As was hinted at in a video featuring Mythic's Jeff Hickman not so long ago, the latest update to Warhammer Online's Fortress gameplay was only the beginning of a larger plan to improve the playability of this important aspect of the game. Mark Jacobs has now elaborated on these future plans, at the same time as giving a report on how the new update has been going on the live servers -- on the night of Jacobs' post, there were no Fortress-related crashes, and general performance was better but not quite where they want it yet.There are three initiatives that the dev team hope to put their focus on in the coming weeks. One of these is simply to see how the new population threshold is working, to determine if and how it should be tweaked with respect to balance and design issues. At the same time, they will be keeping an eye on the Fortress Lords to make sure that their difficulty aligns with the number of players attending a siege. The third change will involve optimizing the code that deals with large-scale battles, in the hopes of being able to open up the population threshold some more. Let's hope they succeed with this last effort, as some fans already have their torches and pitchforks out due to the reduced scale of these end-game encounters.
