped because no one is around to do it.

Wow. Yet another inaccurate article on massively on the matter of capital sieges. It's the third in a row, trying to break a record?
maybe you should read the comments to your articles sometimes, you might get some useful info.
The first time Altdorf was NOT "Burned to the Ground" on Karak eight Peaks. It was merely contested (meaning that destruction could enter the city), but the defenders repelled the attackers and won the day. Funny that in all your articles you describe it in a quite different way despite people continuing to tell you that you're wrong.

And about this latest raid, where's the problem? Altdorf was captured in ONE server after more than three weeks. According to Mythic's predictions, it would have taken a month to see the first city captures. They definately weren't off by much. City captures are a tad easier during the earlier period of the game, because people are still concentrating on leveling and aren't too keen on dropping whatever they're doing to do defend. Also, the number of players in T4 is still scarce, and the lack of defenders is due to that. Still destruction didn't even manage to complete one of the PQs after the capital capture, this means that there's a lot yet to be done.

An RvR game is driven by it's players, there's no mobs handing victory to you on a silver plate like in silly PvE-centric games like wow. If one side organizes a well coordinated raid and the defenders don't care to drop what they're doing to go defend (and there's PLENTY of warning signals much before the capital even goes contested, you see keeps going down, the enemy capturing TWO zones, and then the fortresses being vulnerable, and falling, which takes several hours even with no defenders on the field, with defenders it can take several days of back and forth. It takes just a successful keep defense to stop a raid on it's tracks), the attackers deserve to win and the defenders deserve to loose, no question asked and it's how it should be, no cause for concern other than from sore loosers, that will hopefully learn their lesson and be more organized for next time.

Not to mention the fact that you wrongly identify the capital siege as "the endgame", well, sorry to have to burst a bubble, but WAR's endgame definately isn't just the city siege, it's the whole tier 4 RvR, which has virtually no end and is never repeatitive (this even not mentioning the endgame dungeons).

So you might want to check your facts and evaluate them properly before writing an article. Thank you :D

I have to agree with MalkavianLogic and Danarchy, I am in XoO myself, and this took coordination, organizing, and a hell of a lot of time consuming keeps and BO takes to get this done.

Is it our fault that people did not come to defend? No... Order is so apathetic, it is not even funny...

This is not an end to WAR already, only like maybe a full warband was 40, and you had to be 30+ to get into the city in the first place.

So some of the people that was in the 300 something group of people couldnt even get in.

So once more people hit 30 and up, you can probably guess that the rvr will pick up more, and it will be hard than hell to get to the city again..