But I do indeed feel fine.

So at 7 am on Sunday, an alliance of Destruction guilds on Averheim launched an attack on Altdorf, Order’s Main City. Semantics aside, they got into the city but failed to kill the King before they were ousted. For a few hours, only Tier 4 Order Characters could enter the city and that was to defend it. A few hours later, Altdorf was back to normal and if you’d gone out to enjoy a beautiful fall day yesterday, you wouldn’t have ever known anything had happened.

Unless you checked in with the blogosphere & message boards where people are sharing pretty – strong – reactions to this event.

For Ardwulf, this is reason enough to quit Warhammer [EDIT: see his comment to this post and his blog post on the topic. My apologies for mis-representing his reasons. This was more like a ‘final straw’ thing than his main reason for leaving]. Saylah seems concerned that players can use the clock to get an advantage (the attack started at 7 am), and lucidly points out some weaknesses in the system. I hope she offered these points as feedback to Mythic. And the VN boards are just an explosion of whining, as is typical of the VN boards. In game, we had a guild member seemingly very upset and declaring the war over for Order and that it was pointless to keep playing (I paraphrase, but that was his tone).

I am surprised to find myself surprised by these reactions (meaning the reaction of people on various message boards; I think my fellow bloggers make good points). You’d think I’d learn by now. Warhammer is an RvR game, and RvR (or PvP) isn’t always fair and its almost always messy. Sometimes you’re going to win and other times you’re going to lose, but if you want to win early and consistently, you pretty much have to be hardcore. Casual players/guilds/sides aren’t going to win as often as people who build their life around a game. (This, by the way, is why in general I prefer PvE games, but I’m making an exception or Warhammer since the RvR is so fun.)

One specific note as to the time. Mythic has stated that all the objectives have to be taken within 12 hours in order to capture a city, from which one would infer that this might be a 12-hour event. Given that, 7 am doesn’t seem to be so off the mark as a good time to start.

What no one seems to be considering is how much fun this is going to be when more of us are level 40. We did City Attack and City Defense during beta, and wow, was that some fun stuff, running through the streets of a city, sacking and pillaging, or saving and protecting. It was fun on either side.

And it’s part of the game. If you don’t want to play a game where you are sometimes inconvenienced by events in the world then quitting Warhammer probably is the right thing to do, honestly. People so often complain that their actions in a MMORPG game world have no consequences: well in Warhammer they do have consequences, but not all consequences are good ones.

The impact this attack had on me was to get me anticipating even more getting into higher tier RvR. I wish I’d been high enough level to help defend the city. Next time hopefully I will be. And I’m looking forward to the day when we try to give as good as we’ve got and make a play for the Inevitable City.

And when this back and forth gets tired, I’ll move on. Another puzzle (to me) is people wondering how Warhammer will sustain our interest for years to come if people are attacking the cities already. I’ll say right now that no game is going to sustain my interest for years to come, nor am I looking for such a beast. There are SO MANY games to play and more coming all the time. Life is short and I want to play and enjoy as many of them as I can.