1.01 Discussion

[Azazel]

I have to say, reading both patch notes and discussions like this one on the game doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

[Xenomorph]

I have to say, reading both patch notes and discussions like this one on the game doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

Delurking for a mo.

Are the current problems with the game really bad enough that people are seriously put out, or thinking about not playing? YMMV, but for me, some annoyances are small (Tor Anroc is a clusterfuck; long scenario queues even on highly populated servers), some annoyances are bigger (renown gear being badly itemized and generally sucky, encouraging the dreaded "PvE to PvP"; scenario quality declining a bit after T1, a bit more after T2...), some annoyances are pretty large (on any scale greater than 2v1, combat can be purely a matter of numbers; Mythic deciding prelaunch that XP grind = customer retention; the sluggish pace of combat), some aren't Mythic's fault at all (a community that is collectively shittier at PvP than your average WoW BG PUG; not much communication going on outside of guilds).

But they don't change the fact that this is a fundamentally well-made game, rather than something like AoC, which was a few good ideas wrapped around a steaming pile of shit. It's not perfect, but I could see it being fun in the long term, although maybe not in the mortgage-my-life-to-live-in-Azeroth way WoW is/was. For me, the only thing that could be a deal-breaker is the sluggish combat. WoW PvP may be repetitive, it may be unbalanced, it may be go-geared-or-go-home, but it's well-coded, as responsive as an FPS and just flows in a way that WAR's combat doesn't. So I've felt that it kind of keeps me at a distance, and I really can't get into it as much as I might like. As far as I know, though, that's been a common complaint since beta. They've made improvements, and will hopefully make more (taking CC breaks off the GCD, lowering the GCD itself by a few tenths of a second, tightening up their netcode).

[Arthur_Parker]

I'd say if you are new to mmorpg's try WOW, if you want raids and purples play WOW.  If you find the PVP in WOW isn't to your taste or find that you can only play for short bursts of time, then WAR might fit your style of play better.

[Hawkbit]

The top priority gamebreakers for me right now is fixing stuff like window-dragging and walking through invisible walls.  I won't make it past a few months if this continues.  I can deal (but not happy with) a long T3 grind just to see T4.  But I won't deal with unfair advantages through meta-game activities and/or improper coding. 

It's a pretty enough horse that I'll ride it for a long time as long as the legs are working. 

[HRose]

The worst thing for me is that I'm still level 9 and all PQs and open RvR areas are dead.

I'm a bit tired of standard quests and scenarios. The alternatives are already not working.

[schild]

Level 9 takes like 3 hours even if you've never done it before. Either you're really really really bad at the game, or you're doing it wrong.

Both are the same thing.

[Nija]

Man, I think people are blowing this window dragging stuff out of proportion. I've leveled one guy to the 20s and 3 to the teens and I've not encountered it ONCE. I spent almost all of my time in scenarios too, so you'd think I'd see it.

[Hayduke]

Eh the problem is a technique like this will spread like wildfire.  Maybe people are scared of Punkbuster reporting them though who knows.

And I can't see how anyone could muster up the nerdrage to hate this game.  Even if you don't like it it's still a decent game.

[Nebu]

Man, I think people are blowing this window dragging stuff out of proportion. I've leveled one guy to the 20s and 3 to the teens and I've not encountered it ONCE. I spent almost all of my time in scenarios too, so you'd think I'd see it.

How many characters of yours are melee?  That's where you notice it most. Also, most of the guild groups prone to this are in their 30's to 40 now.  You'll see it again when you get there.

[Arthur_Parker]

Interesting interview

Wondering about the content that was cut from WAR prior to release, I asked Hickman if the additional player cities and abandoned classes would be the first items added back into the WAR universe.
That content, Hickman said, probably wouldn't be reintegrated into the game. All content cut before release was removed because "it sucked" and the WAR team is only working on adding content that "would be very good for the game," he said.

