First WAR city siege takes place

Although Mythic hoped that it would take at least a month before a city siege took place in its new MMO Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, the first occurrence has come less than two weeks after launch.

On Tuesday night, the Destruction side (bad guys) attacked and successfully sacked Altdorf, the capital of the Order races (good guys), on the English-language European server, Karak Eight Peaks. Another first for Europe's raiders.

According to forum posts, the raid didn't present the expected challenge. Reports put the Destruction force at a relatively small 30 to 40 players, many of whom weren't at max level, and weren't wearing the best equipment.

The entire process, beginning with the capture of the contested zones, began in the early evening and was over by the small hours of the morning. This despite the fact that Mythic boss Mark Jacobs told Eurogamer in a recent interview that completing a city siege in one night would be impossible:

"We've laid everything out in a manner that your side has to accomplish a lot, so it's going to take time. We've seen the other games out there where people can do things late at night while nobody else is on, but it doesn't work that way in WAR. It's impossible," he said.

"It should be weeks unless we really messed up."

Plenty of members of the WAR community are already crying foul and claiming that Mythic "messed up". There are reports - mostly from the Order side, naturally - that Destruction exploited a bug in the game's most recent patch update.

One eyewitness was shocked at how easy it was for Destruction to overrun the city's defences, noting that the enemy force entered the final keep guarding Altdorf via a rear door used by the Order side, rather than having to use siege weapons to take the main door down as intended.

"The whole thing," the poster said, referring to the capture of the final fortress, "for a small group of sub level 40s with probably very poor gear compared to endgame, took 15 minutes tops. This is supposed to be the final objective in an epic battle to unlock city sieges."

Destruction players pointed to the lack of player defence on the Order side, but this scenario is what Jacobs said he was trying to avoid. At any rate, this is certainly not what Mythic would have hoped for from the first attempt to take on its grand Realm-versus-Realm endgame.

We've contacted Mythic for comment. In the meantime, you can pick over the bones of the event in the thread on Warhammer Alliance.