PFB did the server's first siege (world first?) this morning at 6am EST on LOTD, a few Sinister who were online decided to take the opportunity to see how "polished" siege warfare was. The naysayers were pretty much deadon. It took little time to break down the main gate (max of 4-5 mins), buildings in general go down really fast with the full raid on them. Siege weapons don't work yet, and the mercenary system isn't in (we had to drop our guild for the siege in order to not kill each other even in the same raid). Keeps still have vunerable areas where you can just run past the walls (on the LOTD keep it was on the right side of the outer wall). After breaching the outer wall we ran into the major problem (I guess?) of sieging. LAG. I run a quad core 2.4ghz 2 gig ram and a 8800GT, and I had a solid 2-3fps once we engaged (btw i spent 500 dollars upgrading my pc for this game). Trying to actually fire combos and kill anyone was virtually impossible unless they were rooted.

I imagine melee classes were banging their heads against the monitor in frustration. Unless a roadblock was setup at the gate etc a group of people can just run past the full raid and maybe one that gets rooted will die. We also found that lag caused the inner wall of LOTD's keep (the right tower) to be basically invisible. We ran straight into, and out of it on the other side. It also seems that there is a cap on the zone of 96 players, because PFB had roughly 30-35 players and some of our guys could not zone into the Border kingdom because it was full (LOTD had a shit ton).

To sum it up in a nutshell, until they fix the insane lag with around 90 players on the screen, sieging will be very boring, and no fun at all. I am VERY disappointed. Call me emo, but this is game breaking. This IS the endgame of AoC for most of us, period. I stated a few weeks ago that they had to have this shit fixed by the time battlekeeps went up and its not. Is it even possible for them to tweak the game engine enough to make sieges playable? Got me. I really, really enjoy this game. I'm willing to give it a bit more time because of that. Only time will tell how things will go, but patience is not one of my virtues.


I read some suggestions about ways to decrease the lag and I'm sorry for not giving credit but I didn't bookmark the responses on the general forum:
1.) Limit Sieges to 24v24 (Get rid of the plan for 150v150...)
2.) Load default skins for armor to the players in a border kingdom. This may be a GREAT suggestion. Anyone who wants to PvP doesnt care all that much about how shiny their helm is, we want to kill people. I was in Lash Border kingdom last night with 15 guild members and had 40-50fps, zoned into it this morning with 10 (with 30 players around me), then 2-3 with 80+ on my screen.
3.) Default skins for Border Kingdom buildings

General Suggestions:
1.) Get siege weapons working
2.) Allow the attacking team to res at a tent (not sure if thats how its supposed to work or not)
3.) Tweak walls so people can fire down and fire up (not just AE down), if they fix the lag issue this will greatly increase strategy and the fun factor.
4.) Aquire points anywhere in the zone, not just 2 feet from the outer wall (we had some battles near rivers and bridges)

Any other suggestions?

Thank you for heading over here to the boards to continue the discussion.

We are very serious about our Massive Siege PvP system and we became more aggressive on fixing several issues appearing in that regard. The bulk of the feedback can be summarized within two categories: a) Client performance and b) Content and collision.

I would like to say that most of you – our players – most likely have some time to go before you reach the stage where Siege Battles become a daily activity. It is unfortunate that some of these issues have arisen, but it will not be felt personally for most of our players as they will be addressed before you participate in Massive Siege. Funcom and I have a clear policy on focusing clearly and honestly on problems. This will give you predictability and the hopefully will be what you, our customers, see us as a company – clear and open.

Client Performance

The client performance seems to be the biggest issue. Luckily we already had several improvements of performance styled directly towards the siege battles in the pipeline when we got this feedback. We are confident that we will be able to get these update s to you within a short time. (We hope to get some out as early as on the Monday down-time!)

The improvements will include: a) ways to remove / hide performance impacting particles and sound, b) a more stylized view-distance (shorter and more pvp fitting) in the battle areas to increase framerate c) changes to how certain abilities and spells are being propagated. We are also confident that this fixes will greatly improve the framerate and overall client performance in the Siege Battles.

We will not stop optimizing this until we get to a stage where we are happy that all clients can host / participate in Siege PvP.

Content and collision

There were other problems with the siege battles as well. Luckily these are less severe in scope and it should be doable to address them all. We already have collision bug fixes for the dynamic collision in these areas on their way.

I hope you understand we do not take this lightly and that we are doing a strong push to address all issues immediately.

You can continue the discussion here.

Gaute Godager
Game Director