Category: Warhammer Online

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The Ettenmoors

I can’t really go back. To a great extent, Warhammer’s open world RvR is everything the Ettenmoors wanted to be and is not. It is not greatly difficult to mentally transpose Order and freeps, Destruction and creeps, and see how (shock shock) PvP works out better in a game built for it. Compare the creep Defiler with the Greenskin Shaman: even the names are similar, but the Shaman is a much more fun, viable class. Would you rather play a Reaver or a Marauder? I had more examples here, but I am already losing the people who have not played both games.

One way that The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume One: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ wins is if you think of creeps as “playing the monsters,” rather than being their own thing. If you just want players being a more realistic AI, where the real market is the freep classes, monsters work brilliantly. They even replicate the PvE mechanics: they have high hit points (and can trait for “ridiculously high”), few abilities, few appearance differences, large numbers, and little resistance to crowd control. They respawn quickly and tend to trickle in at a constant rate, although occasionally you get a huge train. You can easy pull a few, because people will rush out and be easy kills, although you risk pulling the entire zerg if you do that a few times. Healing still draws aggro, although the de-taunt abilities do not work in PvP. Players can capture and defend keeps, but if people wander off, the monsters quickly return things to the “all red” default state. And just like the tutorial, beginning creeps are easy fodder, weaker than all the real players.

You can debate whether that is the intended “monster play” implementation. The NDA for The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ fell this week, so maybe the PvP changes there are significant. It will take a while for the effects to shake out what with new levels, new gear, across-the-board defenses nerf, etc. How dead with the Moors be for that first month after the expansion releases? (Note to Turbine: the 5-10 page Dev Diaries are really annoying. I don’t want to load a new page every two paragraphs. You don’t have ad revenue, so why are you doing that? I never finished the Runekeeper diary.)

: Zubon

WAR-oboros, take two

I wanted to return to the concept of WAR-oboros because I saw the concept evolve, if only in my own perception, the other night.  The early play was glorious.  I signed on and saw some Tier 3 alliance activity for defending the Keep in Talabecland, Passwatch Castle.  I took it as a sign and flew there immediately while a hearty band of Destruction refused to let the overbearing Order through the second door.  Our vengeance was swift was we pushed the enemy players that refused to flee from the RvR lake all the way back to the other Keep, Stoneclaw Castle.  We decided to sweep all the objectives, and while on our way to the distant Hallenfurt Manor Battlefield Objective a message came up that Stoneclaw Castle was falling.  Over ventrilo I heard Aliens-esque battle cries of my comrades-in-arms dying.  “There must have been 70 Order in there.  My screen was just red text.”  We knew the Order-zerg would be heading to Passwatch Castle for their revenge, and so they did.  There were so many that the second Keep door fell within nearly 1 minute of the outer Keep door breaking open.

While my warband did its best to slow down the horde of Order, another Destruction warband remained in the orclands.  They refused to heed our multiple calls for help; the leader booting one of my guildmates for suggesting that they go fight Order where Order seemed to be.  The leader pronounced with his boot mid-swing that they just wanted to take Keeps.  Vanilla War-oboros mentality.

Bitter from the lack of help from the stupid Greenskins and licking our wounds at Hellfang Ridge Warcamp, the warband started discussing the best way to take on the Order zerg.  It was decided that the best we could do is attack an undefended Keep in the hopes of either being ignored or splitting their zerg into people that wanted to keep attacking and those that wanted to defend their newly claimed treasures.  We could only attack the tail.  It would take a strong leadership to reverse the course of nearly 3 warbands of Order players.  So we retook Passwatch Castle, undefended.  It seemed that Order’s hydra-headed snake would not be easily split.
–Ravious

Funneling WAR

I am going to address something that was said on Warhammer Alliance. Lemming Jesus, in a rather pouty post, said that Warhammer Online was “neither massive nor multiplayer” because the the population was far too split up.  I agree for the mid-levels (but not to the degree of rage-quitting), and suggest a different route.

