The first Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning city siege has taken place, and to the presumable chagrin of the developers, it sucked.
Warhammer Online developer Mythic Entertainment had apparently hoped it would be at least a month before a city siege occurred in the game, according to Eurogamer, but it happened less than two weeks after the game’s launch, and by all reports it did not go nearly the way the designers intended. In a recent interview, Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs described city sieges as a massive undertaking that would require a significant amount of time and effort to successfully complete. “We’ve laid everything out in a manner that your side has to accomplish a lot, so it’s going to take time,” he said. “We’ve seen the other games out there where people can do things late at night while nobody else is on, but it doesn’t work that way in WAR. It’s impossible. It should be weeks unless we really messed up.”
Those words may come back to haunt Jacobs, as forum posts report that the Order capital of Altdorf was successfully attacked by a relatively small force of 30-40 Destruction players, many of whom weren’t at max level or using particularly impressive equipment. Worse, the whole thing took place over the course of a single evening, leading many players to suggest that Mythic had, in fact, “really messed up.”
The one-sided whomping led some Order players to accuse the Destruction forces of exploiting bugs, while the Destruction side responded with, “We’re in your citiez griefing your PQs,” and claimed that a lack of order among Order was to blame. Regardless of the reason, one eyewitness to the event provided a particularly detailed and hilarious account of the attack. “I counted the forces of Destruction approach. There were around 30,” he wrote. “It’s okay, I thought to myself, they have no ram, they are mostly sub-40, they are not a particularly large group. Despite the lack of player defense, there is no way they will get through this place.”
“And if they can, it will take so long that we will have a sufficient defense force ready by the time they get to the Lord,” he continued. “Five minutes later they were through the wall’s door. I thought that was quick consider the lack of ram, but never mind, they’ve a whole town to fight through now. Twenty seconds later they were at the main keep, having had to fight no guards that I could see, guard patrols being too spaced out. The door on the keep should hold them back a bit, and maybe last longer than the outside doors. Surprisingly, they ran around to the back of the keep and clicked through the rear door to enter the keep in the same way that Order do. No need to bash down the front door at all.” The entire attack, which the poster described as “supposed to be the final objective in an epic battle to unlock city sieges,” took roughly 15 minutes.
It’s perhaps not as poetic as a horseshoe nail, but the next time people want to avoid the loss of a kingdom they should make sure the back door is locked.
