Improving RvR in Warhammer Online Part I: Battlefield Objectives

This is the first in a series of posts with details about how to improve and embiggen Open RvR in Warhammer Online. This post deals with everyone's favorite renown farm, Battlefield Objectives! For this post, I'm not going to deal with whether or not BO's should given renown/influence/experience. Instead, I want to focus on making Battlefield Objectives a meaningful and important part of Open RvR that are actually worth fighting over and defending.

Click the link below to read on for details.

The basic concept here is that Objectives give bonuses / advantages to those who control them. However, I've also thrown a wrinkle in to give them more flavor and to also make it so that pushing zone control back towards a fortress becomes harder as you lock zones. So, the bonuses for Objectives work for both sides in the center T4 zone, but then as that middle zone is locked and the war is pushed back towards a fotress, the Objective bonuses only benefit the 'defending' side. The attackers will still want to control the Objectives to deny the bonuses to their enemies, but they won't receive the bonuses themselves. This concept is designed to instill a desire for control of the Objectives prior, and during, keep assaults.

To give specific examples, I decided to create a list of potential Battlefield Objective bonuses for all BOs in the Dwarf / Greenksin pairing. I tried to match the bonuses to the official Tome of Knowledge Lore for each objective, but some objectives just don't really make sense. Thunder Mountain is particularly bad about this (come on now! An out-of-the-way, tapped-out Gromril mine that goes nowhere?! Who cares?). Below are my partially thought-out suggestions, along with the official, in-game descriptions for the Objectives.

Black Crag

Lobba Mill - Though goblin constructions are semi-chaotic messes of thrown together bits of whatever is handy (which often includes weaker goblins), their machines are suprisingly effective. The Lobba Mill is one of the most productive spots for production of siege engines in all of the Greenskin lands.

Control of this objective grants a 20% damage bonus to siege engines for all Destruction players in the zone.

Despite its unassuming name, the Lobba Mill is Black Crag's most prolific rock lobber construction camp. The mightiest Lobbas in the Waaagh! are built in the camp, and the abandoned Dwarf stone quarries that dot the mountainsides provide more than enough ammunition for even the longest sieges.

Squiggly Beast Pens - These pens are the source of some of the biggest, nastiest Squigs around.

While the Pens are controlled by Destruction, there will be several champion-level squig and herder patrols added to all keeps controlled by Destruction in this zone.

While the Night Goblins of the Old World Mountains have always been the most cunning, nasty and independent of greenskin tribes, its often easy to capture a few here and there. When kept in small groups they are more craven than rats, and easily forced to work. Most often they are put in the squig pens, where their considerable expertise helps Grumlok and Gazbag's Waaagh! grow the some of the most vicious squigs in existence.

Madcap Pickins - The mysterious shrooms found in this area of the Crag have been known to drive some shaman crazy, but their potential for bolstering magic power is too great to ignore.

While this Objective is controlled by Destruction, all Destruction players and RvR NPCs in the zone have their chance for critical heal and spells increased by 3%.

If there is one thing that Goblin Shaman know how to do when they aren't eating mushrooms, it is growing them. Among the dank mountain caverns many different varieties grow, and every shaman knows that the best mushrooms grow in the darkest, muddiest, and smelliest places. Of particular valley are Madcap mushrooms, a type so potent as to enhance the sorcerous power of the Waaagh! to unpredictable intensity. Consuming a single mushroom will turn a normal Goblin into a frenzied, frothing lunatic. Few Goblins, shaman or not, survive and encounter with a Madcap mushroom, but that hasn't stopped them eating them by any stretch.

Rottenpike Ravine - Controlling this objective allows the Goblin Shamans to harness the restless spirits that linger in the area and utilize their energies for protection.

While Destruction controls this objective, all Destruction players and RvR NPCs in the zone have their magic resistances increased by 100.

This brambled and terraced ravine has been a hideout for all sorts of riff-raff, vagrants, and vagabonds. It is a place of death, and is haunted with the spirits of the innocent men and women who were killed here. In the middle of the ravine is a bend called Hell's Half-Angle where everything from bad luck to full-scale military ambushes seem to occur. The debris of dozens of carts and wagons and towed items such as cannons are strewn about, and even found in piles, and made into defensive redoubts by some forgotten army. In terms of the war, it is an ideal choke point on an obvious line of advance, and both sides desire to control it.

Thunder Mountain

Doomstriker Vein - Controlling this important source of Gromril is vital to creating higher quality weapons and armor.

While controlled, Doomstriker Vein increases melee damage and armor by 5% for all players and RvR NPCs on the controlling side.

While many Dwarfs march to secure Thunder Valley against the coming greenskin Waaagh!, an elite few must follow the direct orders of the High King and obtain the gromril needed to complete the Doomstrikers. Only through the strength granted by these mighty weapons do the Dwarfs have a hope of turning aside the massive horde commanded by Grumlok and Gazbag.

Gromril Kruk - Though the Gromril in this mine has long since been tapped, controlling this mine is a source of pride for both sides.

Whichever side controls this Objective will receive a +3 bonus to Morale generation.

Also, controlling Gromril Kruk and Doomstriker Vein at the same time provides a teleport option between the two locations. If either becomes contested, the teleport is disabled.

For the Dwarfs, Gromril Kruk has transformed into the cruel joke of Thunder Mountain. Recently discovered, the area was heralded as a ripe new source of gromril from which the Dwarfs could finish the Doomstrikers and rebuild their kingdoms. However, the vein gave out quickly and suddenly, proving as false as an Elven promise. No sooner had the Dwarfs come to grips with this truth than a contingent of Orcs took up residence in the barren mine. Now the Dwarfs must contend with a constant stream of enemies from the depths of their false hope, while they scour the mountains for what gromril they can find.

Karik Palik - 10% damage bonus for all players and RvR NPCs on the controlling side.

I couldnt find a description for this objective.

Thargrim's Headwall - 10% armor and resistance bonus for all players and RvR NPCs on the controlling side.

The campaign to capture the summit of Thunder Mountain is a long, painstaking affair. The route to the top of the mountain is narrow and treacherous and easily defended if one holds one of the many choke points alongside the mountain.

Thargrim's Headwall is a large defensible stone redoubt overlooking two smaller redoubts below it on the path up the mountain. As the first major choke point in the route up the mountain, he or she who controls the Headwall can easily frustrate the movement of an enemy army up the volcano.

Note: The above two Objectives were hard to create flavored bonuses for. Apparently, they are both meant to be choke-points, but they really don't serve as that function in-game. Riding past either is no problem, though Karik Palik could potentially be a choke-point if there were player defenders there.

Kadrin's Valley

Gromril Junction - Keeping the trains running on time is important for quick manuevering and defense of this zone agains the rampaging Greenskins.

While Gromril Junction is under Order control, there will be an active teleport to/from Order warcamp and this Objective.

The Dwarf railroad stops at this station at least once every day, as the train engineers proudly boast. The Dwarfs are as hard-nosed and inflexible about keeping this train running as they are about anything else, and will not tolerate any mischief that would cause the trainmaster to have to delay the timetable. The greenskins are fascinated with the idea of interfering with the train, stealing its valuables, slaying the stunties who run it, and at last, breaking the thing into small pieces if they can.

Dolgrund's Cairn - Possession of the Cairn instills a sense of pride in the Dwarven folk and their allies.

While this objective is controlled by Order, all Order players in the zone will receive a +3 Morale generation bonus.

Dolgrund Dralminsson, former commander of the Gharvin's Brace Regiment, gave his life fighting a rear-guard action centuries ago, single-handedly saving the lives of a hundred seven Dwarfs. The burial site of Dolgrund Dralminsson is sacred to the Dwarfs, for no action is as undeniably Dwarfy as an embittered last stand. The greenskins have sensed that they can easily goad the Dwarfs into a fight at the Cairn with a few well place piles of drek, yet such a decision may prove foolish at such a revered location.

Icehearth Crossing - This tunnel provides a quick, easy and secure route for forces moving north and south through the valley. Securing and maintaining control of this tunnel is of vital importance.

As long as this objective is controlled by Order, there will be level 55 Dwarven hero guards blocking the north end of the tunnel.

Icehearth Crossing marks the main passage through the Icehearth Crag. During the winter the cold is so intense that only a being blessed with the legendary stoutness of a Dwarf could bear to cross from one side to other. In the battle for Kadrin Valley, the underpass has proved a valuable route, and both Dwarf and Orc bleed in its chill caverns.

Hardwater Falls - The icy falls provide a source of fresh, clean water for the dwarven camps in the zone.

While this objective is under Order control, all Order players and RvR NPCs in the zone have their health increased health by 10%.

A large waterfall continually pours gouts of fresh water into the Kadrin Valley, where the water collects in many small pools and streams that trickle through the lush terrain and rock formations.
The Dwarfs now call the area the Hardwater Falls after the freezing torrent of water that blasts down from the rock above. The Dwarfs are trying to preserve this source of water to keep their armies supplied, but the Orcs seek to defile the waters in anyway they can.

Are these suggestions balanced and fair? Probably not. Are they all equally useful? Again, probably not. But I'm not a Mythic developer. This is merely meant to be a rough sketch of what could be done to make Battlefield Objectives important, valuable, and interesting.

Addendum

Personally, I would actually consider taking it a step farther and making the bonuses race-specific for the zone. For example, Madcap would only effect goblins. While I'm sure a lot of folks would complain about it being unfair, so what, life is unfair. These additional restrictions would add a different dynamic to the game. I can imagine that Greenskin and Dwarf players would be more interested in fighting in the Dwarf / Greenskin zones because thats where they would get the bonuses.

