Altdorf was taken today on the Averheim server and the word is sneak attack, or at least while Order's guard was down. Waaagh! has a nice writeup about it including Mark Jacob's response to the community (seen directly in this forum thread).

Imbalance

Long before stepping foot in Warhammer, plenty of us predicted the two factors causing the negative situations involved here: Population imbalance and the lack of scheduling for attack windows.

The racial choices obviously gave Destruction the cool factor, while Order seemed dorky to me. How many elf fans will choose High Elves over Dark Elves, seriously? And why didn't they bring in the knights-in-armor Bretonnians instead of the men-in-tights Empire? Don't even get me started on the Dwarves versus Greenskins.

Mythic over-assumed the "good guys" would automatically attract players when the truth is the human race is more visually inclined than morally. =P

RvR Mess

In that post linked above, Mark Jacobs sounds a bit defensive to me. I don't want to be too hard on the man, he's created a great game so far, plus what he's saying makes some logical sense. But it feels a bit like shifting blame to the playerbase when ultimately no one is more responsible for his game than he is. He has control over the game mechanics and that includes their flaws, oversights and shortcomings.

I'd have rather heard a good solid plan from him on how they're going to fix RvR into being more fun. Better ideas than nerfing Scenarios at least.

From what I've seen so far, RvR is a mess in the game. Tier 4 is plagued with these problems while the lower tier RvR areas are nearly a wash from being too-open, too-unimportant. I hoped that despite my misgivings it would somehow work, but it hasn't so far. Thankfully the game has many other redeeming qualities than RvR.

I really hope Mr. Jacobs is willing to step up to the plate to fix problem #1 (population imbalance), but on problem #2 (RvR scheduling) I'm pretty sure he's adamantly opposed and IMHO that's a shame because it'll just mean realms will take turns at exchanging sieges and most of it will be Player-versus-NPC rather than Player-versus-Player.

Mythic has been proactive about fixing issues with their game, so I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they should have seen this one coming a thousand miles away.

"Unless Funcom somehow screws up"-- That was my mantra for over a year prior to Age of Conan's release. There were so many features that sounded great when discussed in dev interviews and on the AoC forums, I was so pumped for this game. Never before had myself and my friends / guildmates made such plans for a game prior to release-- and I feel burned for it.

I love the core game, the combat has been fantastic, visuals are stunning and the immersion is good as well. The city construction is cool, but turns out hollow since the cities themselves don't do much, especially on a PvE server where you can't run around and shoot arrows at each other from the walls.

Funcom has created what I feel is a great leveling up game with good solo fun, but it's not a compelling group experience. It's especially lacking in quality dungeons for small groups at Endgame. The crafting is bland and there are so few things to fiddle with besides just running around and killing mobs.

'Massive' Mistake?

Funcom is determined to push the 'massive' aspects of Sieges and Raiding, which is a direction leaving me cold. They're now working on even bigger Sieges, even bigger Cities and even bigger Guilds (in the form of Alliances). What happened to the original plans for PvP questing in the Border Kingdoms with smaller fights over resource areas and towers? Without that stuff, they have no initial buildup into Sieges, so they're trying to leapfrog higher to provide progression.

How can their game engine support 300-player Sieges? It doesn't even work well with the current Sieges or even their standard Raid size of 24. Anytime I've seen more than a handful of players casting at once, things get out of sync and characters pop in and out of existence. Hell, even just the streets of Tarantia the NPCs blip in and out. Their solution: Drop visual effects from other players? Ugh.

A perfect example of how screwed up their PvP system is: When a Siege is about to take place, all other players are kicked out of that Border Kingdom. Not that the Border Kingdoms have much to do anyway, they're complete wastelands, but this mechanic ensures Funcom will never be able to bring Border Kingdoms up to par with the pre-release expectations.

Even if they fix what's broken now, they're not even close to the Endgame they should have had.

I really feel as though Funcom has made the wrong game for their Dreamworld engine, which seems far more appropriate to smaller groups. It looks spectacular from a solo perspective. They should stick with their strengths.

Where I'm stuck

They're now dicking around with balancing, mostly for PvP and Raiding with a few things just thrown in to slow down the gangway pace of leveling. The glory of the combat is getting watered down fast as they reduce the number one fun factor of the game. Due to their recent changes to balance out the gender damage issue, my Polearm Guardian's animations seem stuttery and unnatural. =(

The Apprentice obliteration was a huge blow to my daily fun, the day it hit was the day I played significantly less since I can no longer team up in a meaningful way with Michelle or Lurch as well as most of my friends and family-related guildmates.

So what am I left with? I can compete with the 12-to-1 ToS ratio that's AoE'ing the snot out of the high end mobs in Kheshatta (no thanks) or I can do Villas over and over again. I can't even spend my time collecting resources for my Tier2 guild city because they won't fit in my bags unless I first spend 22.5g to progress my Architect skill. Crafting as a gold sink != fun. I'm left feeling very unenthusiastic for anything gameplay-related, I'm just socializing with my friends, which I can do regardless.

So it's moving on time

I'm going to be parking Bello, my level 77 Guardian for awhile. Perhaps a short while, perhaps a very long while, it all depends on whether Funcom brings in content I'd actually like to play. What's in the game at the high levels right now is lacking, I've just plain run out of things I'd like to do.

I thought I would have been able to hold out a minimum of six months.

Sooner or later I was bound to take this snapshot, because it's been nagging at me. This is my 2004 World of Warcraft retail box:

A whole lot of people either have selective memories, or they arrived on the scene later, but the release of WoW was not 'polished'. It had numerous bugs, abysmal server stability, barely passable Endgame and virtually none of the faction-PvP features that were highlighted during pre-release.

Sieges of course, were not included. Nor was the "mighty Dragon of Blackrock Spire", although Nefarian did arrive 7 months later.

It was still a great game.

Accolade it for what it was and what it became, not what it wasn't.