Fight on the Flag

I took a brief break from the blog after a business trip. Here’s a quick update.

Obliteration and FOTF have been running King together for the past month or so. We’ve definitely got it down. Loot is rolling in and people are progressing. We have almost a full warband of Warlord geared people and we are bringing in people who are nearly high enough to wear Warlord as we can.

FOTF is also trying to run through VL but the darn thing is so buggy half the time we get frustrated and leave.

We have killed through boss six and only briefly saw boss seven last weekend. Not too bad for only trying for a couple of weeks I say.

Finally Sunday morning we were out and decided to stop the Destro zone flips. The Destro apparently gave up after we stopped them, a shame considering we were vastly outnumbered. I guess they just want their freenown (free renown) as fast as they can get it and it doesn’t occur to them to try to, oh I don’t know, fight people for it?

In any case we are still having fun and still trying to kill Destro at every turn. On another note we are not recruiting anymore. We got some fabulous new guildies and learned quite a bit about those who did not make it through the initiate phase.

It is traditional to host a housewarming party when one takes up a new residence. According to Emily Post, the party is hosted by the homeowner to welcome friends and family to their new home. Schwenderhalle Manor is a prime piece of real estate with views of the river and within sight of the Reikwald Fortress. Fight on the Flag and some members of Knights of Valor and Obliteration took up residence. It was supposed to be a good time.

Unfortunately Destruction is not aware of the rules of etiquette. We had our King Keg out and they wanted to walk right in, completely uninvited! This outrage did not go unanswered. We repelled them for a good 10-20 minutes.

Alas, the beer ran dry and Destruction was able to make it into our new home.

They ransacked the place and had their way with the dwarves. I’ll never look at a beard the same way again.

It was a tough couple of weeks, but I think we’ve found our groove again! We hadn’t played Order for four months when we returned to Gorfang (we spent two months on Phoenix Throne and two in, er, Aion). The corpses piled up and we had a grand time in RVR, which is nearly constant these days.

We spent lots of quality time near flags (even if they weren’t owned by our realm).

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To kick off this post, I wanted to share a screenshot of the text message after Order kicks Destro out of Altdorf:

(Just in case you cannot read the text in the picture, “Altdorf stands strong! The city is Recovering. No mercy for the straggling Order.”)

For those who haven’t surfed the forums relentlessly, Istaflyiii on Gorfang discovered a bug that basically hands Destruction the keys to Altdorf three times a day. By just respirating oxygen into carbon dioxide, Destruction can flip zones and get to Altdorf.

And order can do nothing about it. In fact, if Order tries to do something, it actually works in Destruction’s favor.

Wow. What a disincentive for RVR if you have any shred of realm pride. Fortunately, Mythic says they are working on the bug, though the timeline for a fix is sketchy at best.

One player on Gorfang wanted to try to quantify the gear and renown haul due to the VP bug, and Destro of course, say it’s not a big deal (though there are the few who are calling attention to this).

Case in point: Cald noticed that Order owned one keep in Thunder Mountain. We claimed it, noticed we had about six people and called in T4 channel for help. Anyone who wanted to defend with Ventrilo could join our warband and we could try to prevent Destro from taking the keep.

I wish I had taken screenshots of what some said to me (and I would blur the names to prevent too much humiliation). I got several tells from people saying “Don’t defend it only flips to the city faster” who were actually ANGRY at me trying to defend our lands!

Of course I didn’t listen, and we led about three groups from TM to KV to try to defend. It was all in vain. We were up against 5 warbands at one point (90 on the keep and another warband defending BOs).

Morale on Order side is very low. Let’s hope they fix this bug soon.

We thought we’d ruin some Order’s PVE by running in Land of the Dead for a while on Sunday. For such a highly touted expansion, there was hardly anyone there. But when Order gained control, a lowbie zerg of Shadow Warriors leaped off of a cliff we happened to be hiding behind. Most of them ended up at half health, or worse. They were easily dispatched.

Those aren't all rocks, they're corpses.

Yeah killing a bunch of lowbies wasn’t terribly challenging or brag worthy, but watching renown (albeit very little renown) falling from the skies was pretty entertaining.

We are amazed and awed at the amount of RVR we have seen on Phoenix Throne so far.

This map represents Friday night at about 6:30 p.m. Pacific time. FotF is headed into the fray!

As we slowly accumulate Annihilator and Conquerer gear, we are getting less squishy. We stood toe to toe with one of the better Bright Wizard bomb groups on the server. I am confident once we get equivalent gear that they won’t stand a chance.

Apparently our guild is getting a bit of a reputation (if only for the guild name). I discourage bragging on forums. It’s sometimes hard not to provide advice without seeming like you’re bragging. I don’t want to come off as arrogant (oh but on this server we did it this way and it worked).

But sometimes you really can’t help it. We had a keep defense that everyone thought we would lose. The tank wall was rather massive, though, and I had every confidence that we would prevail. That is, until the people on the tank wall left the wall to chase down people who got past /facepalm.

We steered them (in a not-so-nice way) to get back onto the wall and hold fast. We prevailed and chased them out of the keep!

