…usually has a point.

I’ll quote randomly what I read on the forums:

How we made pvp more boring than WoW by replacing RvR with dumbass scenarios used for xp grinding – a staggering achievement!
How we tried to make a ghostland of every quest, pq, and town on every server before an expansion pack using scenarios.
How we made an unbalanced game for the future by making too many servers, a completely laughable race of High Elves, and overpowered casters (as usual).
How we will change the game’s name to ScenarioWars for Guilds.

I’ve been Mythic fan for years. I hated WoW with a passion. But, I just cannot believe how badly things are turning out for this game.

I think the devs severely overrated their own scenarios. I mean fuck, at the current rate of EXP reward and requirements for T4 levels, i think it’ll take me almost 70-90 scenario wins just to level from RvR. It’s not healthy, I tell ya. Even my friend whom I introduced to the game went bonkers after finishing T1 doing nothing but Nordenwatch. He gave PQ a try and told me it reminded him of grinding (we cant’ finish it with just two of us anyway, what’s the point?) , he tried questing and found it dull (It’s like a shitty WoW, dude!) since he got no mount. So we login, me on my runepriest and he’s on bright wizard. We just sat at the warcamp, picking our noses while waiting for Morkaine to pop. That’s all there to it.

I was thinking this game was robot jesus after the end of t1. That’s probably because all the pqs and open rvr were actually, you know, populated.

The turning point for me was when I hit level 12 and still had tonnes of teir one quests to do, and that was just in the one race area, I hadn’t even barely touched the other two except to explore the rvr areas and battlecamps. Not being able to do scenarios while questing just made the pve seem so much worse than it probably is. So I skipped the rest of the quests and the completist/questor in me switched off. Now I have no connection to the lore and the land and I’m wondering why the hell this is really a MMO and not just a lobby and scenario deal only with the keep areas being implemented as some type of long running scenario.

I love the quests that take you to the PQ.

I hate finding those PQs completely empty.

RvR on my server is very weird: it comes to life for brief periods of intensity and then it dies again. Because WAR isn’t a world and has such a narrow base of satisfying gameplay, if things are popping either in the world RvR or in scenarios, that’s somewhat fun. If that’s not happening, it’s boring as hell.

Huge increases in gear drop rates and xp/rp gains in world rvr would go a long way to provide variety. Sport pvp is fun in small doses, but not enough to keep people interested. The pvp scenarios quickly feel like any other xp grind in the game after you’ve done them enough. It’s really a problem.

These mostly come from F13 and they reflect the way I feel as well.

I’m not canceling my subscription, absolutely not. I canceled my WoW sub instead, when Warhammer launched. I don’t expect even to be back for WotLK. Warhammer is much closer to the game I want to play, and I see its huge potential. I’m also one who gives too much importance to that potential, and not enough to what the game offers now.

Honestly and brutally, for me the game was fun up to level 10. A blast. The most fun I had in a MMO in a long time. But my main now is only 15 and feels like a chore. I try to log in every day so that I feel like I’m making some progress.

The game stopped to be fun, and now I play only because either I wait and hope them to fix stuff, or hoping to eventually reach the endgame and see if it is what I want.

I’m enduring to try to reach the level cap. From this perspective it feels like DAoC all over again. It’s a different grind, but also a similar one.

Why?

For the same reasons I explained in my first “review” of the game, that people mocked because I wrote it just a few hours into the game. The “fun” depends too much on variables outside the control of the game. I thought this was going to be a HUGE problem as the months passed, instead it is a HUGE problem right now. And it can only get worse and worse.

If I’m not having fun is not due to personal issues, or that I like to just bash Mythic, or that I don’t want the game to succeed (If Mark Jacobs is the first, I’m a close second who wants it to). If I’m not having fun is because the variety of gameplay I praised till day one is now crippled.

I enjoy scenarios to an extent, but when I’m doing JUST them they get incredibly boring and dull. A chore. I play while watching TV because if I don’t I won’t even endure to play two in a row. At level 15 I’m already completely bored of Tier 2. And the (understandable) reason is because I’ve already ran the scenarios of choice 40+ times if not more.

I’ve tried, really tried to explore all possibilities. I’ve ran a number of PQs, did some normal quests. Wandered alone and in group in the RvR lakes. But I’m still level 15. I feel like I’ve basically saw everything I wanted to see in the whole tier, but I have still five levels before I can move on the next. And now it’s a chore. The novelty of this tier is over for me.

I consider all this, and then consider also that players aren’t complaining about tier 2, they complain about tier 3. And I wonder how I’ll feel at that point if the game feels a chore already for me at tier 2.

The real big flaw outside the lack of players activity is that the Scenarios are the only option that makes you notice a tangible progress on your exp bar. And when things start to become a chore because you think you have already seen everything, then the exp bar is ALL YOU SEE.

You worship your exp bar. And the best way to worship it is to run Mourakin over and over. And over.

