Sad to hear, I really enjoyed OMD and OMD2 (played a lot in coop with a good friend) and was looking forward to testing this out with said friend once it was done. I guess it's just the nature of more transparent game development that we see ideas be completely scrapped, disappointing people. I am sure there are people working on the game that are just as sad that this didn't work out.

Two questions I have regarding your post. Was there no tutorial for new players to get to proper grips with what this "siege mode" was and were there tools in place to ensure that information could be communicated easily between team mates, so that if someone who was new to the game started doing the wrong thing, more experienced players could redirect them?

It's a shame about the matchmaking ultimately working against the game, but I don't see a way around that beyond better educating newer players and perhaps letting them play against players at their skill level or in some kind of PVE setting.

To be honest, the MOBA elements are what made this game more interesting for me, simply because I had already had my very enjoyable fill with survival wave based OMD from the first two games, but with the cloak of "early access, pre-alpha, beta" then developers are free to try what they want. Perhaps Siege mode will be reintroduced further down the line once they have balanced it better internally?

Anyway, thanks for the write up. I found it very interesting check up on a game that I once was curious for but had completely forgotten.

Damn that's sad and I'm sure you are right as to why it died. I played the demo at PAX East and the devs seemed like super nice guys.

It was definitely unique and I appreciated that A9lthough I felt having to buy upgrades on the fly and then deploy traps on the fly was really difficult given the number of choices), I just think the genre is probably too crowded now. I mean I really liked the game, but am I going to divert my DOTA 2 time each week to playing it? Nope. I pretty much only have time for one MOBA in my life and it's hard to jump ship from something where I have a dependable 5 stack to play with to something where I probably would be going solo.

It's got to be a nightmare to build a game today that's dependent on acquiring a large player base.

@willza92: There was a tutorial for Siege mode, but it was extremely barebones and didn't cover many of its nuances. There was also a PvE vs bots Siege mode, but those bots were extremely stupid and too easy to win against. Neither really prepared newbies for the sharktank that was actual PvP play.

More experienced players often tried to advise/redirect newbies (namely asking them to sell their traps and attack instead of defend), but 90% of newbies didn't listen or even acknowledge it. We placed bets on whether they didn't speak English or were just ignoring us. We coined the term "spike spam" for how they typically tried to help: they would just place as many spike traps (the cheapest trap) as possible, messing up our killboxes and preventing us from placing more traps. Asking them to sell their traps usually fell on deaf ears.

My personal suggestion was for them to limit premade groups in Siege mode to 3 players instead of 5, making it easier for the Matchmaker to split newbies evenly between the teams.

As for reintroducing Siege... I don't know. It sounds like they've already remade it once or twice, and a lot of the veterans got really frustrated at how slow they were to balance or change things. Here's a few examples of some of the major exploits, bugs, and just plain broken characters that have been in the game for anywhere from a month to over a year:

• Guardians that are supposed to protect the lanes (akin to DOTA's towers) can be cheesed by shooting them from behind a treasure chest; their shots will hit the invulnerable chest for no damage.
• The Unchained Fortress map has a location where you can place 2 barricades to force the enemy minion wave to double back through an entire killbox, which makes it near-impossible for even an escorted minion wave to survive to reach the rift.
• The newest hero, Bionka, can place a glyph that upgrades X orcs in an allied minion wave to a larger version. During the lategame, something causes it to bug out and upgrade every orc to a larger version, making her severely overpowered.
• One of the heroes, Blackpaw, not only has some of the highest damage in the game, but the highest mobility in the game thanks to a leap which lets him jump up cliffs and move twice as fast as any other hero. Combined with an anti-crowd control trinket, it's nearly impossible to kill him, even if he blows all of his abilities murdering one of your teammates. The devs argued he didn't need balancing because his win-loss ratio was about 50%; we argued that was because a lot of newbies played him, which balanced out the much higher win ratio veterans had playing him. I actually had a friend quit the game over Blackpaw.

