Folks,
*Assuming* that no exploits were used and that destruction didn’t take advantage of any of the things that will be fixed/tweaked in the next patch, then they deserve congratulations for the first taking of a city. I’ll get the full scoop on this this week.

Now, as to the whole 2AM thing, well, if you want to play an RvR game, there will be times where one side will have a numbers advantage and they will use that advantage. The fact that this is the only city that has been taken out of our 55 servers means that the system is certainly not broken, borked or really messed up. If this had already happened on just our high pop servers, well, then maybe we’d be a little worried but we are 3 weeks since the game’s launch and a city has been taken on only one server. From what I’ve heard, destruction got real organized and did what a large organized force would do against a non-organized (not disorganized since there is no inherent overall organization unless the players make it so) force, they defeated that force. We will look at all the data, look at what’s going in 1.0.3 and if we need to make some new tweaks, we certainly will do so but again, a city has only been taken on one server so far in 3 weeks.

What amuses me about some of the stuff people have been saying is that on one hand, people say “Gimme more open RvR!” but on the other hand *some* people are saying “But it’s not fair, they had more people than us!” and at the same time some people are saying “We hate scenarios!” If you want a true open RvR game then you should not complain about numerical or time-of-day advantages in terms of “Mythic FIX!” This is why it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to satisfy all the different needs/wants of the players. We can’t make sure that all realms have the exact same population no matter what we do even if we were draconian in our efforts. No MMORPG of this type (DAoC, WoW, etc.) has ever had an exact 50/50 split and I doubt any will. We can’t force the players to all log on to the game at the same time. If we were to say that city sieges could only happen during a certain time then we would still have people complaining, saying “It’s our time Mythic, let us attack it when we damn well want to!!!” or “Our alliance can’t get things going until late at night and Mythic is stopping us from attacking!!!!” and if we buffed up the defenses like crazy, people would say “OMG, now nobody has to defend the city, this isn’t fair. This isn’t an RvR game!” etc. People have been saying “Where’s the war in WAR Mythic????” and now that a very organized group has taken a city without exploiting (apparently), now some people are saying “OMG, you mean we could lose because they were more organized and willing to fight? That sucks!”

Again, I’m not saying that the taking of Altdorf was perfect, done beautifully, working as intended, etc. since I don’t have all that data yet. I’m also not saying that after looking at the data we aren’t going to tweak things. However, I will say that if destruction did everything they needed to do lead up to the siege *properly* and then took it over a 7 hour period, that was a pretty special event. And in the coming weeks as we add more rewards and incentives for defending a city as well as the disincentives, I hope that people will more readily leap to the defense of their cities if they come under siege.

As to the whole “But we didn’t know about city being under siege thing” well, I’ll talk to the team this week and make sure that the notification systems that are in the game currently are working as they should be and even if they are, I’ll do a review and see if they need to be buffed up some more. However, if people don’t want to leave what they are currently doing in order to defend their cities, that is their choice not ours. We’ll provide the incentives/disincentives for participating in the defense of a city but it is, as always, up to the players to make their own choices about this aspect of the game.
Mark