I would have had ONLY one racial pairing to begin with as the main part of the game.  Tier 1 would remain the same as it is now.  Tiers 2-3 would NOT have any Dark Elf vs. High Elf (DEvHE) or Greenskin vs. Dwarf zones (GvD).  Tiers 2-3 would all be Empire vs. Chaos (EvC) as it is now.  However, Tiers 2 and 3 would have an additional “contested” map (like Prague for Tier 4) between the two current maps.  Then Tier 4 would begin to umbrella back out to include the DEvHE and GvD zones with future released Tier 4 zones focusing on their story and conflict.  In other words, DEvHE and GvD get the shaft with initial content, but later content would go to those racial pairings.  This would kill two birds with one stone by making the mid-level areas have higher population density, and giving more end-game later on.

This is not wholly my idea, as Lord of the Rings Online nearly does the exact same thing (only they don’t umbrella back to the Shire for the end game… yet).  It allows the race to matter in terms of story, and for the player to get a feel for the race.  But, then it elegantly funnels the population together to start moving en masse to the end game.  At the end game you want lots of content, and I think Mythic made a big error in providing so much population spreading content for the slow-moving mid-levels.

For alt-oholics and what not, the three racial pairings with so many zones is fantastic, but it makes for a lot of ghost towns, empty RvR lakes, and sad and lonely public quests whose final Hero boss sits in a dark corner and cries himself to sleep while holding a shrunken dwarf head because no one will ever get to his stage.  It’s too late now, and my hindsight is not even 20/20.
–Ravious

Near Personal Experience

One thing that is really hard to get with pre-created content (as opposed to procedural, personal content of Spore or most roguelikes) is the feeling that you were given a personal experience. That the personal experience you just received was not ground to dust by the masses and posted about on every guidebook and wiki. It was yours.

Mythic Entertainment came awfully close the other night to giving me this experience in an MMO, and the happening definitely through me for a loop. I was running around Talabecland and grinding out quests for Chapter 11 Chaos, when I stumbled around the huge cathedral-building for the public quest Army of Faith. Off in the distance I saw what I thought was a chaos troll fall to the ground. I had seen no trolls of any kind in Talabecland, and was excited with the prospect of taking down a named mob by myself.

As I ran towards the body I saw an out of the way quest icon on my mini-map. It seemed that the NPC hiding behind one of the cathedral pillars knew about the troll… and a young marauder with “a new pair of boots” that was trying to take the chaos troll down. It all came together, and I ran towards the chaos troll to find another corpse underneath. Lord Tzeentch was full of pride when I took the ‘Liberated’ Boots.

The best part was that I saw the chaos troll die. It made no sense at the time, but I didn’t just come upon a corpse that every other player passing through the zone can see. It felt neat that the event happened for me, even if every other player has the ability to experience the same thing.  I hope I come across more chunks of these near-personal experiences.
–Ravious

The Weekend in Warhammer

Is that magnet ability everywhere in tier 4? The Magus and Engineer can get a magnet at level 29, if they put all their mastery points towards it, so you see a bit in tier 3. The magnet, for those who have not seen it, pulls every enemy in 65 feet (“medium range”) to the caster and snares them for 4 seconds. The caster can also hit his AE root immediately, making the snare redundant. 0 casting time with a 20-second cooldown. Have teammates cast AE spells (or location-based AE DoTs before you cast it): 5-10 kills in about 5 seconds. This is awesome if it is on your team. If it is not your team, and the enemy team has two level 30 Magi with the ability… It works through keep walls in open RvR. The only defense is to stay at long range or have high Willpower and hope for a resist.

My Engineer is ~27.5 right now. I get an AE knockback ability at 28, from mastery points, which will only take ~3 hours. I have not had any interesting new abilities except from my mastery tree since level 20, and that one was at 22, so in one sense I am looking forward to that. In another sense, I gave up grinding, so it is a matter of how long it will take me to get around to that. If I am enjoying scenarios, rather than being magnet bait, I could do it in a night. I can get that Electromagnet ability at 29, another 6-10 hours, if I give up my Grenadier tree.

Spam: none.

Mail: I wrote this post while getting items from 4 letters on an alt. According to the State of Game, the mail system was designed to work well as long as very few people used it.

: Zubon

Warhammer After a Month

The RvR is good. The PvE is unexceptional, not particularly inspired or poor. The classes are fun. The US servers and subscription systems seem fine. Bugs, incomplete features, and imbalances still abound. It is a good game that is improving quickly, but it offers little new to the jaded MMO veteran.

