Warhammer 101: Choosing a Server

So the news is good for Mythic & EA. Half a million accounts created in about a week. Friends of mine who’ve shown no interest in Warhammer are suddenly contacting me and asking me what server they should roll on, so I guess the word is spreading.

Picking a server is pretty much the first decision you have to make in an MMO, and with Warhammer it turns out to be a fairly significant one. So let’s think about this together.

You’ve got two “axis” to work with. Core vs OpenRvR and Core vs RP. The latter is more a thematic decision. I generally prefer RP servers just because of the naming conventions. Stupid names bug me. But that’s just me and its a personal opinion; you need to make your own choice there. Just don’t roll on an RP server, name your character ChuckNorris and then bitch about “naming nazis” when someone complains about it.

The Core vs OpenRVR decision is huge, and I’m going to urge you to choose Core for your first character. There’s still plenty of RvR on Core servers. Now I’m going to be honest and admit I haven’t played on OpenRvR servers in Warhammer, but I just don’t see a reason to. If you’re in the mood to fight other characters in a Core server, you head to easily accessible RvR areas or enter a scenario. If you’re not in the mood to fight, you stay out of those areas. To me, Core = more choices, which is always good. Saylah has a lot more to say about this choice and I urge you to read her thoughts before rolling OpenRvR.

So assuming you know what *type* of server you want to play on, how do you determine which specific server to pick? And the answer there is, look at the population during the times you’ll normally be playing (which means you should probably first play War during your ‘regular gaming time’). Your instinct (OK, *my* instinct) may be to look for a server with a low or moderate population. No one wants to have to camp spawns on a crowded server, right? But that would be The Wrong Choice for Warhammer. You want to join a server with a High population for your intended side. But of course you don’t want to wait around in login queues, so avoid Full servers with large waiting lists (the number in parens after a server name indicates how many people are waiting to get in). Also look at the other side. You want the two sides to have relative parity. I honestly haven’t seen a server where the sides are terribly out of whack (high/low or whatever) but if you find one of those, avoid it!

Remember, you need another team to fight against. If your side has a higher population you’re going to be waiting a long time for scenarios to begin. If your side has a low population then you’re going to get rolled pretty frequently in open world RvR, and control of zones is going to be problematic. Everyone likes to win, sure, but the most fun comes from good competition on both sides. And if a server is low population on both sides, then both sides are going to be waiting a long time to enter scenarios and open world RvR is going to be sparse at best.

So to recap, pick RP or non-RP. Avoid OpenRvR unless you’re really sure of what you’re doing. And look for servers with High/High population counts during the times you’re going to play. One of those is your server, and your best chance of having an enjoyable, well-rounded Warhammer Online experience. Granted this isn’t an exact science; pure population numbers don’t indicate player levels or RvR affinity. But you have to work with what you’ve got, and hopefully this post can help you stack the odds in your favor a bit.

An evening of relative peace

Spent a lot of time in front of the TV tonight. The DVR was filling up, so we got around to watching the 2-hour Heroes season premiere (first half was meh, the second half better), then a bit later this week’s Ghost Hunters and then an old Destination Truth.

That’s a LOT of TV for one night and didn’t leave much time for WAR, which might be a good thing. I was getting a bit *too* wrapped up in it; trying to parse too many things at once: new game mechanics and new places to explore, new classes to check out. All of which I wanted to do at the same time, all the while also wanting to keep up with much more hardcore guildmates, who I was trying to get to know. I was reaching that run-down, irritable state that Ysharros calls “enervated.”

And really, that whole previous paragraph could have and should have been written by her, because while it was me experiencing it, I wasn’t observing the Why of it all. Then I chatted (ok, griped) at her a bit and she just pegged exactly where I was at. Just feeling frazzled and tired and annoyed by really trivial issues. Time for a step back, let things settle a bit in my brain, get the perspective back, then move forward re-energized.

