Warhammer Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Warhammer Online Design Director Adam Gershowitz recently posted a new developer's diary explaining the function of the new Underdog System that went live with the 1.3.3 update. The system itself is aimed at dynamically balancing out campaign difficulty by providing certain advantages to the underdog (losing) side, forcing realms with long campaign winning streaks to fight more strategically to keep pushing into their enemy's city.

The “Underdog” system allows us to dynamically balance the difficulty of the campaign (and its associated objectives) based on the results of recent campaign pushes. Ultimately this will require realms with long campaign win streaks to be more coordinated and effective in order to keep pushing into their enemies city. The loosing realm (commonly referred to as the Underdog) will benefit from this in two ways; First they will have an easier time mounting a defense. Secondly, the underdog realm will have an increased chance to push the campaign back to their enemies city for a short period of time.

The system will levy some penalties against realms with long winning streaks such as reducing the window of opportunity for realms to capture additional pairings and gain access to their enemy's city and increasing the amount of zone control required to capture a Tier 4 city. The diary explains what constitutes a win streak and examples of forced and natural decay that will occur as win streaks persist and you can read them all by clicking here.