v1.3.2 PTS Patch Notes

[Bismallah]

I'm sorry - this game has not got better at all. It's junk and although the early game was a hell of a lot of fun in the day, it's dated worse than WoW or heck, even EQ. Rose coloured glasses I gues - but I really hadn't remembered how bad the game was. It needs to be left to die - the sooner the better.

I'd have to agree with this statement. All of my friends and acquaintances that used to play have quit. Not just quit, but freely and frequently bash the crap out of it at work (where we do talk about games a crap ton probably more than we should). I gave away my 40 WP to a friend from work and he was so bored he gave it to his g/f's brother who has since quit playing as well. (Currently consoles have me occupied, Badlands is a total blast)

[Pagz]

wait wait, do free trail accounts soft cap at level 11 or do you level your character out of T1 so you have to either re-roll or start a new char?

[Shatter]

Warhammer still has too many glaring issues.   Crafting is next to worthless and you cant profit from it.  On top of that money in the game is almost useless cause there is nothing to have to spend it on.  Its a horrible economic system in the game and serves little purpose.  Gear and token drops are also horrible(past Invader).  I retired at RR77 on my WH and I had 3 pieces of WL gear only(2 i purchased).  Dont even get me started on Soveriegn gear that apparently only GM's are allowed to wear.  Token drops are brutally bad which means upgrading gear is also brutal.  They still have a lot to learn with this game

[Montague]

"Ages is arguable", not to be a dick or anything as I'm really not that upset about wasting my time, I should have known better, but it's only really arguable if you don't consider the first 90 days as that important.

Another example of Mythicland vs. market reality, and never the twain shall meet.

[Arthur_Parker]

There's also the whole thing about it being a "bug" offered as an excuse, that's actually worse than somebody deciding to let most of the T4 scenarios pop as SP.  By design you could say one person made a bad decision, a bug means absolutely everybody senior totally missed how the majority of T4 players were spending their time.  I should just let this go as WAR is in a world of hurt right now and I'm actually feeling guilty, but as they can't fix WAR they could at least learn from it.  16 minutes, that how long it took most people playing T4 scenarios to notice SP as an issue, right when two popped in a row.

[Andy_Mythic]

There's also the whole thing about it being a "bug" offered as an excuse, that's actually worse than somebody deciding to let most of the T4 scenarios pop as SP.  By design you could say one person made a bad decision, a bug means absolutely everybody senior totally missed how the majority of T4 players were spending their time.  I should just let this go as WAR is in a world of hurt right now and I'm actually feeling guilty, but as they can't fix WAR they could at least learn from it.  16 minutes, that how long it took most people playing T4 scenarios to notice SP as an issue, right when two popped in a row.

I'm not exactly sure where I offered it up as an "excuse" but rather as a reason it happened. Maybe in so much as the bug was part of the reason for your experience, yes, but in a "Oh there's Mythic making excuses again" I'm not sure I follow.

Yes, we made mistakes, and anyone who can see beyond the hype will recognize that we have owned up to our missteps and are working our collective asses off to correct them.

Or you can keep making jokes about Paul...  

[Arthur_Parker]

I'm not exactly sure where I offered it up as an "excuse" but rather as a reason it happened. Maybe in so much as the bug was part of the reason for your experience, yes, but in a "Oh there's Mythic making excuses again" I'm not sure I follow.

Bugs are used as excuses, I do it all the time, but my major screw ups aren't that interesting. so that's the way I read it.  The bug isn't the reason so many people ended up stuck for so long in SP, Mythic is, everyone at the time thought the players figured SP was the best reward for time investment and so were doing it themselves.  Ironically partly because you guys made levelling such a chore.

So if it's a bug you fix the bug and the problem goes away but if it's player choice then even though exactly the same thing could be happening, it's ok?  That's just my opinion on why it took 90 days.

[Andy_Mythic]

Bugs are used as excuses, I do it all the time, but my major screw ups aren't that interesting. so that's the way I read it.  The bug isn't the reason so many people ended up stuck for so long in SP, Mythic is, everyone at the time thought the players figured SP was the best reward for time investment and so were doing it themselves.  Ironically partly because you guys made levelling such a chore.

