Mythic Entertainment has announced a few changes to how Tier 4 Fortress battles are handled in Warhammer Online. Under the new scheme, lower level characters will be teleported away when a population threshold for the area is reached. The stated reason for these changes is to improve server stability and to make fortress battles run more smoothly. Currently theses changes are in effect on the Phoenix Throne, Dark Crag, Darklands, and Vortex servers, with full implementation soon to follow.

Players on the Phoenix Throne, Dark Crag, Vortex, and Darklands servers (with a planned deployment to all live servers to follow in the coming days) will immediately notice a change to the way that the Tier 4 Racial Pairing Fortress sieges function. We will be implementing a hard cap on the total number of players that are able to occupy the Fortress area during a siege. The purpose of this change is twofold: to improve server stability, and allow even more players to participate in, and benefit from, capital city sieges.

When the Fortress population reaches certain population thresholds, players who are attempting to enter the area of the besieged Fortress that are Rank 35 and below will be teleported to the warcamp for the region they are in. When the next area population threshold has been met, players that are Rank 37 and below will be teleported to the warcamp. The final population threshold applies to players that are Rank 39 and below. Once the total population cap has been met for the area surrounding the Fortress, all players that attempt to enter the area will be teleported back to the region’s warcamp.

It’s very important to note that the majority our players’ Fortress siege experience should not be noticeably affected by this change. Hundreds of players will still be able to participate in taking the Fortress from their enemies. This measure will help to ensure that players are able to experience these epic battles in a more reliable manner.

Because of the strategic advantage that players will always have when defending a Fortress, the attacking forces will have a numeric advantage when attempting to wrest control of a Fortress from the opposing realm.

Read more here.

Going to wait a while longer I guess to get a new 60 day game card.

That is NOT the solution to this problem, honestly I find that takes away not only from the immersion, but it holds you back from doing what YOU want to do.

Not happy at all

I have to agree, this decisions seems... desperate. Is this the best that can be done? Kicking players out when they may be in the middle of accomplishing things?

This isnt going to end well :(

Let's review January:

Mythic announces this 'fix' as a solution for it's endgame problems.

Blizzard announces a new server addition due to overcrowding and hour long queues to play.

Not even two weeks yet into the year yet. I smell a long year for one of those companies. I won't say which one, it's too hard to tell yet.

A hard cap is supposed to improve server stability and allow more people to participate? How exactly does that work?

This is a good thing.  Low level players should not be there anyways! 

Hardware Technology is not good enough for over 1000 or more players in one area.   Let alone people pc's.

The cities battles are instanced so why not the fort battles as well.  This way it will atleast allow the players to enjoy the content of the game.....finally.

Originally posted by icedutah

The cities battles are instanced so why not the fort battles as well.  This way it will atleast allow the players to enjoy the content of the game.....finally.

 

 

But the great majority of the content IS the pvp/rvr.  Actually, I do see both sides of the coin. I don't think they provided a good solution but I also don't think level 35 players can contribute as much. I still remember too many T1 scenarios where my side lost because we had 3 or 4 level 1's leeching away. At least they eventually fixed the tactic where the leechers could just hang out at the entrance and do nothing for the whole time.

Perhaps this isn't the end fix (which require a good bit more technical work) but a band-aid that will buy them some more time to work on the right answer.  In any case, I'm pretty much burned out on WAR and all the stunds/dazes/knockbacks/snares/roots/disables/etc. Seriously, most classes shouldn't be able to do that.

Just put up an article here and on MMOCrunch about this very topic, all feedback is welcomed.   I think this shows a fundamental flaw in the game's design.

At first i thought man thats dumb. And well it is, they should keep tweakign their code.

However, what this can do is provide counter pressure ie the tons of people who can't get into take that fortress may just wanter over to a t4 keep of the opposing side and attack that instead... Now what do you do?

Do any of you actually PLAY the game right now? 

If you don't have 5 greater wards, and you're not level 40, you have zero purpose being in the fort anyway. So, they're taking out the least effective players. BFD. Good. I'm tired of my guild getting shafted b/c some 5 player guild that has slowly leveled to T4, and never helps flip zones or participate in RvR, only to show up at a fort seige they didn't help get to, attain ANYTHING

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Originally posted by icedutah
This is a good thing.  Low level players should not be there anyways! 

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With the lack of available healers, this is not a good thing.

I don't like this idea at all, but considering what could've been done (boot out the oldest person in the area) they did it rather well.  Getting rid of the leechers and ineffective people first is a good way to lower the stress on the servers.  As for the comment about WoW, you can't even do a raid without half of the raid dropping out from D/C since WotLK.  In a Nexxus group we had our healers get kicked out lol.  Better to kick out the people we don't need there, than it to be decided on peoples computers and the server's capacity.  Even with my computer I get FPS lag when I'm around 100ish people, that's with 1024MB dual geforce gtx280.  I could only imagine what it would be like on my old computer (5500 series geforce).

Originally posted by Jpizzle

Do any of you actually PLAY the game right now? 

