The King is dead! Long live the King!

In February 2010, I was privileged enough to take part in an event that would go down as one of the greatest achievements in an MMO of my entire gaming career.

First, a little background. It was the summer of 2009 and I was firmly entrenched playing Warhammer Online. Being a teacher, I had the summers off so I had ample time to sink into the game. My goblin shaman had hit level 40 sometime in March and I was steadily moving up the renown ranks. The guild I was with was small, but tight knit. Two or three days a week we put together a group of 6 to RvR or run Blood/Bile to gear up our guild mates. With the introduction of keep timers that spring, each realm had the opportunity to raid each others' cities a handful of times. But alas, the king was never killed.

For those of you that don't remember, the only way to obtain sovereign gear back then was to kill the king. After you lock a zone, you had to assault the fort. If you succeeded, you moved onto another zone. Once you locked down that zone, you had to assault that fort and if you succeeded, the opposing city would be open to invasion. Once inside the city, your realm had to do its best to win a zone-wide public quest several times against the opposing realm, all while spread across multiple instances. If you lost 1 PQ in 1 instance early on, it could spell disaster for your side. If your realm did manage to sweep the city instances, then you would be granted access to the end game PvE content that included 3 mini-bosses and finally the opposing realm's king. As you can see, this was no small undertaking and required the coordination of your side's tier 4 forces to succeed.

Taking down King Karl Franz...no, he did not pump <clap> us up.

On the evening of February 20, a king push was called by our alliance. The plan was to push each zone back to just before locking it over the course of the night. (they had gotten rid of the fortresses by this point, which in hindsight, was not a good sign). At about 3:30am, our forces were then to begin locking the first zone down. Yes, you read that correctly, 3 FREAKIN' 30am. I remember helping out until about 2am, then "resting my eyes" until about 3 or so, getting into the main warband just in the nick of time. Eataine locked without a hitch, as most sane gamers were sound asleep. As our now 3 warband strong army began storming Reikwald, the word went out to get your friends online to help lock with the push. By the time Reikwald locked around 5am, we had almost 5 warbands,(over 100 players) online and salivating at the chance to push the city.


To make a long story even longer, we ended up sweeping through the city PQ's in dominant fashion, Order not able to muster a force to deal with our 2 A-Team groups (you couldn't enter the 2nd instance until the first was filled, and so on). We had been to the king once before and failed, so this time we wanted retribution. After a long, hard fought battle, our warband ultimately downed Karl Franz at 8:52am eastern time, much to the jubilation of our Destro allies. Never had the king been taken down by either side on the Badlands server, or on my previous 2 servers (Ostermark and Phoenix Throne). It was one of the greatest feelings I had ever had as a gamer up to that point.

I have yet to experience anything even close to this in any game I have played since. We didn't just down a boss in a dungeon, we didn't beat a rival premade in a scenario. We attacked and defeated an entire realm of opposing players. It meant something. King kills on most servers didn't happen every day, or even every week or month. From the time I quit playing WAR, only THREE king kills had been achieved on our server. Why only 3? Because WAR is a game based on PvP, so you had to overcome the unpredictability of human action in order to succeed. Every keep attack, every skirmish, every one vs. one was different. Heroes were created and rivalries were cemented over the course of many epic battles in the RvR lakes, which in my opinion is what kept many players logging in, even in the those days of low populations and disappearing servers.