As a neutral party that went between Teamspeaks during the match and likes both of the factions I have to disagree and say that the area with the blocked off flag DID affect the match in a very large way. You have to look at it critically through the tactical logic of how the leaders of FCC were looking at it. FCC was forced to dedicate a section of their 50 troops solely to getting to a blocked off area for the entirety of the match, troops that were thus not even participating in combat. Both teams in this battle were VERY careful to ensure that they had as close to an active, experienced, and skilled 50 man roster as they could... and FCC having to dedicate 1/5 of it's team simply to getting over this glitch for the entire battle undoubtedly is just not fair and it hampered the ability of FCC to fight on even ground. The entire match was innately flawed and at it's very core impossible for FCC to win unless Hospitaller or admins decided to intervene for the sake of fairness, and neither party did. If you want to argue that FCC didn't have to invest it's manpower in getting to that flag area as a first priority, you aren't understanding FCC's perspective.
Keshian's logic: If FCC had instead used all of their manpower and leadership to capture all of the OTHER flags throughout the city and succeeded in capping all of those flags, this would mean that ALL FIFTY of the Hospitaller troops would now be spawning in the blocked off area at the only remaining flag. This glitch in the map pragmatically made it so that Hospitaller could ONLY lose if they decided to lose by giving up that area (which they did not), and that in order for FCC to win they had to find a way to overcome a glitch that they should have had no obligation to deal with in the first place.
The reason i said stanging area is that you had guys build ladders from that spawn in two directions.
Into your city which I was fine with and those were put up first and quickly. You had people raining down on us from behind the entire fight (where we put our first inside forward spawn. Took us a bit to figure out how you were doing it. We had all the flags in that part of the city under control.
The part that made me say staging area is where you built ladders to the outside and had guys over and over again coming out and attacking our outside forward spawn from the non reachable area. Same group of guys over and over so we had to have people just stand outside. Then the archers and xbow men that hung out up there firing into us without us being able to clear the section.
Summed it up well. We had taken all the left and almost the entire middle of the city past the 2 arches with a 2:1 k/d and almost the entire length of the wall with all those flags down. (A couple people were commenting how this was even easier than Reyvadin (helped we had much better gear in this most recent fight than in both previous city fights and Reyvadin had a much more difficult city setup and better defenders with equivalent gear). Well on track to win with plenty of time to spare getting us a couple thousand troops captured.
Then everyone kept repeating that enemies were jumping from behind and hitting our forward spawn which should have been safely nestled against an invisible wall. After several minutes we figured out what was going on and sent several people back to spam ladders and get over the walls and houses to where their flag was. Meanwhile they had several xbowers hidden safely behind the invisible wall on house roofs where they could have cross to our side but instead just stayed there and sniped at us as we spawned and a few occitan kept using multiple ladders to go from rooftop to rooftop behind the invisible wall in order to drop down directly on the forward spawn. Heroin_jabonra and a couple other hero party guys meanwhile used ladders at the wall to get behind us and then hit our first forward spawn just behind the wall or snipe from the castle walls while we could do nothing in return being blocked by the invisble wall.
It was at this point we decided to bring all the remnant back to build a catapult and defend it to try and break down the buildings/walls part of the invsible wall. This was when we lost a lot of what we gained in the city and basically stayed in the left side of the city. (to the people who said we shoudl have captured the rest of the city and forced everyonne to spawn behind the invisble wall and the developers would have given us the city - i call bullshit, we lost 800 troops to a retreat by the other side when it bugged out and even though we won we lost an entire army. Mercs lost a 1600 man army that had just capped all flags on a castle and it glitched and made defenders win in after battle report and developers never did anything - there is no way developers would have given us the city unless we took it).
When the catapult failed (this is 25-30 minutes into having 1/3rd of our forces focused on getting to that spawn point behind our lines) we brought everyone in focusing on laddering, trying to use horses (actually worked once or twice with backing up then dismounting in just the right spot) and finally doing a cross-forward spawn near the border, but by that point we had pretty much abandoned almost the entire city - had to tk hundreds of tickets of people getting stuck in the spikes or invisible wall and wasted almost 50 minutes to get one flag - with all the tks and us just milling around trying to get in we ended up with slightly better than a 1:1 k/d. I don't think this is Hospitallers fault, but trying to pretend like you would have won regardless is kind of silly - almost every non 6 am battle we do roughly 2:1 k/d and we were well on track to do exactly what we did with curaw and reyvadin.
You got a great reprieve through a glitched map and I'm hoping getting all that gear which actually turn you from sheep into lions so we don't have to always always be the aggressors and you the turtles unless you get to be a proxy for eu troops and gear (strat 2 and 3). yes I wish the developers had tested the map even once before posting it. Yes, i wish the other factions playing as mercs for hospitallers hadn't abused the shit out of the glitch by sniping from behind invisble walls and using the invisble wall to get up close to our forward spawns before dropping down. But there is absolutely no way for that city to be lost until the map is fixed and I have yet to hear a single word from developers that it is being fixed - i guess rageball more important.
P.S. Didn't Hospitallers attack this as a neutral fief in strat 3??? Wouldn't you have known about this from that?? Sorry, I don't know if you did or not - FCC quit really early while we still hadn't lost a major battle and had 8-9 fiefs and thousands of troops we gave away to other factions that didnt find strat 3 mind-numbingly boring compared to LOL and star wars, dont know many of the details other than rumors of devlize selling duped strat gold for millions in crpg gold and stuff like that (rumors, like I said I have no idea what happened)
PPS : really. make use of what we gave you through a glitch and grow a sack - how many other factions than us have the balls to try what we do - 3 cities in a row