Fortress Lords, very powerful beings that are bent on protecting their fortresses. Many groups of players have so far fought these creatures against incredible odds, some with success, while others with horrible failures.

Fortunately for those that have been less than successful to this point, Mark had a few interesting words to say about the continuing tweaks to improving this oRvR experience.

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