Oh Boy Gold Sellers!

Man, like here’s a topic that hasn’t been done TO DEATH a million times over, yet still manages to pop up every now and then, and people get all shocked and up in arms over it, and then a week passes or so, and along comes isobelle to bring it up again. Fuck you all, I hate you, and this is your punishment for living.

Warhammer suffers from gold spam overload right now, but many people can’t seem to understand why. By the time I was level twenty, and able to purchase my new mount, I already had over thirty pieces of gold on my toon, and the mount only costs 15g. Gear in the auction house is pretty underwhelming, as public quest influence points and renown points award the best gear as it is, and they’re guaranteed drops. Hell, they aren’t even drops at all, you just go to the vendor and get it.

Trade skills could use a bit of work, and trade skill items are rare sometimes, but the end result of trade skill crafted items is lackluster at best, and are hardly worth spending real dollars on. I managed to screw up giving my orc a last name (Ixo Belle), clicking the ‘purchase’ button twice before it registered (and paying 8g in the end instead of 4g), but being out twice the cost wasn’t even a big deal since there isn’t really anything to spend gold on anyway. Gear doesn’t decay (need repairs), pots drop from mobs all day long, and there’s so much crap in my bags at the end of a play session that vendoring it all is all I need to keep gold coming in.

Here’s a funny story: I’m actually banned from the game right now on a 5 day suspension because I set my Belkin up to hit three buttons over and over and over while I slept, but not because I need the gold, but because I was after a useless trophy item for my toon, and hoped that killing 5000 dwarves would give me some sort of Tome Tactic unlock. It didn’t. I have yet to discover a single tome tactic, and it makes me crazy seeing that empty button on my UI. I found a spot in Barak Varr where ridiculous amounts of dwarves respawn over and over, and they pose no threat whatsoever to my orc. I have moves that buff my armor, decrease their weapon skill, and an aura that has a 25% chance on hit to proc +600 hp. With a pool of 5000 hp to pull from, I wasn’t going to die. I couldn’t even loot the dead bodies, but like I said, I was after an unlock, not loots. I just set the Belkin to hit N (target nearest enemy), 4 (attack #1), N (target nearest again, just in case the first one died), 6 (attack #2), N, 0 (attack #3), repeat. That ran all night long, and I hit 5000 dwarf kills, but got nothing special for doing so. I actually set it up to go again today around lunch while I ate with the 5th graders, and returned to find myself teleported to a mountaintop standing next to a GM who was /fart-ing and /lol-ing at me. Gee, you caught me, I guess. I suppose in the end, I earned about half of a level worth of XP for killing 3000+ trivial mobs… is this the WORLD FIRST SUSPENSION FOR BOTTING in Warhammer? It wasn’t even a bot, technically…

When I botted in WoW, and was subsequently banned, it was because end game raiding was too pricey, and the alternative (do the same quests every day over and over!) wasn’t fun in any sense of the word. I decided to use the time I slept in the real world to have my rogue kill spiders over and over and over in the Bone Wastes, and I’d auction the Netherweb Spidersilk on the AH at the going rate. I never “took” spawns from anyone else, as the Glider plug-ins I was using (Pogue, pather) would detect when anyone was near me, and I’d patiently wait in stealth until they left.

I also bought gold pre-BC for my epic horsey. I have a job, and if spending one hour at work enabled me to have enough gold to buy a horse that moved 60% faster than the welfare horse, then it didn’t seem like a huge deal to me to make the decision to make the purchase. I wasn’t buying gold, I was buying TIME, and I happily pay people for things that take to much time for me to do personally all the time.

Have you ever baked bread from scratch? I have. That shit takes TIME. Time for the dough to rise, then more time in the oven, then time to cool, not even counting the time mixing the flour and kneading the dough. Have you ever eaten a salad? They’re pretty easy to buy, assuming you have a job, and you don’t have to hand grow tomatoes, pick weeds out of the lettuce patch, fuck with pressing the olives for the dressing, or any of that other crap. You just buy the salad and enjoy the hard work everyone else put in. Way to go champ, you’re apparently a capitalist asshole, and deserve to die in a fire. Sure, you could sit there and GROW a fucking salad from scratch like you’re supposed to do (and everyone else does!), or you could take the (pussy) shortcut and use your (bitch-made) money you earn at your (cock sucking) job to buy a (faggot) salad from some (chinese) supermarket. God, you’re such a bitch.

Pre-BC, time was the biggest commodity (well, it still is), and I happily paid someone to do the bullshit work for me, so I could run around and do quests (woohoo! fun!) on a faster horse. Later, I realized I had free time myself (while I slept or worked, things not every MMO player does), and I could use the computer to make more efficient use of that time.