But if it were race-specific, then you could do interesting things such as making the bonuses bigger and/or adding in potential negative side effects. For example, we could say that Madcap Pickins increase the spell crit chance by 10% for all goblin shaman, but also gave them a 2% chance of being overwhelmed by Waaagh! energy when casting a spell and being disabled for 3 seconds.

But, I know how much most players hate that sort of restriction, so I'm merely adding this suggestion as a note rather than incoporating it into my main proposal.

Pimpin' the Interface, WAR Style: Part II

I figured it was about time for a followup to my initial post about altering the UI for WAR. Unfortunately, Mythic hasn't done much of anything to address UI issues and make their default UI more acceptable (in fact they made it worse by introducing an annoying global cooldown flash that appears on ALL your buttons EVERYTIME you use an ability. I had to download an addon just to disable that 'feature').

So, I am now up 19 addons! Much more than I generally want to maintain, but every one feels needed and or useful at the moment. Click the link below to read all the details and see the screenshots (click on the images to see larger versions of the screenshots).

Here is a basic screenshot of what my UI looks like when I'm not doing anything in particular.



The square mini-map in the corner is provided by Custom Map. In addition to being more compact than the default mini-map, it also allows you to zoom out to region map feature, and displays info about your current influence level for the area you're in.

Simplified group and warband health displays provided by Squared. Has a ton of settings available. I have modified the class colors, the bar size, the text, disabled showing buffs for others and chosen a texture to give the display some pizazz.

Vertigo allows for creation of action bars. You are still limited to the six that the game comes with, but you can define how many buttons they have, and how many rows and columns each bar has as well. Excellent addon for those who like to customize their action bar layouts.

I have a four action bar setup. You can see my main action bar at the bottom. It uses three pages and is controlled by PlanB, which makes it auto change pages based on the progression of my Plan (Black Orc mechanic). Though this hasn't been updated in a while, it still works like a charm. Highly recommended for all Black Orcs and Swordmasters.

The bar on the right hand side has various potions and miscellaneous abilities. Most of my other abilities are on the other two bars which are hidden using Phantom, which is an addon that lets you hide all sorts of basic UI windows and parts that the default UI doesn't allow for. I have run into some issues where it won't reshow previously hidden bars. Something to do with configuring it on a different character. I'm not sure of the details, and it hasn't bothered me enough yet to look for a fix. But the author for it is one of the most respected and active modders for Warhammer Online, so I feel confident the issue will be fixed sometime soon.

War Effort is the little graphical display at the top, center-right of the screen. This addon shows the current status of all T4 zones, including current victory points for the contested zones. The display can be toggled on and off with the little 'W' icon next to it.



In this second screenshot, you'll notice that my current target has red vertical bars around them. These graphics are courtesy of Target Ring. This addon makes it much easier to keep an eye on your targets in a crowd. It uses green bars to denote your friendly target (unfortunately, I didn't have one at the time of this screenshot).

Clean Unit Frames are used to show health for myself, my target and my friendly target. Just a simple layout, without any unneeded fancy borders or graphics.

Duff Timer gets rid of the annoying cluster of buff icons (the number of buffs, debuffs and DoTs in this game is insane) that are constantly shifting and changing during battle, and puts them into a nice, timed display that includes the name of the effect. You can configure, move and size buffs and debuffs separately for yourself, your target and your friendly target.

The black boxes in the bottom corners are courtesy of SNT Panel. Pretty simple mod. It lets you create background panels that can be moved, resized and made transparent via the default UI configuration options. I use this for my chat windows, because the fade-out really bothered me and made it hard to see the text depending on the brightness and color of the terrain I was in. It took some careful resizing and placement, as well as help from a chat mod called Chatty Cathy to get the chat windows looking good in relation to the panels. Chatty Cathy allows you to remove the fluff from the chat windows, including the tabs and scrollbars. A simple slash command redisplays these items if you need to resize or change settings for your chat tabs.

Dammaz Kron is THE must-have mod for anyone that wants to track their PvP kills and deaths. It's very full featured and even integrates directly with your Tome of Knowledge. I'm so impressed by this mod, that I've included a screenshot of it, just to try and encourage others to check it out.




Then there are the addons that can't be seen in the screenshots.

alertMod - This mod allows you to change the size, vertical location, and duration of the text for the alert messages that pop-up in the middle of your screen, for example, the notification you receive when gaining a level. The default text is rather large and can be annoying when it appears in the middle of a fight.

Aura - Lets you configure pop-up icons and/or text messages that appear when certain events occur. As one example, I have an icon that pops up over my character's head when my health drops below 40%. Helps me quickly and easily know when I need to fall back or drink a healing potion.

Think Out Loud - Another mod that wouldn't be required if Mythic allowed you to put more than one action into a macro. This mod simply allows you to say configurable text when using abilities. You can even set the percentage chance that the text will fire.

Global Cooldown Remover - The flash appearing on ALL of your icons is especially annoying when you have multiple action bars. This mod simply removes the global flahs for that 1 sec global cooldown. This is one of those mods that I never should have needed to begin with. But when I had 4 visible action bars on my screen, seeing all of the buttons light up everytime I used any ability was driving me insane.

Realm Status - This is another RvR mod. This one has a couple of different features. One is that it shows you a summary of all victory points for all zones. This display can be shown and hidden with a simple slash command. But, the feature that I find most interesting is a pop-up window that informs you of any change in VPs for any T4 zone. Mythic isn't very good about accurately updating the status of keeps (and since the RvR addons rely on information that Mythic provides, they are generally slow to update as well), but when I see a popup window telling me that the victory points for a zone have changed by 15+ points, I know that a keep has just been taken.

Lib Slash - Required mod for slash commands.

Clean Cast Bar - Simple but sexy looking cast bar.

So there you have it. I actually consider this post a sort of mid-term update. The modding community for WAR is getting better at what they do, and the addons are becoming much more versatile and slick. I already have a couple of new ones that I'm keeping an eye on. Look for another WAR UI post in a month or so, hopefully with better screenshots as well!

The Liberation of Black Crag: A WAR Story

I wrote up this little RP story about one weekend afternoon when the Destruction forces on the Ostermark server locked the Black Crag zone, pushing Order back to Thunder Mountain. Now zone locks have become rather common on our server and occur daily at this point, but the reason this particular one stood out for me was twofold.

1) Order had pushed the conflict into Black Crag and controlled Thunder Mountain for several weeks prior to this. And being a very nationalistic orc player, that was just unacceptable from my viewpoint

2) This was the first time I had ever felt like I personally (along with a few guildmates), had made a distinct and noticeable impact on the zone control.

Click the link below to read the story.


"Skahin' hoomeez," Azh muttered as he picked up the limp body of the shaman, Khargug.

"Wake up ya dum git! It's time ta get ta smashin'!" Azh roared as he violently shook the poor goblin back and forth. A Witch Hunter assassin had snuck right in between the hulking Black Orcs and skillfully stuck a blade into the tiny shaman. The human had tried to make a quick escape afterwords, but while Orcs are often slow on the uptake, nothing stirs up their bloodlust quicker than seeing one of their own cut down in front of them. The red, pulpy remains of the assassin still lay at the end of the road leading out of the Black Crag warcamp as a few ravens circled, eying the fresh meat.

"Oi Boss! Me wakee, me wakee," Khargug groaned as he slowly opened his eyes. Azh set him down on the ground and the shaman muttered a few strange words, calling upon the power of Gork (or was it Mork, Azh could never remember which was which) to mend his grievous wounds.

Azh grunted in satisfaction as he saw the final two Greenskins of his band ride in across the bridge, two not yet fully-grown gobos, Pachum the Shaman and Scraak the Squig Herder. Along with the two other Orcs, Mlarak and Grubdug, Azh had gathered this small Shadowclan force here to probe the enemies defenses and see if they could wrest control of the Crag from the damnable stunties who had inhabited the many ravines of the area for much too long.

Azh had checked in with the goblin scouts at the warcamp who informed him that both keeps were already under the control of Destruction forces. All that was left to secure were the small, odd ruins below the Skar called Rottenpike, and the Squig Pen caves in the north.

But first, it was time to try and throw a wrench into the stuntie machine that allowed them to maintain control of the area. In a small, out-of-the-way niche amongst the many gorges and dead-ends of Black Crag, there was a vital crossing point over which the Greenskins and Stunties fought on a daily basis. Each side had a small encampment nearby, flanking a seemingly never-ending supply cache of Stuntie Boom Barrels. If the Greenskins could permanently blow up the stuntie camp there, they would have a tremendous advantage in pushing the front back towards Thunder Mountain.

So the Shadowclan band gathered their choppas, prepared their mojo and moved into the fray known as Howling Gorge. After nearly an hour of constant combat, including a number of encounters with the same Witch Hunter that had impaled poor Khargug earlier, Shadowclan withdrew, battered, tired, victorious, but ultimately unsuccessful in their attempt to drive the stunties out of the area completely. Numerous booms had been placed, many foes slain and much blood shed, but it was not quite enough to destroy the stuntie camp. Shadowclan rode away from the Gorge, patrolling past Rottenpike and the Pens, discovering in both cases that some other clan had already secured these points. Continuing their patrol of the winding chasms and paths, the Greenskins happened upon a few unlucky Order and gleefully chopped them into little bits.

