Category: MMO

Will Halloween bring OpenRvR Love to WAR?

Posted on by Nimgimli

So over at the Herald Associate Producer Mark Davis brags talks a bit about how some of his ideas made it into Warhammer. It’s a fun enough read but then we get to this:

In the skirmish areas around the entire world during the Halloween holiday, there will be boss monsters lurking for players to kill. They’ll have cool loot on them, of course, so players from both sides will want to take them down. I’m sure Order and Destruction will play nicely with each other and share equally with each other for the spoils of the fight – yeah right!

Yeah right, indeed! Will this be enough to coax people out of the scenario queues? What will it be like, trying to take down a boss monster while also defending yourself from incoming players from the other side. Will we be able to “ninja” the boss, letting the other side weaken it (and the boss weaken them) before we sweep in to obliterate both players and boss at once? Will there be stand-offs with both sides waiting for the other to attack the Boss?

Lots of possibilities here. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, thinking about getting the chance to slaughter (and be slaughtered) in celebration of Witching Night!

In the meantime, Ysh had a great post on PvE up at Stylish Corpse, with Thallian, Smaken and I commenting so far. There’s the beginnings of a good conversation over there, so check it out. I hear Ysh is serving hot mulled cider in honor of the season. Presumably she spikes it with rum….

MMO Longevity

Posted on by Nimgimli

There’s been some talk around the blog-o-sphere about how bloggers don’t stick with any one game “long enough” (whatever that means) and I can’t deny that I’m as guilty as anyone of “game grazing.” I admit it, I get bored pretty easily.

Tonight I logged into LOTRO and did a few quests, said “Hey” to the guild, and refreshed my muscle memory on how to play the game. I did it mostly because I didn’t want to get booted out of my guild kinship, which has a policy of removing long dormant characters.

As I rambled around the hills of the North Downs I was enjoying the scenery and it struck me that MMOs don’t age like they used to. If you played EQ and then Asheron’s Call and then Dark Age of Camelot you’ll remember that once you moved on to a new game, it was hard to go back to the old one. Graphically games got dated really quickly (not just MMOs, all PC games) and the game mechanics that so many poo-poo as being ‘derivative’ today were just being layered into 3D MMOs. (UO was its own beast and still is, honestly.) I’m not saying it *never* happened, just that it was relatively uncommon to go back to an “old” MMO and stick with it. It just felt dated if you did so.

But that’s no longer true. WoW and EQ2 both came out almost 4 years ago (November 2004) and neither of them look dated today. People can and do go back to these games all the time. Warhammer and Age of Conan don’t look that much better, really. This is subjective and you can argue details, but overall if you took screenshots of WoW and War and put them side by side, you wouldn’t immediately say “Oh, this one is four years older than that one.” Same with AoC and EQ2. (I’m making these comparisons because WoW and WAR both go for a stylized, low requirements kind of design, and EQ2 and AoC both go for a more “realistic”, give us more GPU cycles kind of design.) If you look at screenshots of the Bioware/Lucasarts Old Republic MMO you won’t think “Whoa, that’s what the next gen of MMOs is going to look like!” The game looks fine, but it definitely isn’t the ‘order-of-magnitude’ jump in graphics quality that we used to see from year to year.

This is great news for those of us who are easily bored (as well as those of us who can’t afford to upgrade their systems very often. I remember a time when I’d buy a new gaming PC every 6-9 months!). I slipped into LOTRO like it was a comfortable old coat. Granted I’ve only been away for a month, but I’m pretty sure I could slip back into WoW fairly easily too, and I guess it’s been a year or so since I last played that. Going back to something like Tabula Rasa would be a bit more challenging, but I could (and might) do it. I wouldn’t log in and grimace at the low polygon models or the chunky controls.

I don’t have a big point to this long ramble, except that I find it all very relaxing. I don’t feel like I have to rush through MMOs anymore. Next month I’ll be exploring both the EQ2 and LOTRO expansions, so I might pause my Warhammer subscription while I’m doing so (I don’t want to be in a position where I’m paying 3 monthly subs!). But it’ll be nice to know that I’m doing just that: pausing, not quitting. Because as long as the servers are running, I can go back any time and pick right up where I left off. The game won’t look dated and probably it’ll be better than it is now.

MMOs, like wine, improve over time. At least until finally, far in the future, they turn to vinegar. In MMO terms, the servers go dark. I don’t think that’ll be happening to any of the “big” MMOs any time soon, though.

After Chronicles of Spellborn ships later this fall, it looks like we’ll have a bit of a drought when it comes to new MMOs. That’ll be a perfect time to go back and re-visit and re-enjoy some old friends.