Whatever, the point is that we’re back in Warhammer now, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why someone would even want fifty gold, regardless of how CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP it is. Maybe the sellers are just hoping to grab a few sales at the launch of the game, before everyone realizes that gold isn’t really hard to come by, and you earn ｍore than enough to keep you easily training skills and buying renown gear by just playing the game? People will complain that they have to deal with seeing the spam on their screens while they play, but you may as well get upset and break dinner plates over the 30 minutes of previews you’re forced to sit through every time you want to watch a DVD. I’m pretty sure they’re so perfectly entrenched in their demographic (HEY YOU! STANDING IN OGRIMMAR! YOU PLAY MMOS? SWEET, WE SELL MMO GOLD!), that the cost of creating throw away accounts covers it for them. Do these same people that hate gold spam get pissed off at Google every time they send a Gmail, and it offers the option to “invite bill@whoopty-whoops.net to Gmail” (HEY, YOU USE EMAIL? WE HAVE EMAIL TOO!)? Get over it, there are bigger things to be upset about.

I’m honestly more annoyed by the LOLRP messages we get every time some nub is banned, that we HAVE TO CLICK ON to get off our fucking screen:

And yeah, seriously… my bad on the 5000 dwarf thing. I wonder if everyone had to click OK about it? SWEET, I'm famous! I’ll be back in on Friday to sign autographs, lulz.

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Warhammer - RvR and PvP

I’ve had a chance to dive into some player versus player conflict in Warhammer, and have got to say that they seem to have a clear vision of what they wanted to do with regards to this. Whether or not that vision is fully realized or not is up for debate, though. It reminds me of my brief stint at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. My father is an illustrator, and I went to art school for two years before I decided it wasn’t my thing, and then went into IT for a while. At the academy, there were hundreds of kids complaining that they didn’t get any hands on lessons with Photoshop, and instead were ‘wasting all their time in Figure Drawing classes, drawing people’ or ‘dragging their heels in Analysis of Form classes, drawing bowls of fruit’. The point is that companies like Pixar don’t care if you can apply a lens flare filter; they’re more impressed if you can hand draw a walk cycle animation that looks believable. Fancy effects don’t mean much if the underlying principles are flawed. In that respect, Warhammer has pulled it off with their PvP. The soul is present. Now they need to patch it up and work on frame rates and the finer polish.

Scenarios – a.k.a Battlegrounds.

For each tier of gameplay, you move to a new zone. Tier one is level 1-10, two is 11-20, three 21-30, four 31-40. Each tier also has its respective conflict: the Dwarves vs. Greenskins, Dark Elves vs. Something Else, and Fruit Salad vs. Ice Cream. I dunno, I play a Greenskin, and have kinda stuck to my zone. As you run around in your zone, questing or whatever, you can queue up for a scenario. You don’t need to go to a battle master, just click an icon by your minimap and queue up for that zone’s queue (as solo or a group). For example, the Greenskin’s tier one scenario is a Battlefield type ‘capture the three points and hold them’ thing called Mount Ekhorn. The Dark Elf tier one scenario is different. They all are based on the actual zone they take place in, so the Greenskins get a properly ‘Greenskin vs. Dwarf-y map’. If you wish to queue for the Fruit Salad vs. Ice Cream map, you need to go to that zone to queue, or party with someone in that zone and have them join the queue. When it pops, you click to enter it, and when it’s over you’re back wherever you accepted the invite from.

There are various modes of play, from the above mentioned ‘cap and hold points’, to ‘pick up the item and run around with it, earning points for your team as long as you hold it’, to ‘grab this item, and run it to three various locations on the map within 30 seconds, at which point it will reset back to its starting location’. Keeping in mind, that in addition to doing the objectives, all the while people are just killing each other randomly. It’s fast paced, and frantic, and the variety of each map is a huge refreshing breeze to OMFG ARATHI BASIN AGAIN KILL ME PLZ. The fact that you eventually out-level tier one and are forced to move on to tier two seems to make it fresh, but eventually everyone will end up at tier four and stay there, so I dunno how fresh those will remain to be. People in general chat complain loudly about being steamrolled by premades, but…. Uhh… that’s kinda the point of this game… to coordinate with your guild and kick everyone’s ass. Unguilded people don’t seem to ‘get’ that, and I’m sure the game is probably 3000% less fun running around alone.

I accepted the first guild invite I got way back at level two (“Bloody Hands” on Anlec), and it surprisingly turned out to be a pretty awesome guild. Guilds earn XP, and actually level up as you get new members, or do quests together. You can even impose a guild tax (ours is 2%) and every time anyone loots 62 copper off a dead mob, one copper goes into the guild vault. It’s a much better system than begging for (or demanding) donations after a raid, and it’s small enough that it doesn’t matter, but adds up the more members you have. Guilds can also designate Bannersmen that can carry the guild standard into battle and drop it on the ground. The buffs given by the standard range from extra XP given per kill to extra rep gained during quests, and others. Our guild standard currently gives 15% extra influence (or infamy) during Public Quests, and 9% extra XP per kill. We have a guy named White that’s our carrier, and questing with White is the way to go. You can designate five people in your guild as carriers, and if White were to die during a Keep siege taking, the enemy could destroy our banner and we’d be out 2g to buy another one. Banner placement becomes an interesting tactic, as picking it up and moving it isn’t instant, it’s like a 10 second channel.

