Month: September 2008

Warhammer seems to have decided that players need to scroll through and clickwrap-sign one useless, unread document per login, rather than two. This is intended to be a fig leaf for court action, despite Mr. Jacobs’s explicit statement that they do not expect players to read it every time. I will leave you to Lum for discussion and commentary, including links to meta-drama (what the blogosphere is all about).

Instead, I was curious about how many lifespans will be consumed by this click-through that will never benefit anyone, except the legal bloggers who explain why that argument did not work in court. The original stated plan was to waste thirty seconds per player per day (see the link), so the new plan is fifteen. There may be some plus or minus for a variety of factors, but I am going to hand-wave that away and assume it is a wash. You skip some days, you crash a lot some days, your graphics card is choking today, whatever. Fifteen seconds per player per day: how long until that consumes an entire lifespan?

Or, since this is the blogosphere, Mythic, how many people have you killed today?!!!?!

Life expectancy in the United States is 77.8 years. With eight hours of sleep per day, the average waking lifespan is 77.8*365.25*16*60*60= 1,636,787,520 seconds. Dividing by 15, it will take 109,119,168 player-days to have an entire lifespan spent scrolling and clicking. If Warhammer is a modest success with 100,000 subscriptions, this will consume one lifespan every three years. Warhammer has shipped 1.5 million units, which would take 72 days to consume a lifespan, so the time included with those boxes will get us almost half-way to the first one.

I like the “1/3 years/100,000 subscribers” calculation. That seems easy to multiply. If Warhammer gets 300,000 subscribers, it wastes an entire human lifespan per year on the scroll-and-click-through.

You can also argue about MMOs in general wasting human lifespans.

: Zubon

I know I have a post somewhere about how many lifespans a bug taking x minutes/player/day would consume, but my search fu is failing my tonight. Sleepy.

A great thing in the Warhammer lore is that the dark elves really are that evil. Everyone is violent if not genocidal, but the dark elves get a category of their own.

Most of it involves slaughtering peaceful high elves. Look, they are lining up for honorable combat; to the siege weapons! A graveyard full of mourners; free ambush chance! A tower of poets and researchers; kill them all! The public quests really felt right: slaughter the people who are just standing there, wait for someone to come check on them, then gank him too. Knock over some pillars while you’re there. I know that most of the game is fighting the other side, but it is about assaulting a keep, fighting back an assault, or at least hitting opponents who were asking for it. Dark elves raid temples because they like kicking nuns in the face.

Just to make sure you know you are in high elf lands, there are unicorns early on. *stab* Take the Butchering trade skill for extra credit.

A quest involves poisoning someone on your side. Showing off his magnificent bastard stripes, your contact then sends you to plant evidence that he did it. Your commander knows that his best poisoner would not be so sloppy as to drop his gloves during an assassination, so you are sent to kill the guy who seemed most likely to frame the guy who framed himself.

Oh, and that graveyard? Right-click to detonate the mourners’ flowers. You gain nothing for it, there is no reward or reason: you are just blowing up their flowers.

: Zubon

Last night in Warhammer Online felt like a waste of time. Being in a limited head start really kind of sucks. There is not enough people playing. I ran around to 5 or 6 public quests and it was like a ghost town. Nobody around, at all.

I rolled up a Warrior Priest (check out them boots!) and decided to level up some before I join a scenario or enter the RvR areas. I pushed him up to rank 6 by doing quests and I have to say the class bored the heck out of me. Assuming I now know all about this class (kidding), I will be abandoning him as my main. I really enjoyed playing the Bright Wizard with my wife on Sunday so I think I am going to switch the Warrior Priest over to our duo and use the Bright Wizard as my new main character.

I’m hoping the second group of head start folks playing will make the public quests useful and I still have yet to do any RvR stuff. Long overdue for that.

– Ethic

The Warhammer Online Collector’s Edition head start began yesterday and since I still had a functioning CE head start code on my account (I had canceled the order) I was able to play. The following is a summary of my adventures on day one.

I had to work in the morning but I thought I’d try to reserve names before I had to leave. Found out the start was delayed for a few hours. Off to work. Spent all day at work reading about people having long queues and other issues. Finally, time to go home.

Continue reading Ethic in WAR, Day One

As the Warhammer Online Open Beta winds to a close, it is easy to look back over the relatively short development cycle with all its ups and downs, and form an evaluation of Mythic’s performance from start to finish.   My opinion?  Excellent, although your milage may vary.

One thing is certain…   Mythic moved the game to Open Beta, and unlike the vast majority of their peers, they remained committed to continuing the testing, polish and development of the game.   While many game studios often will say ‘forgive us it’s only Beta’ and yet the bugs persist and go unfixed, Mythic tweaked, patched and improved nearly every single day.

I had a tremendous amount of fun, and I just wanted to thank all of the hard workers at Mythic who have given us long hours, commitment and who have poured their blood, sweat and tears into this project, so that we may have a world to lose ourselves for a while, and share wondrous adventures with our friends.

When the dust settles, raise a pint, take a long nap, and be proud of your accomplishments!

~Cyndre

I’m still not sure if I want to play a sequel to World of Warcraft with a team-PvP focus. I passed on the first one.

: Zubon