TreefAM wrote: Wed Sep 30, 2020 2:05 pm
There's nothing competitive about forts.
You want competitive rvr? Set it up with another guild and go fight it out in empty zones.
There's a lot of truth to that. When it comes to ORvR there's no such thing as an even playing field. Even if you have complete parity with your opponent, one or both of you are likely to get reinforcements at any given moment. I'm sure we've all been in fights where your side was fighting fairly equal forces, and winning, and then all the sudden the other side gets a big influx of players and you get wiped. Or vice versa. It's just part of ORvR.
As far as forts, they're intended to favor the defender. Always have, and always will. It's much the same in keep defense. But in keep defense, you don't have population caps. So you can just throw more bodies at the meat grinder and wear the defender down until you push through. So, while the defensive advantage of regular keeps can be mitigated by vastly superior numbers, the same cannot be said for fortresses. So, obviously, this tends to favor order; while order certainly can zerg hard, it seems destro is more consistent at it.
As a primarily order player, the demoralization that destro felt during those failed fortress pushes is regularly felt on order when 200-ish destro roll over 100-ish order. It sucks. However, during the stalemate Reikland became more fun. Having ~100 more people is not as impactful when the populations are O:400 D:500, as compared to when they're O:100 and D:200.
As far as the class composition argument, of course ranged is going to be favored during keep defense, and destro's melee pain train is going to be less effective. That's the nature of holding a defensive position that cannot be easily overrun. Destro's melee train is so effective in almost every other type of content, though, so I don't really see a problem with that; it's great in cities, it's great in scenarios, it's great in the field. However, if destro wants more ranged, there's a solution to that, and it's one button click away.
So it comes back to what should be done...if anything. The devs could continue to tinker with the population caps, and just let the attacker overwhelm the defender by sheer numbers. That doesn't seem like all that much better of a solution, though. The overpopulated realm, which already had a population advantage, continues to get stronger and stronger. The imbalance becomes incrementally more and more chronic. I'm not going to pretend to know the solution.
Then there's the obvious answer to all of this: maybe the devs don't want fortresses to regularly fall and cities to be fired off constantly. Maybe 3 cities a day was not a good thing to them. Maybe they want to, over time, flatten out the number of characters running around in sovereign. Fewer sovereign-geared people running around is a lot easier to deal with for new players. Of course, that doesn't take the sovereign away from the large number of people who already have it. As someone who is currently trying to gear out sovereign, that's a bit frustrating if true. But, that's the game. It's the dev's world. We just play in it.