RvR – Taking Keeps, etc.

I partook in my first (attempted) taking of a keep last night and hot damn… it’s kinda crazy. Again, the soul of the implementation is there. I had a blast, and working together with the guild really builds ties. The framerates, though, suffered horrendously at points, and I can only imagine it’s going to get worse as the struggles get larger. We had about 10 guildies, and a bunch of pugs from the zone filling out a warband (raid), and we tried to take Mandred’s Hold. And failed. Miserably.

Again, organization prevails, as the guild defending the Keep had little trouble fending off what was basically a PUG attack group. The Keep itself is full of NPCs, and a Hero status ‘Keep Lord’. It’s basically like the final push in Alterac Valley. The enemy is trying to screw up your chances of killing the Boss NPC, but there are just way more options available. There are certain spots marked on the ground where various forms of artillery or whatever can be installed. You can’t just throw a cannon on the ground wherever you want, which sucks, but again kind of makes sense because otherwise rich guilds would just buy 800 cannons and it would be impossible for a ‘normal’ guild to ever hold a Keep. But you can install them on these launch pad things, and use things ranging from cannons to battering rams, or vats of hot oil that can be poured on people storming the gate. All these items cost money, and can be purchased from a quartermaster in your town closest to the keep (using guild tax money, hooray).I can see people saying "USE MONEY?! Why would I waste cash on something that's going to be recaptured when I log out?" Because you earn Renown, and renown is a separate leveling system that actually earns you separate stat enhancing talents (think: +HP or +crit%, not new moves, just stat boosts, or new tactics).I'm currently Level 17, Renown Rank 10. I have a few +STR boosting renown points.

Using an item like the cannon gives you a different HUD with a crosshair, and various actions like rolling the mouse wheel will affect how far it shoots, to how hard it hits, or whatever. The Battering Ram I used last night (and failed to take a screenshot of) had four ‘seats’ where people could use it, and once it had people using it they each got a golf swing timer kind of thing on their screen. You’d click to begin the swing, click at max power, and again at the bottom of the swing. Then it would show what each person swung (player 1 hit for 67% of full power, you hit for 32%, the third guy hit 98%), then average out their swings to be the final calculation. Of course you can just whack the front door with your sword to break it down, but using a ram is obviously going to cut that time down to a fraction. Skilled and coordinated rammers will be even faster. All of this is happening while hot oil is being poured down from the ramparts, and people are free to just run up and attack your toon as well while you’re doing all this stuff. It’s crazy.

Once finally inside the place, you still have to contend with getting up the stairs (player collision works), then finally engaging the boss and his body guards, all while suffering harassment from enemy players. I imagine taking a keep that’s completely undefended by players (with just NPC defenders) would be something unto itself, but with enemies present it becomes a real challenge. If those enemies are all coordinated, in vent, and familiar with their ‘keep siege’ roles, it could get hairy. I can’t even imagine what taking a city is going to be like.

There are a few kooky bugs that need to be ironed out (engineer turrets ignore LoS and shoot through walls), and in general framerates go to hell once you get inside the place. This is frustrating for melee, as I’m chasing someone trying to put my snare down, and I’m either too far, too close, or the previously mentioned animation bugs are just rearing their heads. Often, the animation will go off regardless of whether or not the move landed, the only way to really know is to see if the target is actually walking slower or to check debuffs. With the black orc’s gated combat system (have to do move one, before I can do move two, before I can actually do a good damaging move three), this becomes frustrating. Maybe a ‘standing back and nuking’ caster would have a better time of it.

I also find myself just using my tanking gear during PvP, which unto itself is pretty sweet. I’ve been building up two sets of gear, tank and DPS, but actual prot tanks can play vital roles in PvP. I think I’ve mentioned before how they’ve implemented various tanking ideas, but it bears mentioning again.

In addition to tanking’s main stats (toughness and wounds) being applicable to PvP, taunt WORKS. It won’t force anyone to face you, but if they don’t, it’s only doing you a favor. My damage is increased against taunted targets by 30% for 15 seconds, or until they whack me in the face three times. By continuing to ignore me, and go after my healer, they’re only making it harder on themselves. Body collision also works, and in the BGs especially (where frame rates aren’t as bad), there’s very few things as satisfying as physically placing my big black orc ass in between someone trying to go after my pocket healer. I ran with a shaman guildie last night named Cheerup, and the combination of me getting between someone trying to hit him, while they ignored my taunt, was brutal. He’d just start to kite them, and I’d step in between, and they’d stop moving. I could see their little legs going, but they weren’t getting anywhere near Cheer. Strafing from side to side to stay in front of them added a huge element to PvP, and allowed Cheer to get out and heal himself up a bit. It sounds so minor, but it just works.