Anyway, I raise my glass to Ysharros. Guild officer, amateur therapist, and all-round good people.

Of course I did sneak in to get a couple of levels on my baby Witch Hunter, but at this point I can do the first few levels of Empire with my eyes closed.

Warhammer soothes the altaholic

One of the things I love about Warhammer Online is the number of characters per server Mythic allows (10). I am definitely an ‘altaholic’ when it comes to these games. I won’t ever play all these guys to end game, but I do like to sample a wide variety of classes just to get an inkling of what they’re all about. Some games limit you to X characters per account, others are more generous but limit the number per server. Back in the good old days, offering plentiful character slots was the norm; let’s here it for Mythic going retro!

Whoa, wait a minute. I still have room for two more!

Warhammer: Introverts & Extroverts

For the purposes of this post, I’m using (my understanding of) the Meyers-Briggs definition of the terms introvert & extrovert. I’m not normally a fan of Meyers-Briggs; I kind of resent being pigeon-holed into a 4 letter classification. But I do think they’ve nailed it on introverts and extroverts. These ‘labels’ aren’t indicators of whether you enjoy being around people or not. Instead, they’re indicators of where you go to ‘recharge your batteries.’

Extroverts who are feeling low-energy will seek out a group of friends, and from this group they’ll become rejuvenated. Introverts who are feeling low-energy find a quiet spot alone to read a book, watch a movie, draw a picture, play some music…whatever activity soothes them will also help them regain lost energy.

So what does this have to do with Warhammer? Well, I personally am firmly in the introvert category. I enjoy being around (the right) people, but over time I lose energy to the group and eventually I need to retreat to somewhere quiet to recharge on my own.
Continue reading “Warhammer: Introverts & Extroverts”

Gold sellers move in to Warhammer

As Stylish Corpse reports, gold sellers have hit Warhammer Online.

I got a tell from two of them last night, from different web sites. This early on, they have legit-sounding names. And they aren’t spamming in general chat yet. They’re offering to sell you gold or to power-level your character.

In case you are wondering how to deal with this, I opened a CSR ticket under the topic “Harassment” and left the spammer’s name, the fact that they were selling gold, and the URL of the site they were advertising. Not very long after, CSR Rep Cielua contacted me in game to ask what s/he could do for me. I noted that I was just reporting a gold seller and asked if that was the proper way to report such things, and was told “Yes, absolutely.”

In case you want to report them after the fact, don’t forget you have a chat log! Look in:
\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\logs\communication\{server name}\{character name}^M

And you’ll have a file for everyone who sent you a tell, and what they sent you. Mine looked like this:

[08/09/20][01:54:30] [SELLER NAME DELETED]: < <[URL DELETED] >> Have good day. Warhammer Online Gold Price (10G==13 USD) ,Fast Power-Leveling 1-40 sale $239. And World Of Warcraft Gold sale (1000G==$24) . ~~Welcome to ( [URL DELETED] )

As a side note, I was very impressed by how quickly CS responded to my ticket on a busy Friday night.

Warhammer client. What directory holds what?

The point of this post is to help you with debugging or moving preferences from one install/computer to another. I’ve determined what I’m writing just from poking around and you’ll probably want to confirm this data with someone smarter than me.

Logs
Let’s start with the Logs directory. Inside it is a Communications directory. A level deeper is a directory for each server you have characters on, and then inside that a directory for each character. So for my character Meglivorn I’m looking in:

\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\logs\communication\Averheim\Meglivorn

Averheim being the name of the server. Anyway inside here are 4 log files. chat.log, combat.log, guildnews.log and system.log. These are all text files and contain a *ton* of information if you feel like writing a parser for them. Here’s a snippet of the system log:

[08/09/14][12:55:57]You receive Druchii War Pendant.
[08/09/14][12:58:02]You sold Worked Highstaff to Galmaer Silvermoon for 1 silver and 20 brass coins.
[08/09/14][12:58:06]You sold Druchii War Pendant x2 to Galmaer Silvermoon for 24 brass coins.
[08/09/14][12:58:28]You have purchased a new ability.
[08/09/14][13:00:51]Jobildo has invited you to join the Casualties of WAR guild.

