Patches 1.1a-d Have Arrived

[murdoc]

My server is crazy busy every night and had alot of fun yesterday with the new patch.  I filled about half a bar of RvR inf from keep takes and BO's.  Warhammer is holding its own currently and I know 3 people so far that left for WOW and are already 80 there and came back to Warhammer.  If they continue to address problems at the rate they are within 6 months Warhammer will be a solid RvR MMO.  Its better today then it was at launch and I expect that trend to continue.  My guild has a solid WB full + every night and we all have a great time rolling destruction

 

[Nebu]

My guild has a solid WB full + every night and we all have a great time rolling destruction

MMO's are about the people.  You're having fun largely because you have a large group of people to play with nightly.  Now, imagine that you are someone playing the game without a developed social structure.  This would cause you to evaluate the game based entirely on the merits of the software.  I'm going to bet this would wipe some of the gloss off of your rose-colored glasses.   DAoC was the same thing.  Have a steady 8 man: great game.  No people to play with: ok game.  WAR is an ok title right now.  It has a long way to go before it becomes something to heap praise upon.

[Arthur_Parker]

Gamespy talks to the Warhammer Online development team

If the basic design of the modern MMO is analogous to an amusement park, the most nightmarish portion of the development team's job doesn't even begin until after the game launches. Prior to that, the development team can still make major changes and tweaks without worrying about affecting people who are currently paying the bills. Post-launch, however, that all goes out the window by the incessant demands of the player-base that screams for changes without service interruptions. Extending the analogy, it's like asking the designers of Disneyland to completely re-do the Pirates of the Caribbean while people are still riding it. EA Mythic's Warhammer Online MMO launched this year to considerable critical acclaim but even the game's most ardent supporters won't claim the game itself was perfect. We sat down with several members of the development team to discuss the launch and the frenzied road to Warhammer Online version 1.1.

"1.1 represents our very first iteration patch," said Warhammer Online's Associate Producer Josh Drescher. "It's the first major addition of new content and a significant overhaul of our core systems." According to Drescher, one of the most difficult things for a development team to do during the first days after the launch of an MMO is nothing. Apparently as the first players rush onto the system and spread out across the servers, a ton of information and feedback will come flooding in via game forums, initial reviews as well as raw internal data. The temptation then is for the team to rush in and immediately start fixing things based on extremely small data sets and subjective interpretations. What the Warhammer Online team did instead was what might be referred to as "game triage." They needed to decide which problems were truly game-threatening and focus on those and which could wait.

"When we look at game balance, we look at it in terms of realm vs. realm balance," said Jeff Skalski, Warhammer Online's RvR Strike Team Lead. "As long as we're hitting that realm balance, we're happy. Factional, racial or career population imbalances aren't as critical." In fact, the team asserts that one of the biggest criticisms and fears around launch time -- the potential for population or class imbalance -- hasn't really materialized. While there is a perception among Destruction players that there are too many Bright Wizard players and amongst Order players that there are too many Destruction players, that perception simply isn't borne out by Mythic's own numbers. While they wouldn't discuss specifics, Drescher said that population imbalances on servers are usually within single-digit percentages.

Drescher is quick to add that even such low percentages are a cause for concern for the team, but rather than taking a reactionary stance, they believe in getting ahead of the problem as quickly as possible. "We're very proud of the incentive structure we've built to encourage players to spread out. Every time you log in, you'll be greeted with a message that, say the High Elves on a particular server could use some help and we're offering incentives such as extra experience points to join." The team also takes message board and player feedback very seriously and will address issues when they reach certain critical thresholds. A recent shift to healers, for example, occurred because the complaint by healers that their big healing spells were essentially useless in combat was backed up by internal data that showed how often such spells were used. As a result, many big healing spells were jazzed up to become more attractive for players.

