Category: Gaming

The flip side: a night of “solo” War.

Posted on by Nimgimli

So last night, I was feeling pretty cranky and unsociable, but I still needed my daily War fix. I logged on for some solo fun. I was thinking “Log in, kill monsters, log off.”

Turns out it isn’t easy to solo in Warhammer.

And by that I don’t mean that going solo is hard or overly challenging. I mean that there are so many easy ways to group up with other players (implicitly or explicitly) that before you know it, you aren’t solo anymore. You have to kind of go out of your way to play by yourself in this game. (Just to be clear, this is a compliment.)

It started when I realized I still had a few quests left in contested (RvR) areas. I coulda shouted out to the CoWs for help but like I said, I was cranky and didn’t really feel much like talking. I figured I could chance it. After all, everyone is in Scenarios in Tier 1, right?

I’d just hit my first quest goal when I spotted a level 10 Marauder skulking about. Those guys are about as heretical as one can get, with their freaky arms and all. So I did what any good Witch Hunter would do. I shot first, planning to ask questions later. It was a good fight. Level 10 DPS vs Level 10 DPS. Sadly for him, he flinched first… his first reaction was to run, letting me get in a few shots before he decided to turn and fight. Pretty soon, one dead Marauder.

I figured he’d be back with friends. I figured right because before too long three Destros showed up. Three on one didn’t seem too favorable so I ran like a little girl. Popped my Flee, downed a potion and got away before the assorted DoTs and Snares could bring me down. I ran to the guards (I’m sure they had a few choice unmanly names for me at that point) and kept running, circling around to enter the RvR area from another venue.

Y’know what’s creepy & fun? Running into a town square and finding a bunch of bodies that haven’t decayed yet, and wondering which side won. I was whipping my camera back and forth scanning for action and finally spotted movement. Friendlies! A rag-tag bunch of order came running back from the direction of the Destro guards. We took back a control point and hung around for the 3 minutes it takes to solidify the capture. I wasn’t in a Group but I was in a group, if you follow me. We took another control point and hunkered down to finish the cap. Destro kept fainting at us from different vectors, but we held strong. When the timer went off and we got the bonus renown, everyone cheered. By then I’d finished my quests so I headed out of the RvR area.

It was time to leave for Norsca, as I’d finished all the quests in Nordland. In Norsca, I noted one more RvR quest that I’d lost track of. I had to scout a control point in a cave on an island. This is the one thing I really did Solo all night. I ran out there, not a soul in site. I was on the edge of my seat waiting for attacks to start. I hoped to trigger the quest from outside the cave, but nope. I crept inside. Empty. No guards, no players. The control point was Lost, which meant it had changed hands fairly recently (too bad, I was hoping for a solo cap!). I crept back out. Stealthed away, then ran like heck. Success. Sounds boring now, but doing it wasn’t at all.

It was getting late, but I figured I’d start grinding out some Influence in the Chapt 4 PQs. I wasn’t looking to get involved with anything, but when a group invite popped up from a Bright Wizard, it felt rude to ignore it. After all, this WAS a PQ I was doing. We chatted a bit while we ground out the first stage of the PQ. Then another player joined us. And last, a level 23 White Lion. Suddenly we could take the PQ seriously.

We beat it, and of course all got loot bags with such a small group. After a quick discussion we ran off to another PQ, adding a couple more group members but dropping one. The next PQ was completed in fairly short order. The White Lion had a Standard and it gave a +20% Morale Buff and a +3% Exp Buff. My Morale gauge was filling up faster than I could use the skill! With that PQ done, we headed off to yet another. By now the group was in the swing of things, chatting, joking, killing, helping each other out. People were rolling Need on things they could use, and Greed on things they couldn’t. Everything was fun and easy-going. No stress.

The next PQ had a surprise inside. And I’m not going to spoil it, but OUCH! During this one there were a few dwarves running about; they never joined us but definitely were integral to our ultimate success. Nice guys, too. We had a nice chat after the battle.

Finally I *had* to go to bed. Lady Luck was with me; I’d rolled for first place once, and second place twice in our PQ lotteries. I’m not sure what happens with a high level character in these things; I ranked first in contribution on one of them. A level 10 ranking 1st when there’s a 23 in the group? I’m guessing he gets penalized for being so high level, or just doesn’t get in on the meters at all? Anyway, 3 loot bags came with 3 equipment upgrades: tunic, boots and a new rapier. Woot!