So if it's a bug you fix the bug and the problem goes away but if it's player choice then even though exactly the same thing could be happening, it's ok?  That's just my opinion on why it took 90 days.

TBF, it was a combination of player patterns and habits that exacerbated the bug (incoming OMG MYSTIC BLAMES THE PLAYER) and made it more difficult to nail it down. At the time, players all stood around in Dragonwake queuing for SP over and over and over...you get the drift. So the question remains, was one issue symptomatic of the other? Yeah, most definitely. There is no proverbial chicken or egg situation here. The bug came first which lead to player behavior adapting to said bug and only worsening the situation. Not offering justification for the situation (it sucked, I was right there experiencing it with everyone else and yes, I got sick of SP as well) but hopefully some insight into why it took awhile to nail down on our part.

I'm rather surprised you're still picking at a leveling speed which is often considered a very fast curve by modern MMO standards, not withstanding linked WoW accounts. Yeah it was slow to start with, but we reacted to that pretty quickly. There are so many other attractive horses for you to beat on about WAR which have since been addressed.

[Nebu]

I'm rather surprised you're still picking at a leveling speed which is often considered a very fast curve by modern MMO standards, not withstanding linked WoW accounts. Yeah it was slow to start with, but we reacted to that pretty quickly. There are so many other attractive horses for you to beat on about WAR which have since been addressed.

1) It's supposed to be a pvp game.  Any leveling grind is going to be bitched about especially when ...

2) Most of the levels are meaningless anyway.  If you get boosted to level 8 in the first tier that immediately tells me that levels 1-7 are meaningless.  The same could be said for tiers 2 and 3.  This renders most of your levels to be nothing more than worthless cockblocks to any pvp enthusiast.  

By my 5th year in DAoC I could get to level 50 and geared in less than 1 day played solo and I could argue that even that was too slow.  People want(ed) to play WAR for the pvp.  Anything keeping them from doing that was deemed an annoyance.  This is especially true if you spend even a minute attempting the horrible pve instead of grinding xp by doing BG's and the lakes.   As the populations dwindle, the leveling curve will feel even worse.  

What shall we discuss next?  The horrible implementation of AE?  The excess of CC?  The ability to rapidly attain RR80 by avoiding any real pvp?  Class balance issues?  Itemization?  Class specific failures? 

I was a huge Mythic/DAoC fan when WAR came out and I had a hard time lasting a month.  My second attempt at playing a couple of months ago lasted a few days... and I had a tight group of close friends to play with. 

[BoatApe]

My main was a shaman...

I spent an age & 1/2 in Beta and had high hopes...

Nebu summed up the salient points.

Before I cross the line into starfucking I'll back away slowly.

[Shatter]

One of the biggest issues for people I played with up to Sept of this year was a lack of scenarios.  We were on Gorfang, a busy server and you can play all day and get 0 scenarios until about 2pm when one might finally pop.  Then they would be intermittent until about 8pm when they might speed up some but still pop horribly most of the time.  Put in cross server scenarios so scenarios pop at a better rate.

[ghost]

(incoming OMG MYSTIC BLAMES THE PLAYER)

This never ceases to be hilarious.

[Arthur_Parker]

TBF, it was a combination of player patterns and habits that exacerbated the bug (incoming OMG MYSTIC BLAMES THE PLAYER) and made it more difficult to nail it down. At the time, players all stood around in Dragonwake queuing for SP over and over and over...you get the drift. So the question remains, was one issue symptomatic of the other? Yeah, most definitely. There is no proverbial chicken or egg situation here. The bug came first which lead to player behavior adapting to said bug and only worsening the situation. Not offering justification for the situation (it sucked, I was right there experiencing it with everyone else and yes, I got sick of SP as well) but hopefully some insight into why it took awhile to nail down on our part.

I'm rather surprised you're still picking at a leveling speed which is often considered a very fast curve by modern MMO standards, not withstanding linked WoW accounts. Yeah it was slow to start with, but we reacted to that pretty quickly. There are so many other attractive horses for you to beat on about WAR which have since been addressed.