I played quite a bit of Unchained earlier this year, but I never really liked Siege, and I totally see why they axed it. I think the Survival co-op mode is more in the spirit of what Orcs Must Die 2 was, but their matchmaking was taking forever to find people in my level range and we're talking about just finding 4 other people. The game would let you launch with as few as 2 or 3 people and really if you didn't have a full 5 man team or if anyone was outside of +5 or -5 levels from whoever hosted the game you just knew you weren't going to make it to the last wave anyway.

When Overwatch came out, the amount of people online in Unchained at peak times dropped considerably and I finally threw in the towel. I like that they are trying to do a new Orcs Must Die, the maps are very pretty, I liked the different hero classes, and I like how many Orcs you can get running around in some of the later waves. BUT this is a case where I think the f2p model isn't really doing anything good for the game or keeping people coming back for more. There are things in the game that are in there to make you grind. It takes forever to buy things with in game currency so they can get your real money. Then there are things in the game that exist because of siege mode where a level 50 player just does more damage and has more health than say a level 30, and for co-op this also means that orcs take more damage when you have high level people in a match. What both of these things add up to (in Survival mode at least) is that a level 50 can't play a round with his level 20 friend. And in my humble opinion, that isn't what Orcs Must Die has ever been or should be. The trap upgrades at higher levels are fine, but all that meta-level stuff where I do more damage than you simply because I play more can go away. It's ridiculous to expect anyone to play a game like orcs must die regularly enough to grind levels like a call of duty or GTA. My guess is they realized they were spending all this time re-balancing the game for a small group of high level players when 90% of the other players weren't even level 50 or the new players they were getting weren't interested in grinding to level 200 just so they didn't get stomped in Siege mode.

@shaggydude: They also made drastic changes to Survival mode last patch; now it limits you to teams of 3 players unless you're playing Endless, in which case you can have a premade team of 5 players.

As for the HP/damage increase based on level, that solely affects Survival mode. Your level and rank has no effect on Siege mode. I think it was added to justify the free-to-play model. That will still be in the game even after Siege is removed. Siege was actually pretty good about how much of an advantage you got from grinding; I did well with just the default traps/items. It was more about knowing how to use them than what you had to use.

As a casual observer, it sounds like this is languishing in early access, and maybe doesn't actually have a huge enough audience/player base that it's ever going to take in huge amounts of revenue from being F2P. Some of the slow balance updates you mention make it sound like either the overall dev team for this particular OMD game is dwindling or has always been too small (maybe because it's not generating the revenue to justify more staff), or maybe just the Siege mode itself has been getting limited dev time for a long time but the devs weren't willing to admit to themselves sooner that they were gradually dropping support for the mode.

It sounds like they're just forging ahead creating content without paying a ton of attention to balance in all the modes. Surprisingly similar to how Hearthstone works, even with a Blizzard budget to work with. Hearthstone devs forge ahead making more cards, and the best they can do is sometimes make sure that those cards are not wildly underpowered/overpowered in Constructed/Ladder/Ranked. On the other hand, Draft/Arena has been a terribly balanced mode for ages, and their lazy emergency fix recently was to just remove a handful of cards from the Arena format entirely because the (now removed) cards were either entirely useless or were so good they won you the game in Arena matches.

I'm not surprised. Siege just wasn't what the OMD fans were looking for, and the feedback seems to have reflected that. Hopefully they come up with a new way for competitive to work because the ideas (competitive defense/horde game) behind Siege were a fun change to the boring MOBA formula.

People just don't like fun in general, they want the path of least resistance at all cost and will exploit and abuse as much shit as possible to get there; skill is an unreliable thing, for every "top" player that's actually good at whichever game there'll be 1000 (probably higher on the leaderboards) that just copy whatever the good players do and sort of get good at mimmickry instead of actually trying to become good themselves.

Sounds like a bummer! I'll be perfectly honest though: as someone who liked those first two games a decent amount as fast-paced tower defense/action things, the idea of the follow-up having a bunch of Moba-lite elements was enough to turn me off and I wasn't even aware this thing was in early access at all. Your description of the mode makes it sound pretty cool, but it also sounds like there were serious, long-standing problems that the developers weren't able to address.