Category: Warhammer Online

Maybe you wonder where you are
I don’t care
Here is where time is on our side
Take you there…take you there
We’re on a road to nowhere
– Talking Heads

I was fighting in the Battle at Bittermore when I noticed a trail heading north and west into the mountains. Being more of an explorer than a fighter, I slipped away during the battle and climbed up to the trail to see where it went. Turns out it went nowhere, but yet somewhere.

I saw a lot of rocky mountains. I really explored the space man. As far as my eyes could see, rock and more rock. I also got a little bit lost.

I did recall seeing a bridge, perhaps that would lead me back to civilization. Turned out it only lead to the end of the world. Now what?

Looked like down was the only option left, but it looked so far down to the bottom, assuming there was a bottom. I wasn’t sure that jumping was a good idea after all. Oh well, time to go find out just how far up I was.

I can fly!

No, I can’t.

What is the best way to wrap up an adventure? Killing some rats.

– Ethic

Pretty much the same as ranged DPS anywhere, but I like the turrets and multiple, stacking, instant-cast damage over time (DoT) abilities.

The Engineer’s big class feature is the turret. You get three options: long-range, short-range AE, and medium-range grenade turret. I have not been using that last one much, although I might toy with it. It fires the fastest, with an occasional AE. The short-range one is a flamethrower, although sadly the graphics are fireballs rather than a huge cone of fire unless it gets a good roll. None of these are as game-changing as I might have hoped; the extra damage is nice, and it occasionally pulls adds off you, but most of your offense comes from you. This is not the Lugian Tactician.

Continue reading Engineer at Level 10

Hypothesis: There are far more players interested in RvR on Destruction than Order.

Expected outcomes: Order scenario queues are trivial, while Destruction scenario queues are lengthy. Open-world RvR will be dominated by Destruction. At lower tiers, when scenarios are the dominant method of gaining renown, Order will have an advantage; they will have more practice in each scenario and RvR generally, along with higher renown rank. Leveling will be faster on Order, if you use scenarios to level. In the long run, Destruction will dominate most servers in tier 4, because they will have more active players in RvR in the open world.

Data point: I spent more than an hour in a queue on Destruction, perhaps two hours, without getting into a scenario. I have never waited five minutes on the Order side. After waiting the one to two hours on Destruction, I switched to order, ran seven to ten scenarios in quick succession, and gained two levels.

Corollary: There may be more people interested in Destruction generally. It is the evil faction, really evil not just Horde, and it is a naturally attractive element to the hardcore PvP population in a game that promotes itself as the PvP alternative to WoW. Carebears are more likely to want to be pretty elves with white lions than heavily scarred goblins with biologically improbably squigs.

: Zubon

I made my Shaman the night before retail release. After leveling a bit and connecting with the guild for some public quests and RvR scenarios, we decided to hit open world RvR. By the half-way point, we had a full warband. Smile for the camera, guys!

The night before the game went live, we had almost filled a 75-person Ventrilo server. I am not used to being part of a large guild. It is kind of nice. I have many voices to learn. I may go insane trying to match name to character name (across multiple alts) to blog name.

: Zubon

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