The first step in improving the oRvR experience of fortress taking went LIVE across all servers last night. The good news is that there were lots of fortresses captured and defended. The even better news is that there were no fortress-related crashes last night while these warhammer fortress battles raged and were completed by the players. Performance in these battles was also improved, but still not where we want it to be of course.

First, the team will tweak the settings for the Fortress Lords to make sure that their power is in line with the current numbers of players expected to participate in the siege. Second, the team will continue working on optimizing the code’s performance in large-scale warhammer fortress battles so we can increase the population cap over the next few weeks. Third, the team is looking at additional tweaking of the pop cap to ensure that it is where it needs to be in order to allow these battles to be as well-balanced as they can be. In the end, it is up to the players to decide to defend and/or attack a warhammer fortress but it is our job to make sure that the pop cap is set properly to ensure that the maximum number of defenders/attackers that can *choose* to participate is set up so that if the population hits max cap, neither side has an advantage over the other. Most importantly, the team will also be looking at moving the fortress areas out to their own zones to allow an even a greater of number of players to participate, while also maintaining a high level of performance.