Hodo wrote:Come on people grow a spine. If you cant defend your stuff dont build it.
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If you are outnumbered by a bigger guild, make friends or surrender and become a vassal.
I agree with the above sentiment, though to dismiss any disagreement with the proposed IB changes as spineless is rather shortsighted.
IB's offer an interesting opportunity--the field battle concept is novel, and ostensibly helps to limit the lag that ensues when hundreds of players attempt to fight it out on a single regular server. Our experience has been exciting so far and has given us the chance to test different strategies and field compositions.
The announced changes are intended to produce more conflict, and bravo for that. Current mechanics don’t discourage turtling up when raiders come along and are rather heavily tilted in the defender’s favor. Too often while roving the lands, we’ll encounter a group that retreats to their town claim, which is untouchable under any circumstance short of a siege. This can be maddening, though I’m not certain that this change will disincentivize town-claim-only building, only that it will result the distribution of assets onto multiple town claims.
Expanded IB's render the advantage of building defenses and terraforming much less meaningful and eliminate the geographical advantage of building on any particular part of the map--as attackers and defenders can join remotely. Alliances with one's neighbors become meaningless--get enough people in on the wrecking ball, regardless of where they might be, and you’ve got yourself a party.
Under the proposed change, potential attackers need only put up a scant amount of steel, gold, and preparations to place a totem, and lose nothing other than the equipment they may bring into the battle if an attack fails. The lack of ‘skin in the game’ will likely lead to a proliferation of scheduled instanced battles—many if not most of which the attacker has no intention of appearing at, and will only serve to induce fatigue on behalf of potential defenders, who must show up every time to ensure their claim is not trimmed down. A potential remedy? Match the tiers of attacker and defender (e.g. Tier 4 guild may drop a totem on any sized claim; Tier 3 guild may go after tier 1, tier 2, or tier 3 claims, and so on), and institute a ‘loser-pays’ system, in which the attacking group will lose tiles if its attack fails. In this case, selection of one’s target becomes much more important.
Judgement Hours, subject to the variations of server stability as they may be, have been very fun so far, as I’m generally a big fan of open world PvP . Ambushes, third-party involvement, forward operating bases, sabotage—each of these make for compelling combat, and riveting gameplay. Instanced Battles, however stable, are also more sterile. The map suddenly seems a bit smaller, and Life is Feudal MMO leans closer to Life is Feudal: Arena. Some will see this as a feature, rather than a bug—your mileage may vary.