Mark Jacobs Interview at Ten Ton Hammer

Posted on by Nimgimli

Oh, that sweet crooner Mark Jacobs. Look at what he said when asked about the new RvR Influence System:

I know for sure that it’s not going to be designed to encourage people to play scenarios.

Good news to those of us in the Anti Scenario Society [ASS]. We ASSes are sick to death of worlds being empty cuz everyone is sitting in a Scenario Queue. If you’re not an ASS, then don’t fret, Jacobs says they won’t nerf Scenarios, just make OpenRvR better. Hopefully good enough that you’ll leave the queue and come out and try to smack some ASSes around.

Anyway, read the full review here.

Melee DPS in War: Huh! What are they good for?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Absolutely nothin!

OK, that’s not literally true but I needed to say it to invoke the classic song. You young’uns will just have to trust me.

Anyway I spent the weekend alt-hopping, and I’m growing increasingly disillusioned with melee DPS classes in Warhammer Online for doing RvR (they do great at PvE). I’m writing this post so people can tell me how stupid I am and convince me that melee DPS is deadly when handled right.

Over the past couple of days I’ve played a healer, tank and melee DPS on both sides of the fight. Healers are hard to kill and, well, heal. Tanks are hard to kill and do plenty of damage. Melee DPS drop if you look at them wrong and do plenty of damage, assuming no one looks at them wrong. (None of this includes Range DPS…I haven’t been playing them.)

The problem boils down to survivability. Melee DPS armor isn’t anthing to crow about, so you really need external help to stay alive. Healers tend not to heal DPS classes for a couple of valid reasons: 1) Healers are busy keeping themselves and the Tanks alive & 2) Melee DPS takes damage so damned quickly that it’s almost impossible to keep them up unless the healer is laser-focused on 1 particular melee DPS. Plus some healers seem to have an inherent disdain for melee dps since all they do is “smash buttons to do damage”.

Before you react too strongly to that last paragraph I say again, I’ve been playing a healer on and off the past few days, and I too didn’t heal the melee DPS after a few tries. It just wasn’t efficient to do so. By the time they draw the attention of the other side and start taking damage, they’re as good as dead. You can’t dump healing on them fast enough to keep them up unless you ignore everyone else.

Tanks seem to be plenty good at busting through enemy lines and laying the smack down on their healers & ranged DPS. A tank with a pack full of potions can stay up for a long time even without heals; have a healer drop a HoT on him now and then and it’ll take sustained attention from 3 or 4 enemies to bring him down. And his damage is good, too.

To test all this I’ve been playing Scenarios (which, btw, reaffirmed my dislike of them and the people that play them, each of whom is apparently the single person on their team who knows how2play!), so I have a “scorecard” to check. I’ve won some, lost some, playing as Order, playing as Destruction. My Tank consistently ranked near the top of the charts for my side in terms of Damage Done, and near the bottom in terms of deaths. My Melee DPS was the inverse, often topping the charts in number of deaths and being near the bottom in damage done. It’s hard to do damage when you spend most of the scenario face down in the mud.

All of this experimentation was done in Tier 1, so hopefully things change. The classes I played were a Rune Priest, Ironbreaker and Marauder (and I play a Witch Hunter as my ‘main’). It’s possible I picked the best tank and the worst melee dps, or something equally odd to skew my experience. In particular when playing Order I’ve had some bad Witch Elf experiences, and I think that has to do with their short-term stealth maybe?

I’d love to hear from other melee DPS players. Has it been rough for you, or do you do ok? There were literally times with that Marauder that I was killed before I even reached the back ranks of the baddies. They saw me incoming, I got a face full spells and was respawning before I knew what had hit me (literally). I played a high level Marauder in beta and I know they get that freaky tentacle that’ll yank an enemy TO you rather than you trying to charge through enemy lines, so maybe that’s the basic Marauder M.O.?

Minor authorization problems, big customer support issues

Posted on by Nimgimli

Longest blog post title ever…

Anyway last night lots ‘o folks had trouble logging into Warhammer for a while. For some, persistence was the key to getting past an “Invalid Password” message coming up even after we were logged in, with our passwords, which just worked. Um, invalid? Anyway for others, we just had to wait for the IT doodes at Mythic to reboot the Authorization Server.

It sucked but stuff happens, yes?

However before I realized it was a widespread problem, I thought my account was borked. So I attempted to open a support ticket. First thing I learned is that the account I use to manage my Warhammer Online game account is useless for opening support tickets with EA. I needed an EA account for that.