Anyway. With some work on the engine, and various bugfixes, this is going to be a whole new ballgame. I’m still pretty far from endgame (level 17 of 40 now), but with a good guild this is going to be huge. My guild is big enough that we will be able to pull this kind of stuff off, last night was just my first go at doing any of it. We’ve apparently taken a keep before, it just didn’t come together last night. Participating in RvR or world PvP earns individuals renown points, which is a separate leveling system unto itself. Read this LINK for the full breakdown, I’m not going to retype what’s already there.

This is my second full on endorsement of the game. I still haven’t reached the endgame, but if it keeps up this pace, I can see it replacing WoW for a good chunk of people, and that’s a pretty bold statement to make. I mostly just need to see what the city sacking adds up to be like, and if it’s worth bothering to sack a city, or what.

Stay tuned...

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Warhammer Retail Impressions

I’m prepared to catch hell for this, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. If you go back and read anything I’ve written about Warhammer on this website, you can find in every article a sincere hope that the retail game will come out and be worth playing. That said, in the two days or so I’ve had with the game, I can say pretty honestly that yes, it’s a pretty fun game to play. It isn’t going to beat up WoW and take Blizzard’s lunch money, but in the time I’ve been out of beta they’ve honestly gone through and tweaked enough of the game to make it enjoyable.

I’m playing a Black Orc who isn’t high enough for talent points yet (level 9 atm), and has admittedly seen very little of the world. I played a Black Orc in my time with beta, and back then it was painfully apparent that they had a ridiculously long way to go before the game would be something viewed as entertainment instead of punishment. A few gripes still stand, but overall, I would give the final product a thumbs up.

Let’s take a look at some of the expectations I had from last article, and see how they held up.

Playability (including stability, frame rates, and graphics): The game is playable. I honestly don’t think I’ve actuallly crashed out of the game yet, although there’s a pretty obvious memory leak that slowly sucks up resources the longer you play. Framerates start good (XP SP2, AMD Phenom 9850 2.5Ghz Quadcore, 2GB RAM, Geforce 8800 GTX 512 VidCard, Asus M2N-Sli Deluxe Mobo), and slowly begin to drag downward. Playing it on my laptop (Toshiba Satellite p105-9889, Core2Duo 7200 2.0 Ghz, 2GB Ram, Nvidia GeforceGo 7900GS 256 MB Vid) requires throttling the settings a bit, and there are a few wonky settings in the graphics panel that don’t seem to work. Trying to turn off some advanced lighting effects gives a mouseover that “checking this option might not take effect immediately” and I couldn’t even get the checkbox cleared at all. There are some areas on the borders of maps where the game slows to a crawl horrifically; I imagine that it’s starting to spool data for the adjoining zone or something, but it’s something that never happens in WoW (passing from The Barrens into Ashenvale, for example). Also, there seems to be a “spooky cave” lighting effect they throw out when you go into caves that just drags my desktop rig and laptop both to slide show status for a good ten seconds. Maybe my eyes just need to adjust. Also, while I haven’t explicitly crashed out of the game, the client refuses to just quit. Every time I’ve gone and logged out for the evening the game just kills my system and refuses to quit. Even when I get back to the desktop, the WAR little window is sitting on my taskbar, refusing to let me use the start menu or whatever until I try to kill the task over and over, and finally just give up and restart or shutdown.

Graphics wise, it looks good. Not spectacular, but good. I like the characters themselves, but some monsters just look half-assed. There were some horrendously textured and animated monsters in beta, and it’s good to see that those were placeholders for the most part. So far nothing has made me crap my pants with awesomeness, but overall it seems decent. Some of the bigger monsters like trolls or Public Quest NPCs look pretty bad actually, and maybe they’ll just be fluffed up later. This isn’t beta anymore, though, and bad looking mobs kinda jar the immersion overall. When my character runs and jumps, he actually looks like part of the world, which as I type doesn’t sound like it makes much sense. For some games, though, the NPCs and backgrounds don’t really look like they match… like one team was designing and texturing the world, and another team on the opposite side of the world was in charge of characters, and when you lay one on top of the other, it feels… well it just doesn’t look right. WAR seems to have a common unity bringing everything together, so that’s good. I’ve always applauded WoWs distinct art direction. WAR seems to be trying to pull it off as well, but it’s just not at the same level.

Obviously there are some kinks to iron out... I think this is water?

Animation wise, ehhh… they seem to have some Level of Detail thing going where if a group of guys is fighting 20+ yards away, it trims the animation cycles down to give you a better frame rate. That’s good for framerates I guess, but you end up seeing a group of guys fighting on a bridge, and everyone involved looks like animated gifs with 2 frames cycling over and over. It’s wonky. The spell animation bugs I mentioned in the last post are still there, but I’m playing a melee class so it isn’t as readily apparent. I do have a few ability animations, and they do get knocked out of sync from time to time, but I think I’d be more upset about it as a spell caster.

