WAR - another newsletter - more RvR, less sport PvP

[Jayce]

Please don't break out "chief", chief.

Oops! 

[Arthur_Parker]

Mordred and Andred sucked because premade groups constantly ran through and killed people who were respawning at the bind stone in town. Groups tore through the towns because that's where they knew the players were most easily found. People got tired of that and quit, so the server populations tanked.

When designing an FFA PVP environment you always need to provide some safe havens for people, and provide them with enough resources to continue the war.  Modred/Andred failed to do this, AC Darktide, and Shadowbane failed to do this.  As a result all three of those environments tanked.

Not to disagree, but I believe Darktide's population rose steadily in the first couple of years.  I'd guess the lack of safe havens there was somewhat offset by the large game world and a portal transportation system that made some areas more easily defended.

[waylander]

Mordred and Andred sucked because premade groups constantly ran through and killed people who were respawning at the bind stone in town. Groups tore through the towns because that's where they knew the players were most easily found. People got tired of that and quit, so the server populations tanked.

When designing an FFA PVP environment you always need to provide some safe havens for people, and provide them with enough resources to continue the war.  Modred/Andred failed to do this, AC Darktide, and Shadowbane failed to do this.  As a result all three of those environments tanked.

Not to disagree, but I believe Darktide's population rose steadily in the first couple of years.  I'd guess the lack of safe havens there was somewhat offset by the large game world and a portal transportation system that made some areas more easily defended.

Darktide was pretty popular during the first year and a half, but it ultimately died off as a handful of powerful groups dominated all the good areas.  Newbies who came to Darktide in later days were driven off the server due to the lifestone camping. Andred and Mordred were popular too at first, but died out within the first year.

The moral of the story is that FFA environments can work if there is at least a couple of spots that are safe and provide the player with the basic resources they need to continue playing.

[BigBlack]

Darktide was pretty popular during the first year and a half, but it ultimately died off as a handful of powerful groups dominated all the good areas.  Newbies who came to Darktide in later days were driven off the server due to the lifestone camping. Andred and Mordred were popular too at first, but died out within the first year.

This is not at all what killed Darktide.  Lifestone 'camping' doesn't even exist in AC, for starters, because you get 5 minutes of immunity after every death; you only die once when you recall to your lifestone, and one death is nothing.  Gives you plenty of time to get the hell out of dodge.  There were hundreds of lifestones in AC, at all levels of obscurity, and people had no problem living out in the boonies as they learned how to handle themselves, make alliances, etc.  There were always a ton of 'good areas' in AC, nobody was quitting due to a lack of opportunities for advancement.

What killed Darktide was the introduction of personalized safe zones, via housing, especially guild housing -- which made fighting over towns largely obsolete.  The growing number of recalls, hunting areas, etc. meant that there wasn't really anything to fight over anymore, because people could easily do their own thing, but it was housing that really destroyed DT once and for all.

[eldaec]

Darktide was pretty popular during the first year and a half, but it ultimately died off as a handful of powerful groups dominated all the good areas....

.... and once this inevitable situation arose, the design gave vets no reason to help noobs stop being noobs.

It always seems strange to me that developers are continually surprised that high end guilds are inward looking and exclusive, and that developers don't seem to understand the importance of giving those high end guilds a reason to pull noobs in and up.

Protecting new players with safe zones and ways to hunt in reasonable safety is only half the job. You also need to design them a route into the social structures of a game.

[Hoax]

Agreed, devs somehow forget that there will be churn and instead of tweaking the newbie experience so that it doesn't suck balls as the core of the population moves farther and farther ahead of said newbs they usually neglect it entirely.

[Jayce]

What's funny (and sad) is that I basically agree with Hyu here.

My memories of Darktide end around the time of housing.  Before then there were good reasons to take and defend towns.  Also, as he mentioned, the world was big enough to hide in and regrow, and lots of these remote lifestones had viable routes to leveling areas, or had leveling areas themselves.

Also, the main reason that noobs were welcomed into guilds was the xp chaining mechanic.  It was also one of the most controversial, so (as I hear) they nerfed it.  After that there really WAS no reason to mass recruit and give noobs a home to grow and learn the game.

[waylander]

Yeah AC killing the exp chains was a horrible move. It didn't just kill DT, it screwed over allegiances on all the servers.

[AngryGumball]

They haven't restarted beta right?

[eldaec]

It's not launching till late Q3 (no matter what Mythic might say), so there's no rush.

[Kirth]

They haven't restarted beta right?

they did I thought.

[IainC]

They haven't restarted beta right?

they did I thought.