Player behaviour is predictable, if you give them the choice a lot of players will pick one scenario over the others, believing it rewards them better, even when they might personally find the other scenarios more enjoyable.  You mentioned this queueing in the warcamp thing twice now, from your point of view I guess allowing players to queue for a scenario from anywhere is a good change, from a player point of view, you just fixed the system to stop being really stupid.  Maybe it's not fair but you just don't get much good will from that.

Shatter already said it but I'll say it again, there should have been cross server scenarios in from the start.   On the main SP derail, instead of a system that allows players to control which scenario pops, there should have been a system which allowed them to avoid the one or two they personally didn't like.  A single quest for completing x number of different scenarios (x being the number of scenarios minus 1 or 2 for personal dislikes) that rewarded enough exp/rr to overcome the perceived advantage of pure SP scenarios would have avoided the whole issue (except for population issues ~ cross server scenarios).  But again, the whole scenario system was flawed (sounds like it still is) the presence or absence of a bug just changed how Mythic viewed the system.

As for "Mythic blames the players", you guys made the game, ultimately everything that goes on in game is your fault, nobody said playing God was easy.  If you invent a system that allows players to influence which scenarios pop for other players, that's no less crazy than allowing players to influence which loot items drop for other players, even if you do later discover a bug in said system.  I mentioned leveling speed because of scenarios, also if the message got through about that I didn't see any big change in Mythic's stance on it, if it is a lot faster to level now and that's a good thing for the game, why aren't you guys shouting it from the rooftops?  Love this comment "very fast curve by modern MMO standards", correct me if I'm wrong but aren't modern mmo standards mostly shit, so that's why so many people try out new games?

[tazelbain]

Not balancing the scenarios by reward was a huge mistake.  Surely they had the xp/rp per hour data to make every T3 scenario as rewarding as Tor Anoc.

[Shatter]

For me to return to Warhammer would take a number of things to be fixed beyond those mentioned already. 

1)  Crafting, every crafting prof makes no money or horrbile money compared to the time investment. Many people like Crafting and there is little point to it in Warhammer.  You made Talismans permanent so people never have to replace them.  Most people dont even bother taking food since you cant make money in the game.  Gathering professions cant sell their wears to the crafters because crafters dont want it since they cant make money, its an ugly circle.  You destroyed crafting in your own game. 
2)  Money, why do you need money in the game?  There is virtually nothing to buy and no need for people to work towards actualy making money, not that you can since you broke crafting anyways.   
3)  Soveriegn gear - Id like to see stats on how many players have even 1 piece, nevermind a set.  You have this best gear in the game that is virtually impossible to attain.  Invader crests and beyond are RARE drops in the game and made even worse when you compete for them with a WB of 23 other people.  In the 11 months I played the game I got 4 Warlord crests...4.  You need 14 for one piece of WL gear.  Do the math here.  Obtaining gear in the game is still ridiculous to the point of stupid. 
4) End game - well since you broke crafting, I cant make money and even if I made money I have nothing to spend it on.  I cant obtain Soverign gear unless I get hired as a GM, so why do you expect people to play past 40?  Oh yeah, Reknown ranks.  Well I got to 77 and that was enough of a grind since scenarios dont pop hardly ever and getting RR through RvR is about as much fun as slamming my dick in a car door. 

[HaemishM]

TBF, it was a combination of player patterns and habits that exacerbated the bug (incoming OMG MYSTIC BLAMES THE PLAYER) and made it more difficult to nail it down. At the time, players all stood around in Dragonwake queuing for SP over and over and over...you get the drift. So the question remains, was one issue symptomatic of the other? Yeah, most definitely. There is no proverbial chicken or egg situation here.

No. Yes, there may have been a bug there, but the problem with scenarios which really exacerbated the situation all up and down the line was that there was 1 scenario in each tier that so greatly outranked the others in terms of reward that everyone queued for it. That was a design issue, exacerbated by a bug which was also exacerbated by the player's tendency to take the most reward for the least effort.

Yeah it was slow to start with, but we reacted to that pretty quickly.

No, you most certainly fucking didn't react to it quickly. You spent months hemming and hawing and offering 10% increases on the 3rd Sunday of every full moon.