Finding no other activity in the area, the Shadowclan force once more headed back into the meat grinder known as the Howling Gorge, more determined than ever. This time was different. With the Black Orcs stubbornly carrying the Boom Barrel repeatedly, at great risk to themselves (Orcs aren't known for delicately handling anything), the Destruction forces set up a chain of support from the center cache to the stuntie camp, flowing back and forth in response to pushes and attacks from their Order foes. Explosions echoed through the rocks as the stuntie camp was obliterated from the Gorge once and for all.

Battle yells of victory rang out across the land as the powder-singed Shadowclan force emerged from the Gorge. After months of fighting the stunties on the doorstep of the Greenskin fortress, Black Crag had finally been liberated from their grubby little hands, and the push on the dwarf capitol could begin again in earnest.

Azh raised his choppa and gestured northwards as the group mounted up. "Guud job, boyz! On ta Tunder Mownt. Dem stunties gonna be hoppin' mad an us gonna be der ta greet dem when dem come out ub dem holez!"

Azh let out a roar and led his troops onward to the next battle.

How to Lock a Zone in Warhammer Online

6/22/09 Note: This post is about locking via victory points. If you are looking for information about locking a zone via domination, please see my other blog entry on the subject.

In Warhammer Online's RvR endgame, locking zones is the key to pushing the war front closer to your enemies and opening up fortresses and capitols to assault. However, the way this is done is not especially intuitive. So this post is my attempt to summarize what I have learned about the process over the past couple of months.


To lock a Tier 4 zone, one side needs to gain ~97 Victory Points in that zone. Victory Points are gained for controlling objectives and keeps, winning scenarios associated with that zone, completing Public Quests in that zone, and controlling the Tier 3 zones for that pairing.

Victory Points go as high as 97 and as low as 0 and will decay slowly over time if there is no action in the zone or its related scenarios (but the VPs will not fall below whatever the baseline is for the controlled keeps and BOs). Each objective is worth ~6 Victory Points, while keeps are worth ~15. So controlling all six points of interest in a zone will only give you about 54 total points.

Scenarios can contribute significantly to your faction's VP total, but the key is winning on points rather than having time expire. This makes the scenario objectives vitally important, something that many kill-happy players don't seem to understand. Winning a scenario with 500 points will grant your side 6-7 VPs for the appropriate zone. Winning because time ran out, on the other hand, only generates 2-3 VPs. Quite a difference!

PQs only give 1-2 points, which makes grinding PQs to flip a zone rather difficult and not especially efficient. PQ grind should only be considered if you just cant seem to get those last few VPs to lock the zone, or there is major overabundance of players on your side in the zone.

Skirmishes between players in the zone seem to contribute almost nothing to the VP total. Occasionally you will see a 1 or 2 point gain as the result of a large battle, but that's pretty rare.

The bulk pressure of locking a zone still seems to rely on scenarios. And as a result, scenarios are not always the casual, quick fun that they are in the lower tiers. And remember, scenarios only affect VPs for the pairing they are in, so if you're trying to lock a zone, it's best to queue for only scenarios in the pairing that you want to lockdown. Unfortunately, this relies of the other side also queuing for that scenario, but there are usually enough players choosing the queue all option to make it work. Supposedly, if the other side never tries to join the scenarios and you have enough people queued to get it started, your side will still get a few VPs, but I'm not exactly sure how this works.

In my experience, one of the best ways to lock a zone is to first win a bunch of scenarios to push your side's VP total up. If your opponents control the keeps, so much the better. It is unlikely they will notice your point creeping upwards unless you take a keep from them. If you can reach 40 or so VPs without controlling any objectives or keeps in the zone, then you're pretty much set. Run out and grab all the points of interest as quickly as possible, running a scenario or two at the same time to buffer your VPs and keep VP point decay from setting in too much.

To assist in your zone-locking attempts, I recommend installing an addon or two that will give you more information about the Victory Point progression. I use Realm Status and War Effort, myself.

War Effort is a nice addon that shows a window with basic info about all the T4 zones, including current VP count and keep status.

Realm Status is dual-featured. It has a window with VP info about every zone, and it also has popup windows that notify you about changes in VPs for the Tier 4 zones. I almost never look at the main window, but I love the popup notifications. By keeping an eye on these, I can generally get a good idea of whats happening in each zone without actually being there, which makes it easier to see when the RvR focus needs to be moved to a different pairing

Small / Independent Gaming Links - Part II

This is a followup to my first post. Click the link below to see some links and thoughts about a few interesting, independent, free games that you may never have heard of.


First off, we have two constructor set type puzzle games. You use the tools provided to put together machines that accomplish certain goals.

Fantastic Contraption - Assemble a self-propelled contraption to move past obstacles and reach the end goal.

Incredibots - Similar to Fantastic Contraption, but with a lot more complexity in regards to the types of machines you make.

The Eyeballing Game - Very simple concept, but engaging nonetheless. Find out how accurate you are when gauging angles, distances and straight lines.

Auditorium - This is an interesting concept. You move and resize circles to deflect rays through certain spots on the screen. As you successfully do so, bits of music play. The object is to get all of the bits of music to play at the same time. It's basically a puzzle game, but the ebb and flow of the music as you try and manipulate the rays properly lends an ethereal and calming air to the whole process.

Minotaur China Shop - I havent played this one yet, but the concept makes me giggle.

Fun-Motion Physics Games - Blog with commentary and links about various games with physics.

Where me Choppas!?

It was with heavy heart that I read this interview with Adam Gershowitz and Josh Drescher where they stated that there were no plans to work on additional careers for Warhammer Online! Which means, that the Dwarfs and Greenskins are left out in the cold. Not only do we not have the racial capitols available for either race, but they are also both short one class, that of the melee DPS variety.

Having recently started working on some Tier 4 PQs with my all-Greenskin guild, we ran into some extremely difficult end-events for a couple of early T4 PQs, ones that it seemed would have been a lot easier with the capacity to output more damage. Makes me wonder if these PQs were initially designed with all four Greenskin classes in mind, but never re-tuned when they decided to cut one of the DPS classes.

In this post by Mark Jacobs back in March (which was in response to the outcry when he announced the major content cuts) he says:

As to the future of these careers, I would love to say that they will be put into the game at some point but I can't. We will continue to look at them and if we feel we can make them great, then we will put them into the game. If we can't, then we will put in other classes to take their place.

The emphasis is mine, but I think the point still stands. And the devs in the first linked post aren't just saying that there are no plans for Choppas, they are saying that there are no plans at all for additional classes! So given that there aren't even any ideas in motion, the earliest we would see any filling out of the Dwarf and Greenskin factions would be six months down the line!

When Warhammer was first released, I remember there being a lot of complaints about how completing PQs required tanks and how the Dark Elves and Empire factions were having trouble due to their lack of tanks. Now, they are magically blessed with new tank classes. So I just have to ask...

WHERE DA CHOPPAS!

Improving RvR in Warhammer Online

Mark Jacobs made a big announcement yesterday about Mythic's plans to focus on changing and fixing the RvR portion of Warhammer Online. It sounds like their brains are moving in the right direction, but I think there needs to be some significant changes to RvR in WAR aside from simply adding in an influence system.

Below are some various thoughts and ideas I've had about Open RvR and Keep Sieges in particular. And no, this article doesn't discuss the maligned contribution system and the gold bag rewards. I really don't care so much about the items. Having fun is my focus when I play. This post will also not touch on any issues regarding scenarios.

Note: My babbling below comes from playing up to level 31 on an active server, participating in a handful of Tier 4 battles and sieges as well as too numerous to count fights in Tiers 1-3.

Second Note: Most of this was written long before the announcement from Mythic linked above. But this information did prompt me to finish up this post.


OPEN RvR

Lets start this off with some talk about Open RvR. Open RvR is combat in the RvR areas, usually centered around Battlefield Objectives or pushing the opposing side back into their warcamp.

One of the big issues with Open RvR is simply the large, empty spaces. Coupled with scattered objectives, awkward terrain (such as thousand foot high cliffs), and lack of anything else to do, makes it very easy to march in, capture the area and then march back out without ever seeing an enemy player.

Another issue is the lack of purpose regarding Battlefield Objectives. Aside from the experience and renown gain when capturing them, these spots really serve no strategic or tactical use. Give each side a reason for controlling these spots.

BOs should provide some advantage to RvR in the local area. The buffs from the guard captains at BOs can be nice (aside from the fact that the easiest BOs to get to always seem to have the merchant buff!), but give us something interesting and useful. Maybe a long-range siege battery that if controlled by your side, can be commanded to drop AoE catapult-type attacks on either the keep or the besieging force.

Or how about Bugman's Brewery in Blakfire Pass or the Tavern in Tabelecland? If Order controls this spot, then the NPCs in the BOs and keep in this zone have plenty of beer to drink and thus are emboldened to fight harder. Something small, but meaningful like making them do more damage. BOs could provide also provide a discount to owning a nearby keep. For each BO owned by your side near the keep, upkeep costs for claiming that keep are reduced by 5%.

Here are some other thoughts and ideas about Open RvR in general.

• Markers on the world map are not up to date. There have been a number of times where I've traveled to a land where I saw the enemy held a keep, only to find when I arrived that the keep had already been taken by my side.


• Keeps under attack should have better grading of how much of an attack is occuring. One player wandering by and getting one hit in on a guard is treated the same way as an assault by four warbands with siege equipment as far as the indicators are concerned.