The focus on moving with deliberate haste extends even to the business environment that Warhammer Online operates in. When the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft's latest greatest expansion pack, hit the MMO world the way only a game with 11 million subscribers can, the reaction with Mythic was muted. "Wrath of the Lich King is a big marquee product," said Drescher. "Clearly we were aware of it but you can't let a competitor goad you into a rash move that ends up being bad for the game." As a result, the development team took on a policy of pseudo-blindness where Lich King was concerned. "Our general take is that we need to continue to move on with our own plans. We've got the 'Keg's End' event (a drinking-themed in-game holiday event) coming up and if we continue to make our game as good as it can possibly be, the players will be there."

The result of the team's initial focus on staunching critical issues quickly and getting ahead of small leaks before they became big ones seems to have paid off. After only a few months, the 1.1 patch will see the beginning of major structural changes to the game including the launch of two new classes that were cut from the initial release -- the Knights of the Blazing Sun and the Black Guard. "There were a lot of reasons these two classes were cut from the game," said Adam Gershowitz, Combat and Careers Strike Team lead. "While they were farther along than the Choppa and the Hammerer, they were missing huge chunks of artwork and they weren't balanced at all." According to Gershowitz, the two classes were always on the short list for returning to the game, but once they were cut, the game had to balanced without them and regardless of how much the team liked them, they wouldn't be coming back until the team was sure the game could handle them without losing that.

It's Associate Producer Wheeler who segues from discussion of the two new classes to the other major change coming in the patch -- the addition of a new incentive system for Open Realm vs. Realm combat. Of all the problems the most crucial one the game had was one that many players doing other things missed -- there weren't enough people playing in the lower tier open realm RvR. While this had always been an anticipated problem as the player base aged and leveled up, all the data indicated that it was happening faster than it should. It was clearly something that needed to be addressed.

"What we've found is that Scenarios tend to be their own reward," Drescher said. "People who really want to do Open RvR, though, were falling behind PvE and scenario players in terms of gear. We needed to do something to draw people back into the 'RvR lakes.'" To encourage this, the team introduced a new "influence" system similar to the one in place for Public Quests that would reward those fighting in the open fields. "However players decide to play our game, we want to make sure they can all get equal rewards," Drescher said.

Working on the Open RvR system also allowed the team to try and get ahead of another problem -- the aging of the player base. The first element of this is the addition of "chicken content." This is a series of quests that encourage higher tier player to revisit lower-tier zones (where they get turned into a chicken) in exchange for a fun series of Tome unlocks and quests that also provide interesting content for lower level characters as well. Apparently players will get experience for killing high level player-chickens and according to the team, there are as many Tome unlocks involving them as there were for fighting while naked.

The patch has a whole host of other additions as well. They include things like a "player statue" system in which players who get the most renown points for the week are rewarded by having statues of them placed in the capitol cities. They're also including chat hyperlinking and introducing lower difficulty Public Quests that will help players do them even when there are not many others around. "In the end, adding a patch like this is all about giving the players what they want, but in a way that preserves the game they love," Drescher said. For the Warhammer Online team, the proof is in their success so far. "If you had said we'd be where we are just a few months after launch last year, we'd have called you a liar," Drescher concluded. "We're ecstatically happy with where we are, but we're not sitting on our laurels. We're never going to be finished with this game."

I like Drescher, he gives good funny.  People do scenarios for gear apparently, hey I learnt something, I thought it was for exp and realm rank.

[Trippy]

linky

The reality is the best way to earn influence, renown, and xp is to battle against other players over keeps and objectives, the cumulative sum of rewards is generally greater.

Unfortunately the path of least resistance is also tempting, rest assured though we'll continue to improve RvR to make it so that conflict is a common occurrence as best we can, but players adjust to massive RvR may still have yet to learn that a lot of the fun of RvR has to do with what you make of it. We expect to see players naturally migrate towards conflict as the initial influence frenzy calms down :)

Game is fine, players need to be patched.

Players are far better than designers are at figuring out the most efficient ways of doing things in a game. If you as the designer believe that battling over BOs is the most efficient way to earn "stuff" but the players aren't doing that then you are wrong, not the players.