[Morfiend]

For me to return to Warhammer would take a number of things to be fixed beyond those mentioned already. 

For me it would be:

1) Drastically, and I mean drastically increase leveling speed. Maybe Shadowbane leveling speed. We should be able to get to Rank 40 in a few weeks of normal play or a week of hardcore.
2) Put all the dev time in to end game stuff. Make a bunch more end game gear also.
3) Dont make the RVR rewards so painful and grindy to get.

Basically shift the focus of the game from the journey to the destination. Its supposed to be an RVR/PVP game. Getting RR ranks is still not cake so its not like people wont have a carrot at R40. By adding a bunch more gear to the end game, you let people max out easily, but they can still progress their characters via the RR and new gear ala WoW.

Honestly, it seems like a lot of WARs problems stem from the design decision to shift from the original 4 tier leveling system to the level based tier system. If you have tiers, the lower players are always going to be fodder. So why bother. I cant see that changing now anyway, so just let the players get to the end game where levels dont matter.

[Kail]

2) Most of the levels are meaningless anyway.  If you get boosted to level 8 in the first tier that immediately tells me that levels 1-7 are meaningless.  The same could be said for tiers 2 and 3.  This renders most of your levels to be nothing more than worthless cockblocks to any pvp enthusiast.  

By my 5th year in DAoC I could get to level 50 and geared in less than 1 day played solo and I could argue that even that was too slow.  People want(ed) to play WAR for the pvp.

I dunno if I agree with that...

I have no problem leveling in a game.  I like having little dings every few minutes.  What I have a problem with is when I have to level to be competitive, I.E. when I can get one-shotted by someone ten levels higher than me.  Warhammer largely fixes this problem; my level 12 might not be able to solo a level 21, but I still pose a reasonable threat to him, unlike in something like WoW or Aion.  Meanwhile, my level 21 can roll around with a fairly respectable level of power for a while before getting dumped back down to newb status in T3.  Since I generally find the "endgame" less fun than the mid-game, I have no problem with spending eight or ten hours getting dings in tier 2 or whatever.

I mean, yeah, people wanted to play WAR for the PvP.  But WAR is the only game I can think of where you can (or could, when the servers were more populated) PvP from start to end, so complaining about having to wait until level cap to PvP seems strange to me.  If you didn't like leveling, I don't see why you think you'd like the endgame, since it's basically the same thing, just with bigger zergs.

[ghost]

The problem is that when you have a largely unenjoyable game you don't need more blockages to running through the material, e.g. crappy scenario queues, crappy scenarios, dead zones, slow leveling, etc.  Having to grind out hundreds of quests in a PvP game to level up is pretty lame.  Of course, the clear issue is that they tried to be everything for everyone, and you always fail when you do that.

[Nebu]

I dunno if I agree with that...

I understand what you're getting at, but think about it for a minute.  If each scenario boosts you to a level that is cap - 3, the why does the game make players grind through all the other levels for that tier?  In tier 1, levels 1-7 serve almost no purpose beyond slowing you down and limiting your effectiveness (in terms of gating your ability gains).  It's the same for the early levels in tiers 2 and 3... and even 4.  If you want players to PvP from the start, why not just have 4 levels per tier (ie. 8,9,10,11 for tier 1) from the start?

[Shatter]

I agree with Morfiend.  After I played Warhammer for 1 year and high reknown rank it needs A LOT more end game love.  I also agree that leveling should be made very easy to get to 40.  Heck, I had 0 alts because I couldnt be bothered to level a new character through that again.  Right now you CANT level via pvp cause there arent enough scenarios popping to do that anyhow, you have to level via PvE and that sucks if you came to a game for the purpose of PvP.

[Lantyssa]

After about Tier 1, maybe halfway through Tier 2, It sucks if you came to game for PvE, too...

[Feverdream]

I'm not sure how 'fast leveling speed' is defined by Mythic these days.  If you want to level in PvP, it's not fast because scenarios don't reliably pop outside of T1 on most servers.

I can't believe I'm even posting in this damned forum again, anyway.  I guess I keep holding on to the hope that Mythic will find the courage and creativity to do what really needs to be done with the game rather than treat it like a stable and successful MMO that only requires smaller, slower, more incremental changes.