So I created one and…huh, apparently I already have one, as my email is in use. So I hit the “Forgotten Password” button and was assured my password would be mailed to me. Uh-uh. 15 or so hours later, still no email (and yeah, I checked the spam folder).

So I created one again. Nice thing about using gmail… you can put a . anywhere in front of the @ sign and systems like EA’s will consider it a “new” email but Gmail won’t. So I finally got an account set up, and opened a ticket.

I got a response at 1:24 am local time, though the response itself was time stamped 10:24 pm. The email was (and I’m sure this will shock you) a canned response about password management that urged players *not* to use special characters in their password! (As a web developer this killed me a little inside.)

Anyway, I’ll paste the whole email below.

Overall response time wasn’t too bad, but the response itself indicates no communication between the IT guys and the Support guys. What I *should* have gotten was an email saying “We apologize, our authorization servers were experiencing technical difficulties this evening, you should now be able to log in normally.” rather than sending the poor schlub user on a wild goose chase of trying to figure out what s/he did wrong.

Also, the Herald should’ve been updated during the problem. The Server Status page shows only gameplay servers, which were all up. Maybe Mythic needs to add Patcher and Authorization Servers to that page?

Anyway, credit for a reasonable turn around time but everything else was handled poorly. Let’s hope someone learned something during this event (honestly there have been very few issues like this so the customer service chain probably hasn’t had as much in-the-field testing as one might expect by Launch+1 month).

Here’s the pertinent part of the email. Note the lack of formatting between Q’s & A’s and no indication that the rep actually read and understood the issue. They do, towards the end, mention servers being down but then direct you to a page where all the servers showed as Up during the problem.

Greetings,

Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts.

If you are having problems using your account name and password, here are some common problems, and solutions that we have encountered.

Are there any general rules on entering my new account information before I submit my information?

There are no rules persay, but it is always best to make sure you use Alpha & Numerical characters ONLY, when creating an account name and password. Refrain from using any special symbols or characters as it will make it easier for “you”, the user, to remember these in the future.

I am getting the message “Your password is incorrect”. What can be the problem and what can I do to correct this issue?

Please double check and perform the following, to assist you:

* Passwords are case sensitive, please note how you entered this info in your new account section.
* Make sure you check to see if your CAPS LOCK button is on or off. .
* Account names cannot be longer then 18 characters in length or you may have problems logging into the game. .
* If your account name and password are repeatedly coming up incorrect, try typing them up in a notepad document and compare it against the account information to rule out any keyboard malfunctions.

Also,
There can be one possibility where the servers are down and so you are getting incorrect password error. The server status can be located at the below mentioned link.

http://realmwar.warhammeronline.com/realmwar/ServerStatus.war

If you have any questions about this material or have any additional questions about your issue, please let us know. Take care.

Sincerely,

EARep Hagan
Player Relations
Electronic Arts

Regional Chat is a double edged sword.

Posted on by Nimgimli

As we all know, Mythic added a regional chat channel to Warhammer Online a few days ago. Last night was my first experience paying any attention to it. I was on an unguilded alt so wasn’t watching my “Guild Chat” tab.

There’s good news and there’s bad news.

The bad news is pretty much what you’d expect. I didn’t actually see any Chuck Norris jokes, but there was plenty of pointless ‘spam’ chatter. Some idiot randomly saying “poopiekickkick!” for instance. Yes, thank you very much for sharing and reminding me that a quarter of the people playing these games are mentally about 5 years old, no matter what their chronological age.

And then there are names. Names are a big deal with me. I really don’t like names that deliberately break the ‘tone’ of the game. No, I don’t report names (at least not on a non-RP server) unless they’re deliberately offensive/obscene, but I do avoid people with names that I, (as judge, jury and executioner), deem “stupid”. In a bind and need help, but have the name Azzblaster? I’ll watch you die rather than help you. At least on my alts. If I’m on a guilded character, I have the reputation of the guild to think about and so suppress my vengeful side.

Thing is, I’m old and my eyes are bad, so generally I don’t notice names in the “3D World” unless someone is standing right next to me. When someone runs by me, chances are I won’t be able to make out their name before they’re gone. So before regional chat was put in, I only really noted names when I was grouped with someone. But now, my chat box is full of names like Jeffyweffy (a dwarf, no less) and Graphic. Actually Graphic isn’t so bad now but you know when he gets a last name it’s going to be Violence or Secs or something equally stupid.