Combat. It’s been tuned up. My main gripe with the beta in general was how lame combat felt. Every class I played seemed to have one button, and you’d just spam it over and over. It left me wanting to play on an NES Advantage with turbo on the A button. On my black orc, it’s somewhat improved, but there’s still a monotony to combat that I’m hoping will disappear as I get more skills, but looks like it won’t. With the black orc, you have a thing kind of like combo points that won’t allow you to do a certain move until you’ve done a different move before hand. In that sense, it’s more like ‘gates’ than combo points. You start out with “no plan” and do a level 1 move that gives you a “gud plan”. From gud plan, you need to do a level 2 move to give you “da best plan”, with unlocks level 3 moves. So far for me, I have two level 1 moves, so I can pick which one will put me into the next mode. I have two level 2 moves now, and two level 3s (just got my new level 3 before logging out last night. Assigning these letters, I can basically perfom combos like a,b,c / a,B,c / A,B,c / A,b,C. Everything I do in combat starts with “a or A”, then goes to “b or B” etc etc etc. It feels better than just doing AAAAAAAAAAA, but still doesn’t translate into very much variety. Add to that that one of my ‘b’ moves requires a shield which I stopped wearing in favor of a 2h, one of the ‘a’ moves gives a minor buff (used at beginning of combat, and then not again for 20 sec), and one of my ‘c’ moves is a gimpy AoE instead of a direct attack for higher damage, and combat is pretty much A,b,c,a,b,c,a,b,c,a,b,c. Yeah. Black Orc. Woo. Haven’t tried any other classes yet, we’ll see…

RvR / Public Quests. Again, I hate to write anything on this game without having spent a lot of time in the PvP side of things, because that’s where the game’s focus is, but I can only comment on what I’ve personally seen. If I play the game for two months to write a first impressions thing, it defeats the point.

I’ve done a few public quests, and a few scenarios (battlegrounds), but haven’t gone off to storm the castle yet since I’m still just level 8. The public quests seem very similar to what I saw in beta. The concept is there, but whether or not people take part in them is going to be the biggest deciding factor in whether or not they succeed as a concept. The very first one I came across had a bunch of people playing it, because it was opening weekend in the starting zone. After passing into zone two, and finding about 3 of these spread out around the map, I saw less and less actual groups tackling them. The groups in Warhammer are public, unless you specifically block out joiners, so you can just mash yourself into a group if you see people doing a public quest. Even if their group is set to private, you can just go along with the flow of action and contribute, and you’ll be given a chance to roll at the end. The rolling system itself is kind of interesting, and the loots they distribute bear commenting.

If you partake in public quests all day long, and keep getting screwed out of loot by bad rolls, the system recognizes this, and will boost your roll accordingly. If you stand around AFK in a public quest zone, you will also not receive any ‘participation’ bonuses. The more you do, the higher your initial roll will be. Then your ‘I got screwed the last two PQs’ bonus gets tacked on, and you end up with some 4 digit number. The chest that spawns contains loot bags of varying uberness, from white bags containing silver and vendor trash, to green ones with (surprise) green items, to later blue and purple bags containing rares and epics. Usually the system breaks it down like ‘this quest awards 5 green bags and 2 whites’ and if you place in the top seven after rolls go out, you get a bag out of the chest. Even if you die at the last instant before the quest completes, you still see your roll happening, but you have to make it back in time to loot the chest or your bag disappears when the public quest resets and starts again (as I found the hard way last night, by about 5 seconds).

...looking inside one of the loot bags, you can choose one reward from a few choices inside.

The rewards inside these bags usually match up pretty cleanly to your infamy rewards. Infamy is a special kind of rep that gets shared between PQs of the same chapter. Chapter one is the very first starting zone, two being ‘across the bridge in zone #2’ etc. Within each chapter, there are usually a few PQs to be found, and so if you get sick of doing the same one over and over, you can do do a different one and bring your points with you. After earning infamy, there’s an infamy vendor in town that will give (not sell) you items based on what level you attained. It’s usually 3 tiers of rep, first tier being a pot, second being a piece of armor, and third being a weapon or whatever. The interesting thing to note is that the PQ chest loot usually is the exact same level of gear as your rep reward. You could convievably get lucky on your first PQ in the zone, and get a piece of gear out of the chest that’s the same (basically) as the tier 3 level of what you’d keep doing the quest over and over to earn the hard way. In this way, you’re guaranteed the loot. If you suck for rolls you can just do the PQ 5 times over. If you get lucky, don’t bother doing it anymore, as you already have the reward. It’s kind of a nice system, I think.

