The Fight or Flight Response

Class is in session -- please pull your desks into a circle and let's get into a good discussion here.

The scene: last night, I've joined a hearty warband that's seeking Action(tm) wherever it can get it. First Black Crag -- yup, did everything you could in the RvR lake there. Then we skedaddled over to Caledor. Both Dwarf vs. Greenskin and Elfie vs. Elfie pairings were brushing up against Destruction's fortresses, and buzz in our guild's vent speculated on when we might (if ever) attack the Inevitable City.

Caledor goes well. Some light resistance, but we capture both keeps and the BOs while keeping Destruction at bay. Looking up, a lot of people notice that we're close -- like 96% close -- to locking down the zone. That's when it happened:

"Stop fighting!" someone yelled.

"Send a group to go suicide on the Destruction warcamp's guards!" cries another. "Don't let it flip!"

What is this madness? My eyebrows were riding high on my forehead, and fellow guildies in vent ask the same question.

Turns out, locking down the zone leading into a fortress is a Bad Thing. I did not know this, having listened to Mythic's purpose for the game, but apparently it scares the crap out of some people. The thinking is that we didn't have anywhere near the force it would take to storm a fortress -- some having erroneously claimed that no server has managed to take fortresses yet -- and if we lost the fortress we'd get pushed back to the middle zone in the tier. So by giving Destruction points (suiciding on enemy guards), they could prevent that from happening:



Now I'm a pretty peaceful guy in chat and I do like to get along with as many people as possible, but I called strong malarkey on this whole line of thinking and started to question the people demanding this to happen. The reasons I gave were:

• Isn't running from a potentially hard fight being, y'know, a coward?
• Couldn't we put out a call to all our guilds and people in the capital city to come help?
• What would new players think about the game, if they claw their way up to T4, only to hear people actively avoiding content that's supposed to be the key focus of RvR and shouting down those who disagreed?
• Would it hurt anything, really, to just try? What about people who've never done a fortress battle on offense before?
• Why are we PLAYING THIS GAME in the first place if we're too scared of stubbing our toes?

Their responses, to a "33 Engineer who doesn't know better":

• You have to schedule fortress sieges well in advance -- they can't be spur of the moment events.
• Shut up.
• It's too hard to fight a fortress lord and we don't have anyone who could handle it and we're not going to try to find any.
• If it's that big of a concern for you, you organize the fight then.

Now the question I want to ask the class is whose view is correct in this situation, and is this aversion to fortress battles a failing on the part of the players or on Mythic? I know I'm pretty new to the end game scene here, so I'd be interested in knowing if this was my noobish side showing, and is this something that's pretty common?

God bless the good folks in Tome Raiders, because they assured me I wasn't going insane for speaking up about this -- a couple guildies were far more spitting mad than I. It wasn't my intention to get into a flame war with these people about this, and after a while I let it go to just fight (Destruction, afraid we might flip the zone, showed up in force -- but they needn't have bothered, really).

So is that it? Is RvR something so complex and tough that it must be scheduled instead of experienced, and will most of my time in T4 oRvR be comprised of bouncing around from zone to zone taking BOs and Keeps but trying to avoid anything bigger until the mega-guilds converge and order us about? Because, thank you but no thanks to that.