 

If you don't have 5 greater wards, and you're not level 40, you have zero purpose being in the fort anyway. So, they're taking out the least effective players. BFD. Good. I'm tired of my guild getting shafted b/c some 5 player guild that has slowly leveled to T4, and never helps flip zones or participate in RvR, only to show up at a fort seige they didn't help get to, attain ANYTHING

Thats the team spirit. I mean how dare those leeches that dont play 12 hours a day or that recently purchased the game be allowed to access the content their sub pays for.

Originally posted by finnmacool1

Originally posted by Jpizzle

Do any of you actually PLAY the game right now? 

 

If you don't have 5 greater wards, and you're not level 40, you have zero purpose being in the fort anyway. So, they're taking out the least effective players. BFD. Good. I'm tired of my guild getting shafted b/c some 5 player guild that has slowly leveled to T4, and never helps flip zones or participate in RvR, only to show up at a fort seige they didn't help get to, attain ANYTHING

 

Thats the team spirit. I mean how dare those leeches that dont play 12 hours a day or that recently purchased the game be allowed to access the content their sub pays for.

Exactly, those that have been hear, got the gear that protects them, and enables them to have a fighting chance.. that's the group that should suffer. I mean, let a bunch of low level, out geared, newer players that haven't fought there way into the fort walk right in on the coat tails of others. That's the spirit! 

 Bad fix for the problem... cap on the players that can be in a fortress battle? Couldnt they just... get better servers lol

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Originally posted by Jpizzle

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Originally posted by finnmacool1

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Originally posted by Jpizzle

Do any of you actually PLAY the game right now? 
 
If you don't have 5 greater wards, and you're not level 40, you have zero purpose being in the fort anyway. So, they're taking out the least effective players. BFD. Good. I'm tired of my guild getting shafted b/c some 5 player guild that has slowly leveled to T4, and never helps flip zones or participate in RvR, only to show up at a fort seige they didn't help get to, attain ANYTHING

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Thats the team spirit. I mean how dare those leeches that dont play 12 hours a day or that recently purchased the game be allowed to access the content their sub pays for.

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Exactly, those that have been hear, got the gear that protects them, and enables them to have a fighting chance.. that's the group that should suffer. I mean, let a bunch of low level, out geared, newer players that haven't fought there way into the fort walk right in on the coat tails of others. That's the spirit! 

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Well, good luck with your guild clearing the way to the siege, then people sitting outside hop inside and you lose your level35 healer out of your warband, cause he got kicked...or you lose your Lev40 tanks and miss out on the phat lootz that you guys were gunning for.

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Originally posted by sanders01
 Bad fix for the problem... cap on the players that can be in a fortress battle? Couldnt they just... get better servers lol

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Well if that was it, just a hardware problem. Apparently according to this dude, it's a coding problem, something that should have been fleshed out in a PROPER beta stress test:

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Folks,

First, Happy New Year all!

Second, these changes are not "the fix" but rather the first step in solving the crashing issue that occurs in some large-scale fortress battles. As I said late last year we will do what is necessary to ensure that the all of our players get to enjoy and progress through all aspects of oRvR system without worrying about the server crashing on them. We will continue to work on the code and as we are confident that we've made additional improvements to the code so that we can raise the caps, we will raise the caps. Also, we are working on creating additional oRvR opportunities for those that are "capped out" to participate in the main fortress battles.

The most important thing we could do with fortresses right now was to put in a cap and so we did it. Additional improvements to the code take time and we weren't about to allow the situation with some large-scale fortress battles resulting in a crash to continue in the hopes that the improvements would come "real soon now". That approach is almost always the wrong approach. As always, we'll do what we need to do in order to continue to make a great game even better even if that means changing/adding/subtracting things.

Mark

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He said that today, btw. It's not a server hardware problem, its a brainpower problem.

If they knew from the beginning that anyone not at max level for any given tier was not helpful or competitive, then why set up a 10 level spread per tier in the first place?  Gawd, what a cheesy way to do things, especially for Mythic.  I have lost all respect for Mythic, the only company in my book that still had scruples. 

Instead of wasting time teleporting players who are there in good faith, set the level range per tier down to a 5 level spread or even worse, 2 level spread as they want with this whole teleportation scheme.  I'm glad I left this piece of crap game.  It gives me faith in my ability to recognize a gaming company that is falling into the dark abyss of greed based capitalism.

What ever happned to doing business fairly and in a way that makes the customers happy and as a result, you make tons of money?

Instead of screwing around and making things worse with half-assed bandaid fixes, how aobut doing it right the first time by taking your time and fixing the actual problem and reducing any side effects.  I'm sick to death of these knee jerk responses from developers in these games, they end up making things worse and pissing a lot of people off.

I don't see why everyone thinks this is such a problem. If you've got over 100 people at a keep your either talking at least three warbands on both sides or a huge numbers advantage to one side. Either way if there's that many people in play at once why aren't you hitting multiple keeps at the same time in the first place?