You get unlocks in your tome by ding each PQ in the area, so I’ve already begun to see completionists trying to egg the group that finished PQ1 to go with them across the zone to ‘do the other one now!’ etc.

You get unlocks for doing ANYTHING. Seeing a wolf, dying ten times, blowing your nose...

Scenarios are like loose battlegrounds. I say loose, because the one I’ve done is pretty basic ‘cap three zones and hold them while the timer ticks’. I only see these getting tougher as time goes on, and people learn the quirks of each one. There are bunches in the game, so maybe they aren’t as well thought out as Arenas / BGs, or maybe Blizzard is just lazy and hates us. Overall, combat in them is fast paced zerg tactics. I’d be really interested to see a coordinated group go at it with vent etc, but the only ones I’ve been in are zero communication chaos madness while everyone just tries to nuke everyone else at the same time. Fun, but shallow. Once I get my hands on actual RvR, with the taking of keeps and everything, I can see that being meaty enough (or not) for an article unto itself. I just haven’t done it yet. I rolled on an Open server, which is supposedly the PvP of WAR, and have been steamrolled once or twice by 5 man groups, but haven’t actually partaken in any real RvR yet. I’ve had four quests to go ‘scout these towers’, but the zones were totally empty save for a few random scrubs. Either the whole headstart set of people outleveled me, or no one is bothering with RvR yet. I seriously just walked straight into the middle of the RvR zones, scouted the towers, then just turned around to go turn the quests in. All the towers were already controlled by my team, so it may have been different if the enemy controlled them. I came across two people, and they attacked me until they realized I might win, and then they ran off to the ‘guard NPCs’ and stood around regenning health while /taunt-ing me. Zzzzz.

The map shows where quests can be done without needing an Addon.

If I had to sum it up in a sentence, I’d just say go get a copy and check it out. That’s an endorsement, as with Age of Conan I’d just tell you to not bother. I’m going to be checking it out over the next few weeks, and it will be interesting to see once the world at large has their hands on it (I’ve been playing the preorder headstart). The beta was awful during the time I played it. I’m sure the comments section will fill up with I TOLD YOU SOs by jackasses that never had the game back then, and still haven’t even played it now. I kept hoping they’d make it work, because I’ve wanted something not-WoW for a while now, and with the kid at the apartment, having something a step down from end game raiding is nice. Once you’ve been there, you can’t go back to being a casual, but RvR sounds more like something you can throw an hour at whenever you feel like it, and still have it feel like you got something done.

Hooray.

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Warhammer Expectations

I don’t have the game yet, and haven’t played it since I was famously booted from beta for breaking the NDA in a pretty long rant that got some attention here on NotAddicted. That said, they have my money already, and I’m eagerly looking forward to playing it again tomorrow when I get into the preorder head start thing. I’ve been combing forums in the meantime trying to figure out if the game is living up to the hype so far, and this article will be a summary of what I feel I can realistically EXPECT from an MMO backed in funding by the world’s biggest gaming superpower, and created by a non-newcomer to the genre. I think it’s fair to say this isn’t the entry to the market by Ted and Sally from down the street working out of their basement.

1) First and foremost, I expect the game to function properly. More and more often, with each release of a new MMO, people seem to be expecting a bug riddled piece of trash for the first few months. Why we’ve grown so complacent in this genre really doesn’t make much sense. If a game doesn’t work until the third month after release, it should have been released in March instead of January. People on Warhammer forums are still asking if there’s going to be another magical patch after-the-headstart-and-before-public-release. I think two days before the official release is a little late to be hoping for bugfixes. Yes, there will be patches. That’s expected, but I don’t get it… is EA so strapped for cash after the release of Madden 09 that they need to push their huge triple-A MMO title out before it’s done? Is it too much to expect a final product?

2) I expect combat to work. Saying ‘work’ is setting the bar pretty low, and I won’t complain TOO MUCH if it at least works. Again, EA and Mythic aren’t exactly new to gaming, and this isn’t a new genre they’re blazing trails in. WARhammer is pretty much WoW (which was pretty much EQ, etc etc), with a few changes to gameplay mechanics. If these new mechanics are slightly kinky, and need some ironing out, fine. But when I set forth into the wild to slay my first “Small Brown Rat”, I expect things like spell animations to fire correctly. I bring up spell animations in particular, because there’s a pretty detailed movie I’ve seen from the very latest build that seems to indicate when a spell animation finishes casting has no relevance whatsoever to when the spell actually fires. There are even haste effects you gain as you play that speed up spell casting by 20% per rank, and while the 80% rank correctly throttles the animation speed (assuming you don’t get interrupted or pushed back), once you hit 100% haste (instant cast) it bonks back down to the original spell cast speed. Wonky.