Accurate quote or the interviewer didn't understand him correctly?

[murdoc]

Man, I think people are blowing this window dragging stuff out of proportion. I've leveled one guy to the 20s and 3 to the teens and I've not encountered it ONCE. I spent almost all of my time in scenarios too, so you'd think I'd see it.

Do you play a tank? It's VERY noticeable when you're trying to use your tank to block people from either getting at your healers/flag carrier/whatever, or trying to pin in their healers/flag carrier/whatever. Sometimes it's lag, a lot of times it's not. Especially when it happens every single time with some characters.

I have to say, reading both patch notes and discussions like this one on the game doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

We have to be careful, if we talk about how much we like the game and what's all good with it and everything, they'll revoke our F13 hatecard and label us fanbois and start pointing fingers at the AoC forum. Game is very extremely fun to play.

[Khaldun]

I notice exploits early because I've learned the hard way that saying, "Eh, it's just a few people" is inevitably a prelude to, "I am the last person not exploiting, fuck this shit". This is pretty close to a demonstrable natural law. Exploits will spread through a gaming community in direct proportion to the extent that a developer or other referee either doesn't care about the exploit or is helpless to prevent it. I'm long since past thinking that it even has any moral implications for the exploit-users: it's like having a moral opinion on a virus at some stage of a pandemic. And following that analogy, if you're concerned with public health, you really don't want to be in the position of saying, "Eh, avian flu, who gives a shit, it's just killing a couple of chicken farmers in some rice paddy down along the Mekong".

--------

The problem with saying that Warhammer is a casual-friendly game for people who just want a bit of PvP is that in a very short time, there is going to be no PvP to be had at the lower levels. I'm at the cusp of tier 3, playing fairly casually, and already on my medium-to-low pop server the tier2 scenarios are very visible sputtering and dying. You're either riding the wave of player levelling or you're not with Warhammer. If you're ahead of the wave, you're a catass who is grinding a lot of nasty PvE. If you're behind it, you're going to catass whether you like to do it or not. Warhammer really, really relies on players being involved in simultaneous experiences. The normal trickling of alt-development is absolutely not going to cut it for this game, because that is going to need very serious synchronization if it's going to match the fun that people are having now. Quite a few of the folks here (HRose, others) noticed this aspect of things in Beta, and it's becoming very clear that they're right. The only thing that's going to get a casual player through the empty, barren experience of developing a character after everyone is at the endgame is going to be a very very strong pull from friends.

This patch gave me some hope that Mythic is going to deal with the very many rough edges and subpar feature sets that make much of the game more annoying than it ought to be. But I honestly don't know how they're going to overcome some of the structural issues which they're going to face in about two or three months time. The endgame had better be some super-entertaining ultra-fun if they want strong retention of the subscriber base. And once they start to bleed subscribers, if they don't have some smart ideas about how to get new or returning players right back into the heat of things, then this game is going to die.

[tazelbain]

You can like the game and still realize that the game has serious mid term and long tern problems that need to be resolved to make WAR a success.

[Khaldun]

Well, exactly. I like the game when everything is going right, which is way more than I could say about Age of Conan, which I didn't even like in the much-fellated Tortuge levels. But I can see stuff coming that I have very little confidence in Mythic's ability to respond to at the speed and level of innovation that they'll need to respond to it at. Some of the medium-term problems are likely to be just as fatal to the game's prospects as Age of Conan's inner core of empty suckitude was, even if the basic structure of War is far more likeable and has far greater potential.

[schild]

I don't notice the exploits because arrows still kill once they're fired.

Join the Shadow Warrior Army today.

[kildorn]

My main complaint is that sorcs and BWs make the T3 game unfun. Like "I'd rather go bitch at pet pathing on my alt" unfun. Damage is out of control for a few classes, and there's no fix in sight, or statements on appropriateness.