I swear, even Blizzard is more fearless about making big changes (their success gives them a lot of room to take the 'incremental' route) than Mythic...and Mythic is the one that really needs to step up and take advantage of a critical situation to implement some sweeping changes.  Probably the resources just aren't there to do that anymore, though, so we'll continue to watch this godawful death-by-inches of a game that should have been spectacular.

As a bit of an aside, even though player behavior can most certainly be included in any assessment of what's going wrong in a game, I just feel that Mythic burned their bridges long ago in terms of being able to publicly place blame on players.  They did it too often in instances where it simply wasn't true, so now any attempt to do so just makes them look petty.  I don't think they ARE petty, but really, they need to stay away from anything that sounds like 'oh, a lot of it is because of the players' for maybe the next ten years or so =P.

[Sir T]

My impression of it was very positive over tier 1. I loved the scenario idea. Combat was fast and furious,playing a high elf mage was fun and interesting. But when I hit tier 2 there was nobody there, and I never logged in again...

Frankly if you really want to push people together ditch Ulthan and that grenskin/ dwarf area. Splitting your players into 3 areas was always going to be bad as people will gravitate to one area anyway to find people. That was empire. If you want top be bold then thats the way to go, in my opinion

[IainC]

My impression of it was very positive over tier 1. I loved the scenario idea. Combat was fast and furious,playing a high elf mage was fun and interesting. But when I hit tier 2 there was nobody there, and I never logged in again...

Frankly if you really want to push people together ditch Ulthan and that grenskin/ dwarf area. Splitting your players into 3 areas was always going to be bad as people will gravitate to one area anyway to find people. That was empire. If you want top be bold then thats the way to go, in my opinion

I see you've read the patch notes thoroughly.

* Starting Area Relocation: As part of the New User Journey, all new characters will now start in either Nordland or Norsca, based on their Realm affiliation. This emphasis will bring a variety of races into the same starting areas, giving Tier 1 a boost to population that will help ensure a fulfilling experience for all players. Trial users will only be able to access the Empire vs. Chaos starter areas, but subscribers will be able to visit the other Tier 1 pairings if they desire by visiting a Flight Master.
* Open Realm vs. Realm Combat (Tier 1): As part of the starting-area consolidation, the only active RVR lake will be in Nordland. This will focus the Open RvR portion of Tier 1 and help ensure explosive battles over the Battlefield Objectives. As part of this emphasis, we've eliminated the Lagoon Battlefield Objective to ensure that all of the Open RvR objectives are in the same lake and easily visible and accessible to all players.

[Sir T]

I see you've read the patch notes thoroughly.

I haven't read the patch notes at all

[Arthur_Parker]

Heck, I had 0 alts because I couldnt be bothered to level a new character through that again.

I don't understand the resistance to faster leveling. WAR has 24 different character classes split over unique 6 races, is it reasonable to expect players to pick the 1 class that suits their personal playstyle best out of a possible 24, on their first attempt, while their knowledge of the game is at it's very weakest?  Because that's the result of a slow leveling grind, it's easier to quit and move on rather than consider playing a 2nd, 3rd or 4th character to high level.

I'm convinced it would be fairly easy to get Mythic to publicly support in game sex changes, but faster leveling speed?  No way, that's just something they don't want to talk about.  It seems to have been far more important to copy the WoW Auction house (minus a working economy) rather than consider why all those WoW players have so many many alts.  How many subscribed WoW players are still using their first character as their main?

[Shatter]

My impression of it was very positive over tier 1. I loved the scenario idea. Combat was fast and furious,playing a high elf mage was fun and interesting. But when I hit tier 2 there was nobody there, and I never logged in again...

Frankly if you really want to push people together ditch Ulthan and that grenskin/ dwarf area. Splitting your players into 3 areas was always going to be bad as people will gravitate to one area anyway to find people. That was empire. If you want top be bold then thats the way to go, in my opinion

I see you've read the patch notes thoroughly.

