The big draw of Warhammer Online has always been epic battles around keeps, fortresses, and castles, but the damning truth of packing a small area full of players is that modern servers just can’t keep up. Flames and terror are the usual result, not in the game but inside the server room. This makes for unhappy players in that special way only staring at a login screen after the game explodes can.
To salvage what they can after being brought low by the limitations of hardware, the folks at Mythic have made a few changes to the way these massive sieges work. The big deal in all this is a hard cap on the number of players, but what’s really interesting is how this cap is enforced. Basically, lower-level players get the boot in favour of their higher-level counterparts. The long version has it so once the cap is reached, low-levels won’t be able to get in, while the bouncer cheerfully opens that red rope for the max-level crowd. So if you bought into Warhammer Online expecting to get in on that big PvP action, well, better get grinding! Only max-level characters need apply.
To be fair, the result has been a pretty smooth run for what is intended to be the major endgame activity of Warhammer Online, but Mythic is just buying time at the expense of their latest customers. This sort of by-level cap on PvP action helps to continue and empower the system where characters really only have two states of progression; max-level and not max-level. Segregating newer players into some kind of loathsome second-class caste isn’t exactly a selling point, which is a mistake that could very well come back to haunt Mythic directly in the bottom line. Why play a game that drops down a big red flashing middle finger in your face when you try to join in the fun?
You can expect further changes and tweaks to the battle system in the future, as Mythic adjusts the whole affair to this new world order. You can check out a dev blog post about it at the Warhammer Herald.
There is a bit of misinformation here. It is true that only max level people will be able to participate, but if this applies to all 4 tiers of leveling, there will be opportunity for all players to participate at all levels of the game. Not just once they get to max level for the game, but max level for each of the tiers as well (max levels for each tier are 11, 21, 31, 40 btw).