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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

Guild Wars Mission Melting Pot

After a long hiatus from playing GW PvE (before WAR I signed on for some quick PvP action now and then), I decided to jump back in. Specifically, I wanted to try out the much heralded quest chain called Zinn’s Task, which requires players owning all three campaigns to hunt down some rogue golems.  The first thing you need to do to start the quest chain is get a new hero named M.O.X. and the Golem Training Guide.  The Golem Training Guide works as a book, which you open up and read, and you can enter a training mission by further using the book.  This led me to reminisce on all the different mission mechanics Guild Wars used throughout its nearly complete lifetime.

Guild Wars Prophecies gave us the mission mechanic for Guild Wars, where you entered an instanced story event with objectives and a definite endpoint. These were unlike the vanilla MMO quests that occured in a sandbox-style zone (persistent or not). Missions were vignettes of story, objective, and activity where if you failed a restart was required. For Prophecies, the mission had its own outpost to start from and the mission area was completely designed and used only for that mission.

The later products of ArenaNet slowly shifted the mechanics and definition of a “mission.” In Factions, missions were nearly identicaly to Prophecies, but you could return and explore the area later on without having to enter the mission. In Nightfall, the missions started from an NPC in an outpost instead of being outpost-wide, and although some content was gated by mission completion, much of the time you could explore the zone prior to the mission.

The Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North, had probably the biggest change in mission mechanics, which were nearly the same as Nightfall, except that you couldn’t fail by merely dying and some missions started in explorable areas instead of outposts. If you died you would resurrect at a rez point without the whole mission-story resetting. NPCs were also “unkillable” in that regard (no instant fail from NPC death), but they gained death penalty the same as the players. Then, the Bonus Mission Pack brought us full circle back to Prophecies, where each mission had its own separate zone and if you failed (by dying or an NPC dying) you had to restart completely.

It is interesting how one of their core storytelling mechanics evolved and changed at every step of the way, and leaves the answer wide open as to what Guild War 2’s mission mechanics will be.  Personally, I preferred the Eye of the North style missions the best where there was no insta-fail, but for mission outposts I would prefer something more similar to Prophecies/Factions.—Ravious

Massive Traffic

One complaint about Warhammer has more comments than anything else I have written in months. This must be what it feels like to blog about WoW: people care about the popular games, while I can say anything I want about the lower tiers of games and get three comments.

To make this perfectly general (and have some fun Monday morning excitement), I hereby hate your game. Whatever you are playing, I hate it. Come, rage against me or agree and talk about how much your devs suck. They’re intentionally trying to ruin the game! Because context also sucks, please make up whatever you like about me and use it as an element of your comment.

No, I know what really drives our traffic: Asheron’s Call 2. This will shock some of you, but this post on Asheron’s Call 2 is the most popular thing on the site, rivaling the front page. When it hits 100 comments, I may bake it a cake or something. An AC2 reference in a Warhammer post got more comments than the content of the post itself. This is now the first post in two years in the Asheron’s Call 2 category, and I expect to reap the benefits. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

: Zubon

Our biggest traffic spikes were driven by sites like Reddit or StumbledUpon, so we added the plug-in you might have noticed.

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