Fight on the Flag

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.

PVP this weekend was very off and on. We didn’t have any action Saturday until well after noon. Sunday in the morning, we thwarted what I think was a Destruction attempt to push zones in preparation for a later city push. They had a couple (or more) warbands out.

It was a lot of fun in Praag fighting in the middle and at the graveyard. The only problem is the fights would be awesome for maybe an hour, then Destro would leave and go hide for a few hours. This was great for our guild rank because we started powerleveling necessary alts. But it was terrible for morale.

Our high points were really high. One fight on Sunday, we had seven people near the east keep in Caledor. Destruction was headed toward the East BO maybe? I forget why they were there, but we wiped them with our seven people. Nobody else was around.

After that, they came back again and again. We used the terrain to our advantage, and I hugged trees and rocks to stay away from those pesky Squig Herders.

We then made the tactical mistake of getting impatient and chasing one group. We got sandwiched by another warband that had been hiding in the keep.

I’ve been playing around with Fraps quite a lot lately. Here is another fight from May 17, where FOTF, TS and some other folks ran to look for the Destro zerg. And boy, did we find them!

What followed was a fight from the big bridge in Dragonwake all the way to the Destruction warcamp. The fight actually lasted about seven minutes, but I compressed the entire thing down to three. Enjoy!

(Watch this video in HQ mode.)

Such an intense, crazy fight!

On another note, FOTS (as we now call the combination of Fight on the Flag and Temporal Space) has been avoiding keep assaults. We timed how long it took for us to get through the first and second doors of a rank four keep: nearly half an hour. That was with two warbands banging on the door.

By the way, no new videos until I get a special project completed. Hopefully I will have more word of said project in the coming week.

Thought I would throw up another video of FOTF/TS taking down two warbands of Destruction at the south keep in Kadrin Valley. This was one of those ultimate Warhammer moments I will never forget. (Click HQ to view in high quality.)

Khaevil was talking in this, but unfortunately I had him muted (we are in the same room after all).

I was really skeptical that we would win this fight, and yet we did. Look at all of the Destruction! I am pretty sure we were the only people there. If we weren’t there was maybe a handful of Order with us. Great teamwork all around!

Here’s a short video from a fight in Praag. We heard a warband of Destro was attacking the north keep in Praag, Garrison of Skulls. We came up behind them and ambushed them. (Use HQ mode.)

That’s Organdonar who accidentally punted the group of them away. Oops! I Like how he was all casual “Who did that?”

Tons of fun fights last weekend. Sunday we had an awesome, rolling six-minute fight from the big bridge in Dragonwake down to the Destro warcamp. I’ll edit that footage down to two minutes or so and post it later.

Yesterday’s PVP wasn’t too bad. Granted, the doors in our path are so high-level that it literally takes us an hour to get through two of them. It’s getting to be ridiculous.

Realm vs. Door is an entirely new kind of fight. It’s filled with long stretches of boredom and periodic killing.

Anyway, here’s a video of some of the PVP action. This was from a short fight (about 3-4 minutes) at Chillwind Manor after we got tired of trying to bash the doors down.

I should mention there were just seven members in the group (you can see from the video in my Squared interface). I am guessing there were at least three groups of Destro in Chillwind (someone had a mod that said about 22 Destro were at the BO).

(Click the HQ button for higher quality)

I apologize for the spliced video clips in there (there are three). I only have the trial version of Fraps, which only allows 30-second clips. We actually almost wiped at one point, but because me lying on the ground staring at a wall is boring I did not include that clip.

Feeback on my video capturing is welcome. My feedback to the Destro: Don’t go AFK at a Battlefield Objective!

There was so much PVP this weekend that I didn’t have time to post. Well, except Sunday morning. Needless to say, our guild achieved another Warhammer first: The Warcamper title!

Yes, I realize that the title is not actually in game yet, but I feel with coaxing, taking over a Warcamp will be recognized by Mythic in some fashion. A Warcamper title would be just the incentive!

Order also had some really pathetic Fortress pushes this weekend. No screenshots yet (we are working on a special project to be unveiled to Mythic after a team member makes a logo).

In other news, the PVP we found was fast and furious. We rolled with mostly FOTF members and Temporal Space.

Of course, other warbands tend to follow us when we are on a roll:

We left a trail of dead Destruction in our wake.

We didn’t win all of our fights, though. Many times when we fought twice our number or more, we did fail.

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I cannot be more happy with the state of Gorfang than I am right now. The Destruction have returned in force and there are some amazing fights to be had. I only wish my commute didn’t suck (1 hour each way) so I could PVP more

View the following screenshots as an example of the fights we were in Sunday (click for higher resolution).

The first two are from two separate attacks on the north Battlefield Objective in Reikland, one from a defense and another from an assault where we are defending from the Destro trying to take it back.

The second two pictures are when 2-3 groups of Order took the far east BO in Caledor and defended against a seemingly insurmountable force of Destruction. They just kept coming and that fight lasted at least 10 minutes, based on my timers from using action point potions. That was an incredibly epic fight.

Destruction succeeded in taking two fortresses at once and entered Altdorf for the first time. Congratulations! (Though the first take was marred by the buggy Fortress lord in Reikwald, d’oh!)