• On a related note, the cryers in warcamps should speak up whenever ANY keep is under attack. Along with slightly varying messages, such as "The outer door has been breached by our foes at Gnol Baraz!"


• Battlefield objectives should have a little marker on the zone map indicating whether or not they are available to be captured. It sucks to spend time running to an objective only to find that you can't even try to capture it yet.


• There needs to be more points of interest in the RvR areas. Something else to fight over besides the one to four focus points that are currently there. (Just one example.)


• Ability to bind in a Warcamp. Making it difficult to get to the RvR areas was not a good decision. Why do I have to bind in a PvE area? (note: This was just added recently but since it was already in my list of things to improve, I figured I would leave it in for future reference)
  
• More Contested PQs. There seem to be only a handful of these, and they are awkwardly placed so that one side has a clear advantage to accessing them. Contested PQs should be everywhere. Give us a reason to engage in PvP outside of the RvR zones


• Add in more NPC patrols to the RvR area when one side controls all the objectives. And not just around the fort, but between the BOs as well.


• NPC 'scouts' that shout out warnings about enemy warbands. If they see more than XX number of enemy players, they make a zone-wide shout announcing their presence and where the enemies are located. So, in order to move through the area without drawing attention, you would want small, scout-killing parties out in front of your main force that can dispatch the scouts without causing them to raise a zone-wide alarm.

KEEP SIEGES

There are numerous problems and bugs related to keep sieges. The biggest defensive issue is getting to the keep before its taken. A full, prepared warband can tear down the outer doors in the time it takes me to recall to the nearest warcamp and run to the fort. The problem for attackers is the lack of options and strategy. Basically, there is only one. Bash down the doors, charge up the one ramp and kill the lord. There really is no strategy involved. And if there are player defenders, the ONLY way to succeed is to have them heavily outnumbered.


Step 1: The Initial Siege

First off, someone really needs to very carefully go through every single siege pad in and around every single keep and check their LOS, as well as actual visibility (ie what the player can see). Their are numerous places where siege engines have no LOS to other siege engines, or, they are out of range. A catapult placed on a siege pad should never be useless. I should be able to see and target all the enemy siege pads.

Secondly, move the guards back from the doors. Having them run in and out constantly getting in single hits is extremely annoying and just plain dumb. Or better yet, keep them from runing through the doors altogether. And on a similar note, increase the leash range for the guards and patrols. Too often I see them rubberband back and forth because they decide to attack a healer who is out of their leash range.

Next up, you need to stop the ability for defending players to run inside through a gauntlet of foes. If a player is in combat, they shouldn't be able to go in through the doors at all. This will give the attacking players incentive to defend the postern doors, and it will also provide incentive for those inside to make a sally outside in order to secure that door for their reinforcements. Getting in and out of the keep should be about control, not about who has the most lag-free connection.

Add in some interesting siege options such as the Orcapult (Greenskin special catapult that Black Orcs can use to try and launch themselves onto the walls. Sometimes they miss with disastrous results.) Allow the option to seize the gatehouse from the inside and open the gates (put a lever in the gatehouse with a long interaction time that can be used to open the gates).

Along with these changes to give more options to the attackers, you need to help out the defenders as well. The main issue I've found when defending keeps is simply that by the time I recalled to a warcamp and ran out to the keep that was under attack, the outer doors would already be down. So give the gates some more health and make it more resistant to spells and bleeds (in fact, I think that doors should be immune to all sorts of things, but that's another issue).

Also, put some NPC archers up on the walls! What kind of shoddy keep defense has noone on the walls!?


Step 2: Inside the Outer Walls

For Tier three keeps and up, we really need to some more points of interest inside the first keep walls. You have all of this area inside the walls that is virtually useless and generally ignored. The only points of interest are the gates, the walls and the postern doors. Much too narrowly focused.

Having such a single, narrow focal point throughout the entire keep assault really makes things boring. Here are a few random ideas that popped in my head.

1) A Barracks with a hero-level guard captain. If the attacking players don't go and kill this captain, he periodically spawns a full group of guards that head for the front door. Not enough to seriously hamper a sizable warband, but enough to be annoying and provide another point of conflict in the fight for the inner keep. Attackers have a reason to kill him, while defenders have a reason to defend him.

2) Magical teleporter - This provides another way for defending players to get inside aside from the postern door and also a way for the defenders to sally from an unexpected spot. Attackers will obviously want to destroy this.

3) Add-in the ability to break down a postern door. These are doors after all. However, they are generally small and placed in awkward attack locations so that a ram cant be used. However, if the attacking players want to try and beat it down with their swords, that should be an option. Inside the postern door should be a narrow, easily defended hallway. Not the best solution for storming a keep, but something to add another layer of potential strategy and tactics.


Step 3: The Final Assault

Once inside the keep, things really get ugly when you have defenders (and are simply boring when you don't). Trying to crowd up a single-narrow staircase that opens directly onto a tiny room with more narrow stairs up to the third floor is just annoying. In particular, a heavy mass of players combined with the decreased room for camera angles makes this fight not much fun. Make the room bigger and make the Lord and his guards move faster if you're worried about players kiting them.

Make the inside of the keeps interesting. Currently they are extremely plain.

Turrets and whatever else attacking through walls, floors an ceilings is a pretty awful bug. This really needs to be fixed ASAP. These bugs seem to result in lots of extra lag as well.

One of the worst things about the Lord room is the fact that the Lord and his bodyguards reset when they reach the top of the stairs. And where is the first place they make a beeline for when they get low on health? That's right, the top of the stairs. The easy (and sensible) solution is to just make it so that they don't try to run at all. They should stay and fight to the death once engaged.

The inside of keeps definitely need some love. Multiple stairs, larger interiors, hallways and passages to fight over. One room down, one room up is so boring and uninteresting. The rooms themselves should be larger to start with. Give us some room to maneuver and engage our foes rather than having everyone pile up into one big mass.

Step 4: The Aftermath

Killing a Keep Lord is a bit of a letdown after the crazy combat of an all-out assault. Insta-spawn guards and keep lords are boring. Have the new troops spawn slightly outside the keep and march inside, taking their assigned spots.

I understand that supposedly, keeps NPCs do upgrade after a while when a guild claims a keep and holds onto it for extended periods. However, I have never seen evidence of this in-game, nor have I seen any official info about this feature from Mythic. It sounds good in practice, but given the fact that a keep can go from completely safe to dead Keep Lord in 20 minutes, makes it pretty much impossible to ever maintain a claimed keep on servers with active, balanced populations (and even on those servers a late hours raid could easily make short work of any NPC defense).

Pimpin' the Interface, WAR Style

After a month of getting by with the default UI options, I finally broke down and looked into installing some player made addons.

My general goal when looking at addons is giving myself more empty screen real estate and a cleaner, more streamlined UI. I like to do as much as I can with the built-in interface options and find addons that are simple and to the point, without a lot of extra fluff that I don't use. I also try to keep the number of addons I'm running to a minimum. The more you have, the more you have to worry about conflicts, updates, etc. Five or Six addons at most would be ideal for me.

I did quite a bit of interface tweaking in WoW via addons, and its obvious that the WAR addon community (as well as the WAR API that allows addons) is still in its infancy. So while the addons themselves are generally easy to install (simply copy the folder into your Interface -> Addons folder), they all use a variety of slash commands to change options in-game and there are a number of minor issues with a lot of them.

One of the first addons you will likely need is Libslash. This is a dependency that many other addons require. It allows the addon authors to easily incorporate slash commands to allow users to control the addon settings.

First off, a quick note about what I changed with the default UI options. Looking at this first screenshot you can see that I have hidden both my experience and renown bars. It's not overly important to me to know exactly how far along in rank I am, so out they went. I decreased the size of the game options bar and the zone control bar, putting both in the center. I've also broken my chat into three tabs and removed the combat tab altogether. One chat tab is the basic default tab, the other is for all guild and alliance chat as well as tells, while the third is for say, emotes, party, warband and scenario. General and guild chat tabs are on the left and the local chat tab is on the tight. I also moved around a number of screen elements to try and keep everything compact and near the edges of the screen.

Click on the images below to see a larger version.



In the bottom right you can see my minimap, provided by Custom Map. Not only does it remove the extra graphic fluff around the mini-map, but it makes it into a nice square shape (which is great for fitting it into a corner) and also allows me to zoom out to the zone level, which is nice for getting a quick view of the local battlefield objective and keep status. Current location is displayed above the map, and at the bottom of the map, it gives your percentage influence for the current area.

Warband and party healthbars are controlled by Squared. Makes everything nice and simple and also has numerous commands for changing the shape, size, layout, colors, etc. It has an option for displaying buffs/debuffs on players in your warband, but I have that disabled to try and improve my system performance. You can move the Squared display around by going into the Layout Editor and moving the Squared Anchor box.

The only issue I've had with this addon so far is that every game session, I have to go into the warband UI and manually tell it to not display the default warband healthbars. There doesnt seem to be a way in Mythic's UI options to just not display this. Apparently there are are other addons that will take care of hiding the default warband interface, but so far I've just been manually disabling it every time rather than adding in yet another addon.

Healthbars for myself, pet, target and friendly target are all controlled by Clean Unit Frames, I've never really understood why MMOS force me to look at photos of myself and those I have targeted. It would seem like this would be an obvious option to add in from the beginning. There is a little bit of weirdness with this addon in that each UI element has a small sliver of black space on the left side, and to get mouseover info on buffs and debuffs, you have to hover over a very precise, tiny area at the top of the buff icon, but otherwise it works great and has a compact, sleek look that I appreciate. Character rank and renown rank are both displayed on my healthbar. Champion, hero and lord level mobs are noted by the + signs next to their names on the target healthbars.