and the combat log:

[08/09/14][12:26:45]You have learned about Eltharin, Language of the High Elves
[08/09/14][12:26:45]You gain 104 experience.
[08/09/14][12:27:40]You gain 700 experience.
[08/09/14][12:28:19]You gain 700 experience.
[08/09/14][12:29:02]Your Eagle Eye hits Dark Sprite for 52 damage. (21 mitigated)
[08/09/14][12:29:02]Dark Sprite’s attack hits you for 9 damage.
[08/09/14][12:29:03]Your Grim Slash hits Dark Sprite for 28 damage. (11 mitigated)
[08/09/14][12:29:04]Dark Sprite’s attack critically hits you for 13 damage.

And so on. The only odd thing I’ve found is that /tells *seem* to go into a separate directory, named your character name + ^M. So for Meglivorn, his private chats are in \logs\communication\Averheim\Meglivorn^M Inside that directory is a file for each person you exchanged /tells with.

Check out the logs though. There’s a lot of data to play with in there.

Notes
The notes directory holds the current patch notes from the launcher, in case you don’t feel like logging in to read them

Interface
Next is the interface directory. You might not have one of these yet, but if you’re going to install modes they go in interface\addons\{nameOfMod}. e.g.:

\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\interface\addons\CurseProfiler\

These are the ‘static’ files for addons.

User
Now let’s look at the user directory. Inside it is your UserSetttings.xml file. This contains screen resolution, key mapping, and a lot of other stuff controlled by the User Settings GUI in-game. There’s an audio_log_settings.xml file too, which I assume holds audio settings. Rocket science this ain’t.

But when moving clients, you probably really want to bring over
\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\user\UserSettings.xml

Inside the user directory is a nested interface directory, and inside that an AllCharacters directory. And inside that, a huge list of subdirectories, including ones matching the names of your addons. This is where all the settings for addons and various chunks of the UI are held.

I think a lot of this gets auto-loaded from the server. For instance inside EA_ActionBars is a SavedVariables.lua file (standard name for UI setting files) with the hotbars slots indicated, but there’s no character name attached to them. It possibly contains hot bar settings for all characters, but still, I quickly logged into my freshly installed client and although the UI was in its default layout, the hotbars were correct for that character, so that data must’ve been loaded from the server. On the other hand, the physical layout of the windows themselves didn’t. The EA_BackpackWindow has a SavedVariables.lua that contains the items in each characters backpack, and we *know* that info is held on the server, so this must be some kind of caching mechanism.

An important file is the settings file in EASystem_ActionBarClusterManager. This file contains all your UI layout settings, so you’ll probably want to bring that over.

Also, if you’ve ever tried to scale ActionBars using the mouse you probably found it to be tedious to get them all the same size. It looks to me like you could edit this by hand:

EA_ActionBar1 =
{
buttonCount = 12,
columns = 12,
buttonXSpacing = 0,
barId = 1,
modificationSettings =
{
true,
true,
},
buttonXPadding = 6,
buttonYSpacing = 0,
show = true,
buttonYPadding = 5,
showEmptySlots = 46,
caps = true,
buttonFactory = "ActionButton",
background = true,
scale = 0.93,
selector = 43,
}

Change the scale factor to be the same for each action bar, and voila. I’m intrigued by the other options here, too. If you made the bar 10 columns and 20 buttons, would it have 2 rows of 10, or just have half the bars hidden? Some experimentation is in order.

By the way, this is all in an AllCharacters directory. It appears that you can make custom settings for your characters by putting them in interface\{server_name}\{character_name} if you like. You’d have to do this by hand; as far as I know there’s no way to do it using the GUI.

