Today, let’s talk about City Capture in Warhammer Online! According to the latest word coming from Mark Jacobs, Mythic Entertainment is heavily considering a rotating cities model, where only two cities are capturable at any given time. To unlock a city for capture, we must control at least two of the three Tier 4 pairings. To control a pairing, we must push the enemy all the way back to their main T4 fortress, and actually overtake it.

Here’s a little snippet from a recent Ten Ton Hammer interview with Mark Jacobs to give you some additional context:

What we’re thinking about doing is rotating in cities, in and out. In the RvR, so let’s say in the content expansion another city pairing comes up. So the old cities get turned off to RvR. It’s not going to be there as a focus for that. Players can focus on whatever the current pairing is, and then we rotate in another pairing. When we rotate the cities out it gives us time to go back and make changes to them. To learn from out mistakes, we can say we thought this scenario was great it isn’t, we thought this design was great for the stuff in the city and it wasn’t. So we can take it out of production and put a new city in or update the city and put it back in when a new city pairing comes in. So I think for the long term health for this game I think that is critical. I think it is absolutely critical. I am very happy about this decision. I know it is hard for people to believe, but if you just think about it. Especially for the people who played DAOC, think about the issues in that game, or any game, that has RvR or PvP or something similar, getting people to focus on something can be a challenge. This forces them to focus.

Part of the reasoning Mark gives is that this rotation feature will give Mythic a chance to refine cities during their downtime and the other part is that having only two cities capturable will give players a goal to focus on. I can’t argue the first part, because I think that’s definitely a positive side effect of this system, however, I want to get into the second part a bit more.

Giving players a focus - does this actually make it any easier?

The way the original model was explained to us, there were going to be three enemy cities, and to open one of them up for capture, you would have had to work your way towards controlling the specific T4 zone and fortress for that pairing.

In the newly proposed system, you will only have one enemy city to focus on, and to unlock it, you must control two out of three T4 zones and fortresses. That’s how I understand it, anyway. Am I wrong? Hope not, because this is what I’m basing my entire stance on!

Doesn’t the new system actually seem MORE difficult to any of you? Needing to control two zones to capture one city seems a lot more difficult than controlling one zone to unlock one city to me…

Mark is arguing that the players focus in the original system would be split across three pairings, which would be way too spread out to actually accomplish anything. If that were the case, sure, it would be a problem. Fortunately, most players aren’t complete morons. I don’t think it would take very long to realize in the original proposal it would be in your best interest to focus your attack on one front to drive towards its capital. In the new system, you have to coordinate a major offensive in TWO zones, which is vastly more difficult imho.

Let’s not forget defense either. In the original system, if the players were focusing their offensive in one zone, you only had to really defend one zone. In this new system, you have to split your defense into two zones. You’ve just doubled the amount of players you must dedicate to offense/defense.

You’ve actually just doubled the amount of player spread… I can’t really think of any way that this city capture model is any better than the previous one based on these arguments. Can you?

A friend of mine thinks that in the old system, if one city looked like it was about to be unlocked, people would have simply abandoned the other zones they were fighting in to take up arms in offense and defense. To him, it seemed as if one city would always be the focus no matter what, so he doesn’t think this new system changes that inevitability. That sounds a lot like what Mythic wants with this new system, except you don’t have to capture two fronts to make it happen…

Hopefully, my understanding of how they want and wanted it to play out is correct. From what I’ve read on a few different sites, that’s seems to be how he’s explaining himself. Thanks to Wizards and Wenches for inspiring this post.

Am I way off base here?