Vertigo is used to control the layout of the action bars. You can change the number of buttons each bar has as well as how many columns the buttons are arranged in. The bars can be moved and sized as normal via the layout editor. I have Action Bar 1 reduced to 6 buttons and use it for storing all of my attacks (it switched pages based on my current 'plan'. See the PlanB info below). Action Bars 2 and 3 are below that along the bottom of the screen and I altered the hotkeys for one of them to use the F1 through F8 keys. And then, over on the right next to the mini-map, I have a smaller, vertical bar where I store consumable items for quick usage.

MinChat is a simple chat mod to remove the scrollbar from the side of the chat windows and also removes the extra graphics fluff. The mousewheel is used to scroll through the text in the chat windows.



Note: It looks like I hadn't yet installed MinChat when I took the above screenshot as you can see the scrollbars on the chat windows.


On top of those I also have two mods that cant really be presented in pictures.

PlanB - This mod is a godsend for Black Orcs and Swordmasters. It sets things up so that your first action bar will change pages based on your current Career status. This way you can reduce icon clutter on your screen. Unfortunately, Mythic has it setup so that page 2 of action bar 1 is the same as action bar 2, which makes it kind of useless for people who want more than one action bar on the screen. Luckily, PlanB has ways to handle this. First off, I used the /planb pagemax slash command to increase the number of pages available. Then I used the /planb pages command to make it scroll through pages 1, 5 and 6 on action bar 1, so that those buttons wouldn't overlap with my other action bars. Very handy. I held off on installing this mod for a while, but as soon as I got it setup and configured, I kicked myself for not installing it earlier. It makes combat as a Black Orc much easier to deal with.

Buff Throttle - Controls how often buffs and debuffs refresh. Given the extreme number of these seen during RvR, this addon seems to be pretty much required if you are interested in engaging in large RvR battles. It definitely put a dent in the amount of lag I was having to deal with.

So that comes out to 8 mods total. One is simply a library for some of the other mods, and another is only in place due to WAR's poorly optimized client. I'm sure there are lots of other mods out there that many people would find useful. I don't do crafting and I also don't get a lot of emails, so I haven't looked into any mods that help out with those two features.

So this is just Round One. I expect to continue tweaking my interface (and in fact, I've already made some modifications since taking these screenshots). Look for another post on tweaking the WAR interface soon.

Warhammer Online: 2-week Impressions

It's been exactly two weeks since the official launch of Warhammer Online (not including the head start). And I thought it was about time for another post. Most of it will be complaints (because the annoying bits seem to stick in my memory), but I give the game a thumbs up rating overall!

In my last post I bitched about the dumb way that Mythic decided to roll out their servers, and I still stand by that.

My guild had initially chosen Skavenblight as its server of choice. But since that server wasnt open until the official launch date, it has a very low population. So low that we felt forced to switch servers. There just wasn't very much PvP action. And to top it off, Destruction had a great than 2-1 advantage in numbers, making our chances of finding a fun fight very slim. We switched to a more populated server (Ostermark), and even though we're a week behind most of the larger guilds, both in guild rank and character levels, our intra-guild activity is at an all-time high and everyone seems to be having lots of fun. Encounters with enemy players occur often, and the keeps come under siege from one side or the other on a regular basis.

Skavenblight is still a low population server to this day. And its unlikely that this status will change anytime soon. Most players want interaction with other players in their MMO, particularly when its focused on PvP. So new players will gravitate towards the more populated servers, leaving the low-pop servers out in the cold.

The interface needs a lot of work. Chat tabs have lots of issues (hopefully somewhat alleviated with todays patch). You're unable to customize what you see in the frames (for example, the large player pictures next the their status bar). Text sizing within frames is independent of frame size, so if I shrink down a window, the text shrinks with it, making most text unreadable. There is a lack of real options for the action bars. I can only have 1 2 or 4? Not 3? I can't turn them sideways? Or have them active but hidden? I'm sure some user mods will come out with these features, but since the game is only two weeks old, the mod community is still in its birthing stage. I installed a mod that gave me different unit frames, but then it screwed up my ability to edit the interface, so I had to remove it entirely.

I've also had horrible, horrible graphics lag in major RvR encounters. I've tried all sorts of changes to the graphics settings, but oddly, the one that seems to work best is using the default 'balanced' setting. Manually turning all the settings down and turning off the extra fluff seemed to actually make things worse. I also had someone suggest that I remove my combat log tab, which I've done. We'll see if that makes any difference.

Another issue I've run into with my guild is a severe lack of guild vault space. I can fill up our entire guild vault by myself after a couple of hours of PvE and Scavenging. There are just so many varieties of crafting materials. And for a large guild with 100+ players, this really becomes a major problem. We've ended up using the Guild Auctions as storage space instead. It's also pretty annoying that you cant stack items in the vault. You have to pull things out to your pack to get them to stack properly.

The amount of gold/level selling services spam via tells and in-game mail is pretty ridiculous. I reported them at first, but that doesn't seem to have much effect, as I find myself getting spammed by the same people the next day. Hopefully this will die down, as gold really isn't very useful in WAR once you get your mount. But this ties into my next point

No right-click functionality within the chat window. Right-clicking just brings up the options for opacity and such. I cant actually interact with the text in the window at all. I'm used to WoW where I can do such things as party invitations, sending tells and reporting gold spammers, all with a quick click. I have to say that I'm pretty surprised that such functionality didn't make it into WAR.

They just changed the way scenario queuing works other day so that you can queue for any scenario for your level from any zone pairing or the same Tier. This means that I can queue for the Chaos and Dark Elves scenarios without leaving my preferred Greenskin lands. This is an excellent change for those who love playing in the scenarios, but overall, I have found that I'm enjoying scenarios a lot less due to this alteration. No longer do scenarios have racial flavors. I used to go into the Gates of Ekrund and find that at least half, if not 90%, of the players were Dwarves or Greenskins. I knew that I could encounter my hated enemies there. Now its just a random mishmash of players from all over the world. All racial flavor has been removed. Also, this change has also had the undesired effect of pushing the average level of characters in scenarios up quite a bit. Now a large percentage of players are at the top end of the level range, making scenarios much less enjoyable for lower-level players.

Open RvR can be quite a bit of fun, provided that both sides show up for the fight. And though most large fights are reminiscent of the old Hillsbrad/Southshore battles back in the old days of WoW (ie. pre-battlegrounds), it has become apparent that there is room for tactics to play a part in the results. Using terrain to your advantage both to hide your own forces and to force the enemy into choke points is a viable strategy. Flanking maneuvers can also be highly successful. For example, a few nights ago there was a keep under siege by the forces of Order. We ran out there and went inside via the back postern door. But sitting in a keep waiting for the door to fall is not something I particularly enjoy, especially since I didn't have any siege equipment on me. So we sallied forth, catching a couple of players who were trying to camp the back door and then moving around towards the front. This resulted in some initial success, as we pulled a few players over and tore them up, but soon our foes realized what was going on and smashed our ranks apart, sending us back to the warcamp. After a couple of run backs and more defeat, the Order forces finally broke through, took the first floor and began trading long-range fire with the Destruction forces camped inside. Myself and several other players took positions out front, attacking any Order reinforcements that tried to run inside. A few of their stouter characters managed to get past our blockade, but we effectively blocked and/or killed the majority of them. This in turn forced those players inside to try and clear us out, which in turn gave the upstairs defenders an opening to push down to the first floor, and in-between our two groups, we crushed the remaining Order forces and drove their army back to their warcamp! Good times!


But beyond any issues I listed above, I am having a lot of fun, which is really the most important part of any game. All of my complaints can be fixed by Mythic to one degree or another. And in spite of those, I still login daily.

We have a large, active guild (which makes a huge difference), and there is almost always at least one warband engaging in RvR somewhere in the world. Just so long as I can get my graphics issues worked out, I see myself continuing to play this game for quite some time. My WoW time is way off in the distance of my rear view mirror and I wont be looking back that way again!

How to Screw Up Your Initial Server Release in an MMO (A Lesson from WAR)

1) Purposefully stagger your server launch so that the initial ones are overly full and the later ones are ghost towns.

2) Make copies of the full ones a couple of days later and encourage players to play on the new copies instead of allowing/encouraging transfers to the ghost town servers.

Warhammer Online: Preview Weekend Thoughts

Played some over this weekend, though I tried out a lot of different classes using my newly patented Smash 'Em leveling technique (queue for scenarios constantly as soon as you log in, doing quests while waiting in line. I hit level 5 and renown rank 5 in under an hour using this technique).

Here are some random thoughts and comments in no particular order.


I noticed that a lot more low-level items come with slots these days. I assume this is to give the as-yet-unreleased Talisman Making profession a use from the start. I just wish they would patch it in so we can see how it works.

It seemed to be very popular to level up to 11 (the max for the Tier one scenarios) and queue for scenarios. That way players could feel powerful by tearing through the lower-ranked opponents. But, since PvP gives experience gains (and pretty significant ones at that), at least these putzes will eventually level out of that Tier, which is a godsend in my opinion. None of that perma-twink BS that is the bane of low-level WoW battlegrounds.