By the balance rules we were given in beta, they're nerfbait (TTK was the rule of the day, everything is balanced by TTK. At the very elast, Withering Heat and Hand of Ruin violate the TTK rules by about 80%)

[Nija]

How many characters of yours are melee?  That's where you notice it most. Also, most of the guild groups prone to this are in their 30's to 40 now.  You'll see it again when you get there.

All of 'em! DoK, Witch Elf, and a White Lion! The only warping shit I see is normal, FPS-grade client desyncronization. People get exactly behind someone backing up and get CONFUSED when he warps through you. News flash, network prediction doesn't work like that and hasn't since you were LANing duke3d.

Get 10 ft behind the person, predicting where they are going to go, and set up your road block there.

[schild]

My main complaint is that sorcs and BWs make the T3 game unfun.

I assume you're playing a melee class? I'm pretty sure Shadow Warrior makes some scenarios unfun for BWs and Sorcs. Especially Sorcs . Can we say 1 hit kill? Morale 2nd Level + Festering Arrows. Hell, if you think they have over 3k hit points, just lay that other +20% damage ability over it. Adds up to about, oh, 3400 damage.

[slog]

I have to say, reading both patch notes and discussions like this one on the game doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

Delurking for a mo.

Are the current problems with the game really bad enough that people are seriously put out, or thinking about not playing?

*raises hand*

I brought a preorder key for a dollar from Target.  My primary motivation for wanting to try the game was fustration with WoW's PvP.  Arena was getting old, and BG's get stale after a while.

Why I didn't buy:
1) UI.  I like WoW's UI a lot.  They should have just ripped it off completely.Plenty of addons, I can tell who's buffed, who's not, casting bars tell me what my target is casting etc.  WAR's UI sucked horribly in comparison.  I don't like stepping backwards.  

2) I HATED the newbie experience.  I am SO SICK of having to level impotent newbies.  I never made it to Tier 2 because I found Tier 1 so boring.  Not enough spells to cast.  My solution:  Let me start from character creation at Tier 2. (I know, not going to happen, but that's what I want)

3) No one chats.  Whats the hell?  A mmo where no one chats?

3) Synch issues:  I didn't like how the synch between the client and server worked.  

So I figure I'll wait for them to figure it out and will try it in 6 months.

[schild]

2) I HATED the newbie experience.  I am SO SICK of having to level impotent newbies.  I never made it to Tier 2 because I found Tier 1 so boring.  Not enough spells to cast.  My solution:  Let me start from character creation at Tier 2. (I know, not going to happen, but that's what I want)

I'm going to assume you weren't rolling with a guild on vent.

3) No one chats.  Whats the hell?  A mmo where no one chats?

Ok, I was right. Try getting in with a guild that uses vent.

So I figure I'll wait for them to figure it out and will try it in 6 months.

Come back with friends, and, ahem, vent.

Otherwise you'll leave with the same opinion again.

[Nebu]

The only warping shit I see is normal, FPS-grade client desyncronization. People get exactly behind someone backing up and get CONFUSED when he warps through you. News flash, network prediction doesn't work like that and hasn't since you were LANing duke3d.

Get 10 ft behind the person, predicting where they are going to go, and set up your road block there.

I'm going to bet that you never played DAoC for a prolonged period of time.  Lag-casting, lag-jumping, and window-dragging, were all the norm. Though players could do a bit to minimize the effects of these things, they still played a part in the outcome of close fights.  Like I said... you'll see for yourself when you get into the 30-40 bracket or the endgame.

[slog]

2) I HATED the newbie experience.  I am SO SICK of having to level impotent newbies.  I never made it to Tier 2 because I found Tier 1 so boring.  Not enough spells to cast.  My solution:  Let me start from character creation at Tier 2. (I know, not going to happen, but that's what I want)

I'm going to assume you weren't rolling with a guild on vent.

3) No one chats.  Whats the hell?  A mmo where no one chats?

Ok, I was right. Try getting in with a guild that uses vent.

