Keep improvements

Heh, tricked you all!

Instead of any of the previously talked about topics I am going to talk about Keeps and how I feel they could be improved. Unfortunately I didn't go to bed till about 5am so...I may ramble.

Okay so as we all know keeps and as an extension Fortresses leave a lot to be desired, although I have no problems with leaving Fortresses as a vanilla zerg versus zerg objective. Please ...just a little more room to move around, a little less lag and possibly make it a little more obvious to everyone involved that unless you have wards your gonna take a bajillion damage?

Anyway, keeps.

Back when I played Tabula Rasa I was most disapointed by the keeps system, I honestly thought it was going to be more dynamic than it was, but instead it turned out that if you owned something it was yours and every 20 mins or so bugs attacked it.

Sigh. On the plus side though the walls were a lot lower, everyone had ranged weapons and just generally more went on, even though it was only an NPC attack.

I think this needs to be the case here, all of the attackers need to be able to get involved with something. Ranged are fine, they can blast away at the people on the floor, but melee gets the shaft unless the enemy gets reinforcements and the postern door needs defending or the oil is down and the door can be attacked.

My solution, make the whole thing more interactive, actually allow people to break through into the keep before the main door is down. An example would be reikland from the Chaos side.

At the south keep there is a crypt that you can actually enter and run around in, what if the door to it was locked shut and required some sort of dark blessing to open it.

Anyway, you could get the dark blessing from one of the centre BOs, a friendly zealot would appear at the Reikwatch BO when you took it saying something like, I was working on a ritual when order attacked and I hid. Anyway this zealot invites 6 people to join the ritual and they all end up with the buff, the zealot then dies permanently until the BO is next captured.

All well and good you might say? But why would I want to open the crypt gates? Well here's why at Scwenderhalle manor, the southern BO, inside the house and guarded by the sergeant, only openable by people not in combat is a secret passage that will take you into the crypt inside the outer walls. Anyone with the buff can now be inside the castle walls and run around.

Why not just implement the bypass defences that allows melee DPS to enter keeps? cause this is more fun and why would people even want to do this?

Well inside the keep would be a minor objective at the gatehouse where you could actually spend 5 uninterupted seconds opening the door from the inside, meaning that the defender (order in this case) needs to pay attention to whats going on.

This is intentionally powerful because it punishes the keep defender who cant also defend the outlying BOs. Even if they just defended one of the two.

You could have all sorts of similar things everywhere and tie in BOs as an important part of keep defence.

But why defend keeps rather than just heading off you might ask? Well here is the answer, firstly defenders should get a PQ where if they kill 100 attackers or so a couple of golden loot bags are thrown their way.

I also think that there needs to be a bigger bonus for holding onto a zone once you have it. Because with keeps and BOs being static VPs that means that once you have captured a keep there is no incentive to keep it because you know if you really want to lock the zone you just need to go get the keeps back.

My idea is that keeps are initially worth ZERO victory points but for every hour you hold them they add some up to like 110% of their original worth over 3 hours. I think this would make people more likely to defend them.

Just generally I think any and all of these changes would make the game more fun.