Mythic may have had me at hello with their promise of epic city sieges, but the tier 4 reality is anything but love. In fact, it’s one of the primary reasons for my departure in June. However, the developers now have some “short term” changes in store. But are they a sign of good things to come, or a painful reminder of a misguided dream?

Since patch 1.3.2, reports across the realms have been flying in saying that capital cities are now under constant siege. This is due to Mythic removing the need for factions to capture two fortresses. Even more so, there are still some players who feel these “short term” changes still don’t address the main issues with the city siege mechanic.

The city siege should be the pinnacle of the Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning experience. Nothing should compare to storming your enemy’s capital city to burn it down to the ground. During development, players drooled at the chance to do this. However, the result was anything but extraordinary.

Right now, players and developers are currently fighting to find a balance between the level of difficulty it takes to start a city siege and the difficulty and length that the city siege lasts. No matter what Mythic does, the current game is not set up for this type of casual RvR experience.

From the start, Mythic has been back peddling to get their game where it should have been at launch, but have any of the developers said anything about the remaining four capital cities that were heralded pre-launch? What would their inclusion do to the tier 4 RvR end game?

Theoretically, if they were in place, players wouldn’t be funneled into only one option for the end game. As it stands right now, each faction only has one place to go when they hit tier 4 and that is the enemy’s lone capital city. But what if you had three enemy cities to choose from? While it is safe to say — in WAR’s current state — that city sieges would still be occurring just as frequently as they are now, it is plausible to believe that the burden would be shared across three cities, instead of just one. In theory, the speed to capture a city would become a moot point, since there are still two defended cities.

With this action in place, players who are locked out of their city can still have access to goods and services in two other allying capital cities. If this was done, there would be no need for time limits or constraints as to how long a city is captured before it is auto-purged. In fact, the auto-purge mechanic can be thrown in the casual waste bin. With three capital cities per faction, Mythic could introduce that much yearned after third faction. This third faction could in fact be NPC-controlled soldiers from one of the two other cities that aren’t locked down. This gives players a little help when trying to take back the captured capital city within their faction.

If Mythic wants to really fix WAR, then they need to seriously bring the remaining four capital cities into the discussion, as well as a third faction, be it an entirely new army or one that is comprised of non-captured cities. The only new content Mythic should be working on is the missing capital cities.

Mythic tried to cater to everyone by making a difficult task easy. With easy sieges comes alarm clock raids. Instead, take the players that you have right now and focus on building the definitive RvR MMO. Mythic, you can’t cater to everyone. It’s time for WAR to put its big boy pants on and become the game that we all thought we were getting back in ‘08.

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