So during my whole “solo” night I really did one thing alone. And I’ve specifically mentioned the chat that was happening in /group and in /say because I keep reading articles about how quiet Warhammer is. I don’t find it quiet, really. I’ll grant you that region-wide chat channels are quiet. But face to face conversation seems fine to me. I really don’t miss anonymous-ish chat channels with their petty flame wars and Chuck Norris jokes. When you’re standing right there in front of a person, or are grouped with them, chances are you’re going to treat them more like you would in ‘real life’ and not just randomly attack. And that’s been my experience so far.

All in all, another night of great fun and adventure in Warhammer Online. I began the night at level 9 and finished about half-way through level 11, without touching a scenario. (I keep hearing that doing scenarios are the fastest way to level, but 2 dings on a weeknight seems pretty good to me.) What’ll be next!!?

RvR: Open World vs Scenarios

Posted on by Nimgimli

So last night I got together with some guildies to do Tier 1 Open World RvR in Warhammer Online. This was the first time I’ve done ‘organized’ Open World RvR since launch, and the first time I’ve done it with a character I’d ‘grown’ naturally. (We did a lot of RvR in beta testing, but it was always with an insta-leveled character that I never had a good feel for.)

Short version of the story: It was a blast!

Long version: There was a bit of give and take early on, as some folks really wanted to do scenarios even though the ‘scheduled event’ was open world RvR. Nice thing about War is that this wasn’t a deal breaker. Some of us went one way and others went another. We swept through all three pairings taking objectives. Sadly only Nordland/Norsca was heavily contested and thus that pairing was the most fun. But it was the first outting for several of us and getting out there to get a feel for the lay of the land of each zone was entertaining and helpful. We left our Warband open and some random folks joined in the fun. At least one of them asked if the guild was accepting new members (they asked me via private tell) and I had to let them down gently. For now our recruitment is closed.

Anyway, all of this led me to the question of Scenarios vs Open World.

I seem to be in a minority in preferring Open World RvR. In fact, some people think Tier 1 RvR is broken. and maybe it is, but I haven’t noticed. I personally find Scenarios to feel awfully “flat” and while they’re a nice change of pace, I think I’ve already had my fill of the T1 Warhammer Scenarios. This is definitely a personal preference and plenty of people are still *loving* the scenarios.

Y’see, I’m a role-player at heart, even if I’m not on an RP server. By this I don’t mean I have some elaborate backstory for my character. But I mean when I’m playing, I AM my character. Maybe I should say I’m a VR junkie rather than a role-player. Immersion is important to me, which is why stupid names and Chuck Norris jokes bug the hell out of me: they strongly remind me that I’m playing a game.

And Scenarios do that too. Every one starts the same and ends with a big fat score-card in front of my face. Scenarios are a sport, and I’m not much of a sports guy. They feel like a video game and I don’t want a video game: I want a virtual world to lose myself in.

Open World RvR is random. You head out and you don’t know if you’re going to encounter an overwhelmingly powerful force….or no one. I LOVE that. That’s like a big old Christmas present under the tree for me. Surprise!

The downside is, well, I’m an aberration. The vast majority of people seem to prefer Scenarios, and I can even understand that: they’re quick to get into (on our server at least…a five minute wait is a long wait on Averheim/Order) and you *know* there’s going to be competition. And they give lots of experience, and mostly people are eager to gain new levels. Scenarios are a very “theme park” feature, and as we’ve seen, Theme Park MMOs are very popular.

Hopefully this mindset will change in higher tiers. I’ve done only one Tier 2 scenario: Phoenix Gate. PH is a “Capture the Flag” scenario and to me… well, cleaning the toilet starts to sound like fun when compared to Capture the Flag in any and every computer game I’ve ever played. I just despise CtF as a theme. Again, totally a personal preference. Probably has a lot to do with sucking at gym class when I was a kid. Chasing a flag carrier and not being fast enough to catch up brings back a lot of bad memories. 🙂

But the point I’m trying to make is, I sure hope either other scenarios are more interesting in T2 and beyond, or there’s more Open World RvR up there.

And I’d love to see Mythic add more incentive to OW RvR. Maybe if instead of just telling us how much personal Renown we’ve gained for taking a control point (lots, btw, I gained 5 renown levels in a few hours) we also got a more concrete indication of how much we’ve moved the “Realm Control” needle when we capture a zone? I mean, everyone loves the ‘kapow!’ of our side capturing a tier, right? Not to mention that nice Victory Call buff?

Anyway, another wall of text. I’m going to make an effort to try to organize more Open World RvR in our guild, and I’m going to try to find some good Destruction Guilds on Averheim and call them out when I do so. Let’s do what we can to make that “War is Everywhere!” battle call to be true!

