f13.net

It’s been a while since we’ve done a round of experience enhancements, but with the new year comes some good news for those players working their way through Tier 3 and eager to join their friends in Fortress raids and capital city sieges.

We are pleased to announce the fifth phase of our ongoing experience enhancements. In response to the valuable feedback of many players, we have reduced the required experience needed to attain ranks 20 through 33. As a result, it will now take you less time to advance through Tier 3 and the earliest ranks of Tier 4.

We hope you will enjoy the brisk new pace of advancement, as well the many challenges and rewards that await you in Tier 4!

Folks,

   The first step in improving the oRvR experience of fortress taking went LIVE across all servers last night.  The good news is that there were lots of fortresses captured and defended.  The even better news is that there were no fortress-related crashes last night while these battles raged and were completed by the players.  Performance in these battles was also improved, but still not where we want it to be of course.  While this is a good start, continuing to improve the mechanisms behind these battles remains one of our top priorities now and going forward.  Over the next few weeks, we will be working on a number of initiatives that I can now talk about.

   First, the team will tweak the settings for the Fortress Lords to make sure that their power is in line with the current numbers of players expected to participate in the siege.  Second, the team will continue working on optimizing the code’s performance in large-scale battles so we can increase the population cap over the next few weeks.  Third, the team is looking at additional tweaking of the pop cap to ensure that it is where it needs to be in order to allow these battles to be as well-balanced (from a design perspective) as they can be.  In the end, it is up to the players to decide to defend and/or attack a fortress but it is our job to make sure that the pop cap is set properly to ensure that the maximum number of defenders/attackers that can *choose* to participate is set up so that if the population hits max cap (and assuming that both sides are equally powerful), neither side has an advantage over the other.  Most importantly, the team will also be looking at moving the fortress areas out to their own zones to allow an even a greater of number of players to participate, while also maintaining a high level of performance.  While they are doing that, they will also be looking at ways to enhance the fortress areas to take advantage of having their own dedicated zone.  This might also allow us to get slightly lower-level players into the action, either directly in the fortress sieges, and/or in supporting roles around the main action.  However, we won’t move the sieges into their own zones unless we are sure that we can get either some design and/or performance improvements by doing so.

  As always, we appreciate your feedback, suggestions, patience, and participation as we continue to work on these issues and initiatives.  What we’ve done so far is only the first step and we have a lot more coming in the next few weeks.

  Oh, and expect a major announcement from us at the end of the month regarding our plans for the next few months and beyond.  It’s going to get even more interesting around these parts soon. :)

Mark

For more information on Tier 4 Fortress changes, click here.

Posted in other threads.  It's like 10%, nothing to get worked up about.

Really?  :ye_gods:  I looked too. My bad. I found it interesting, because well, it was one of the major complaints on this board.

Nice Avatar pic with GWAR!! (is that who it is?)

I didn't mind Tor Anroc, but then I played it less than ten times and I was a Swordmaster.  Had some of my best games there, mainly because people still hadn't learned about killing the Dude with the Thing.  I only punished someone with Gust if they tried to knock me off first (not a map to have a Swordmaster gunning swording for you).  :drillf:

I think you could get away with starting at rank 18, but really, a shorter experience curve from 20-33 is absolutely crucial.

There is a distinct possibility that my loathing for Tor Anroc comes from my first character, a White Lion with no knockbacks. I must have run that scenario hundreds of times (it was frequently the only scenario that popped in T3), and it gives me the twitches now, even if I'm not getting knocked into the lava every couple of minutes.

Ugh. If it was easier to get out of the lava that would be *something*. Very very frustrating.

Posted in other threads.  It's like 10%, nothing to get worked up about.

What!?

Tor Anroc was my fav as a WL.

Course, I was in there when pounce was utterly broken, but even after, pounce still made the knock backs useless if you were quick to cast.
Of all the classes, its least frustrating for the WL.

I think the more apt analogy would be to give cpr to someone that has been dead for a month. 

There was a lot of potential wasted with this title and it all started with the use of a shitty pvp engine. 

Edit: By 'play', I don't mean log on and knock out 5 levels every now and then. I mean play - like a customer. 1-40. Participate in everything the game has to offer, on a regular basis.

I don't think its the engine (http://www.emergent.net/), i think its their application layer, and server code. I understand you were using engine as a catch all.

Prediction:
Mythic will put the other 2 capitals for each faction back in.
This will result in reduction of Fortress requirement from 2 to just the respective zone fort to unlock the capital city siege.
Which would make more sense since people will have more options and cry less about 'population cap limit' for fortress raids.