WAR’s new system: Zone Domination

In a youtube video (read more at the end of this entry to watch it) that paul prepared on his Birthday (happy b-day Pb), he and Jeff Hickman revealed a new “supplemental” system that is coming to WAR’s realm war system: Zone Domination.  According to the video, this zone domination system acts exactly how I’ve been saying RvR should act from the beginning: If you own all of the keeps and battle objectives, and you can defend them, then the zone becomes under your control.  What does this mean for the realm war?  It means EXACTLY what I’ve been saying it would mean – it means you have a reason to defend now and a reason to actively get out there and take stuff!  Without these silly bars of victory points (well, I assume they may be staying) you won’t have to worry about accumulating all these extra points and crap just to lock a zone.  If you own the objectives and the keeps in a zone then you own it.   All I have to say is FINALLY.

Unrelated to this video, I spent a long, long, long time logged in yesterday leveling my Squig Herder.  He’s now level 27 (almost 28!) and a little over halfway through renown rank 26.   I have all but my Devastator shoulders for my T3 keep sieging set and they look really cool and have made my little squiggy a beast.  I respec’d from Big Shootin’ to Quick Shootin’ as well because I was tired of sitting back and just plinking.  Don’t get me wrong, sitting back and plinking meant I was at the top of the damage charts and completely rocking anything that wasn’t a tank.  It just wasn’t my style though.  Quick Shootin’ offers me several abilities like: “RUN AWAY!” that allows me to hurl myself forward,  a huge boost to my bleed DoT, a new DoT/heal debuff that truly turns the tide of the battle, and splinterin arrows for my run and shoot – totally amazing ability to harry the back lines.

T3 still sucks though.  It’s dragging on for me like it always has and I just can’t wait to get out of it.  I really miss the feeling I had in T2.  I’m not even sure what it is really… maybe it’s that I felt like I was actually progressing at an acceptable rate in T2 or maybe it’s just that in T3 everything feels like it’s a huge burden to accomplish.   T3 feels “bleh”.  Maybe someone else can sum it up better than that.

Anyway, the Darkfall delay means I’ll have plenty of time to get my Squig to 40 and hopefully Mythic will have this ‘Zone Domination’ system in place soon.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvHFxbuQyuA[/youtube]

  • The details are my main concern. How long do you have to hold a zone in order to lock it? If it is too short, we’ll have late night city captures.

  • That’s the point though. If someone wants to attack and take all of the objectives/keeps then they -should- be able to do a late night city capture. The threat of losing your realm’s territory should be this big looming threat over everyone’s head. Players will -want- to defend their territory instead of just shrugging it off because it doesn’t matter if they capture it or not since locking a zone is this huge process.

    As I have always maintained: If you don’t defend, then you should be open to losing it all.

  • The 4am fortress takes may get a bit worse. Normal people can’t be expected to defend at those times every night. That said, Billy NoLife & Co can have a crack at doing 4am fortress takes now if they want to.

    As long as that doesn’t ruin things for everyone else, this should be a really good change. Can’t wait to have zones with combat actually spread across them, instead of being 2 zergs racing around RvEing. Praag should be awesome with this 🙂

  • Keep on that Squig Herder man! You won’t be disappointed! Are you able to run to Black Crag at 27? If so, I suggest skipping the rest of T4 and move directly into the awesomeness that begins in Chapter 15. 😛

    Question unrelated to this post: I’ve been hearing about tons of in-game exploits lately going on over on Dark Crag. People are using hacks that allow them to take 0 fall damage, float up walls, self-rez, etc. Have you seen or heard of any of this on your server? If so, what are your thoughts?

  • In the current system, you will be raiding your second fortress by 4am anyway, even if you started at dinner time. It just takes THAT BLOODY LONG. 😛

  • Excellent point, Snafzg. The current system does indeed make you wait all day long just to finally flip the zone when your realm may have held the objectives and keeps for hours. The best defense right now is no defense at all – that’s just wrong.

  • @keen: I agree in principal, but 4am city captures would really be awful. Right now we have some late night fortress captures, as Snafzg mentioned, since it is slow. They can’t ‘start and end the war’ in one late night.

    Moving the ‘end game’ to 4am would just be telling many folks they can’t participate. So is that really an improvement?

  • But in the new system, locking a zone should become much much quicker. Therefore, if you can make a strong push during primetime, you should be able to reach a city siege in a decent amount of time.

    I’m not worried about 4AM raids at all. This is something that should naturally balance itself out. Does one realm stay up innately later than the other? Not on average, therefore, if there are enough people online at 4AM to make a fortress push, there should theoretically be enough people online to defend against it, just like at primetime.

    I have been up until 4AM playing WAR, and let me tell you – Ostermark is a freakin’ ghost town! 😛

  • We’ll have to see how it goes. I think the prime-time pushes will be stalemates most of the time so whoever logs off first gets the city.

    I wonder if they will put in a timeout for the cities, so they are not captured nightly.

  • @Andrew: Agreed. And that’s what we have on the current system as it is: artificial caps. If they’re removed then city sieges and conquering the enemy realm can happen any time the attackers are able – which means that it can happen at 2pm in the afternoon just as easily at 2am. A lot of people instantly think of the worst case scenario of 2am sieges – and yes, they will happen – but overall, the game benefits more from a more open system.

  • It worked just the same way in DAOC.. We used to alarm clock 5am raid relics all the time. You could attack at anytime you wanted. When you have a system of “crap they have everything in the zone, ohh well, lets go to x zone and just flip BO’s and Keeps, they wont try to lock the zone anyway so theres no need to defend” it’s broken.

    I think we will see many more zone locks back and forth, and if people dont want the zone locked they need to defend, instead of relying on the system to be so difficult that you dont have to really worry.

    Good change in my book.

  • I’m sure there will be city captures at other times of the day but most will end up in odd hours. As Alchemda said: “5am raid relics all the time.” It is the path of least resistance. I really hope I am wrong.

    I just want to be able to participate in the war. Once offensives start and end during a nights sleep, what will be the point of the rest of the time?

  • Hopefully like Snafzg says it will balance out between both faction’s late night brigade. Though if it’s like my DaoC server was, we’ll need a rota arranged with people that work nights vs days 😛

    Of course we don’t know if this will even be issue with the new system, since we don’t know any real details yet.

    I reckon it should make for more interesting primetime gaming whatever the outcome.

  • Ya know, some of us who play at 4 am do it because of the shifts we work, with this change I’ll feel like I can do something during that time without as many people on to fight.

  • WAR needs less levels, there should only have been T1, T2 and then maxed. It’s really not much fun as a leveling game, but oddly the first two tiers are more fun than the others (call it grind or whatever, I agree, T3 isn’t much of a party).

    Nice to hear about the zone domination stuff.. I haven’t logged in at all this week and my account will completely lapse soon(ish) but I’m enjoying hearing about the improvements.

  • Don’t know much about WAR but I like reading this blog in general. I hope the zone control doesn’t automatically happen the moment a faction controls the keeps.

    From my experiences in Planetside it’s better if a timer is implemented to discourage 3am raids.

  • T3 is has more open rvr then T4; T3 does not crash as much or as often as T4 keep sieges. You say T3 is “bleh”, that’s what I feel about this site that Mythic forced me to visit. WH in general now feeling “bleh”..waiting for Darkfall and Hello Kitty.

  • Umm… I hate to break it to you, but you buy the devastator shoulders from a keep renown vendor…

  • @Postop: Yeah, I found that out after casually just checking the vendors for some new gear. And hey, why would you hate to break it to me? 😛 It’s a good thing!