Lockout system is a failure and some people takes advantage of it

[illumius]

The problem is exacerbated by the sick power ratio. Since February, the online side of destruction has been 52-65%. (Thanks to the broken class balance) This means that people on the order side who care about oRVR are not getting victories and are leaving the game. This has killed many servers in the original game, but now there is only one server that can be manually managed.

[tjalfe]

Maybe debuff players for 10min after switching would fix it, giving each side a fighting chance.

[koozyer]

Hello everyone! Thank you for your insights and we appreciate your concerns. We have excellent news for you today, we're working on adding a third faction! The Skaven!! You can't make a character on this faction however. If your account ever switches and gains rvr experience with the opposite side your account becomes indefinitely locked to only playing as the rat you are on the Skaven faction! Wow!!! And Skaven always have AAo! Amazing!! Make the switch today and join your fellow rats in our quest for absolute world domination, infinite food, and warpstone!!! Yes Yes!

[Minisynn]

To leave an actually serious comment this time, these sort of threads are absolutely useless without giving actual feedback - they're just rage threads masquerading under a thin veil of game system criticism, and more often than not (like in this case) are more rooted how people *feel* about what's going on in the game, rather than what's *actually* going on in the game. I know that after 5 or 6 years of playing this game that any attempt to rationalise usually falls on deaf ears, but here we go anyway:

What do you think is a viable solution here? Do we go back to the old lockout system? Because let me tell you, before Evil was banned, we'd xrealm for fort/keep defences often enough because it's far more enjoyable than battering down the doors of an empty keep and then PvE-ing a lord. So clearly that's not going to solve it. And people were often furious about that too, demanding that the devs ban xrealming entirely.

I'll start by saying that I've only been involved in one or two nights in the warband you're talking about, so it's possible that I don't have the full picture - but I'm fairly certain that I was there for the Caledor night you're referring to, so I think that I know enough.

Personally, I think that the current system is a far more honest implementation due to the reward lockout. Despite what people *feel* is happening (which is often completely detached from reality, but spreads and morphs like a game of Chinese whispers). The warbands that you're talking about have been run on an open Discord and half filled with players from all over the server. And they're almost always somewhere between 6 and 18 players. I can assure you that 95% of the people in these warbands still want gear for their characters, and much prefer swapping when there's AAO on the other side because it means they'll actually still get rewards for playing, on top of actually having something to fight. I'm sure the vast majority of players that xrealm are in the same boat.

One of the most common misconceptions from the community in this game has always been the idea of mysterious xrealming forces materialising out of thin air to thwart their sieges. It's honestly unbelievable that in 2026, people still don't realise that:

1. People will often log in, or leave the cities/whatever they're doing to go to the lakes for a fort or siege defence, because it's an easy way to guarantee PvP action and decent rewards. For small groups, siege defences and fort defences in particular are a great way to even the playing field against a stacked side, as it guarantees you support from your realm and you can fight on your own terms.

2. It's a small game. Imagine that there are 200 people in a zone; 130 of them are on Order, and 70 are on Destruction. That's going to be roughly 80% AAO if the equation is still ((D-U)/U)*100). Now imagine that 20 people swap from Order to Destruction because it feels very one sided, and the AAO is getting high. That's now 110 vs 90 people, or 20% AAO. With a single warband swapping sides, AAO shifted by 75% of it's value.

Both of these factors combined mean that relatively small population swings can have enormous swings in AAO, and it can often be hard to predict just how big that swing is going to be because of point #1. To someone who struggles to wrap their head around statistics and/or correlation/causation, this can certainly seem like a huge swathe of players have suddenly appeared on the other side, which *must* mean that they've all swapped from your side. And it's not just the general playerbase that react this way - there was a member of the RoR team on Order with you during the Caledor night that you're referring to, and they posted a dishonest population graph and made jabs at a "Certain group of players" for swapping sides - despite the fact that they had just formed a warband on Order when Destro were already being farmed into their warcamp, and there were already 2 other organsied WBs on order versus zero on destro.