I took some time to stop in one place and just look around, taking in the action that was going on. Even though WAR is a themepark MMO, they do an excellent job of making it feel alive, with NPCs fighting it out, reinforcements running around the camps, explosions and artillery combat happening at a steady pace. It would add some flavor to the game if these bombardments actually caused some damage (not a lot, just something to keep you on your toes).

Every class plays differently. I haven't played them all, but I've spent at least a few levels with Shaman, Squig Herders, Ironbreakers, Engineers, Bright Wizards, Marauders, and of course, lots of time with the Black Orcs, and they all have different mechanics or styles of play. Add this on top of the ability to PvP right out of the starting gate, and replayability becomes a huge draw for WAR (at least in the early levels. The grind might get more tedious as you get to Tiers 3 and 4).

Scavenging is a very useful money-maker. Butchering not so much, since animals are less common than humanoids.

Still no functioning banks, guild or otherwise. Same with the auction house.

The polish is definitely in progress. A lot of people seem to be complaining about the clunky feel of combat, but for those who have been in beta previously, the new system is much improved (though it can still use more improvement). The low-level game just seems a lot slicker and tighter than it did a month ago.

I haven't played all of the starting areas, but the Greenskin area seems to be a lot more compact. I felt like I was running around a lot more in the Dwarf, Empire and Chaos starting areas.

Warhammer Online: Guild Beta Impressions - Part III

Phase 3.3 saw the opening of the Tier 4 zones, along with character wipes and the ability to make level 31, templated characters.

Seeing the Tier 4 zones and getting a chance to try and push the zone control so that your side can assault new zones was interesting, but it also revealed some flaws with the system.


For example, its possible for your side to gain control of all the objectives and keeps in an area, but still lose control of the zone. I know that PvE and Scenarios also have an effect on the zone control, it just feels kind of weird to have physical control of a zone, but the magic meter tells you something different.

Keep combat is very one-dimensional. Attack the front gate, run in, attack the keep lord. The only difference with the higher tier keeps is that they require you to bust down two doors. The keeps look fancy, but 90% of the area is never used. It's also odd that there are no NPCs on the walls. You would think they could stick in some static archers.

Tier 4 areas have a bit of an interesting setup. In the middle there is a zone that is 80% RvR, flanked on either side by two PvE zones that feed into the middle zone for control purposes.

Thunder Mountain is the central Tier 4 area for the Greenskin/Dwarf pairing. It is a badlands type area, with a volcano in the center. Very cool atmosphere, very crappy for actually getting anywhere. Due to large chasms dominating the landscape, you often have to take a very roundabout route to get to where you need to go (note: this is for the RvR area. The PvE areas of the zone don't have this issue), resulting in a lot of running around. This is especially annoying because it is the RvR area. I don't want to spend more time running back to the combat than I do actually fighting.

The Empire vs Chaos area of Praag on the other hand, is a great RvR setup. Almost the entire zone is encompassed by the town, which each side having a warcamp on the outskirts to give them easy access to the interior. Objectives are on a general line through the middle of town, with one keep at each end. This is much more fun than running around on windy paths in Thunder Mountain. It also gives more of a feeling of an actual war, since you're fighting in a city instead of out in the middle of nowhere at some random spot.

I really think that Mythic will have to revisit the RvR zones for the other two pairings to make them as interesting. Currently, 90% of the outdoor PvP action happens in the Empire vs Chaos areas.

Another thing that really bothers me is zone control resetting periodically? I find this feature a bit odd. Apparently, you are under a time limit in regards to gaining control of zones. Otherwise, the zone resets entirely. Pretty lame design, IMO, but I guess it goes along with the theme park style of gaming. After several posts about this issue, I finally got some details from a Mythic employee. Once you start a keep assault, you have 60 minutes to win before it resets (though I'm not sure what exactly causes the timer to start. Hitting the front door? Destroying the front door? Attacking the keep lord?). Also, once one of the final fortresses is taken, you have 36 hours to take one of the other two, which will then open up the capitol for attack. If you don't beat the time deadline, the Tier for which the fortress was taken resets back to its default values. All objectives in that zone become neutral and the keeps revert to initial ownership. I find this to be a pretty lame mechanic. Maybe if they had an NPC spawn that retook the keep, that would be interesting. But as it is, it just suddenly pops back and you have to start all over from the bottom. My preference would be to leave it in the hands of the players to retake the keeps. Make the players actually fight for what is theirs rather than just resetting the pins for another round. But, I guess that goes along with the themepark MMO.

Leveling is definitely slower post 30. But its still not too bad. Definitely much quicker leveling than any of the other fantasy MMOs on the market.

I continue to be impressed with the whole open party concept. It works very well, with most successful open Warbands being formed around a small core of guild players. There are a few issues. The main one that bothers me is that I cant always see where everyone in my warband is on the map. But, this is a bug that affects all warbands, not just open ones.

Talisman making is still not in game yet, but drops for it have begun to appear. Some items have enhancement slots, so I am assuming that Talisman making will create items for these slots, kind of like Jewelcrafting in WoW.

Got a chance to play with some of the dye options. The colors seem to be a lot more apparent on the higher-level gear. And it does make your avatar stand out. Unfortunately, there are only a dozen or so color options, and some of them are priced differently. I've seen some hints in-game that they plan on letting Apothecaries create their own dyes, but it seems that this feature isn't fully implemented as noone has managed to actually make any.

The game has improved quite a bit over the last month. Things generally seem a lot smoother, particularly client-side. I still get occasional graphics lag, but it is vastly improved.

And before I finish up this post, I suppose I should talk a bit about the guild system. Forming a guild in WAR requires a full party of 6 players to gather at the guild registrar in Inevitable City. You then pay a fee, pick a guild name and you're all set. The guild window has several tabs, including one for managing alliances. The UI has a few issues, but all-in-all, its well laid out and fairly comprehensive. One of the more unique aspects of WAR is its Living Guild system, whereby your guild gains levels. Each level opens up something new, from standards, to special access to the guild area in the capitol, to designing your own, personal heraldry (which has quite a number of options to choose from). This system seems to work pretty naturally, and quickly as well. We had to remake our guild several times during the beta, but we were always able to gain back the early levels rather easily. The highest level our guild achieved was 9, so I cant comment too much on the details above that, but it definitely was a source of pride for us to see our guild growing as a result of our efforts to bash in some stuntie heads!

Warhammer Online: Guild Beta Impressions - Part II

Here is the second of my beta impressions from the Guild Beta. This post is kind of short, since this phase only lasted a week. This was labeled Beta 3.2 and opened up the Tier 3 zones. My random thoughts are below in no particular order.

Note: This was written in mid to late July.


===========

In addition to continuing to play my Black Orc, I also played a bit in the starting zones for the Empire and Dark Elves as well as playing a Squig Herder up to level 10.

I noticed that the Tier one objectives for Empire/Chaos were a hotbed of activity. Likely due to the fact that they are all of 10 seconds outside of the camps, and sit smack in the middle of both sides. On the other hand, the objectives for the first two Greenskin/Dwarf zones are tucked away in a corner of the map that noone ever goes to. So those objectives usually switch hands with no conflict whatsoever. Of course, it was mostly a mindless zerg (if you played WoW before they implemented battlegrounds, this is akin to the mass Hillsbrad/Southshore fights that used to happen on a daily basis).

Beta 3.2 saw the opening of Tier 3 zones, but they seemed strangely empty. It also seemed that the racial pairings aren't as in your face as they were in the other zones. The only times I saw any enemies in the two Greenksin/Dwarf Tier 3 zones was when they were riding by to go to the Gunbad dungeon.

Speaking of dungeons, I believe this is the first dungeon available for Destruction players. It's called Mount Gunbad and is designed for mid-20s players. It involves delving down into a cave to take on some goblins that are breeding super squigs. Though you have to go through a portal to get inside, the dungeon itself is open, which means that everyone is in the same instance. I think it's divided by faction, since I didn't see any enemy players inside, and all of the quest givers were goblins. There is no party-size limit, so you can take as many players as you want. Unfortunately, I crashed soon after entering and was unable to get back to my non-Guild group due to respawns, so I didn't get to see much of the place.

Some of the scenarios are pretty lame. For example, there is one King of the Hill scenario that is actually on a hill. Unfortunately, a number of classes get a knockback ability, which they will use to knock you off the top of the hill, forcing you to run back up. Another scenario requires you to grab and hold an artifact. The usual result is that one side gets it first, then camps below their spawn with it. Sometimes I have fun, sometimes I don't, usually revolving around how well my side is doing. If you enjoyed WoW's battlegrounds, you'll probably enjoy WAR's scenarios. Though sometimes you might end up waiting a while to get into a scenario, one good thing is that once the scenario is done, you're returned to the exact spot you were in before you entered. Makes it easy to continue on with questing or activities while waiting in line.

This phase also saw the push of the Realm War 'leader boards' which are pretty dumb at the moment. For one, they don't update and still have info from two weeks ago. For two, they're really not that interesting. For three, I don't see any info about the actual war. That is what I want to know! Which keeps are controlled by who, where has the fighting been going on for the past couple of hours. What objectives are available for attack. How close are we to pushing the gates of our opponents' city? This is the sort of info I expect to see. I could really care less about who spent the past 24 hours grinding renown points. But, I'm assuming they have plans to make it more interesting.

Next Up: Part III, which includes info from some time we were given in the Tier 4 zones with templated characters.

Warhammer Online: Guild Beta Impressions - Part I

Note: These are my initial impressions from the Guild Beta and were written a month ago. A lot has changed in the game since then. More recent thoughts will follow over the next couple of days.

