kpihuss wrote: Mon Jun 01, 2026 11:28 am
Players will fight tooth and nail to avoid losing their capital and preventing the enemy realm from running the instances. It's really a mix of PvP and PvE content.
People will fight hard in the cities to prevent the enemy side from winning and running the instances... Is this the return of realm pride and interesting campaigns? Let's hope so.
Will they?
How many more years' worth of evidence do we need on player behaviour to realise that the only thing the majority of players care about is levelling their characters? It doesn't matter which side is winning, as most players have characters on both sides, so they always have the opportunity to join the winning side for easy rewards. As this wasn't an option on Live, that old-school realm pride led to the fights that use descirbe, but it rarely happens here. Sadly, it's probably not possible to bring those days back.
Reverting to the old campaign system and locking new gear to cities will result in exactly what happened last time this was the case: Multiple PvD city pushes every day for weeks (or months) outside of prime-time. Now that sieging the enemy city actually makes a difference to rewards, the players that would normally swap to the other side to defend city once they'd finished PvD on their alts won't even do that now as they could be missing out.
As good and well intentioned as they dev's plans are, we as players always find a way to ruin it for ourselves. Hopefully, they'll design a system that can't be abused so easily.
leftayparxoun wrote: Mon Jun 01, 2026 12:33 pm
kpihuss wrote: Mon Jun 01, 2026 11:28 am
Jeliel80 wrote: Mon Jun 01, 2026 6:22 am
Just don't lock BIS gear in PVE city instances, that doesn't "renew" the campaign (that will be pushed in off hours 100%, prove me wrong), it's the last nail in the coffin.
If you read the patch notes carefully, you'll see they say that captured cities will only be unlocked if the side that wins the campaign also wins the majority of city instances.
As I understand it, there first needs to be a lot of PvP content, including city sieges, for that content to unlock (I imagine for a relatively long time so groups can form). Players will fight tooth and nail to avoid losing their capital and preventing the enemy realm from running the instances. It's really a mix of PvP and PvE content.
People will fight hard in the cities to prevent the enemy side from winning and running the instances... Is this the return of realm pride and interesting campaigns? Let's hope so.
Will heavily depend on how entry requirements to the Captured City raids will be handled.
Might be a pessimistic outlook, but I'd imagine that unless it's handled VERY carefully we will see Org stacking on the same side, followed by pug stacking on the side the org stacks are at, followed by complaints about no pops (due to everyone stacking on the same side).
And with the devs openly stating that
Our vision for Captured Cities will inherit many of Mythic’s goals, then will add a lot of our own to make these cities accessible for even more players
and that
the team is also considering other things to add to make the captured City States something all players can join in
there has to be some rigorous way to disincentivize stacking. We've seen it in LOTD (100+ resources on the usually winning side vs 20+ on the usually losing side), we've seen it on PvD Forts (169 inside +80 outside waiting in queue vs barely 50 defenders) and we hopefully won't have to see it in Cities and Captured Cities too.
Devs should be looking at this post like Frodo looking into the Mirror of Galadriel.
"It is what will come to pass if you should fail"