This isn’t a problem of Scenarios being too rewarding, because what triggers the process of worship is boredom. The boredom kicks in BEFORE you start the worshiping. What is lacking is the novelty.

I think I’ve gone through a patter that is common to many players. I started the game with a completist attitude. Do all quests, complete all PQs at least once. Then, at some point, I discovered that I played a whole lot, accomplished a while lot, but made very little progress overall. I feel like the content had outlevelled me, and I now have half a tier of grind so I can move onto something that feels new. And, by level 22, I’m pretty sure I’ll be bored even of tier 3.

The problem is twofold. First, they really, really need to speed up things. Because the big risk isn’t that players are bored at the cap, the risk is that players will play WotLK LONG BEFORE they reach the cap.

Levelling fast isn’t a tabu. Mythic, don’t be scared to speed up things. Don’t be scared to move players quickly to the endgame. Let them have a blast. It’s much more important that the game is consistently fun, than its longevity right now. Right now and later.

Do not dilute, do not water down. Consolidate instead. Trim. Cut.

Normal PvE and PQs need a huge boost. All the various gameplay possibilities need to be balanced against each other. Scenarios, PQs, open RvR. For “x” minutes spent in one of them the reward should be comparable to “x” minutes spent in another. INCLUDING DOWNTIMES. For PQs it would include the traveling, searching for an open party, organizing. For open RvR it should include its unpredictability.

I know Mark Jacobs says they have all sort of tools to monitor the situation and get statistics. Well, as with the interview with Jeff Hickman, THEY ARE COMPLETELY OUT OF TOUCH WITH THE COMMUNITY.

I don’t need to study ANY metrics to see where the problems of this game lay. They are glaring, glowing obvious.

You say you don’t want to repeat the same mistakes of ToA for DAoC. You are repeating them under a new form. Baby steps didn’t fix ToA. Baby steps didn’t prevent ToA becoming a fire brand and stain Mythic reputation for a long time.

Once the players form an opinion, it’s then hard to dismantle it. Right now Warhammer is Scenarios and then Scenarios. Open RvR is dead or insubstantial even after that timid 50% boost to kills. PQs are deserted. The world feels empty. The community seems dead. Either you act quickly, and firmly, or there won’t be much to save later.

Yesterday I logged in and fifteen seconds I was in a RvR warband. This is what I saw, to all those who claim that players don’t talk in Warhammer. My chat box was swarmed:

Players talk, if only those parts where the community has a role actually existed in the game. Open RvR has that role, but open RvR right now is non existent. The flaw of the game isn’t of not supporting the community. The flaw is that it isn’t using its potential. In Scenarios you don’t need to chat, because what you have to do is pretty obvious. It’s linear. Discussions are superfluous. Open RvR is instead where the moving parts are more unpredictable, where coordination comes to play, and the sense of community builds up.

Warhammer has this. It has this much, much, much more than every other MMO out there. Problem is that right now Warhammer is only Scenarios Online and not much else.

You know what’s the problem? The problem is that half an hour later I was in that warband, my experience bar didn’t budge. And the warband disbanded since it was accomplishing nothing.

8 minutes later I had one bubble an half, made out of Scenarios.

When the RvR warband disbanded I was reading how much fun people had trying, but how pointless it felt.

P.S.
I’ve read PLENTY of very valid solutions to open RvR issues. Including my own.

How to unlearn all the lessons.

If you try WAR alone, it’ll feel lonelier than some other MMOs.

grouping requires less communication, which enhances play time but lessens bonding or memory of other players.

Because WAR gives you multiple paths to level your characters, there’s no urgency to find someone you can rely on for a specific task

The path to glory is still heavily shaped by the game design, but it makes players feel like they have more control due to the abundance of options and the ease with which a person rotates among those options. More control means less submission to imposed standards, which means less cohesive socialization.

The text in this game is non-intrusive and there are fewer breaks in the game.

The game never stops you; only you do.

There simply isn’t any reason to sit around and chat because of boredom, economics, or forced breaks due to game design.

No really?

GOOD RIDDANCE.

Anthropologist my ass. Go play EverQuest. And make sure to not come back.

I was reading Tobold, who finally acknowledge how Warhammer strengths are also its weaknesses.

Nothing new, but it kinda fueled some fancy thoughts:

I suspect that one part of the solution is technical: More players per server. The current numbers worked great when all of us were in tier 1. But now half of the players are in tier 3, and the other half distributed over tiers 1, 2, and 4. With 6 races, 20 chapters per race, and several PQs per chapter, there simply aren’t enough players around to man the PQs. It is really crazy to first have to queue, and then have an underpopulation problem. I can only assume the limit is hardware related, not game design related.

Yes, the limit is technical because, as in DAoC, if you go above the 3000 cap the server will crash.

But I was thinking that, abstractly, Warhammer doesn’t behave the same way of DAoC, and the solution to all this may be technically plausible. If all the players are in scenarios, why you can’t rise the population cap on the world zones?