A peek into the Warhammer client directories

As mentioned in my last post, I installed a new “fresh” copy of the Warhammer client off the retail disks. Before nuking the old one I took a quick glance at the two side by side, and here’s some of what I found. This isn’t a complete list; I did drill into every directory to compare things.

New directories in the retail client are GDF and Support. GDF looks to have something to do with patching, and Support contains a bunch of Help HTML files. Worth looking at if you’re having trouble.

The old Beta server has one directory and a few files that retail doesn’t. *Presumably* these are no longer needed, but of course I take no responsibility if you delete them and it totally fubars your install. The directory is audio and holds, unsurprisingly, a bunch of mp3 files with names like Music-Test_Fanfare_Chaos08.mp3. I’ll be holding on to these!

Now we get to the file level and again I’m not going to list everything. 3 directxfiles, d3dx9_30.dll, d3dx9_34.dll and d3dx9d_34.dll are in the beta client but not retail. These aren’t very big though. dev_zones.myp is huge, though, a bit over 3 gigs. .myp seems to be the basic data file ‘bundle’ extension for Warhammer Online. There are also some Player_Guide files that you d/led for beta.

On the retail side, there’s a world.myp which presumably takes the place of dev_zones.myp, though its a bit smaller, about 2.8 gigs. And there’s the opening video (I assume) video.myp, which is a 1.5 gigs or so. I wonder if we could nuke that to save space once we’ve watched it?

In my next post I’m going to talk about what some of the other directories are far.

Warhammer fiddling

I didn’t play much Warhammer last night, but instead was fiddling around with addons and such. I wound up installing the Curse Client, which is supposed to gather data to populate the online-database.

I couldn’t get the addons to work at first using the Client’s automatic installation system, and my google-fu was weak and I couldn’t find out where to put stuff to install manually. Finally I stopped acting like a dweeb and just started looking at directory structures. Long story short: as a former beta tester I had 2 Warhammer Clients installed (one for beta, one for test) and the Curse Client was installing addons to the Test Client.

Inside the beta client was a likely looking directory that was completely wrong…maybe a remnant from earlier days? It has interface by server and then by character, including an “all characters” directory and that seemed like a likely spot, and I was manually installing the addons to there. Bzzzt! The correct place is … heck, I’m 99% sure but don’t want to post the info until I’m home and can check to be sure \Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\interface\addons assuming you’ve installed the client in the default location.

Anyway, I finally got “Clock” working. Yeah, the first addon I installed was one to put the time of day on-screen; something I really need with Warhammer because otherwise I totally lose track of what time it is.

This morning I re-installed the client from the disks. I wanted a ‘clean’ install, and wanted to let the patcher run while I was at work. I left the old clients installed and will compare directory structures to see how much cruft is in the beta that is no longer needed. Will post that info here.

Finally I rolled a Chaos Marauder for the Destruction side of CoW, got him to level 4 or so and into the guild. Now Genda says they’re ok and don’t really need us, so I dunno if I’ll play him or not. But damn, those guys are EVIL… burning and pillaging, even killing “our own.” I do actually “role-play” these games and I’m not sure I want to be that vile full time. But OTOH I want to see everything the game has to offer.

4 day weekend begins at 5 pm today. WAAAGGHHH!!!

Quick review of Warhammer CE

So I just tore open my Warhammer Collector’s Edition. I was fairly pleased. The own bummer for me is the figure that comes with it: it needs to be assembled and painted, which I’m not the least bit interested in doing.

Beyond that, both the art book and the graphic novel are hard bound and printed on what appears to be good quality, clay-surfaced paper. There’s a code for the game, of course, and a code for an extra map for C&C Red Alert… uh, which is weird but I understand C&C Red Alert is going to come with a code for a Warhammer helm or something.

No trial or buddy codes, and of course we haven’t seen all the in-game stuff yet. What’s there seems to be pretty high quality, and of course we got an extra 2 days of Headstart, so overall I’m pretty satisfied.