It restarted mid-December as scheduled in the Producer's letter posted last November.

[Merusk]

Gah, and still no F13 guild or personal invite! 

[schild]

Gah, and still no F13 guild or personal invite! 

I can research this. I think. I don't know how far they are into guild invites or even if they've gone back into them fully.

[Merusk]

Gah, and still no F13 guild or personal invite! 

I can research this. I think. I don't know how far they are into guild invites or even if they've gone back into them fully.

That, sir, would rock. I think there's lots of us salivating over this one.

[waylander]

Gah, and still no F13 guild or personal invite! 

I can research this. I think. I don't know how far they are into guild invites or even if they've gone back into them fully.

All I know is that we are in guild beta when they did the first round of invites.  Since we are only allowed to say if we are in beta or not, all I can say is that I'm the only one currently in the beta from my guild.

[Signe]

Everyone I know who is in the beta got in as an individual, not as part of a guild invite.

[Triforcer]

How did I miss knowing about this game almost entirely?  A few gut reactions/questions from perusing the web site:

1)  Any stealth classes?  I read all the descriptions they have up, and while at least one seemed to approximate "rogue" (agile poisoning dark elf), none seemed to imply stealth/invisibility.

2)  Classes that immediately spoke to my innermost soul- sorceress and squig herder.  I don't care if my own magic kills me 8 out of 10 times if I can get the nuclear one shot off the other two.  And I like any class where you get a SWARM of pets. 

3)  Like the RvR emphasis.  A lot.  McPvp got real old real fast in WoW.  Anything that keeps targets out in the REAL game world (and not an instance) is good in my book.

4)  Speaking of WoW, if you cut through the florid class descriptions, most of the classes seemed very WoWish.  Every warrior-type had a 100 word description that boiled down to: WoW Rage mechanic.  Although it seemed like there were fewer dedicated healer classes and more healer/offense hybrids.  That is good.   

EDIT: 5)  I don't like the gender restrictions.  That will turn off some players who a class really speaks to but are the wrong gender.  It just seems to unnecessarily ward off potential subscribers. 

SECRET DOUBLE EDIT:  6)  I don't know why people are celebrating the minimizing of CC.  Without CC, every encounter with a larger force is probably a loss.  CC gives any PvP game an additional tactical dimension.  I'd rather occassionally go "baa" for 15 seconds than to know my side is doomed every time the opposing zerg is larger. 

[Xanthippe]

Gender restrictions?  Ugh :(

[Merusk]

Nope, no stealth last I heard.  Biggest complaints in any pvp game are always around stealth-classes, then CC classes. (Nobody likes just standing around, thumb up their ass because someone else forced them that way.) They seem to be trying to remove or reducing those complaints.

The gender restrictions are probably mandated by the license holder. Mythic: "Well, we want to have female AND male 'wives of the murder god.'  GW: "You're kidding, or you're fired. We're not rewriting 25+ years of lore for a computer game. Work with it. "

[Velorath]

SECRET DOUBLE EDIT:  6)  I don't know why people are celebrating the minimizing of CC.  Without CC, every encounter with a larger force is probably a loss.  CC gives any PvP game an additional tactical dimension.  I'd rather occassionally go "baa" for 15 seconds than to know my side is doomed every time the opposing zerg is larger. 

CC as it has been used in past games is a completely broken mechanic.  As for being able to stop a larger force with it, chances are that larger force has CC classes also.  Probably more than the smaller group, in which case the outcome of the battle gets determined by which CC'ers press their button first (and which side has less AOE CC-breaking retards).  Meanwhile, half the people are left sitting there unable to do anything.

[eldaec]

SECRET DOUBLE EDIT:  6)  I don't know why people are celebrating the minimizing of CC.  Without CC, every encounter with a larger force is probably a loss.  CC gives any PvP game an additional tactical dimension.  I'd rather occassionally go "baa" for 15 seconds than to know my side is doomed every time the opposing zerg is larger. 

They didn't get rid of it so much as move it onto tank classes, and turn collision detection on.

Using chokepoints and meat shields for cc >> magic ranged instant mezz.

imo.

[eldaec]

The producer's letter video on www.warhammeronline.com is interesting to watch, specifically because it gives background as to why the game wasn't RvR focussed to begin with.

It seems mythic had decided to conciously leave clear water between daoc and war, I can only presume because they didn't want to repeat the problems AC2 and EQ2 had as a result of being sequels.

Note to Mythic: That only matters when the orginal game is still a relevant force. DAoC, unfortunately, isn't.