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I'm not going to be able to post this before the NDA is lifted, but I wanted to gather my thoughts together from Day one onwards. This initial writeup was made from my experiences playing exclusively as a Black Orc with an established guild (Shadowclan) for the first 10 days of Guild Beta (July 15th - 24th).


First things first. The ambiance of the Greenskin starting area was good. You start out in a fungus-lined cave and emerge to beat on some dwarfs as your first quest. Initial leveling is quick and painless (I was 30% through level one before even fighting anyone). Since I logged in on the initial day of Guild beta, the starting area was quite crowded. I didn't really have issues with completing quests because of the crowd, it just resulted in a lot of extra lag.

The User Interface is very customizable, though they still have some work to do. You are given the option to go into layout mode and move, hide and resize all of the various parts of the UI. Unfortunately, you don't have control over text attached to the various panes, so resizing sometimes makes the text unreadable. But, all in all, having this functionality straight out of the box earns lots of bonus points from me.

Public quests are awesome! Though the roll for loot is more random than you might expect (and generally leads to initial shock and griping after you finish 1st in contribution but then get a bad roll and no loot), it seems to work out in the long run. It really works best if you have a group that will run through the same public quest a couple of times. Public Quests are centered around the various Chapters on quest progression and participating in them gives you influence points for that chapter. Each chapter seems to have three or so public quests associated with it. Oftentimes the one closest to the camp is the busiest while those further away are mostly empty. Some public quests are also labeled as difficult, but in exchange, the rewards are better.

While on the subject of public quests, I should probably also talk about grouping. In particular, WAR's open group system. By default, all new groups are open, meaning with a couple of mouse-clicks, anyone nearby can join. By far, this is the best grouping system I have ever seen. I've joined open groups for everything; from Public Quests, to assaulting Keeps.

It also helps that no quests (at least as far as I have encountered in the first two Tiers) are hindered by being in a raid/warband. I can complete quest objectives no matter how many players are in my group. In fact, many of the public quests encourage large groups (some of them require killing 100 mobs to advance to the next stage). Being able to complete all quests in a warband (WAR's version of a raid which allows up to 24 players), also negates the pressure many players feel to only allow certain classes to join. It just really doesn't matter that much. This might be different in the high-end content, but that sort of stuff will likely be organized ahead of time anyway.

It's kind of interesting to think about the ramifications of this open group concept. WoW received a lot of praise for its solo-friendly content. WAR takes that a step farther, but in a kind of sideways manner. Most of the standard quests are easily done solo (and in under 10 minutes), but it is so simple to join a group, that you tend to find yourself grouped for pretty much everything else. You're still solo in a sense, in that you're not with a specific group, but you're also being social by grouping. Hard to get my point across in words, but trust me, its a beautiful concept that works extremely well, especially in this sort of RvR environment.

Joining an open group is as simple as two clicks. One click opens the group window displaying the list of open groups in the nearby area, how far away they are, who the leader is, how many players are in the group and what the group is involved in (PvE, RvR). You click the join button and voila! You're in the group! So it manages to meld the soloist into group play in a very smooth manner. The only issue is getting the word around about this feature and how to use it. It's very common to be involved in bashing something and have someone come up and ask for an invite when your group is already open and they can just join whenever they want to.

There are options for kicking troublesome players and banning them from joining your group, but I have never seen that used in beta. Even if a player just goes AFK to leech, it usually doesn't really matter than much (and its a rare sight in my experience). Instead of walking into a mob area and seeing several players doing their own thing, you walk into a mob area and see several players fighting together. Even if they're not working directly together (IE, everyone is beating on a different mob), they're all working towards a common goal.

Its also nice that quest drops happen automatically. You often don't even have to loot. You can just kill the required mob and immediately get a notification about completing a quest objective. I've even finished a number of quests without realizing it due to groupmates completing the required steps while I was nearby.

Mythic has definitely raised the bar on ease of access with public quests and public grouping.

One of WAR's taglines has been War is Everywhere. And I have to say, that is pretty much true so far. Not only are a lot of the quests in the first 4 zones of the Greenskin area based around smashing stunties (Hoowah dat!), but the scenery evokes the feel of a WAR in progress and a number of public quests are shared by both sides, though working at opposite goals. While these are technically PvE areas, they often result in heavy PvP fights when both sides show up. And in these sorts of PQs, there are usually NPCs fighting it out even when no players are involved!

Collision detection does indeed play a role in PvP, especially when you have narrow stairs or other choke points. And there have been a couple of times where I've managed to hinder someone's escape by blocking their path. It seems that slipping around someone blocking you isn't too difficult, but it can delay and confuse players enough to make a difference. I haven't yet had a chance to really coordinate on forming a wall, but I guess that it is possible.


Now for the low points.

First off, I'm curious as to how Mythic defines polish. They have said for a while that they were in the polish phase, but yet there are lots of major bugs and missing features. While major things such as combat, movement, creating guilds, are in place, other things aren't; banks for example!

Secondly, the much-lauded Living Cities, the system who is at fault for loss of four out of six capitol cities.. In current beta, the two existing cities are supposed to be at their peak level, and to be honest, I really see nothing special that I haven't already seen in every other MMO. They have vendors, they have trainers, they have a banker (not working), auctioneer (not working), a mostly-empty guild hall, a couple of quests and a dungeon or two inside the city. Whats so special about all of this? This is what I EXPECT from a capitol city. If a lower-level capitol doesn't have these basics, then its not much of a capitol at all. And why cant they shove this stuff into four other cities? Maybe there is more secret features that aren't in-game yet, but currently, I am thoroughly unimpressed. The graphics are very pretty, but I was expecting something different and special with the Living Cities system.

Crafting, well, at the moment, all we have are the gathering skills and apothecary. And really there's not that much new about either. Apothecary is very much a grind to gain skill, despite the claims in the crafting videos. You still have hard skill limits on everything, so you end up standing near a vendor, making the same potions over and over again to increase your skill so you can use the higher level components which have skill requirements. They should really just remove the hard skill limits on raw materials and allow players to use everything from skill level 1. The user is presented with a success meter showing their chances of making the potion. If they want to use up their higher-level materials on low-chance mixes, that should be their prerogative!

Single-race viability certainly seems possible, though I don't think there is enough faction-specific symmetry to preclude a guild from taking the best classes from 3 races and combining them into a force that could easily dominate any equal-sized single-race group. But, if you're not worried about dominating and just want to have fun, you can certainly do everything, including PvE and RvR, as a single-race guild.

RvR seems too isolated from the rest of the world. The RvR areas in the first two Tiers are rather large, but there is nothing there besides the battlefield objectives and keeps. So, what generally ends up happening is that one side runs through and captures the points, then everyone leaves because its boring in the RvR when no opponents are around. Then an our later, the other side comes through and does the same thing. Rinse and repeat over and over. And this rut certainly isn't helped by the fact that the announcements about objectives/keeps being attacked are either non-existent or way too short. For example, the objectives give the previous owners three minutes to respond when they're taken by the other side. However, it takes a good minute (or more) to run there from the nearest flightpath. Add by the time you get to a flight master, fly down there and hopefully join an RvR warband, you're already too late. Keeps don't send out any defense warnings until the keep lord is under attack.

This all basically makes RvR a round-robin game of taking turns on capturing objectives. I can only hope that there are more points of interest or things to do in the RvR areas in the higher Tiers.

I upgraded my CPU over the weekend (from an Athon 3500 to an Athlon X 64 5200) and the difference was just astounding. I went from having low graphic settings at 1024x768 and still getting lots of graphics lag when too many models were on the screen, to running at 1440x900, high graphics mode and only occasional slight stutters when loading new graphics content.


Next up! Some looks at the game from a different faction's perspective and hopefully insight into missing features and higher-level tiers (Mythic willing).

Farewell to Warcraft

This post is actually several weeks late, as I canceled my World of Warcraft account last month and the subscription expired on July 11th. So, I will likely have very little, if nothing to post about WoW in the foreseeable future, which is a bit unfortunate as my posts about the interface and Heroic Mechanar are the most popular ones on this site. However, in replacement I hope to have an ongoing series about my very casual foray into Age of Conan, and I am in the Guild Beta for Warhammer Online and plan on creating a number of posts about my experiences that will be seen here as soon as the NDA drops!

Age of Conan: Initial Impressions Part I

I played Age of Conan during the 'open' beta and did not really enjoy it that much, so I decided to give it some time to see if Funcom would end up crashing and burning or if they would manage to pull their act together and quickly take care of the major issues. So, here we are, 2 months later and I found myself purchasing and installing a copy of AoC.

I'm hoping to document my progression through the game on a regular basis, though it will be a bit sporadic since I am also participating in the WAR Beta at the same time. So here we go with Part One...


First off, installation. Both installation and the patching process went smoothly, though I was a bit annoyed to see it taking time to copy the movie files in several languages to my computer when I had selected the option to install the English version. Why even give me that choice at installation time?!

But once I was in-game, my experience was quite fun. Performance was much better than when I was in the beta. I only had to tone down a couple of fluff settings to get a decent 45-50 frames per second. However, this did drop noticeably once I started encountering other players.

