Spugnort's

While battles to take and defend the fortresses in WAR raged on without any major hiccups, Mark Jacobs admits there is still room for improvement. Below is an excerpt of a statement he made last week detailing some of the changes which will be coming very soon (the first has already been made).

“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.”

We think this part of the game is great and we would love to see it have its own special place to shine. We will definitely be keeping an eye on this!