I stand by my earlier opinion that Warhammer was the most ready-to-release Yet Another Fantasy MMORPG out there. I then spent the first week of release ranting that good for a YAFMMORPG is still not good. In the sense of polish, that remains true: the game is missing features so basic I never thought to test for them, some things are imbalanced, and others do not work at all.

But what impresses me most about the release of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is the speed with which Mythic has addressed problems. They are working from a relatively solid base, they have a clear understanding of priorities, and they are addressing problems as they come up. Patches are frequent and meaningful. It is still frequently frustrating to be a first-month player, but Mythic is putting together a game that deserves to compete for your gaming dollar. Assuming you like DikuMUD with graphics.

Continue reading Warhammer After a Month

WAR-oboros

Ouroboros is the tail-eating snake of legend; which when used as a symbol it usually represents cyclicality.  It should be the symbol for Open RvR in Warhammer Online, especially in regards to Keeps.  In Warhammer Online, I think the developers really wanted the two snakes (Order and Destruction) to fight head on, but I think the players looked at the eternal snake and decided that “the tail tastes better.”

The tail in this case is an undefended Keep in another racial pairing.  There are six Keeps in Tier 2 and 3, two in each racial pairing (I have not yet been to T4 to experience Open RvR, and so refrain from commenting as of yet).  I have yet to see more than two massive zergs, one Order and one Destruction, in a Tier doing open RvR.  So two snakes have their pick of Keeps to devour.  A warband could wait around and defend a Keep when they think an enemy group is coming, but humans (especially MMO players) want to go the path of least resistance.  In this case, that would be an undefended Keep in a sleepy RvR lake.

The other night a two-warband Destruction group decided to sack Keeps in T3.  There were very few defenders at any of them.  An Order group formed up to attack a Keep we had just finished sacking, moving on to greater glory thereafter.  We went back, successfully defended the Keep, and then a small bit of drama formed.  People didn’t want to stay and defend the Keep anymore.  “Why defend, let Order have it, and we can just take it back.  Rewards (renown and loot bags) seem better that way.”  We sacked four Keeps that night before I crashed.  At the very end, we came upon the Order group that was in the process of sacking one of Destruction’s undefended Keeps in another racial pairing with 1-2 warbands.  We didn’t seek them out.  It was more that our snake ate the tail of the other snake faster.

Tobold recently discussed “moving the cheese” in MMOs to get players to move around.  I honestly believe that for T2 and T3 Keeps (can’t comment on how T4 runs yet) the cheese needs to be moved so that eating the other snake’s head is worth more than just eating it’s tail all night.
–Ravious

Tracking and Displaying

What gets rewarded gets done. Hence the assorted debates about what is counted or not in Warhammer public quests. How are things like taunting, holding aggro, taking damage, buffing, healing, and dealing damage credited? You want to optimize your Skinner box experience.

What gets observed also tends to get done. 10,000 years of evolution is not much, and your primitive brain still wants to make sure that you look good in public, to improve your reproductive odds and reduce the chance of being clubbed. (FYI, despite your brain’s hardwiring on alpha male status, having the best paladin on the server is unlikely to get you laid.) Monitoring increases other-directed behavior, which you know because of how Internet anonymity affects people. If your primitive brain recognizes that others can see you, it will act accordingly, just as it recognizes when it is easy to freeload.

Warhammer scenarios track a few things, reward a few things, and do not show exact connections between them and other factors. You get experience and renown. The scoreboard (at the end or any time during) shows damage dealt, healing dealt, deaths, and kills. It does not show damage received, damage prevented, resurrections, damage increases due to buffs, flag captures, or whether you were strategically useful at all. That last one is hard to measure consistently, but you might imagine how these other measures (or lack thereof) affect behavior. Healers will compete for their scoreboard, as will damage dealers. No one is rewarded for guarding the flag, unless the enemy is throwing itself against yours, in which case the best rewards are for turtling rather than risking an attack on the enemy flag. I get a better reward for healing you than bubbling you. Sacrificing yourself for the team means that you miss out while you wait to rez. And so on. And no one will know that you did anything that does not appear on the scoreboards.

You can be the greatest fielder in baseball, and it will not show up in your statistics. The pitcher gets credit for that. I hope someone is taking those Sabernomics into account.

: Zubon