So I figure I'll wait for them to figure it out and will try it in 6 months.

Come back with friends, and, ahem, vent.

Otherwise you'll leave with the same opinion again.

So what happens to all the folks that joined without a pre-existing guild?

[schild]

They either join one or QQ on forums where someone tells them they should've joined a guild and gotten on vent.

[Nebu]

So what happens to all the folks that joined without a pre-existing guild?

They provide rps and xp for all of the existing guilds until they are assimilated.  

[Lakov_Sanite]

So what happens to all the folks that joined without a pre-existing guild?

They provide rps and xp for all of the existing guilds until they are assimilated.  

I love how people are expecting 1mil subs (post wotlk) for this game. 

[insouciant]

They are not going to take the time to be assimilated.  The f13 crowd may appreciate WAR for all the things it got right, but I wonder how people whose first MMOG was WoW are going to like grinding just to to get farther and farther behind the levelling bulge.  I do not see how a game is going to survive when its appeal is principally limited to those who join with an existing guild or play group.  Wasn't that the formula that DDO parlayed into such tremendous success?

[schild]

DDO thought people would repeat quests. Different situation altogether.

[Nebu]

They are not going to take the time to be assimilated.  The f13 crowd may appreciate WAR for all the things it got right, but I wonder how people whose first MMOG was WoW are going to like grinding just to to get farther and farther behind the levelling bulge.  I do not see how a game is going to survive when its appeal is principally limited to those who join with an existing guild or play group.  Wasn't that the formula that DDO parlayed into such tremendous success?

WAR (as much as it may be in denial about it) is a niche game.  It's an alternative for those players that want a more PvP-centric gaming experience than WoW offers.  For that, I think it has managed to do well.  It's accessible to the casual player and deep enough to keep the hardcore interested for a while. 

[amiable]

They are not going to take the time to be assimilated.  The f13 crowd may appreciate WAR for all the things it got right, but I wonder how people whose first MMOG was WoW are going to like grinding just to to get farther and farther behind the levelling bulge.  I do not see how a game is going to survive when its appeal is principally limited to those who join with an existing guild or play group.  Wasn't that the formula that DDO parlayed into such tremendous success?

WoW advanced the genre by making it easy to accomplish things solo.

WAR advances the genre by making it easy to find and join a group.

[HRose]

Level 9 takes like 3 hours even if you've never done it before. Either you're really really really bad at the game, or you're doing it wrong.

Both are the same thing.

I'm not complaining it takes too long, I'm complaining that I can't play the way I want because PQs and RvR areas are dead. So I mostly do quests and wait for queues (even if now I can't queue because I'm on the higher zone, which should really get fixed).

[Lakov_Sanite]

Adding the open party system is not "advancing the genre" well in the barest sense perhaps.  It's a great system don't get me wrong but in and of itself doesn't mean it's a revolutionary idea that will give us a third gen mmo(are we on two or three now?)

WAR has a lot of fun things but it also has a lot of stupid barriers to entry that will in the end keep it niche when it didn't need to be. Yes, it offers an alternative to wow but it's a poor one.

It's as if you don't like beef so WAR offers you chicken, except it's pretty dry while the beef is succulent and delicious. You still prefer chicken but it's just not as palatable and those who have no real preference will be taking the beef.

[Khaldun]

How many characters of yours are melee?  That's where you notice it most. Also, most of the guild groups prone to this are in their 30's to 40 now.  You'll see it again when you get there.

All of 'em! DoK, Witch Elf, and a White Lion! The only warping shit I see is normal, FPS-grade client desyncronization. People get exactly behind someone backing up and get CONFUSED when he warps through you. News flash, network prediction doesn't work like that and hasn't since you were LANing duke3d.

Get 10 ft behind the person, predicting where they are going to go, and set up your road block there.