It's a shame they started this way, because there are still a bunch of real design problems in WAR that Mythic has already solved in DAoC. Most notably, 2 is the wrong number of realms, having enemies able to prance around in your newbie pve zones, and having the pve-rvr zone transition marked by out-of-character magic lines, instead of sodding great big fortresses.
 

[Triforcer]

I don't have a problem with 2 realms.  How else could you realistically split up the WAR universe anyway, given the prominent races? 

What I do think will be a problem is people abandoning their "racial frontier": because 1) Your side is getting stomped, so why not go to where your side is winning, and 2) as a tactical advantage.  As a squig herder, for example, why would I fight dwarves who know how to handle squig herders?  I'd go to the farthest region from greenskin territory, to fight Order players who haven't refined anti-herder tactics. 

[eldaec]

Remember that you'll find exactly the same dwarfs in every other zone, it is not as if travel is going to be hard or people won't be able to zip from zone to zone to meet up with their guild etc. It'll be consistent mixes of Dwarf/HElf/Empire vs Chaos/Green/DElf on three different zones, not Dwarf vs Green with the odd ally in one zone and Helf vs Delf in another. Mythic have even gone so far as to have personal rvr quest objectives rotate between the zones.

There will be nightly swings of population between the zones ofc, just like there is in daoc. On the whole it works out well since you can chase the high/low population areas according to taste. And in practice the masses swing toward whichever zone is nearest being won/lost, yes people want to win, but even more than that, they want to be around when shit happens.

As for how you'd organise it with the correct number of realms, well, exactly like daoc I imagine.

[AngryGumball]

Edit: Hrm, I started talking about how I had two email addresses that stopped receiving the newsletter, butmaybe my second email has not stopped receiving.

but my first email did, around December 2006

btw, that San Diego Comic-Con code to give you a bump into beta, totally worthless. :) I still wanna kick their people working that time who were hyping it like THIS IS YOUR Golden Ticket to heaven! Take it and be one of the few alive who will witness the greatness that is. :P

[Typhon]

Using chokepoints and meat shields for cc >> magic ranged instant mezz.

imo.

I agree with this, if it's true.  Places where I'm sceptical are:

- I haven't yet played one of these games where it was clear just by looking what type of terrain you could climb and what type you couldn't.
- Positional attacks will be/should be very important, especially if collision detection is turned off for allies
- if collision detection is turned off for allies, the damage a casting class can do will have to be tuned appropriately (i.e. it will be less then most casting classes expect)

I still think this could be fun, but I'm also disappoint that there are only 2 realms.

[Merusk]

The sole issue I have with collision detection is lag.  Lag always introduces all kinds of wonderful exploits like running through things that you shouldn't.  In a PVP game there's lots of incentive to figure out how to do this on a regular basis.

[Triforcer]

Another question (for when the NDA falls, or if anyone has an opinion):

It is really gutsy, when you think about it, to have twenty-four separate classes.  Now, it may be that within each side and as-compared to the other side- all tank classes are exactly the same, all ranged DPS the same, with just different racial skins.  They don't seem to want to do this.   

But if they are different, you run the real risk of each side determining that one tank is the best, one type of healer is the best, etc, and all the rest are gimped.  This leads to griping from the other classes, and you have the shaman/paladin feud (before each side had both) x 1000.

I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all major MMOs, but to have all different classes in a PvP/RvR type game is ambitious.     

[Venkman]

SWG and DAoC both exceeded 24 in raw count, pre-pub19 EQ2 had more once you hit the tier 3 (or whatever the second sub-class choice level was called). But then SWG paired that back to the core nine classes. EQ2 redesigned that noise for Pub 19. Not sure what happened with DAoC, but in the early days I would classify the "different" classes as largely duplicated across realms. You simply can't take the core MMO abilities and not give them to the opposition. And when I mean core, I refer to expectations like tanking, melee DPS, range DPS, DoTs, silence, root, snare, heals and HoTs.

This is one thing I like about the Koreangrind model and in many ways WoW. Less classes but with customization within. It's certainly more user friendly than the arbitrary class splits that end up with nonsense like "this class DoTs with Poison" vs "this class DoTs with Disease". Down that path goes the endless FoTM class chasing, as players migrate towards the most effective ones, requiring devs to focus on those due to the greater amount of people affected (SWG's perennial early problems).

Less classes with more abilities > more classes with less of them.

[Aez]

Good point Triforcer.  

