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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

New Chronicles of Spellborn Site

The Chronicles of Spellborn has a new site live that is actually good. It may not be the best of all things, but it has what I want: gameplay information at the top. The game has an odd take on hotkey bars: you get one bar at a time that rotates with each attack. What especially interests me is that they have learned from City of Heroes:

Dress to Impress — What it really means.

  1. Right at character creation, you can choose from a large variety of clothing and armour, i.e. there is no “newbie clothing”. In other words, “you can look cool right from the start”
  2. Pick a ranged and a melee weapon from a vast assortment. Your attacks are based on Skills (like “Slash”). Such Skills can be executed with any melee weapon, be it a long-sword, double axe or dagger. That means, you can freely pick any weapon that looks cool on your avatar. When a Skill is executed, the avatar will automatically equip the designated weapon. E.g. when you use “shoot” the avatar will switch to his range weapon. With the weapon choice, you also determine your visual fighting style (one-handed, one-handed-with-shield, two-hander).
  3. You can wear the weapons and armours in any situation you want, because you can upgrade and customise them. You do not need to switch to uglier equipment because it is “better”. It means that even the short dagger from character creation can become your personal “epic” weapon if you upgrade it with powerful sigils.

: 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

Celebration System

Let’s hit the wayback machine. I don’t just want a ding, I want a lot more. I want an entire celebration system. No more of this “little graphic and audio effect” nonsense. Give me fireworks that shoot 100 meters into the sky along with Ode to Joy, as if this were Peggle. Send a message to my group, the zone, and my guild. Keep a permanent journal on my character that commemorates the moment with a time stamp, what put me over the edge, and a note about how awesome I am. Then have the nearest NPC send me a letter in the mail reminding me of how awesome I am, for the next time I hit a mailbox. And think of some more ways that the game can tell me just how great it is that I leveled. If I hit the level cap, have a statue that looks like me (at least when seen from my client). Ooh, better: have two lines of them along the path to the main castle (or whatever), with the number of statues set to the number of characters you can have on a server. If you cap all your characters, they all see lines of YOU YOU YOU OH SO AWESOME as you ride into the castle.

Also, give me a menu option so I can toggle all that crap off, at least other people’s meaningless ding spam. I mean really, this is all about me, not them.

: Zubon

That statue idea isn’t half bad, really.

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

Exit Survey

I was reminded recently about exit surveys. When you cancel a subscription, some game companies will ask you why, what was missing, etc. This makes sense to me, although it needs to be in the format “Your account has been canceled. Would you please tell us why you are going?” rather than making it seem like the exit survey is a requirement of the process (or worse, actually making it required).

I was surprised that Warhammer had no such survey, but then…

City of Heroes has a survey that was good but has become particularly inapt over time. There is a section asking if various things would help lure you back. About half the list has been implemented, but the question set remains the same. Nothing says “your feedback is important” quite like a survey that is more than a year out of date.

: Zubon

Are you worried that the upcoming Marvel game will distract Cryptic’s attention from City of Heroes? Yes / No / Undecided (Not an actual question.)

Guild Wars Halloween 2008

For a non-subscription game, Guild Wars has some fantastic holiday-like events that run through the year.  My favorite is by far the Guild Wars Halloween festival ith the runner up being the Dragon Festival.

Two of the cities, Lion’s Arch and Kamadan, are completely outfitted with tombstones, skeletons, and other Halloween-themed graphics. The circle of glowing mushrooms by a 2-story witch’s cauldron is a player-favorite meeting place/ dance zone. Farmers kill thousands of the denizens of Tyria (read: raptor babies) for Halloween candy and absinthe drops.

There are two jewels that make this festival rise above the others. First is the appearance of Mad King Thorn and his candy corn soldiers. The Mad King comes every few hours (this year on October 31) to play a deadly game of Simon Says, and hand out a festival hat. For a game that is often criticized as lacking community, this is a great time to meet hundreds of festival goers in the “persistent” cities.

The second jewel, is the one I am most looking forward to: Costume Brawl. Costume Brawl is a random 5v5 PvP game which is an amalgamation of capture point and deathmatch (it most closely resembles Guild Wars Hero Battles without the Heroes). The catch is that each class has a set skillbar. So if you enter as a Paragon, you will share the same skillbar with every other Paragon on the field. It is a great change of pace in a game where the player’s build can be so critical. This year they are adding a new map to the Costume Brawl game.

It will be another great Guild Wars festival, and I fully recommend dusting off your copy of the subscription-free MMO for the fun-filled weekend.
–Ravious