Another look at gold selling Spam

Posted on by Nimgimli

So Mythic made a big fuss about how tough they were going to be on gold sellers and how they’ve made it “easier” to report them.

Hmmm.

From the Herald article, Reporting Spammers 101:

Place the text the player sent you in the second window, which asks for details about what was sent. Also note if this solicitation came in the form of in-game chat (any channel), or through the mail system.

Here is a typical gold selling spam. This is what Mythic wants you to key in every time you want to report a gold seller.

Skdjfhoiertr: Hello, www.asdfasd.ca, is selling warhammer gold, 10g for $3.75, 50g for $ 18.77. Delivery in less 3 hours. Get the gold now and be ahead of others

and another:

Banded: < < www.ignsux.com >> Cheapest Warhammer Online Gold, Price (100G==28 USD) , Order < 20 Mins Deliver. Fast Power-Leveling 1-40 sale $259. ~~Welcome to ( www.ignsux.com )

(I’ve changed the urls a bit for obvious reasons.)

In the first case, just typing in the name of the seller is a chore. And while these aren’t super lengthy passages to type, I just feel like Mythic is punishing ME, the paying customer, here. At least that’s how it felt after submitting a dozen or so of these things, many of them complete duplicates of others. Why do I have to type all this crap out? Either allow us to cut and paste the tells, or do the work yourselves and check the log files. I’m happy to type the name of the person and the site they’re advertising, but why is my typing out the cost of the gold they’re selling relevant?

Then once you do report them, does Mythic respond quickly?

[08/10/05][11:08:51]Joined Channel: [1. – Ekrund – Mordrin’s Watch]
(Me logging in. So it took 18 minutes for this spammer to find me.)
[08/10/05][11:26:22] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][11:35:56] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][11:47:17] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][11:57:56] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][12:10:31] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][12:21:53] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][12:34:43] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][12:46:53] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][13:29:25] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][13:43:19] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][13:59:02] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][14:13:22] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][16:09:18] Grotidkya:
And I logged out at 16:21, 6 minutes late for the start of the football game. No idea how much longer Grotidkya was spamming people.
[08/10/05][16:21:35]You will finish logging out in 10 seconds.
[08/10/05][16:21:40]You will finish logging out in 5 seconds.
[08/10/05][16:21:45]You are no longer logging out.

How long does it take to swing the ban-hammer? Either a lot longer than it would seem, or Mythic is seriously deluged with reports. But how many accounts can there be? And if that number is huge…say 1000 gold seller accounts. That’s $50,000 in retail sales for EA/Mythic in gold seller revenue! Or is Mythic banning Characters rather than accounts? That seems to be a losing battle.

I’m just going to start ignoring these guys. They were pretty easy to ignore before I started being a good citizen and following Mythic’s reporting rules. But now that I’ve been trying to report each seller, I suddenly feel like a data entry clerk, not a gamer. I’ll install SpamMeNot and let the gold sellers be someone else’s problem.

Side note: A few of these jerkwads spam you for more than one website. Not sure if the sites are all owned by the same place, or if “gold seller spammer” is a new contractual position in the world of bottom feeders.

A taste of RvR

Posted on by Nimgimli

Tonight I got my first real taste of “open world RvR” in Warhammer Online.

I mean, I did plenty of it in beta testing, but when you get handed a level 30 or 40 character and go bash other people who are all level 30 or 40, it just isn’t the same as going out there with the character that you grew from level 1, and who is going to be encountering opponents both higher and lower than he is.

It really brought back memories of pre-Battlegrounds WoW PvP, and I mean that as a compliment. I wasn’t even grouped, just moving *with* a group, and trying to do some quests while dodging baddies, or ambushing them, depending on circumstances. This was in Tier 1, mind you. It was so great to see stuff happening in T1 RvR! Early on I did a bunch of quests in the High Elf T1 RvR areas, and never even saw another player.

I was also playing as a Witch Hunter, a class that has always called to me and that I have, for mostly silly reasons, resisted until now. I’ve actually rolled a WH on not one but two different RP servers, because I really wanted to “RP” a Witch Hunter. But I keep playing on Averheim, so I was ‘saving’ the Witch Hunter until such time as I moved to an RP server. But CoW is turning out to be such a good guild that I’ve abandoned all other servers..well anyway, no matter.

Point I’m trying to get at is that the Witch Hunter is incredibly fun. His basic pistol shot has a snare effect when it hits someone in the back, and he can shoot while running, so he’s pretty useful in RvR even when outmatched, since he can snare fleeing bad guys. (My Shadow Warrior has a snare shot as well, but he has to stand still to fire it off.)