[palmer_eldritch]

And then the slap in the face are the keeps, retro keep takes ftl. Hell WoW has at least moveable siege that is fun and innovative, destructable walls, etc... why did WAR not use their own old design from DAOC is just beyond me.

I'm enjoying WAR, but I really agree with this. Keep attacks, if the keep is defended, are all about the stairs. One group at the top, one group at the bottom, both groups trying to find a spot where they can target the opposition without being targetted. There's some strategy involved and it's an interesting war of attrition, but it's hardly an epic fight.

Also, my server is constantly crashing since the patch, which I have never seen before.

[Nebu]

There is something fun about punching a hole in a keep wall, or climbing up the walls to keep the mundane part of keep takes fun.  DAoC did have some fun elements and I'm at a loss to know why they were so readily discarded. 

[rk47]

I think I feel a little bit jaded after the cycle of nerf and buffs and then going back at it again to gain 'influence' from RVR kills just to get..oh more purples.
It does not get any better than that. That is it. You take a zone. Then you advance. Then hit the fortress, in my server it crashes within the hour of siege.

Done. End Game cockblocked. The RVR content is very shallow for the core of the game. Having people decked out in full sets because they used bugged skills or pre-patch PVE broken boss AI didn't help. The latecomers get shafted again and again. Talisman prices are shooting up now, forcing the newcomers to shell out more while the vets hoard it before patch is in. Quite depressing really.

And they broke a lot of stuff in this patch. I don't know if it's really 'broken' or the UI is just not updating itself, but defensive buffs like block% and parry% no longer updates itself on the char sheet. Also heard Black Orks having their +10% Block tactic actually REDUCING it by 10%.

  How can you fuck shit up further?

[Fraeg]

Wheeler said that they'd been looking through the data and had realized that the renown reward for actually defending a keep was far less than it should have been, meaning that there was little incentive to defend something once you'd taken it. In 1.1, he said, "defenders are going to get a lot more renown and influence in RvR by defending a keep. I think we'll see a more doggish mentality where you go out, take a keep, and dare others to attack it."

Good to see that the designers are only, oh, 8 months or so behind their players in figuring out the problems with their game design (we told them repeatedly at least 8 months ago if not even earlier that there needed to be incentives to hold BOs).

...but, but 100 renown PER MINUTE!!, how can you not be happy with that!!, Why, you will be renown 80 in no time.

[Zzulo]

There is something fun about punching a hole in a keep wall, or climbing up the walls to keep the mundane part of keep takes fun.  DAoC did have some fun elements and I'm at a loss to know why they were so readily discarded. 

They were not discarded as much as they were left out due to deadlines and development issues. Keeps were added late in the development of WAR (since they were never a part of the original vision of WAR), and I simply don't think they had time to put anything more than a very very basic keep siege idea into the game before launch.

[ghost]

Got on for a bit today and did six keep takes and like 9 BOs.  At level 20 I got a bubble and a half..............................


That just isn't going to cut it.  I would have to do like 800 keeps to get to 40.

[waffel]

Go take part in the thrilling and exciting PvE, then.

[UnSub]

Got on for a bit today and did six keep takes and like 9 BOs.  At level 20 I got a bubble and a half..............................


That just isn't going to cut it.  I would have to do like 800 keeps to get to 40.

but players adjust to massive RvR may still have yet to learn that a lot of the fun of RvR has to do with what you make of it.

According to Mythic, that's 800x the fun! Just adjust to it! 

[ghost]

Go take part in the thrilling and exciting PvE, then.

It was PVE.  There weren't any defenders, haha. 

[Sleep]

Last night we finally locked Kadrian Valley. The ensuing BO pattycake and fortress slideshow made the server crap its pants like 4 times.