DAOC was like that and they somewhat managed it. Envy between realms was not that bad. The main problem with class balance was that some had roles and others didn't. High DPS, low dmg class where useless in a group if you compared them to a real tank. I think the scald was the only loved one because he had a run buff.  I'm expecting the same problem in War unless they found some magical way to deal with it.  Maybe pvp leveling is the real solution, you don't need an optimal tank to do it.

[eldaec]

It is really gutsy, when you think about it, to have twenty-four separate classes.  Now, it may be that within each side and as-compared to the other side- all tank classes are exactly the same, all ranged DPS the same, with just different racial skins.  They don't seem to want to do this.   

Looks to me like most of the classes have an exact partner on the other side.

Zealot = Runepriest, both are pretty similar to a CoH defender.
Warriorpriest = Disciple, paladins basically.

etc etc

I imagine that there will be arguments about which is best, and there will be high population classes and low population classes. But also, like every other MMOG, the percieved overpowered class will change from week to week as people learn2play, and from month to month as new content and patching adjusts the actual power level of players and the usefulness of skillsets through changes to the environment.


Unfortunately one thing WoW seems to have taught developers is that they can get away with much less variation between characters than was the prior consensus. So I expect, like in other recent MMOGs, WAR will dial down the indviduality and differentiation compared with what we saw in DAOC.

[Venkman]

If you have too much variation between classes, you end up with these two dreaded things:

- Required roles for groups that can't also be fun soloable.
- Classes ignored as devs chase classes most played.

Even games that had a dozen+ classes weren't sufficiently diverse enough to justify that. How many abilities exist in MMOs at present? I listed the main ones above. If there's others beyond foozle stuff like Shaman Far Sight or crafting crap, then I'm all ears Seriously, I think the idea that more classes is both better and, well, even achievable at all (budget, time, dev period and live) is still arguable.

Edit to clarify

Wanted to mention I find the class-count thing academic. I'd prefer a revival of the old-UO method of skills trees. Add in some proper game guidance and a number of other abilities spread across skill combines and I think all the neophyteMMO  WoW talent-tree lovers would gawk at the complexity. But this needs to be done in a big budget game for it to gain big attention, which unfortunately speaks for the probability of it happening...

[Johny Cee]

If you have too much variation between classes, you end up with these two dreaded things:

- Required roles for groups that can't also be fun soloable.
- Classes ignored as devs chase classes most played.

Even games that had a dozen+ classes weren't sufficiently diverse enough to justify that. How many abilities exist in MMOs at present? I listed the main ones above. If there's others beyond foozle stuff like Shaman Far Sight or crafting crap, then I'm all ears Seriously, I think the idea that more classes is both better and, well, even achievable at all (budget, time, dev period and live) is still arguable.

The number of PvP/RvR viable abilities depends on the system.  DAoC,  for instance,  had plenty of abilities that were considered essential for short periods of time as the game and metagaming advanced that don't make your list.

PBT/Bladeturn or Bubbling  -- Early game,  before tank trains really took off
AOE Disease (small snare,  halved heals received, interrupted) -- Until group cure disease reduced the effectiveness of this.
Resist buffs -- Off and on depending.
Group Celerity (attack speed buff)  -- Mid tank groups.
Nearsight -- Shut down casters and healers.
Interrupt tools (wholely due to DAoCs spell casting system) -- Thurg pets,  or any long distance aoe.
Resist debuffs (assist nuking on debuffed target)  -- The infamous resist debuff/stun/nukenukenuke.

Hell, the whole idea of DPS class is far more broad than short/long range.  PBAOE DD.  Cone DD.  AOE Bolts.  Alpha-striking classes.  Turret classes.  AOE DD.

If you wanted to 8 man in DAoC,  a tank train melee group was solid.  Zergs out,  or you want to camp a bridge?  A PBAOE group.  Both pbaoe and melee could be countered (depending on locaton) by a caster extend and assist group.  Etc.


One of the great things about DAoC was the variation.  Of course, it took Mythic 4 years to balance all that...

[Venkman]

And how many players did they end up appealing to in that end?

If we're talking about another generic fantasy title for gamers, I completely agree with you. But if you're trying to hit it big by grabbing a big (Relatively-speaking) IP with a big budget for lots of players, having a confusing array of classes at launch is bad enough. Then expecting them to stick around for four years, numerous expansions and team changes, and for the sole purpose of an endgame that hasn't yet proven to have the mass appeal you were trying to hit with that big IP and budget, is, well, optomistic.

I'm a huge fan of experimentation. But more-classes is not the way I'd personally go. I'd rather start with a core and expand outward than start outward and hope to fill it.

Just me though. Sorry for belaboring the point.