So if you're a warband on the overpopulated side, bored out of your mind because the enemy are sitting in their keep or AFK in their warcamp due to the number imbalance, or getting farmed into their warcamp and totally demoralised, at this point you have two options:

1. Stay bored, call your warband, siege a keep in which the defenders likely have zero chance or simply abandon the keep, etc.

or

2. Swap sides, and hope that the number balance doesn't swing so far that the AAO evaporates entirely. This option pretty much guarantees that you'll have headstrong enemies to fight, and often rallies the realm that was getting steamrolled before because they're now able to fight back.

What do you think the right call is here? What's more enjoyable to you and your guild as players? Say it was a pug led WB that swapped and didn't have the stopping power of "some guild's" warbands; do you think that you'd be as upset about this system, or would you actually be happy that you've gone from having a boring evening to having more enemies to farm?

I honestly think that a lot of this debate (as it has over the years) just comes down to people being sore losers. I'm not going to pretend that I don't understand the frustration - your entire WB has farmed the enemy back into their warcamp or into hiding, you're having a blast, and you decide that you're going to siege down a zone to end the night. Suddenly seeing a 12-18 man that was helping you farm the enemy 10 minutes ago appearing on the other side might feel like you've been betrayed. But at the end of the day, this is a PvP game. The entire purpose is PvP, and ultimately what's the point of PvP when you're playing with an insurmountable advantage, or against enemies that you seemingly outnumber 10:1, and often don't even have enough manpower to funnel the main door of a keep? Part of the reason I stopped playing this game much is because of how it often feels like you're just punching down without a challenge, which takes most of the enjoyment out of PvP for me. Playing on the AAO side is infinitely more frustrating, but also so much more satisfying and rewarding if/when you manage to come out on top.

I do think that outright baiting your realm to siege when you intend to xrealm is a bit dubious, but at the end of the day it's RoR - the siege was going to happen eventually, but you've now just cut out the middle man of being bored for 30 minutes while the last shreds of resistance from the losing realm get demoralised into their keep or warcamp, while your realm puts off spawning a ram because they don't want to lose a good zone, are afraid that they might not win the siege, or whatever else.

There's a lot more nuance to trying to balance a game like RoR than threads like this make it sound, and I've skimmed over a lot of that in this comment. What happens if the faction with AAO is actually farming the other side, because they've got more organised warbands and a bunch of high-skilled RPDS small scale groups surfing the wave? What about when you xrealm to balance numbers and suddenly another warband leader starts to form, meaning you're bollocked either way? Or what about all of the times in the past month of (((player))) running these warbands where the xrealming actually made a positive difference for the losing side, like the several evenings where (((player's))) warband ended up fighting against massive AAO and supporting the losing realm for hours straight? Or on the flip side, what about the other night where (((player's))) warband was on Order with your guild, and you were all farming Destro at a 9:1 kill ratio? How do we police one form of swapping sides and encourage the other? Would you have been happy to see them swapping to Destro to give you an actual fight, or are you content as long as it's just your guild/warband that's having fun regardless of how the other faction is feeling? (and yes, I am aware of the irony of that last point)

If it's not explosive pots supposedly causing FPS lag, purported teleport hacks and immunity hacks, xrealm ram saboteurs and spies, blobbing, or xrealming, there's going to be another reason that the playerbase gets up in arms over an issue that they're either outright wrong about, don't understand the nuance of, or heard via rumours and spread as even worse rumours because that's just the way it goes around here.

If your guild or any other guild/warband on the server decides to boycott sieges because you don't trust certain guilds/warband leaders, then you're entirely within your rights to do so. But ultimately, you need to reflect on what it actually is that you want out of this PvP game, and how you want the devs to actually implement that vision. Once you've done that, you can deliver actual workable feedback, and then put it out to the court of public opinion to be critiqued or pushed towards the devs. Actual constructive criticism with suggestions is a lot more valuable than emotionally charged complaining.