Zone Domination, Ostermark and Phoenix Throne
Posted by: Nazgum
On: Mar 18, 2009 at 09:50am
Definitely one of the hot topics of patch 1.2 has been Zone Domination. Hopes of it getting more people into the RvR lakes and fighting over territory. Fears of 5am city sieges and catering to the more populated realm. It would be interesting to take a look at some data and see how Zone Domination is panning out. Fortunately, I have some!
Lets start with a question we likely know the answer to. Has Zone Domination gotten more people out into the RvR lakes trying to lock zones?
The above chart is tracking zone locks across all of Warhammers NA servers and showing data for the last 30 days. Zone Domination landed on March 3rd, where you see the giant spike of activity. The average amount of zone locks has doubled with Zone Domination! Personally, I think this is great. RvR needs to be more fluid with the battlefield moving around from zone to zone. Fortresses were built to be sieged! I've definitely noticed more targets out in the RvR lakes and that makes this shaman happy =)
What about 5am zone locks? How often are these occurring? Lets find out!
The above chart is again tracking all of Warhammers NA servers, and is showing data from the past 30 days, broken up into the hours of the day. Overall I'd say it looks pretty good, there is definitely some late night zone locking going on, but not so much the rest of the day is devoid of attempts. Noon til 3pm appears to be the most quite time in the game..
Next I'm going to dive into two questions for my fellow Ostermark players. The first seemed to flood our Warhammer Alliances forums for a week or so after Order Sieged IC twice in one night, and that is, is Ostermark dying and has Destruction given up?
The above chart shows zone locks for the Ostermark server over the past 30 days. Up until Zone Domination our server was basically flat-lined. Life actually begun with patch 1.2, despite what some of the doomsayers have been saying. Looking at the chart you can see the two nights Order sieged IC (March 7th and 8th), but as you can see Destruction has been holding its own and even topping Order in zone locks a few nights since then.
And finally, the last question I'll cover in this post, "the grass is greener". Lots of people in Ostermark bring it up. They want to be on Phoenix Throne, where they think all the action is. Just how much more active is Phoenix Throne than Ostermark?
The above chart shows zone locks for Ostermark and Phoenix Throne for the past 30 days. The data is actually quite similar between the two servers. Order has a slight edge on both servers in the amount of zone captures, but destruction still manages to eek out wins some nights. What's it mean? It means if you're playing on Ostermark stop wishing you were elsewhere, our server is great, with a fun community, and is anything but dead.
And that's all the stats I'm up for crawling through today =)
A few quick notes on this post. How did I get this data? I get it by checking Mythic's Realmwar site, using a script that is as polite as possible, only making 4 calls per active server and only checking in once every 30 minutes. How accurate is this data? Only as accurate as Mythic's Realmwar site, which can sometimes have issues (you may have noticed on a few of the charts, the realmwar site was not updating on Feb 24th and 25th).
Lets start with a question we likely know the answer to. Has Zone Domination gotten more people out into the RvR lakes trying to lock zones?
The above chart is tracking zone locks across all of Warhammers NA servers and showing data for the last 30 days. Zone Domination landed on March 3rd, where you see the giant spike of activity. The average amount of zone locks has doubled with Zone Domination! Personally, I think this is great. RvR needs to be more fluid with the battlefield moving around from zone to zone. Fortresses were built to be sieged! I've definitely noticed more targets out in the RvR lakes and that makes this shaman happy =)
What about 5am zone locks? How often are these occurring? Lets find out!
The above chart is again tracking all of Warhammers NA servers, and is showing data from the past 30 days, broken up into the hours of the day. Overall I'd say it looks pretty good, there is definitely some late night zone locking going on, but not so much the rest of the day is devoid of attempts. Noon til 3pm appears to be the most quite time in the game..
Next I'm going to dive into two questions for my fellow Ostermark players. The first seemed to flood our Warhammer Alliances forums for a week or so after Order Sieged IC twice in one night, and that is, is Ostermark dying and has Destruction given up?
The above chart shows zone locks for the Ostermark server over the past 30 days. Up until Zone Domination our server was basically flat-lined. Life actually begun with patch 1.2, despite what some of the doomsayers have been saying. Looking at the chart you can see the two nights Order sieged IC (March 7th and 8th), but as you can see Destruction has been holding its own and even topping Order in zone locks a few nights since then.
And finally, the last question I'll cover in this post, "the grass is greener". Lots of people in Ostermark bring it up. They want to be on Phoenix Throne, where they think all the action is. Just how much more active is Phoenix Throne than Ostermark?
The above chart shows zone locks for Ostermark and Phoenix Throne for the past 30 days. The data is actually quite similar between the two servers. Order has a slight edge on both servers in the amount of zone captures, but destruction still manages to eek out wins some nights. What's it mean? It means if you're playing on Ostermark stop wishing you were elsewhere, our server is great, with a fun community, and is anything but dead.
And that's all the stats I'm up for crawling through today =)
A few quick notes on this post. How did I get this data? I get it by checking Mythic's Realmwar site, using a script that is as polite as possible, only making 4 calls per active server and only checking in once every 30 minutes. How accurate is this data? Only as accurate as Mythic's Realmwar site, which can sometimes have issues (you may have noticed on a few of the charts, the realmwar site was not updating on Feb 24th and 25th).
Just for comparison's sake, I'd love to see my server, Volkmar. Destro has just about given given up except for a couple of guilds. It would be a good to compare with Ostermark to show what a truly one sided server looks like. We've got to IC at least 10-15 times in the last month.
- Are these ALL zone locks (ie, T1-T4) or just T4?
- What time zone are you using?
- Do you have a chart of "Locks by Hour of the Day" pre- and post-Zone Domination? It might be interesting to see if there are more early morning zone locks with ZDS than there were before.
There have been a lot more zone locks due to the domination system (in fact, I dont think Ostermark has had a 'normal' zone lock since this patch), but it was not even close to even that first week. Order was locking zones in all pairings on a nightly basis and Destruction was getting steamrolled. I would guess that at least 75% of the 'locks' for Destruction during that time were due to pairing resets.
Things have since evened out a bit, but the graphs above are misleading.