I'm not really interested in doing a bunch of standard run-here collect that quests in Age of Conan, so I resolved to only pursue the destiny quest until I got away from Tortage. Unfortunately, that revealed a hole in the Destiny Quest line. Mainly, the requirement that you be a certain level to proceed past certain sections. Now keep in mind that I wasn't doing any side quests, but I also wasn't avoiding combat. I killed anything and everything along the way and I still came up about 2/3 of a level short when I reached the part that requires you to be level 10, and a little over 2 levels short at the step that required level 15! Kind of annoying. I can understand having level restrictions for later parts of the Quest, but this is the starter, newbie island. It should be easy to complete this initial part and move on to the larger world. I could see it being especially bothersome when having to run through the same exact content for every character you make!

And, I do have to again complain about the fact that while I'm in my own private instance, I have to zone in and out of the houses! And to make things worse, the main quest NPC that you talk to repeatedly is also in her own private zone! Come on Funcom! Give me a break, here!

Anyway, since I had two levels to go before I could continue on my annoying, but required Destiny Quest, I headed over the Acheronian Ruins and kill some Picts while gathering up a nice Pictish outfit. As I made my way through the instance (which is very breath-taking. Kudos to the level designers for this zone) I saw a number of other players around. Most noticeable were the Necromancers who seemed to always have a number of pets and who would simply wade into the middle of a group of 4-5 Picts and emerge victorious, grabbing loot before moving on to the next pack. Meanwhile, I was left skulking about the edges, trying to grab lone Picts, two at most, though I could sometimes defeat three at once if I was lucky. I'm guessing that Necromancers the current uber-powerful PvE class?

Ended up with a LOT of deaths while grinding away in the Ruins (since I didn't have a half-dozen pets around to help me out). But I could see where having a couple of buddies to group with would make it much easier, and more enjoyable. It also seems that the NPC Picts are very good at seeing through stealth (or maybe stealth just becomes a lot less useful after level 10). I have my stealth maxed and the only time I was able to sneak up on a Pict was when they had just spawned.

I found the button-smash combat more interesting this time around. Perhaps because I realized that timing can make a big difference. And I definitely appreciate the interactiveness of the system, though it forces you to rewire your reactions when coming to AoC from other MMOs.

I ran into an odd bug with setting up hotkeys for the left-bottom bar. After quitting the game and then logging back in, the bar no longer displayed text showing me which hotkey was bound to which slot, but the hotkeys still worked. Not a hug deal, but a little confusing if you aren't aware of the issue. Another UI issue is the fact that the Feats screen doesn't display how many feat points you have available. You just have to try and select a feat and see if it works or you get an error message. Seems like a simple enough thing to fix, so I'm not sure why this issue is even in the game at this point.

Overall, my first few hours were fun, though it 90% solo, and 90% of that in my own instance. Hopefully my next installment will include some time spent with the Shadowclan Picts!

The Gutting of Warhammer Online

In a very surprising announcement yesterday, Mark Jacobs informed the Warhammer community that Warhammer Online was cutting out some pretty major parts of their game, including all capitol cities except for Inevitable City (Chaos) and Altdorf (Empire) and four careers! Holy Feature-Cut Batman! I don't think I've ever seen such a major gutting of game features since the great MMO disappointment that was formerly known as Horizons!


This is a pretty huge blow in several ways. First off, the capitol city removal. To me, this is almost a game breaker. Not having a capitol city completely destroys the culture of those races who are now forced to inhabit a city that is not their own. Very sad indeed. Not to mention the pain of having to deal with traveling to your racial-specific areas from someone else's capitol city every single time you want to adventure there! All the quests are going to be dogpiled into these same cities and they will be the ONLY place to trade, sell, repair, etc, and I shudder to think of the lag that everyone will get to experience in these towns. It will be like WoW (pre Burning Crusade), where only one city on each side is the hotspot and the other capitol cities are ghost towns. And that makes me weep.

Mark Jacobs has posted further elaboration on the VN Boards, part of which includes a thought about maybe rotating in cities so that the focus is on one at a time. That is an even more horrible idea. Who cares if the players are spread out in three areas of the game? That's what the game is about! If one side decides that they want to make a serious push on one city, then maybe they would need to try and coordinate with the other races to focus on that particular section of the world. If they cant get organized enough to manage that, then they don't deserve to lay siege to capitol cities. Sieging a capitol city is supposed to be a big deal anyway, right? It shouldn't be happening every other month!

I won't suggest additional delays to the release date (which would be fine with me), but personally, I would much prefer to have some sort of placeholders in place instead. I don't mind if my capitol city doesn't grow in size and cant be sieged and maybe doesn't even have all the amenities of those for Empire and Chaos. But I do want a place to call home. A place where I can meet up with my fellow Greenskins that is OUR home. They can always patch in city improvements later, but losing that cultural quality in the initial launch is a hard thing to swallow. And yes, I know that they'll add in the cities at some point. But how long will it take? Will the cities be less interesting because a majority of the player base has already outleveled a significant portion of their content? Given the loss of entire career options, its not as if each race has a lot of options for replayability. And how much of that initial awe and excitement of being part of our own capitol city will be lost? Too much, IMO. I really don't care how fancy Inevitable City is. I'm not planning on playing a Chaos character. I'm a Greenskin at heart and I want a Greenskin city, not a couple of token Greenskins in someone else's town. Knowing that you'll be making major changes in the future allows you to plan for that ahead of time and lock off parts of the capitol city area as needed. Blocking them off entirely is a demoralizing and crushing blow to those races.

The loss of no less than four careers is a bit less galling to me (likely because it didn't hit any of my main class choices directly), but probably even more damaging in terms of gameplay. Those races that have lost careers are now much less viable as single-race entities, especially the ones that have lost their tank class! Single-race guilds are reeling beneath this announcement. ARAC all the way it seems, which makes me weep even more. If you wish to read more, there's also a thread covering this topic.

These changes seem to really destroy the concept of racial-pairing and will have a huge impact on both RvR and PvE.

So, I issue a heartfelt plea to Mythic. I certainly understand the desire to get things right and not release half-assed efforts, but I also understand that MMOs go through a lot of changes, especially in the first few months after launch. I can only speak for myself, but I would rather have partial, incomplete content that maintains the immersion and flavor that I've been eagerly awaiting for well over a year, instead of HUGE missing gaps that force players into a big, generic mash that undermines the concept of racial pairings. Let us have our cities and classes, as incomplete as they might be rather than completely denying each race their individuality.

Crafting and MMOs: A Look from Three Perspectives

Crafting has always been a system that has attracted my attention, especially from a design standpoint. Partially because most games seem to relegate it to a sidebin.

As serendipity would have it, there has been some minor discussion from three different games in development about their crafting systems. Those being Warhammer, Earthrise and Darkfall.


WAR released a podcast several weeks ago where Mark Jacobs talks about crafting in WAR. This was followed with a three-part interview (which seems to be divided into three parts just to be annoying since each part only has 3-4 questions).

In these , we find out that the WAR devs claim that their crafting system is non-recipe based, which is a bit disingenuous. There is a recipe system, its just not presented to the players up-front, and it is more flexible than crafting in most games, which tend to go for crafting systems that are extremely static (IE, X +Y makes Z with no variations). In WAR, the crafters will be able to play around with various ingredients to alter the results of the standard recipes.

WAR also plans on having only a few, limited crafting options at launch; three gathering professions and two crafting. In the interview, Jacobs explained that they would rather start with a small subset that can be expanded later and do it right, rather than trying to do everything at once. And that's certainly a philosophy I can agree with. Three years after launch, WoW is still working on trying to make their crafting professions useful, and failing for the most part.

The ability to customize your potions based upon your needs is great. The more control you give to the crafters the better. I also find their idea of having more gathering than crafting professions interesting, though we'll have to see how it plays out in-game. Is the world going to end up flooded with crafters who cant get hold of materials because there is too much competition for them? WAR also wants to make it so that crafting doesn't replace item drops and quest rewards, which I'm a bit leery of. Now we're headed back into EQ and WoW territory, where the crafted items are only minor bonuses compared to what you get from defeating the Big Bad Boss.

On the other side of the coin, you have Earthrise. In a recent interview, the talked about their plans for crafting (which are also revealed in a post on their forums. They are planning on making crafting THE way to acquire items. Players will be able to craft every item in the game, and they will also be able to make customized items by sticking various parts together. A complex system, and a bold venture by Masthead, but one that I hope works out well so that other games will feel emboldened enough to make crafting more than a side diversion from their amusement park rides.

And then, to round things out to a nice even three, I also want to include mention of a recent post from the Darkfall devs (yes, apparently they are still alive). In Darkfall, the plan on letting players

"You can gather crafting materials from killing mobs, and looting and/or skinning them. You can harvest materials from the environment, for example from rocks, trees, bushes etc. You can get the materials faster from organized resource production, like mines and farms, while collecting in nature is slower. You can craft crafting materials used to build complex items when they’re made of building blocks. Finally you can kill players and take theirs."

Hey, they're stealing my ideas! Though I didn't go into complete detail in the linked post, I've actually had a similar concept floating around for some time, so as you imagine, I'm excited to see how Darkfall handles it (assuming that they ever release their game). I really like the idea of being able to harvest from almost anywhere, ala Ultima Online, but also encouraging player cities/guilds to invest resources and time into creating semi-permanent structures that function as advanced resource harvesting centers. Not only does it allow for multiple levels of play and interaction, just within the harvesting system, but it also provides focal points for interesting conflicts between players.

So, there we have it. Three games will very different philosophies about crafting, though all look to be trending in the direction of giving more control to the player. I certainly hope that this is a sign of things to come in the future of MMOs.