As it stands now, we are actually unable to play this game. The servers can't handle sieges yet. Anytime more then 20 people are around one place my computer turns into captain dragass and I have a top of the line system. We crashed the server multiple times until finally the massive zerg trickled out as people got tired of relogging into the clusterfuck just to crash again. rinse/repeat

[Zzulo]

I agree that the servers struggle with fortress sieges, but it is bull that the game can't handle "20 guys in an area". I just came from a 4hr back-and-forth in Reikland (it's still going on as I type this), where there must have been around 100+ guys, and my FPS never dropped below 30.

[hammurabi]

Good to see that the designers are only, oh, 8 months or so behind their players in figuring out the problems with their game design (we told them repeatedly at least 8 months ago if not even earlier that there needed to be incentives to hold BOs).

We told them basically every problem that people are leaving/whining about today the moment we saw it.  The instant BOs were introduced (about 15 months ago, now), there was a ton of discussion about why we should care.  One of the beta forum threads I started was titled "Battlefield Objectives:  Why Should I Care?"

Another huge case in point (beating the rotting horse corpse):  stats on gear.  The first time ANYONE got ANY loot that had stats, they looked at it and thought, "wtf, these stats don't do shit for me,"  EVEN back when stats didn't actually affect your performance.  All along they've had gear with stats that didn't make any sense.  In fact, they're going on 18 FUCKING MONTHS since that was first noted and inquired about on the forums.

To address another thing brought up, Mythic absolutely got lucky with DAOC and did seem to actively attempt breaking/killing a good thing throughout the meaningful lifespan of the game.  As one longtime Mythic dev. friend noted last summer, "DAOC was an anomaly, an aberration.  You should see how this place is run!  [implied clownshoes]"

[Threash]

I just did several hours of tier 4 pvp, got about 4k influence, half a level of rr but only about 4% of a level of exp.  Thats just ridiculous.  One thing i did notice that rocked was a 1500 rr/inf bonus for a keep defence after we defended a lord.

[Tannhauser]

"If you had said we'd be where we are just a few months after launch last year, we'd have called you a liar," Drescher concluded.

Oh I'm sure you would. 

Blizzard=Toyota:  We will do research and find out what our customers want to drive.
Mythic=Chrysler:  We will make the cars we want to make, our customers will take it or leave it.

[Bismallah]

"We're ecstatically happy with where we are..."

What a douchebag. How can anyone related to this shitty product say "ecstatically happy" and still keep a straight face in an interview. Especially someone that can see what's behind the curtain with regards to subscription numbers and overall game issues.

[UnSub]

He has to phrase it like that if he wants to keep his job. Too much hype went into WAR upfront for "it's only doing okay and we're going to have to crunch through Xmas to meet our patch schedule" to be their public face.

[Lantyssa]

Or, as they have shown in the past, they're oblivious to reality.

[Tannhauser]

I vote oblivious to reality.

[waffel]

Mythic just needs to make the fortress zone change into a 2d top-down zoomed out view so we can have super awesome views and battles like this:


It fits the IP, would fix the lag (they just need to tone the graphics down) and it wouldn't be any worse than what they're dealing with now.

[Lantyssa]

Turning seiges into an RTS-like battle where your character leads a stack of troops could be interesting.  Not that many would go for it, and I certainly have no faith Mythic would be able to accomplish such a change.

[Zzulo]

Not sure why that would reduce lag

[Arthur_Parker]

2d or not 2d.

[rk47]

Darklands fortress stability improved, but still crashes. We managed to take a fortress and was moving into another when the dreaded crash kicks in. Both doors are restored and we lost 15 mins. Second attempt. Made it to Lord room. Crashed again.

Unplayable. You rush up there to a room full of 100 players and a NPC lord that literally 3 shot people without wards. While those wearing Wards are hardly protected against the 100 players bunkering up at the keep lord. The only chance of a fortress attack is probably 3 AM++ where most of the defenders are asleep. Because climbing a stairs riddled with 30 land mines while 30 Bright Wizards are spreading happy aoe is not gonna work out for any zerg.