And when it comes in to close up fighting, the WH has a nice variety of melee and close range pistol shots. Just great fun all around.

My only fear now is the scenarios are going to feel dull after tonight!

Warpapers at Flickr

Posted on by Nimgimli

[EDIT: I just realized that Flickr borks wallpapers. The largest size they offer is still a reduced size. I’ll have to come up with a better solution.]

[EDIT #2: Photobucket doesn’t resize images smaller than 1 meg if you fiddle with the album settings, so here you go: http://photobucket.com/dragonchasers

I set up a “Wallpaper” set at Flickr where I’ll be storing various full-sized “landscape” shots from Warhammer (and other MMOs). If you’re playing the game, you probably can create your own, but other folks might like to see what the world offers.

Wallpaper Set

And a ‘cropped’ set of generic Warhammer shots.

What’s in a name?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Approximately 8 billion bloggers have written on this subject, but now its my turn.

So I was playing Warhammer last night, running a baby dwarf through the first PQs. If you’ve done the dwarf PQs you’ll know that the boss of the first one is pretty tough. There was a White Lion running around doing the quest with us. His name was Jyrk.

Now to me, that’s an odd choice for a name. And the player was berating an Iron Breaker (who was I think level 4) for not tanking the boss. Now yeah, an IB lives to tank, but this little guy was getting slaughtered by the boss when he tried to tank him. He died over and over again, and Jyrk was calling him stupid, or an idiot, or something along those lines. Jyrk seemed to be paired with a Rune Priest named Jynx, but she had to drop heals on the IB so fast that invariably she’d get aggro and when the IB went down, and then she’d be next to die.

Basically it was a difficult situation because we just didn’t have the ranks to cleanly take down that boss. But we were also low enough level that we’d just respawn with no ill-effects and run back into the battle (the spawn point is seconds from the PQ). So there was really NO reason to get upset, and certainly no reason for Jyrk to be berating this dude who was still figuring out how to play his class.

So maybe the name fit. Maybe Jyrk’s player really is a jerk. My experience would suggest he is. But maybe he’d had a really crappy day at work, or he has a sick family member, or he was heavily invested in the stock market. Maybe he was acting abnormally for whatever reason. He might normally be a very nice guy.

But his character’s name was Jyrk, so I can only assume that, yeah, the dude that plays this character is an ass, and I’ll make a point of avoiding him if we ever cross paths again.

So I’m going to be the 8 billion and oneth blogger to urge you to think about your character’s name, and what the name says to other people. For most players you’ll encounter, your name is the first bit of data they’re going to use when they start to form an opinion of you. Neutral names are fine, but if you’re going to use a descriptive name, assume people are going to believe it.

Gamer Grub!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m so totally stocking up on this stuff:
Gamer Grub, One-Handed Food For Gamers

This stuff has apparently been scientifically formulated to provide the perfect balance of vitamins and nutrients that your body needs to perform “such as visual input, cognitive processing, signal transmission and muscle reflexes” during marathon gaming.

Who’s gonna pwn n00bs now, huh?

Action Pizza for me, Strategy Chocolate for the woman.

No more supermarket runs from here on out….

Main > Alt ??

Posted on by Nimgimli

Casualties of War just put a Roster module in-place. As has happened in just about every guild I’ve ever been in, I was asked to specify a Main character. People talk about Mains and Alts all the time. But I don’t really understand what the term Main means, and I’ve yet to hear a really good, consistent definition.

Don’t misread me, I’m not condemning CoW or any guild for using the term. Heck, I talk about being an “alt-aholic” which infers that I have Alts. And having Alts in turn infers that I have a Main. So I use the term too. But what does it mean?

Is your Main your highest level character?
Is your Main your character with the largest /played value?
Is your Main the character that you find the most fun to play?
Is your Main the character you can most naturally role-play as?
Is your Main the first character that you roll on a server?

And from an external point of view, what significance is it that Char A is my Main and Char B is my Alt?

The only theory I have is that your Main is the character that you personally identify as Most Important, and since its Most Important, the Guild is going to give priority to helping you equip/level that character over the Alts of other players. So if a nice juicy loot drop for a Priest appears, and Player A is playing a Priest that is his “Main” and Player B is playing a Priest that is his “Alt” then Player A gets the item (all other things being equal).

In the same way, if there’s one slot open in a guild event, and the group needs DPS, and two DPS characters want to come, the Main gets preference over the Alt.