Quote from an interesting thread from NutellaGrande (with 13,000+ views) over at warhammeralliance.com:

This problem occurs becuase WAR's cast animations are static, while WoW's cast times are dynamic (due to pushback from damage). In WoW, every race/class has their own cast animation, its the same for every spell, it can go on indefinitely before the spell fires, and its exactly the same throughout. Whether your uninterrupted frostbolt is 2.5 seconds or your LOLFELHUNTER frostbolt is 12 seconds, your frostyhands are there until the castbar finishes, and your frostbolt goes off.

In WAR, each spell has its own separate animation, and its timed to end when the base cast time of the spell ends. What do you get when your cast time is increased by a second? a second delay between the firing of your frostbolt and when your frostbolt spell finishes, throwing your brain off, and making it look clunky.

The guy has a pretty clean hi-rez video posted on FileFront, which I’ve gone and re-hosted on YouTube so you can actually watch it, instead of just getting Server Full errors all day long.

Read his thread, and watch the video. Yeah. Some people seem to recommend pushing buttons slower, giving you time during combat to "think, respond, and have a sip of soda". Hmm... sipping soda during PvP sounds intense!

3) I can hope to expect engaging PvP. I’ve said time and time again that I am not an Arena Junkie, never ground out High Warlord over the course of two years, and don't really give a crap about things like battlegrounds. THAT SAID, this game is touting PvP as the big difference between it and WoW. WoW’s end game revolves around 25 man PVE raids, while Warhammer is supposedly a climb to the level cap to fight each other. I know the climb itself will be tedious. I don’t expect to shudder in ecstasy while reading quest dialog boxes. The end itself should at least partially

Okay. Let me stop that sentence there. I began to type “the end itself should at least partially resemble this ‘war is everywhere RvR woot woot’ they’ve been hyping for years’ and then there I was back at my first point up above. The game shouldn't be ‘at least partially’ anything. It should hit that nail square on the head. That has been their main hyping point for the game since we’ve heard about it, and they’ve had over three years to work that out. I’m sick of hoping for ‘some of what they promise’. I want all of it. I’m the customer. If I see a Big Mac poster outside a McDonald’s, go in and order one, and only receive a half eaten moldy bun, I’d be like ‘what the hell is this crap?’ and demand my money back. We’ve already accepted that there are no refunds for software somewhere along the line for god knows why. To now install that software and only find 1/3 of the code in place just seems silly.

WAR IS EVERYWHERE! has been pounded into our heads since this game was announced. It makes me wonder then, why the two server rulesets are so confusing. ‘Core’ and ‘Open RvR’ sound an awful lot like ‘Normal’ and ‘PvP’ for WoW, but it isn’t really the case. Core requires that you flag yourself for RvR or be found to be off-limits for world PvP, while Open has the flag always on. Okay, so far so good, but now if a higher level toon goes back to a lower tier area of the map, they get turned into a chicken, are able to be one shotted by anyone, and then respawn on the other side of the zone.

People are applauding this as the end of ganking by higher level toons, but I really don’t get it. Getting steamrolled by bored 70s while you level in STV is part of playing on a PvP server. If you don’t like it, ROLL PVE. I recently went back to Goldshire on my hunter to grind out 7 or 8 quick super lowbie quests to hit exalted with Stormwind on my Draeni for the horse mount. Something like this won’t be physically possible on an Open RvR server in Warhammer. Once you leave the zone, there’s no going back, but they have this whole Tome of Knowledge thing that you’re supposed to fill out to earn extra abilities.

This is conjecture. I haven’t played yet. We’ll see how it turns out, but when you see Famous PvP guilds like the Something Awful’s Goon Squad from Mal’Ganis saying they’ll be rolling on Core servers because the Open rule set is ‘retarded’ it kinda makes you wonder. I intend to roll on an Open server first to see how it works, and if I find myself being turned into a chicken for engaging in world PvP then we’ll know that WAR IS SOMEWHERE, BUT NOT RIGHT THERE, OKAY?

I always end my Warhammer rants with the sincere wish that the game turns out to be fun. I’m just sick of WoW. It’s the best game available right now, and there’s plenty in it that I haven’t done (and probably never will), but it’s time for something new. I want to move on to a new game with new toons and new locations. I hope Warhammer fits the bill. Stay tuned, as I officially get underway tomorrow. I’ll probably have a solid “first impressions” up by the weekend at the latest.

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I Hope You Play MMOs For YOU...

...because no one else gives a shit if you stop. Don't think otherwise. I mean, it seems pretty obvious, but I think sometimes we lose track of that. Here’s a funny little story. I played WoW since retail release way back in February of 1987. Back then Franklin Roosevelt was president, Vietnam had just ended, and although the Great Depression was just getting started, WoW was fun and exciting, and I really had a good time playing it. MMOs were a whole new can of worms, and I would happily slay wolves all day looking for those oh-so-elusive wolf noses. I played with a roommate, then joined a guild, then stayed with that guild for a while. None of this is news. It’s not even remotely interesting. I KNOW. SHUT UP.