[Nebu]

Unplayable. You rush up there to a room full of 100 players and a NPC lord that literally 3 shot people without wards. While those wearing Wards are hardly protected against the 100 players bunkering up at the keep lord. The only chance of a fortress attack is probably 3 AM++ where most of the defenders are asleep. Because climbing a stairs riddled with 30 land mines while 30 Bright Wizards are spreading happy aoe is not gonna work out for any zerg.

The endgame sounds like FUN!  Well worth the grind to get there.

[Bismallah]

How anyone continues to pay for this game is just boggling.

[waffel]

People are so desperate for RvR/PvP in a MMO world that I guess they're willing to put up with a lot of shit.

[HaemishM]

Mythic just needs to make the fortress zone change into a 2d top-down zoomed out view so we can have super awesome views and battles like this:


It fits the IP, would fix the lag (they just need to tone the graphics down) and it wouldn't be any worse than what they're dealing with now.

I'd play that before I'd play this game again. Hell, I still maintain that's the game Games Workshop should have contracted someone to make. An individually-focused MMOG just isn't what the IP is for.

[Arthur_Parker]

WHFRP suits a single character mmorpg (skill based, career advancement instead of levels), WFB not so much.

[Setanta]

I know this is going a little OT (blame it on the TT pics), but are there any stats as to how the Warhammer 40K RTS sales fares against WAR? I only suggest this because IMO the IP really suits an RTS (even if there were imbalances such as vanilla Space Marines etc). Thankk god for WH40K 2 with CoH engine.

Point? To be honest, I felt more immersed in the 40K RTS universe with its one campaign per game/expansion or even going it head to head online than I do in WAR. Why? Because it told a story while being fun. Remember fun Mythic? It's what your game should have been. All you did was take an IP universe and wrap it around a poorly executed PvE game. As I tell my students, you can take a shit sandwich, garnish it however you like, but as soon as you bite into it you know it's shit. Unless of course you are in so much denial that you truly believe that this shit is better than the other types of shit out there. Should I have said fecal matter? Still sounds bad - and that sums up WAR to me.

I know it's apples and oranges, but the apple in one genre was a game that was enjoyable and a non-grindfest as opposed to WAR's T3/T4 grindfest (I won't even get started on the shitty WoW-wannabe PvE).

More importantly, how the hell did WAR go from "wheee this is fun" T1/T2 to "this is too much fun, lets suck the life out of the game by making people grind to get to a point where we will cockblock them more with PvE in order to PvP and hope to god that they don't notice the stinking mess our endgame truly is". It wasn't necessary to rip the fun out of the game, but Mythic managed it.

I could rant forever, but it's not because I hate the game. I don't. I really wanted it to be good. I still want it to be good. But the sandwich still tastes bad and I don't think the chefs are going to fix the receipe anytime soon.

[Bismallah]

The boards are speaking loudly this morning across the interwebs... same shit. Forts crashing, end game is useless, lagbeasts galore, etc...

I have a bad feeling by the end of this month this game is going to take another dip after it appeared to have stabilized there for a couple weeks. They had a mass exodus of folks after WotLK released, those folks probably left their subs active and came back to find the game a disaster and quit for good.

When you see the thread I posted about November PC game sales and WAR dropped from 5th in October to off the top 20 in the matter of one month, that's not a good sign. Especially when they had HUGE discounts for Black Friday. Hell, there are still Collector's Editions at the local Game Stop, at least 5 copies just sitting there 'collecting' dust. Right next to the Tabula Rasa special editions. Anyone remember when they were practically giving Shadowbane away? It dropped to 5 bucks and shortly after that if you took the box up to the counter they just gave it to you. "Please, just take the box, we can't sell it".

Still, seeing a game that was this hyped really take a shit so quickly is not good for the MMO industry as a whole.

[Draegan]

I think its great for the Genre.  It's a big guide to who not to hire and what not the fuck to do.