On the positive side, at one point Destruction took control of Nordland/Norsca. (Weird, I thought everyone on Destruction/Averheim was Tier 4 already!) Almost immediately, over Regional Chat, someone asked if we were going to take control back, and a few others replied with (I paraphrase) “Hell yeah we are!” And that brightened my mood considerably. (Now if only taking control back were as simple as capturing Battlefield Objectives, but that’s a whole different post.)

If Regional Chat helps OpenRvR get a bit more attention from the players, then I guess I can clench my jaw when “MyDiaperIsFull” starts yelling “Change Me!” over the chat channel. /ignore is for more than just gold sellers, I guess.

Easily influenced

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night you got a rant. Now you get uncomfortable naval-gazing….

That’s right, its the introspection post! Woot!

A couple of nights ago I went tearing through Tier 2 with CoWs and others and had an absolute blast playing. Since then I haven’t had any significant time to play. But I’ve been following blogs and some boards and this whole scenario issue has been eating at me.

And before ya know it, I’m ranting about everyone playing scenarios and no one doing OpenRvR when *the last time I played* all we did was OpenRvR. Granted most of Destruction didn’t get the memo but it was still fun to be in a big group (that wasn’t playing a scenario) taking down objectives.

I dunno why I let myself get caught up in the negativity. I think it has a lot to do with being frustrated because I want to play but can’t. So already my brain is headed down the road to snarky and when there’s other snarky brains headed in the same direction, mine just joins the warband and the snark breeds.

Before I do any more commenting on Warhammer, I’m going to wait until I find some time to put a few solid hours in. Get the joy back. Pretty much every time I log into Warhammer, I have a good time. Often I have a great time.

Maybe I’ll get to play tonight. I’ll definitely get the chance tomorrow. Blessed weekend, come to me!!!

Scenarios are not MMO

Posted on by Nimgimli

Warning: This is an opinionated, biased rant. 🙂

Jobildo’s post got some excellent comments and in turn got me to thinking about scenarios and why I resist them as much as I do.

And the answer, it turns out, is pretty simple: I’m not paying $15/month to play Team Fortress with some RPG trappings. I’m paying to play a Massively Multiplayer game with a persistent world. Call of Duty 4 allows me to play missions over and over on the same handful of maps while leveling up a character and guess what? It doesn’t cost me a penny once I’ve bought the game.

For people who sit in a warcamp and grind scenarios, there is really no need for a persistent world. A lobby would do just as well, wouldn’t it? A lobby would require vastly fewer server resources and would’ve cost orders of magnitude less to develop.

Essentially, this is battle.net.

It feels stupid for me to pay a monthly fee to, in part, support the infrastructure for a world that no one wants to use.

And I’m kind of dubious that after ranking through 40 levels in scenarios, people are suddenly going to go into OpenRvR (erm, that assumes that T4 scenarios exist…I honestly am not sure if they do)! More likely they’ll either leave the game or keep grinding scenarios until they hit 80 renown, and then leave.

What I’d like to see is all the scenario grinders funneled off to one server, and all the OpenRvRers gathered together into another server. The grinders shouldn’t have to pay $15/month to play, either, but that’s a side point. The OpenRvR Server shouldn’t even offer scenarios.

What irks me is that, yeah, it’s hard to find OpenRvR even on high population servers. Why? Because everyone is grinding scenarios while commenting that OpenRvR isn’t fun because no one does it. Curiously, I wonder if there isn’t MORE OpenRvR on less populated servers with longer wait times for scenario queues. I plan to find out.

I understand people want to get to cap as fast as they can. That’s why the gold sellers also offer leveling services. Grinding scenarios isn’t the fastest and easiest way to cap: paying someone to level your character is. But I don’t see anyone openly suggesting this is the best way to go about it. Why not? If all that matters is getting to 40 as fast as possible, why not just buy your way there?

If you really enjoy running scenarios, then this rant isn’t really directed at you. Enjoy the game, though why you pay a monthly fee to do in this game what you could do for free in any of a multitude of others is beyond me.

But I’m seeing people expressing opinions along the lines of “I don’t really like standing around grinding scenarios but there’s nothing else to do.” Well you sir/madame, are part of the problem. Get out of the damned queue and get out and start exploring the world! Yeah, it might be quiet at first, but if people on both sides of the battle just opted to not grind scenarios for one night and head to the RvR Lakes, there’d be *plenty* to do!!

OK, end rant.

Whew, I feel better getting that off my chest.

And Mythic, for the love of all that is holy, stop sticking us in a friggin’ scenario queue every damned time we move into an RvR Lake. You’re just fanning the flames doing that, tempting people to leave!!!

OK now I’m REALLY done this time.