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The Summoner's Guidebook: Get back, get back!
Last week, I said I would avoid doing articles on the situational "soft skills" in League of Legends. Well, this week kind of ruins that already. Today we're going to talk about lane positioning, zoning, and harassment. These things are not something I can just give you blanket tips on. There are a lot of nuances involved in good positioning, and every single matchup is completely different. You do not stand in the same places laning against Cassiopeia as you do against Kennen, and those positions change depending on which character you're playing, too. Even though there is a lot of matchup-specific knowledge involved in lane positioning, there are some general tips I can provide. This week I'm going to only teach you about the basics of lane safety but give you some dirty mindgame tricks that will absolutely ruin your opponents. Interested? Read on!
Zone locks double in WAR after release of new Zone Domination System
The primary RvR campaign goal in Warhammer Online is to capture and defend zones from your enemy. Up until recently, it was very difficult to capture zones and too easy to defend zones, which led to player frustration. Mythic introduced a new zone locking mechanic called the Zone Domination System (ZDS) in patch 1.2 to help address this issue. We heard early reports that the ZDS was working as intended, but had no hard numbers to back up the claims. Now we do. Nazgum, an avid MMO gamer and new WAR blogger, has been collecting zone capture data from the official Realm War site for the last 30 days and has come up with some interesting results.Zone captures have doubled across all servers with the new ZDS. Order and Destruction are roughly even in number of zone captures if you average them out across all servers as well. One concern players have with the new system is that zones can be more easily "ninja'd" during 5am raids. Nazgum's charts show that the majority of zone locks occur between 2 and 6am (in North America). Finally, he compares activity on the two role-play servers to address Ostermark's envy of Phoenix Throne.
WAR's new Zone Domination system in development
Without a doubt one of the liveliest people we know of in the MMO industry, Paul Barnett, put out a YouTube video this week in celebration of his birthday, and brought Warhammer Online devs Jeff Hickman and Colin Shannon in for some updates on the game. Perhaps the most interesting thing revealed is WAR's new Zone Domination system which is currently in the works. It's intended to supplement Warhammer Online's realm-vs.-realm system by providing more compelling ways to capture zones. Hickman says, "If you can capture everything in a zone and hold it, claiming the Keeps and dominate that zone, then you have a very good chance of capturing the zone." Or, as Barnett summarizes, Zone Domination will give players more reasons for defending and holding objectives.Colin Shannon also provides an update on the reduction of crashes in WAR, and there's (perhaps) a ray of hope mentioned at the end for having multiple items in the mail system. Check out the video embed below the cut for more on the state of the game, and what new features WAR players should be getting in a forthcoming patch.
Bringing WAR to the web
Any massively multiplayer online game built around the twin pillars of PvP and territorial control can't go wrong by providing realtime status updates of the struggle via the web. Warhammer Online has endeavored to do just that with the Realm War site, as addressed in a dev diary by the title's Web Development Lead, Scott Stricklin. The dev blog touches on what Mythic has accomplished thus far with bringing WAR to the web, and what they hope to accomplish in the future -- namely, podcasts, community news, and character and guild profiles. While they have no shortage of ideas about how to expand WAR outside of the client, their first objective has been to bring Realm vs. Realm data to the web. That goal has now been realized, and Stricklin walks the reader through the features of the newly revamped Realm War site.Players now have access to updated information about the overall campaign and the status of each capital city, Stricklin writes. This information is also presented visually, with each capital city's look changing based on its status, ranging from peaceful to besieged. This can all be kept in a pop up box in your browser to provide continual updates for when the tide of battle turns. Further information is provided through selectors which represent a server's racial pairings, giving a snapshot of what's happening with each tier's zone control. An added bonus to this are influence maps for each zone, similar to the in-game maps, which show the status of the various RvR objectives and allow a player to mouse over keeps, seeing when it was last captured and by which guild. Have a look at Scott Stricklin's dev diary for more on the Realm War site, or better yet, just head over there and try it out for yourself. Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out our Warhammer guides: Massively's Character Creation Guide and our WoW Player's Guide to Warhammer. Plus, don't miss any of our ongoing coverage as Massively goes to WAR!
WAR's latest Grab Bag explores Zone Control
Aside from answering a variety of user questions and reporting on the latest tidbits of Warhammer Online news in the usual Grab Bag style, this week's regular feature focuses on the basics of Zone Control.If you've ever made the mistake of assuming that your realm has captured a zone by controlling all Battlefield objectives and Keeps, you'd be wrong. That's exactly what this Grab Bag feature aims to do: help the players understand what exactly is involved in controlling your Zone. Check out the entire article for more on Zone control and the answers to a few important player questions.
