Played siege for a little bit yesterday. There was a map with a set of doors with so much HP that it took the attackers 5 minutes to break it down, only to find there was another set of doors behind that one. Talk about compelling gameplay, huh?
If we could set our own ladders in siege like the old days, that map would not have been a problem. Taking away our ladders really hurt siege more than anything else. Ladders were only ever a problem to EU players anyway.
THIS SUMS UP THE MAIN PROBLEM!!
Maps are shit especailly without ladders to get inside. Its a fricking siege and instead its run like a deathmatch with doors. The EU's only complained about archers camping unreachable roofs in battle server and they removed it because of the whining (even though now the hitboxes on arrows are broken since last patch and there already its a kickable/bannable offense to not drop from roof if last ones left alive), but why get rid of ladders on siege where that was a not a problem and probably hurt their team by stopping them from getting back to the flag.
Siege was actually a strong mode with solid gameplay before and all sorts of clans would play there and keep it populated. Once they removed ladders which could be strategically placed to circumvent extremely narrow doorways/nearly unbreeakable doors or other highly predictable routes - it made the game heavily unbalanced in favor of defenders and teams with little skill but very high armor/strength/ironflesh. Since most of EU does balanced builds/ranged the developers probably haven't noticed how weak the gameplay is in NA where people actually enjoy meleeing.
I remember some of the best fun I have had was on the siege rather than battle server where one person did a perfect ladder and we charged along the walls and it was a tough but close fight as we fought tooth and nail to get the flag that was so far from attacker's spawn. In contrast siege is more composed of hammering away at a door for 3 minutes, then the next door for 3 minutes and then using a heavy steel pick and hitting some guy 6-7 times before he dies because he is super pro pure strength build in 3x loomed near plate while he can't block for shit you still can't get to the flag past the narrow and only real entrypoint because he took too long to die.
P.S. Also, for the love of god can just 1 developer/admin just take 1 day out of their lives and add the non-native/village maps for NA battle and siege???? There are hundreds of great maps out there and used to be all over the servers in NA but now all we have is single-player highly unbalanced boring maps. Its pure laziness that its been a year now and they have not been added back in after we switched who provided the servers. NA is a significant part of this community and its really annoying to be completely ignored.