Just to give you an example of what is more than normal client desynchronization. Last night in a tier2 scenario, I'm at my team's flag. An ironbreaker grabs it while I'm trying to smack away another player. I turn on him right away. I click on him (rather than tab) and I cannot target him: I get a "untargetable" message. He doesn't target when I cycle through tab, and at the moment, he's the only enemy player visible ahead of me. The nearest accompanying enemy player is showing as well behind me when I swing my camera around. I'm right behind him. Now even if he were somehow way ahead of me, I should be able to target him unless there was a line-of-sight problem, and the area well ahead of us is completely free of LOS blocking obstacles of any kind. Suddenly this player warps well ahead of me. After a minute of chasing, he suddenly becomes targetable, but is out of range of any of my tanking abilities except a few futile tosses of my axe. I'm not the only one with this problem, I find, talking to other players on my side, and this player is the only one that we're having the problem with. No other enemy is warping or is untargetable. The ironbreaker, I should add, is *not* using his flee ability, because we see him actually activate that as he approaches his own flag for a turn-in. I watch this ironbreaker for the rest of the scenario. He is targetable and his movements synchronized with the rest of us when approaching our flag. If he gets our flag, he becomes untargetable for a brief period and warps at around the same point, always away from any chasers.

That's not a coincidence when it happens regularly in a 10-minute scenario. (And when the same character does it again in the next iteration of that scenario later in the evening.) It's always possible that in some cases, this is the server doing something weird to try and interpret the consequence of abilities that speed a player up relative to other players, but when it's happening to a class that doesn't really have those abilities for the most part, and it's happening only when it is to that player's advantage, it really means something out of the ordinary is going on. And if whatever that "it" is starts to happen routinely, it will have a very bad impact on this game, far more so than games which are built around PvE.

[Xenomorph]

Yeah, the ceiling on WAR's popularity is going to be caused by the fact that PvP has been successful in the "mass market" (i.e. in WoW) when it's been packaged as solo-friendly skirmishes. WAR's primary focus is large-scale guild battles. And since there's not a whole lot of in-game communication--WAR is seriously hurting for an official global channel, at least for the purpose of guild recruitment--those guilds are ones that people either made before they joined the game or put together on a message board somewhere. Players with strong guild ties that go beyond a given game, players who read MMOG-related forums--I doubt that adds up to a million people, let alone a million subs.

WAR has scenarios, and I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who will subscribe solely for the sake of more and (sometimes) better BGs/scenarios. And right now they're reasonably solo-friendly in the sense that you don't find too many organized guild groups running. But the amount of success you can have at every level in WAR PvP through class interdependency is a hell of a lot greater than you get from premading in WoW. Once more people realize that--especially if warband queueing gets in the game one way or another--I expect scenarios will get positively solo-unfriendly since the PUG v. premade issue will be a much bigger problem here than it is in WoW.

Edit: Am I misremembering, or did Mythic set the population caps of servers are some ridiculously low numbers? I want to say 1k, but that can't be right--maybe per side? Any server I've been on that's been lower than high/high pops feels like a ghost town. Although that could be because of the nobody-fooking-talks thing.

[tazelbain]

Adding the open party system is not "advancing the genre" well in the barest sense perhaps.  It's a great system don't get me wrong but in and of itself doesn't mean it's a revolutionary idea that will give us a third gen mmo(are we on two or three now?)

It doesn't have to be revolutionary to advance the genre.  In the evolutionary enviroment diku clones, advancement come small steps.

[kildorn]

My main complaint is that sorcs and BWs make the T3 game unfun.

I assume you're playing a melee class? I'm pretty sure Shadow Warrior makes some scenarios unfun for BWs and Sorcs. Especially Sorcs . Can we say 1 hit kill? Morale 2nd Level + Festering Arrows. Hell, if you think they have over 3k hit points, just lay that other +20% damage ability over it. Adds up to about, oh, 3400 damage.

Warrior Priest. Worse than a melee class, a healer that can't heal for Shit without being able to melee.