* Starting Area Relocation: As part of the New User Journey, all new characters will now start in either Nordland or Norsca, based on their Realm affiliation. This emphasis will bring a variety of races into the same starting areas, giving Tier 1 a boost to population that will help ensure a fulfilling experience for all players. Trial users will only be able to access the Empire vs. Chaos starter areas, but subscribers will be able to visit the other Tier 1 pairings if they desire by visiting a Flight Master.
* Open Realm vs. Realm Combat (Tier 1): As part of the starting-area consolidation, the only active RVR lake will be in Nordland. This will focus the Open RvR portion of Tier 1 and help ensure explosive battles over the Battlefield Objectives. As part of this emphasis, we've eliminated the Lagoon Battlefield Objective to ensure that all of the Open RvR objectives are in the same lake and easily visible and accessible to all players.

See this is why Mythic fails.  You think jamming everyone into 1 Pairing fixes the issues?  You think scenarios will pop all day every day by doing this?  Nope, I GUARANTEE you they wont.  Is RvR a good way to level via PvP?  Again...nope its not.  Dev stupidity like this reminds me why I quit and wont go back

[BitWarrior]

See this is why Mythic fails.  You think jamming everyone into 1 Pairing fixes the issues?  You think scenarios will pop all day every day by doing this?  Nope, I GUARANTEE you they wont.  Is RvR a good way to level via PvP?  Again...nope its not.  Dev stupidity like this reminds me why I quit and wont go back

[Kageru]

At this point in time "going back to warhammer" is fairly irrelevant. The game is so population dependent and that active population below critical mass. It's mostly inteteresting as an academic study in how they got there and what games should do to avoid the same.

I'm fairly sure they're not doing an iterative development approach through lack of courage or perceived need but more because people in nice suits are asking them to justify spending more money on development.

[Velorath]

At this point in time "going back to warhammer" is fairly irrelevant.

At least they made the best part of the game (the first 10 levels) free.

[raydeen]

At this point in time "going back to warhammer" is fairly irrelevant.

At least they made the best part of the game (the first 10 levels) free.

I would love to see them get several million players in the free trial only. What other MMO has only 10 levels to level cap! Heck, just jump into a few Nordenwatches (because we all know that's just about the only scenario that ever popped) and you'll be at the top level in under an hour!! 

[Arthur_Parker]

If the unlimited trial is restricted to T1, then the only benefit is increased population at tier 1.  I'd have thought at this point you would be trying more drastic measures like making destruction free to play till RR40, maybe super rare loot drops on cities/keeps allowing +1 RR increase over 40.  Then you wouldn't have to worry about balance and you could just say Order is meant to be overpowered, they actually pay.

I will respectfully disagree with you on the benefit.

Also, why on earth would we make Destruction FTP? I'm assuming you do not know the current state of the servers.

As with any faction based MMO, the balance of power swings like a pendulum.

Old quote but still, WAR was the first thing I thought of when I read the below.

http://www.turbine.com/news/5-press/93-dungeons-a-dragons-onliner-eberron-unlimited-surpasses-one-million-new-players.html

WESTWOOD, MA – February 26, 2010 –Turbine, Inc. announced today that Dungeons & Dragons Online®: Eberron Unlimited™ (DDO Unlimited), the world’s best free-to-play massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) has already attracted over one million new players since its September 2009 launch.  The massive influx of new players has been across all of the various consumer plans available.  DDO Unlimited’s paid subscriber base has more than doubled, while at the same time players are transacting in the new DDO store at three times the industry average, growing the franchise’s revenue over 500% since its launch in September.

Before reading that I would have guessed that DDO was in an even worse state than WAR.

[Sir T]

Yeah, DDOs FTP model has really paid off for them. I have some friends that play it and really enjoy it.

[Nebu]

I'd like to see this model used more in MMO's as it supports games that are well-crafted but underappreciated.  First, attract a fan base using F2P.  Second, offer them a catalog of boutique services for reasonable cost.  Third, offer a subscription plan as a value to those that find the game worth investing in. 

If MMO's are going to charge a subscription fee they had better first demonstrate that their free core gameplay is worth paying for.  If consumers find value in that, they will gladly plop down cash for additional services.  This seems a far better way to go than to extort money up front for a barely finished, broken piece of gaming.