Author: Ethic

I own this little MMO gaming blog but I hardly ever write on it any more. I'm more of a bloglord or something. Thankfully I have several minions to keep things rolling along.
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Fever Pitch

This is what it’s all about. The day before you can first log in to a new MMO. Everyone’s talking about it. People are excited because this is the best game ever. People are holding off because all new MMOs need 6 months to really be ready to play. People are angry because it’s just more of the same old thing.

It’s a fresh start, a new beginning. New adventures with old friends. Old adventures with new friends. Finding a new guild or moving with the old guild. New game mechanics to figure out, or just to figure out they are the same as the old. A new class, a new race, a new sex. What name should I choose? Should I use the old name so people know me right away? What if someone grabs my name before me? Maybe I’ll choose a new name and new identity, I was kind of a jerk in that last game. I think I’ll create a character on each server to save my name. Ah, who cares if someone else gets my name.

What server should I choose? Maybe the first or last alphabetically? Oh I know, I’ll pick the coolest name so I will be on a popular servers. No way, I want a quieter server so I’ll go for the lamest name in the bunch. Nah, I’ll wait until they add a new server and I’ll join that one.

Anyway, for me this is where it all begins. A new game. Whatever you plan to do and wherever you plan to do it, I hope it is everything you had hoped for and more.

– Ethic

Shaman vs Rune-keeper

I’ve been playing a Shaman in Warhammer Online during beta on a regular basis and find the mechanic they use to encourage both healing and damage dealing to be entertaining. How it works is that basically the more damage you do, the more effective your healing spells become and the more you heal your friends, the more powerful your attack skills become. Therefore, the system encourages you to play the balance of damage and healing. No longer are the healers getting yelled at for attacking. It’s all part of the design and I find it quite fun.

Now along comes the Rune-keeper in Lord of the Rings Online. This is one of the new classes coming out with the Mines of Moria expansion. The thing that caught my eye here is a system called Attunement. The Rune-keeper is also a healer/damage dealing hybrid like the Shaman, but in this case Turbine has appeared to flip the design over. The more damage you do, the better you get at doing damage. The more healing you do, the better you get at healing. It seems to actually discourage you from filling both roles. Instead, I guess you must pick one role or the other before you start the fight. I can’t tell at this point if one will be more fun than the other but I plan to create a Rune-keeper when the expansion launches to test the class. My gut tells me the Shaman will be more fun, but I could be wrong.

– Ethic

Warhammer Public Quests Problem

A while back I read at The Cesspit and Nerfbat about some issues Warhammer Online will face. One quote:

Too many parts of Warhammer’s core design are strictly dependent on keeping a fine balance on the number of players participating, and so vulnerable. It’s not about PQs only. It’s about PQs, faction balance in open RvR, issues of overcrowding and depopulation in all the parts of the game. The *fun* strictly depends on that fine balance, to keep all the options viable at all times, and to keep the single option fun without suffering overcrowding or depopulation.

I hadn’t really seen it as an issue until it slapped me in the face last night. I was playing on the side of Order in the lower levels and the first two Public Quests I participated in could not be completed. There just was not enough people to take on the spawning mobs and people would not bother coming back if they got killed. I tried several times and eventually I got to the point that I would just slip into the PQ area and look at the quest progress to see if the mobs are being killed fast (the first phase is usually something like kill 25 somethings). If the numbers didn’t go up quick, I knew there was not enough playing and moved along – thus feeding into the problem more.

I’d hate to see what the early PQ’s look like a year from now (not to mention the even larger related problems mentioned in the quote above) if they don’t make some changes to address this.

– Ethic

Full Disclosure

We have not, do not and will not accept free product, subscriptions, advertising, or any related items from any game company. We feel that any payment of any sort creates doubt in the readers’ minds about our opinions being honest. Rest assured that all opinions stated on this site are our own opinions, no influence will be accepted or tolerated.

– Ethic

Ethic turns down money all the time. I’ve seen the e-mails. I’m just not important enough to be bribed. [Update: someone once offered me an exclusive screenshot.]

: Zubon

Warhammer Online: Biggest Failure Ever

Not.

I’m really getting a kick out of reading all the reviews for Warhammer Online. People hate it, people love it. It’s funny. There has not been any real significant change in the MMO industry since Day 1 and yet still people expect each game to be the one to change it all. These are games. If they are fun, play them. If not, don’t. Why get your panties in a bunch because there is a new game available? Check it out if you want.

Continue reading Warhammer Online: Biggest Failure Ever

The WoW Killer

There will never be a “WoW Killer” simply because WoW itself was unable to kill any of the big MMOs in existence when it launched. If big bad WoW couldn’t kill when it launched, why would we think something new would be able to kill WoW? And why do we want to kill WoW anyway? I like to have options.

– Ethic

WAR Beta Impressions

I’m not interested in writing a bunch of stuff that will likely be covered by several other sites so instead I’m just going to write a little about the impressions I got from playing in the Warhammer Online beta.

First off, the game was not nearly as polished as I had hoped. It had plenty of weird bugs and glitches including the “crash to desktop”. It was not unusual to attack something and watch it run around trying to find a path to you. Messages appeared on the screen telling you that you are out of range of something even though it is standing in front of you. Many of the classes really did nothing for me at first glance. I almost felt like I had to choose the class that was the least boring. The level of graphics was restricted to a level that made it hard to enjoy at times. So all in all, it was not the perfect game ready to take the world by storm.

Continue reading WAR Beta Impressions