A funny thing happened, though, on May 20th 2008. My account, which I had logged over 8 zillion hours on and had three level 70 ‘mains’ (lol alts are for noobs) got banned because I began to tire of the grind associated with raiding, and finally just downloaded Glider one day and set that shit up to run while I slept, yo!

Hm.

Blah blah blah, tried finding a new game (Age of LoLnan), that didn’t work, and eventually got given a new WoW account from a friend. In my teary eyed naiveté I was like GOLLY! I GOT A NEW LEASE ON (my lack of a) LIFE! I’VE CERTAINLY LEARNED MY LESSON. I’M GONNA PLAY WOW LIKE I USED TO, AND ENJOY THE GAME FOR WHAT IT IS! Except now I had no one to play with anymore, and playing MMOs ‘alone’ blows. My guild that was just starting to tackle Archimonde in Hyjal was busy doing what raiding guilds do, and when I looked up my roommate from oh so long ago, he had crossed over and was now playing alliance side on a PVE server. This will be fun! I’ve never played alliance, so everything will be NEW! Woo here I go new class new race new everything, ready set commence!

Except my friend still lives in America, and I’m stuck playing the entire grind from 1 to 70 while the rest of the server sleeps. Even the gold spamming bots don’t play when I’m on. It reminds me why I stopped playing with him in the first place, after moving to Japan. This shit sucks, and even if I wanted to xfer my now 62 hunter to another server, it’s fucking alliance side on PVE. Gralgahagahrlahalrag. Have you ever been in a BG with Alliance? I'm not saying they're bad, it's like they just figure they're going to lose, and so refuse to put forth effort accordingly.

But why should I keep plugging away, alone on the server, for the day my hunter is 70, if the only light at the end of the tunnel is raiding Kara again with my roommate’s guild on my-Saturday-morning-his-Friday-night? I suppose in the end I’ll at least have a (PVE server alliance) level 70 hunter to play with in Wrath?

Druids, rogues, and warriors all seem like the classes I’m most interested to play again in Wrath, though, because those were the three I actually used to play in a somewhat high level (tier 5ish) before they all got banned. At this point, there’s very little incentive to log in and play, so I’m left wondering what it is I’m playing for again. In the end, I’m really not. I go to the arcade and play Street Fighter 4 (or save a few bucks and play an older version on MAME), just chill with the kid, or soak up Japanese programming on TV. 62 was a milestone for the hunter (Steady Shot, woo woo), but now that I’ve reached it, seeing the Outlands stretching out before me looks more like a pain in the ass than “the final stretch to 70”.

The next big thing has got to be Warhammer, it certainly wasn’t Conan. In the meantime, I’ll probably just see about botting one of each class back up to 70. I keep feeling like I’m reaching the edge of my threshold for suffering through games, and it isn’t even my job to do so. The guys at GameSpot or whatever are supposed to suffer through them. As a hobby, why is ours so hateful? Reading books or watching movies is rarely as painful as the grind to 70. I honestly can’t be fucked doing it all over again, and I’ve reached the point (again) that if the new account gets banned, it’s just as well anyway.

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Man's Best Friend

There’s a dog that lives next door. His name is “Bz”, pronounced like a swarm of insects that wants to sting you. Bz is a small dog that, as far as I can tell, stays locked in a cage for twenty four hours a day, and only exists on this planet to annoy me. He barks and barks and barks, and sometimes even makes little guttural snarling noises like he really wants me dead. This would be horribly amusing if it weren’t so annoying for two reasons: I’ve never seen him out of the cage, and even if he were to escape and try to attack me, I could just step on him, suffering minor injury to my ankle. Probably the act of stepping would pose more of a threat to my ankle’s well being, as this dog is roughly the size of a football, and wouldn’t require any Holy Hand Grenades to vanquish.

The dog is doing its job, I suppose. By alerting the Fujisawa house that a big ugly foreigner is putting on his scooter helmet, or bringing groceries up to his apartment, he is earning his keep. The problem is that Bz never shuts the fuck up, so I really doubt that the Fujisawas even pay attention to him anymore. I’ve developed a fantasy scenario in my head, and each time Bz launches into a new tirade, a new chapter is developed. It basically boils down to me infiltrating the Fujisawa household, and killing everyone inside. Bz would probably go into nuclear meltdown mode were I to cross from the carport to their actual property, but I doubt anyone inside the house would even register his ferocious yapping any more than they do now. Then I could just come outside, drenched in blood and stand over Bz’s cage laughing the maniacal overlord laugh of one whose plan has come to full fruition. Then I’d let him starve to death in his cage, knowing that even though he tried his best to warn them of their impending doom, they ignored him, because he’s such an annoying shit for the other 6 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes of every week.

God I fucking hate dogs.

Maybe I'll expound more on it later, but even typing this up is making my blood pressure rise. I need a beer, Christ.

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