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Thoughts on the siege:

Hindsight and all. I have no issues, except the one, on how the fights were called, just want to put my thoughts down on how we can improve.

Holding the ground above the stones was fun. Overall I thought we fought well. Our one mistake that cost us the top is that We should have moved all of our forces to the west side when they started their major push. I would guess by the time we knew Blood was not holding, it was to late. We knew they had all of their forces pushing there and our best place to stop them was at the edge. By the time our group was called to go over we were already pushed all the way back to the crevice and there was very little room to maneuver. The fight was lost.

The second part of the siege was a cluster. We should have been able to hold them at the Keep/Bindstone. We had two commanders calling opposite orders and we got split, one to hold the bindstone and one to take a boat. They came in from the land bridge down the middle of us and we never recovered. Then there was crashes and people getting upset and a shitty ending to an otherwise good fight. This reminded me of our pushes on the siege stones.

We need to keep together and whoever is leading needs to lead, not get engaged in the middle of the fight. Orders stop coming and things go to shit. Nothing kills morale faster than getting killed without getting in a real fight.

Only other item is we need less chatter in the channel. If you want to bitch, do it in /Clan. Nobody needs to know about your shitty connection, hacking, that you are getting ganked over and over or that you lost gear.


Just a comment on numbers. I think the fights were fairly even, maybe around a group in their favor. Them hiring (or whatever) Lost minions and CO at the end definitely tipped it in their favor since LoD was not working with us and were just playing friendly scroachers.

I would like to hear from others what they thought, I think it is a good exercise to help us improve. The sieges are going to keep coming.

There were two times for me where I thought we could have pushed them out/won:

First was after we were knocked off the top and came back and battled them on the hill. We had most of them pushed back away from the ledge (I thought we did very well here) but the call was made to go into Apautan and try to defend the stone.

The second was when we were fighting at the broken walls and actually pushed a lot of them back outside the walls and onto the land bridge (seen in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKf7XwqGvn8 at around 3:30) but one call was made to keep pushing them away and the other was to attack the boats along the shore. Our forces started to split and they all pushed back in. I was at the walls south west of the bind point and only saw 3-4 people left there because most went towards the boats.

There's one more thing and it isn't meant to be mean or anything. I really feel that we're hurting on player skill. I've watched a lot members just start backpedaling and trying to parry with a warrior on them only to have their shield disabled (and them not knowing it's disabled) and get mauled down. Some robe wearers don't even carry a shield. The numbers difference between parrying with a shield or a staff is HUGE. I also think a lot of people are just panicking when someone gets on them and they either forget or don't know what to do. It's hard to practice this together on PvP night though since you know the people your fighting aren't going to actually kill you.

I share many of the sentiments Niru and Revco, and its not Morlanders fault or Donks as they both have different styles/tactics to seige defending, and I think are great leaders in their own ways. Lets not blame the numbers game cause then we use it as an excuse or crutch to try and win. Reality is, they pushed harder and ended up outplaying us on two critical moments that paid off for them. We may have won if things went better, but id rather focus on what we can improve on.

One thing I was hoping we could learn from this is that when we were defending Apautan on the ground after we gave up on the seigestones, is how to learn to form groups before hand that are balanced with good mix of all classes and have groups move together as a team in individual chat rooms while listening to command chat from our generals as its designed too. I think the cluster of using one channel is also scaring some people from saying important things, meanwhile making people say dumb things at the same time (complaints and general stuff that should be left for after). We need to work as a cohesive seige force if we want to outplay our opponents. But its really early in the game and synergy from addiction guys/new people/and older kgb vets has yet to really form. We got tested today and I think it wasnt all that bad. Trust me when I say that. We lost a seige as Addiction and it was horrifyingly bad. We kept our own and dished it out quite a bit.

I uploaded a non listed video for anyone who cares to watch the battle of the apautan plateaus.

http://youtu.be/RtFUwFDG4Ko

dont post this on the forums or anywhere else for the matter. I havent learned how to block out guild chat and all that stuff on Vegas Pro 12. I just got it yesterday and im learning it. I dont plan on posting any videos until I get better at figuring out how to make my videos look better, with editing and intros for KGB. This is strictly for KGB watching!

Good input. As with many situations, the failure to follow one focused leader, in this case, Donk, resulted in disarray, split forces and defeat taken from the sure hands of Victory.

No fight will ever achieve sustained victory if the forces are following two separate agenda's and conflicting directions.

Fully agree.

From the standpoint of observing majority of the battle and where our forces were located we started off great. We had held the eastern cliff from the start and our forces made sure little to none got up onto the ledge.

However, the 1st problem came into leaving the western ridge to the Allies only. Like majority of the points listed above the call that they were being overran came too late. One sides wanted to hold and another wanted to bring everything. When this point approached the lag was too bad for many of the remaining individuals on the eastern ridge to even make the jump across. We lost several in the process. We had no contingency for the forces that fell off which started to number more than the forces we held on the ridges.

Problem 2 came into play on our return to the ledge again while the enemy held the upper strong point. Without proper direction on two separate approaches the forces were split on the points of entry. There were also a half of dozen KGB that never moved from the first hill that we came in on. If people are not going to follow the clan during a time of siege don't show your confusing the players that wanted to be there and complicating the situation.

Problem 3 was inside the city. We again had two split decisions to guard the bridge and attack the boats. I believe that both had merit in their decisions but it was unnecessary with the amount of forces we had being outnumbered. With Council of the Elders and Lost Mininos siding with Who Cares at the end splitting our forces led to our loss. We may have taken the boats but we should have left that to proxy alone to deal with. We didn't have the numbers on the last stand to split our forces.

Communication is TS3 still needs work and the unnecessary talk that occurs during sieges regarding complaints or whatever needs to be reduced. That can be tweaked slightly with a features in TS3 for priority speaker however, it still is in the members best interest to reduce these types of actions. It complicates the situation.

My standpoint overall. Morlander needs to command the battles himself or finally appoint a General G5 and step away from military actions. Having more than one commanding officer on the battle field is not working. We have lost 2 sieges in DFUW so far and this can't continue. I can't speak for others but I would not step into that role if my orders are being counter acted and the rest of the members are confused on who needs to be where and who they should follow.

I agree that we can improve and with the statements made by others.

The one suggestion I would put in on top of those already said is we should break into our groups in TS and allow communication within the groups while allowing the battle leader / General to talk to all channels. With out in group communication, it is very difficult for a group to work together, other than seeing your group on the map.

Your right we should split up and that suggestion has been made multiple times. However, the commander of the battle on most cases doesn't want to do that.

I've suggested in the past

-Splitting Comms to improve communication
-1 Field Observer to report necessary adjustments to the Battle Leader if he himself wont stay in the back field.

No matter who they are they can't see the complete battle on the front lines and I agree with the statements made above.

working to iron out the military leadership end of things to not have orders comming from 2 people at once
and to make sieging easier and more fun

wonderful input in this thread!