So many misinformed spreading more misinformation. AoC would NOT be very fun if your keep was attackable 24/7, why? Because your castles will help you get closer to certain dungeons/places that other guilds will be jealous of and want to take over your guilds great field position. The Keep is suppose to be something of great value, not something you lose overnight because half the guild was too busy with real life matters to play.

Do you really expect a castle to be defended by real people 24/7??? If you do than you have no life or expect others to have ZERO life and this is JUST A GAME.

If your guild wants to attack a keep you will have to earn the right to taking... kind of like boxing and earning a title shot but instead... its Conan...

Your guild will earn points to be the #1 Contender for a take over... A great system which is plain and simple.

Sadly i think that the battle sieges are instanced.

It's almost the only way they can keep the playercap i assume there would be since it's not free for everyone to attack,so there has to be some sort of a cap for how many players that can attend at a battlesiege.

Huge letdown if battlesieges are instanced.

I wonder if it's their engine that can't handle to many players on screen at once so they are forced to make battlesieges instanced,so we wont see epic battles DAOC style with several hundred players involved in big scale battles.

They say their Cheetah 2 engine can have 800+ NPCs on the battlefield and their PC's still ran with 25+ FPS but i bet that is not something that is possible with 800 players.

I hope things change a bit sooner or later so it ends up a bit like DAOC's sieges and not some instanced junk with a cap on how many players can join a battle.

As i understand it now a guild can gather PvP points and challenge those who has a battlekeep and then those earned guildpvp points is removed before or after the battle has taken place.

That's all nice and so because then smaller guilds can save up PvP points so they one day can become the ones who challenges a battlekeep,but what if there is a cap how many players that can be involved.

That would totally suck for huge guilds if someone has to forefit and stay away from the battlekeepsiegefights,because those players helped build up the PvP points that lead into the challenge in the first place and after the fight is over those points are gone.

Or am i misunderstanding something?

I read it so there is a cap in siegefights and that the challengeers loose their points after the match is done.

Seige Warfare is one of the very few MMORPG Game mechanics that should be structured. If AoC  Devs had chosen to make each Battlekeep its own instance, they would have really screwed this up. Luckily they kept things open in the entire Borderlands.

I personally hate the instanced Player Cities, but I like how you will have neighbors in your instance. It will be great getting to know the  neighbor guilds and really allows for a whole other dimension in social interaction. As great as it would be forming major alliances with the other guilds in your instance, making enemies of one or more of them would really spice up the game. Not just with borderlands, but also on Open PvP Servers.

NPC AI takes more resources than a normal player toon. In the radio interview posted in these forums a few today,  of the aoc dev's mentioned 500 player battles being doable.... if that's true... then i'll bet both the attacking and defending guilds will have use hired guns...

can't wait!

My bet is that they will instanced as their video stated the battle will be between 2 guilds and it will be set previously and no other can attack during that time.

So technically speaking they probably set an ID for both the defenders guild members and the attacker guild members to an instance of their battlekeep.

Perhaps I am wrong and they figured out how to place these battlekeeps in an open world where a 100+ people can quest and how to seperate them to not join the fray.

/bump

Here is some more info to taste:

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/153332

Link - http://www.uberguilds.org/radio/grenade

You can download the 62mb file here: http://www.uberguilds.org/radio/audio/download/239/GrenadeAOCInterviewEP6.mp3

Radio interview, good stuff 3/4 way thru.