So assuming all this is true, I can see why a guild as an entity would want you to declare a Main. But why do individuals do it? You see it in chat all the time: “My main is a {insert level cap} wizard!” In this case is it just bravado? A way to prove that you aren’t a noob to be pwned just because you’re a low level character?

I need to pick a “Main” in Warhammer, and suddenly it is becoming a dilemma. My highest level is a Shadow Warrior but I haven’t touched him since Sunday since I’m having so much fun playing various Alts. I guess I need to do some navel gazing and decide what class I find to be the Most Fun, which will make that character the Most Important to me. This is going to be tough since I enjoy them all so much.

And oy! I hope the Alts don’t resent my Main and start accusing me of playing favorites. 🙂

Hinterland Update x2

Posted on by Nimgimli

Update #1: Tilted Mill released a patch for Hinterland tonight. Steam should auto-update your copy. Changes follow:

* Pet dragons now move at the proper speed
* Score modifiers for the difficulty setting have been rebalanced
* When playing on easy, the maximum difficulty level of an encounter has been lowered
* When playing on difficult or hardcore, enemies will work together more frequently when they fight you
* Fixed several issues relating to random chests, the way they were distributed in the world, and King’s requests for items in chests
* Audio loading moved from pre-game to scenario creation (may fix some audio driver conflicts, improves game start time)
* Fixed an issue with some versions of direct 9.0c in particular installations of Vista and DirectX 10 that would cause crashes on start-up or when loading
* Switched to starting in windowed mode by default (may fix some crashes on start-up)
* Fixed minimap corruption at higher resolutions
* Fixed a rare infinite loop in scenario creation that caused a lock-up on starting a new character
* Fixed an issue with the game resizing fonts more than necessary (may fix some crashes, particularly upon changing to full-screen mode)

Update #2: I finished my first game tonight. So that’s what? Three evenings of playing probably 60-90 minutes to finish a game on Easy (I think I chose Easy…maybe it was Normal).

Overall I’d give the game an 8 out of 10. A replay might change that score: it’d be interesting to see how the experience differs with bigger or hard games. Most of my gripes ended up being user error, and I thank the folks who commented here and set me straight on those.

My remaining gripes have to do with the end game. There were times when I just had to let the game run to generate gold. There were almost no enemies left on the map (so no raiders) but the ones that were left were too tough for me to kill, so I need to do some upgrading, which meant I needed gold, which meant just twiddling my thumbs waiting for my coffers to fill. By the end of the game I had two rows of Craftsman at various levels of upgrade just generating gold.

It’d be nice if I could sell excess food, or just turn a farm or herder over to generating coin; that’d just make for some variety. You can order Craftsmen to do Research, but I never found a way to see what they’d discovered, other than switching them back to creating items and seeing what popped out. And if there’s a way to “level up” your townspeople, I didn’t find it. Maybe they level up by adventuring with you, but I left that until late in the game, so I was level 6 or so, the things I was fighting were 6 or 7, and my townsfolk were 3. In those circumstances, 3 is very squishy!

My town had a dragonmaster by the endgame, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to take the dragon out adventuring without also taking the dragon herder, who was a very low level person, so I just left ’em both back in town. So that’s another puzzle.

But these are all pretty minor concerns/questions and overall, I’m quite pleased. It’s worth keeping in mind the game was $20, and I already feel like I got my money’s worth. It’s one of these games that gives you a score when you’re done, and I’m looking forward to going back and trying to beat that score next time.

It’s an interesting combination. I’ll be crossing my fingers for expansions or a Hinterland 2, because they could really expand the game in many interesting ways.

Warhammer Chat Paradox

Posted on by Nimgimli

Two of the biggest issues that people are complaining about when it comes time to complain about Warhammer Online:

1) I always miss /tells because nothing draws my attention to them
2) Gold sellers keep sending me /tells and its seriously impacting my enjoyment of the game

Does this seem odd to anyone else?

If the chat system is so bad that you don’t notice tells, then how can the gold seller spam be so annoying!!?

I’m just askin…

And, like Ysharros, I’m sorta tired of the WAR bashing. If you don’t like the game, that’s fine. We get it. No game is right for everyone. But why put so much energy into a string of anti-Warhammer posts? It seems to me like it takes one, maybe two, posts to say “I don’t like Warhammer because of X, Y, & Z. If these are big issues for you too, you might want to hold off on buying the game.”

Then move on and share your *enthusiasm* for games you like. Because enthusiasm is infectious and fun to read. Whining, not so much.

And yeah, I realize the irony of me whining about whining. 🙂