I anticipate more fun today and Sunday.

We had several exciting fights this weekend, but nothing was as exciting as a former DAOC guildmate finding Pylith on Facebook and then joining the guild.

Welcome back Kuvasz! She played an armswoman in DAOC and ran with our 8-man gank squad. After New Frontiers, we all quit because we were tired of keep humping (sound familiar?).

We had exciting times on Saturday in Praag, whipping up several groups of Destro into tasty batches of renown. I managed to get RR71, so I guess I drop Royal Crests now. With the number of Destro who zerg around me now, I probably should hire a Swordmaster to guard me :p

Unfortunately it seems Doorhammer is all we do now if we want to see RVR. Destro is too wary of our group (unless they have 150 of them defending a fortress and all we have is eight people, like on Monday night).

Yes, underneath the hooves of the Destro warhorses is a dead ginger-headed freak (Bright Wizards is what we call them on Order side). We couldn’t find any RVR until we realized a fort had been taken and Order left to go somewhere else. We investigated and found tons and tons and TONS of Destro outside Fell Landing.

I would be lying if I said our first attempts were anything but utter defeat. In our defense we were missing a couple of key players, but we managed to kill equal to our number before we died.

With the long holiday weekend coming up, plenty of us FOTFers are planning to PVP. Thursday night we had some good fights, when we could find them. Order owned LOTD so you would think it would have been easy. But no.

I’ll be honest, we didn’t have our A team for much of these fights (sorry Vidbranna). We had a badly geared BW and we still beat them. Then, we went to Fireguard once to prevent a Dragonwake lock. Khaevil was waaay out front, and I was practically at the warcamp. About two groups of Destro were at the BO but they scattered at the mere sight of Khaevil running in by himself.

He cant kill you if he’s alone. /sigh

Here’s to hoping the PVP is going to be better the rest of this weekend. And happy Fourth, everyone!

Apparently Fight on the Flag and Temporal Space is being blamed for a recent rash of Destruction members quitting the game. Many of these posts were made Sunday and Monday (visit to see for yourself). (Edited to add direct links to posts: We reap what we sow, canceled, FOTF/TS moved to Phoenix Throne read some of the hate in that one)

It was too much for one Destruction member to take. Visit the official forums here.

I am ashamed to admit that I read his post to guildies in vent, at times laughing so hard that I couldn’t even speak.

Destro tried multiple attempts to counter the bomb teams.  Spreading out, hunting the healers, and silencing.  All to no avail.  Cave BOs were massacres.  I believe they took out 2 warbands at one point.

My guess is they didn’t try coordination and teamwork, getting on vent and using an assist train. You can’t try these tactics once, lose a few times and then decide it doesn’t work. It requires discipline and teamwork to initiate.

This is a terrible picture of the end of a seriously epic fight where we had six players against more than a warband of Destruction. Initially they were in the cave at the East BO in Thunder Mountain. They were just leaving the cave when we rolled in. We were dead if not for a very very lucky res by Organdonar. He died right as I got the res, and I hid and ressed him, and from there we got everyone up.

At the end of the fight, the adrenalin was pumping so hard through my body I was literally shaking. I think it was one of the best fights we’ve ever had in Warhammer.

Would we have been able to do this without communication? Hell no! If Destruction were halfway organized we would have failed then, too.

Instead of them working together, they are ragequitting over something they can easily prevent. Fight on the Flag has been working together for 10 years or more in some cases. You can’t overcome that with a three times our numbers in a PUG warband that’s tab targetting the nearest thing to you.

I want to be respectful to our enemies, but it’s hard sometimes when they put forth nearly no effort and cry so much about losing (Hellfish, Turmoil and Tempered Ignorance as the exception of course). I guess the sooner Destro leaves Gorfang the sooner we get our merger, right?

After a whole week at work I finally got to PVP with the guys Friday. When PVP is hopping I really love this game. Unfortunately what we would consider action is barely a blip on a larger server’s radar.

(Above is a screenshot of Perle getting RR 70)

We had some good fights in Praag. I wish I had Fraps running for some of those fights. It almost felt like that scene in the Matrix where Neo gets attacked by all those agents and they keep coming.

A few of our members announced they are quitting the game. However, I have faith that the game will be rescued. For one, Mark Jacobs has left Mythic, which has been merged with Bioware. I am not sure if that means the game is going to change rapidly or not. But there are some encouraging signs  in a recent producers letter (it takes a while to load sometimes because lots are reading it).

One item that caught my eye, given the recent campaign to try to get Mythic to merge our server, is this passage:

Another area where we frequently receive feedback is population. Whether in terms of Realm balance or overall server population, this continues to be a very important issue for us. We’re looking at some fairly radical approaches on how to best bring the population together. We want to ensure everyone is having fun, but we need to do so in such a way that further imbalances aren’t created overnight as we have seen in the past. There are a lot of ideas on the table, but your satisfaction is our top concern.

It will be interesting to see how they address population in future patches. I am looking forward to PVP changes to city and fortress assaults.

What are your thoughts? Post in the comments below.