IF the great majority of players, like everyone is repeating, is just playing into instances, then you can “virtualize” the server structure. They aren’t crowding the same game area, they are instead just playing inside private rooms. So, abstractly, you can separate these private rooms from the rest of the game world. This would allow to increase the population cap per server, since very few players actually play “together”.

The fancy idea would be “clustering” the scenarios between servers the same way Blizzard did with Battlegroups, so that you make sure you never run out of players and that the faction balance is more even. While also increasing the population caps on the world server, since most of players run scenarios anyway and so do not keep it busy.

Split the scenarios servers from world servers so that you can then increase the cap significantly on the world servers. It is plausible, but then it depends on how Mythic is organized and how long it would take to rework things this way.

Then, if you’re willingly to go through this significant change, you may as well take the ball and run with it. Because you can surely increase the cap per server and make tiers 1, 2 and 3 more alive, but you also continue to risk to blow everything up when all those more players crowd the endgame, it’s just a bigger and less predictable unbalance, like a time bomb. The risks increase since you cannot regulate the way the players behave. It may well work 99% of the times when all of them sit in the scenarios, and then blow up the day they all decide to join a big siege.

The other idea is: Virtualize all the server structure like I’ve been suggesting for a long time. Make the population caps zone-specific, like Guild Wars, so that a new instance of the zone only opens up when the previous is full.

Sure, both for clustering and this other, more radical, idea you would also need to rework a lot of things on the design side since the “campaign” needs a degree of persistence. I’m not forgetting this aspect, but I think it can be all worked out.

The drawback is how you bring a revolution to the server structure without fucking everything up. This kind of migration wouldn’t be easy. You can’t bring the servers down and then, a few hours later, everything is different. Or maybe you can.

What if instead of recoding the current servers, you develop the new server structure as an independent cluster. Like a wholly different game. When the work is done, you start migrating some characters accounts on the new cluster, same way they did with the “cloning”. Basically you develop the new cluster, then only copy over, progressively, the accounts. This means that the “old” server structure is unaffected and may as well continue to run, while you can start testing the new game, and progressively migrate to it without the risk of disrupting the players experience.

Fancy, but plausible.

And worth the big programmers’ headache.

Bad interview with Jeff Hickman.

Where he says how they “talked about all this stuff” for two years without coming out with anything at all. Pretty clever.

Everyone with a minimal experience with MMOs knows how the concept of PQs is flawed without an adaptable system. Everyone knows that low level zones WILL have serious population issues. Moreover just everyone can experience those problems simply by logging in and playing: things are working correctly on a MINORITY of the cases. That is on high/full populated servers during prime time. If you’re lucky.

That’s NOT how you design a game. You don’t design it so it’s fun only “sometimes”, or only if picked the right server, or only if you play at a set hour.

Two years that you work on the concept of Public Quests and open RvR. Outside the idea itself, the implementation is deeply flawed. And it required two years of talking and figuring out.

“What we found,” he continued, “in Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online (these are games that are old, old, old games) there are still people in the low level areas. New people, people re-rolling, people coming through the game, so for months and years to come, we will have a constant stream of players rolling and going up through the ranks. What you’ll find is that you go into an area and there’ll be some people there… multiple people generally, doing PQs. Yes, some of the time you’re going to run into a PQ and there won’t be anyone there. Run to another one.”

That goes without commenting as it’s pure bullshit.

Outside the comments about DAoC that right now has a bazillion of clustered servers that together don’t make 1/5 of what is required to make a single server playable, it’s false that “some of the time” you run into a PQ and find it empty (and let’s not even talk about open RvR). It’s true that MOST OF THE TIMES it happens. If you’re lucky you find a couple of players to farm the first two phases and then get slaughtered at the last. Or that you find a decent group somewhere deep in the zone through Open Parties. But sometimes to rarely. And we are two weeks from launch and things can ONLY get worse.

In the meantime Mark Jacobs talks about open RvR being essential for the success of the game, as well as population balance. And that they’ll approach this with baby steps, because they don’t want to overreact.

Nothing really wrong with being careful, but I’m not sure if the players will be still there when you’re done with the talking and considering. Especially when it took two years to come out with… no solution.

The rest of the interview isn’t better, especially when he says that players aren’t participating in open RvR because they don’t know the best loot is there. Huh? Maybe that’s why Blizzard put raids only at the level cap? When you are leveling up you do not care where the best shiny piece of loot is. You care about moving up as faster as possible, and gear isn’t a problem there. That’s why it’s becoming “Scenarios Online” and not Warhammer.

Jeff told me that in the end, this really comes down to players not yet having discovered en masse that these things exist (in fact, knowing this, it actually somewhat addresses the issue of fewer people participating in open world RvR thinking that the rewards aren’t great enough).

If the players have not yet discovered “en masse that these things exist”, it’s because you’ve done a crappy work directing them.

Don’t put the blame on your players if you are bad at game design.

P.S.
Who the fuck wrote that interview? By way of answering this question, Jeff told me… What the fuck?