Professional game design in action - Age of Conan and massive PvP battles.
Ever since launch, all the top guilds in Age of Conan were stuck at Tier 2 guild cities due to a bug. That bug got fixed yesterday, and it allowed guilds to finally build Tier 3 guild cities. The cities themselves don't do much (yet), as most of the city features are not yet implemented, but the reason everyone wanted a Tier 3 city was PvP - it's a prerequisite to build a Battlekeep to the borderlands PvP areas.
So, in very short order the biggest guilds built the first Battlekeeps, and once they got that out of the way, they naturally tried to participate on the "endgame" PvP by sieging another Battlekeep built by a competing guild. Just one small problem; The game mechanics in Age of Conan do not allow that.
Funcom has designed the system so that you can only attack a Battlekeep if your guild doesn't already have a keep of their own. With 9 pre-designated spots for Battlekeeps per server, anyone who has played just about any MMO with guilds can immediately see the problem; On any given server, no matter how big, the top guilds tend to "scoop up" a large percentage of the players. It's true for a lightly populated WoW server, it's true for the massive universe of EVE Online - the actual server size doesn't matter. I would venture a guess that the Battlekeep-owning guilds in any given server would consist of over 50% of the population on that server - perhaps even more.
With all the "hardcore" players concentrated into these top guilds, what's left over to attack these keeps is a number of smaller rag-tag guilds and unguilded casuals. Or, in other words, nobody. So, the "massive PvP battles" of Age of Conan are not happening due to a small, "unforeseen", design error by Funcom. You can also look the situation from another perspective - if you are interested in proactively participating in the much-promoted massive PvP battles, you can't build a Battlekeep of your own, or you are forced to defend, and only defend it.
Hopefully Funcom can rapidly devise a working fix. An obvious quick hack would be to allow other keep holders to raid and raze competing keeps without the ability to capture them, but considering the amount of materials needed to build a keep, I'm not sure how feasible that is. Another potential fix would be to dynamically adjust the number of available keep plots to ensure that there are less plots than high end guilds per server, but even that would leave the problem of forcing keep holders to a defensive posture. It might also drive guilds to merge up, and once again there would be "too many" keep spots and no PvP battles.
Only one thing is sure; Funcom's game design is once again falling a tad short of expectations set by the pre-launch PR campaign.
Update: When initially writing the story, I failed to consider the 48 vs. 48 limitation on keep sieges. Apologies. So let's take that into account.
It's true that large guilds (500+ members) might rapidly run into issues as their members can't participate in the PvP action they hoped for due to this limitation. Assuming Funcom doesn't cave in when the whining starts, the solution is to fragment these guilds into smaller PvP siege guilds. With around 50-100 members - enough to consistently field a 48-man siege team - it would mean that at least on some servers there would be enough of these guilds so that the server will eventually end up with nine battlekeeps and guilds of similar size waiting more - initiating conflict. However, the task of collecting materials to build everything up (Tier 3 city) is massive for a small guild, and in any case I doubt there will be proper sieges for a long time under the current model. Yet if the smaller guilds are independent only in name and actually allied - with or without actual game support for Alliances - it may be possible that we see the system working in some way.
Naturally this only works if we have several strong factions per server - the design breaks as soon as one big alliance has all the battlekeeps in control with nine "proxy guilds". In any case, the design has some serious issues as it doesn't scale in any way to accommodate for the different number of players and guilds each server has as the "9 battlekeep spots" is a constant. I'm still not convinced Funcom has really plotted it all out.
Age of Conan to evolve
