Wednesday, December 3, 2008

WAR is Too Massive! Part 1

It has been a pretty busy week for Werit and the CoWs. Mythic decided to effectively shut down the Averheim server, so we all moved over to the Badlands. Their goal was to reduce the number of Medium population servers to a few High population. It seems to have worked as the activity on Badlands is pretty high.

Strangely enough, the name Werit was taken on Badlands. So I am now known as Tirew, different name, same Engineer. In addition to the name change, I reached BR 32/ RR 32 and left T3 behind. My first real T4 open RvR was quite interesting.

Destruction started to push through Reikland, so I made my way to the keep. It was my first time in the zone, so I was pretty much lost. They managed to lock the zone pretty quickly and open up the Reikland Fortress. I have never seen a fortress, but they are pretty big. There are 3 attackable gates and a 4 story inner-keep to fight through.

What happened next was good and bad. A lot of Order came to the defense... I would have to guess in the hundreds. When Destruction came, they also had 100's of people. Epic battle incoming... but the zone crashed multiple times. My system, which is pretty good, could not even draw a fraction of the Destruction players.

In a VN post, Mythic mentioned they have seen upwards of 800 people fighting in these zones. They even conceded they might not be able to support such huge battles. This is not really surprising, as the Fortresses were a late addition in the scheme of things. Remember, Capital cities (instances) were there instead of Fortresses.

More to come in part 2...

3 comments:

This crashing is going to hurt. 800 people battles are awesome and I wish there was a way it could be done. If there was no lag and no crashing, these battles would be what WAR is all about. Sad it doesn't work.

I think it was one of those things they just didn't get the numbers to test in beta. Maybe they should have done a siege preview weekend like AoC, just to see if they should consider layering instances for that part?

The city sieges have instances when the fight's going on, so it makes sense that the Keeps would need them as well.

WAR's a great game, don't get me wrong, but they have some things that need addressing before long or it's going to hurt them in the long run.

This is kind of disappointing. I have my 60 day game card ready to go, but I think I'll let WAR percolate a bit longer before diving back in. I'm having a blast with COWWOW at the moment anyway...

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