This has become the most diffused internet meme associated with the HRose name. “I predicted it on my blog”. An expression that I never really used all that often but that I started using for laughs. There is really anything more irritating and arrogant than saying “I was right, I told you so”.

But sometimes it’s true. We can see at things superficially for shit and giggles, stay at the form. Or instead look at the merit of things.

Yesterday, during prime time, the Warhammer server where I created my character had a queue of 500 and a wait time up to an hour. Totally expected on my side, in fact I let the client sat there for the time and when I was finally in I had a very good time. With plenty of players participating in RvR and almost no lag. Ideal experience to me.

If it wasn’t for what I discovered later.

What I discovered later is that the “bloggers” guild I’d like to join hit the panic button, decided that Volkmar wasn’t anymore a playable server and moved to another one. I’m talking about this because it affects me. IT SUCKS to invest seven hours in a character and then be told to start over again. Especially because it’s the third time in less than a month and I’d rather punch my balls than going through the same content again. And AGAIN.

More so because I’m a kind of completist player and so I go and try to finish all public quests. Even if I’m restless there, doing the grind and hoping it’s quick. I don’t have ALTITIS. I like to grow my main character and stick to it. I like to invest the time so that I know it doesn’t get wasted because I switch a class or server. I look at the longer term and for me the choice of a well populated server, with lots of RvR activity comes before any other transitory problem. Because in six months the server may end up deserted, and I’m sure I’m going to regret having moved if it happens.

I’m not completely selfish. There are players in that guild that joined with the CE headstart and had characters up to rank 14, and still agreed to move. It sucks. And not just for me.

So lets look at it from a broader perspective. Server population balance and factional balance.

It’s years that I rant on this because I see it as a fundamental problem that severely affects *everyone*. It’s in the interest of everyone to find a radical solution. It’s not acceptable that every single time a mmorpg launches the servers are unstable, or the PvP sucks because of faction unbalance, or that guilds can’t organize well because they end up on a server with long queues, or that you can’t join friends because half go in a server and half in another. Or that you have to start over again a bunch of times because there is always some problem. One server is crammed, the other is empty.

I have a working solution for this and, while technically not simple, it is based on a simple concept: the player characters being an abstraction external and independent from the server.

First you create your character, then you move the character into a server. The server is no eternal bound, your character is.

A concrete example on the today’s situation:
My idea is once again to allow server travel regulated by strict rules. For example now Volkmar has long queues during prime time. In my idea there would be a portal/beacon in the game that lights up under specific cases. What kills these servers and creates all the problems is not that there are too many players and not enough servers. But that players tend to overpopulate certain servers while others are nearly empty.

This because it’s desirable to play, you know, with people. Especially for PvP. But it isn’t desirable if the server crashes and burns or if you have to sit in a queue for an hour when you have an hour and half to play in total.

But now think if that portal existed. My (hopefully it will be) guild now is asking me to toss away the seven hours I put in my character to create a brand new one in another server. It sucks. But if there was a way to use server travel and move my existing character to a lower populated one, I WOULD DO IT. And with me a MAJORITY of players who prefer moving than sitting in a queue.

If you allow players to police themselves they will. Because it’s in their interest to keep factions balanced and the servers queues-free. If they DO NOT do it, it’s because, like me, they don’t want to toss the investment they made in a character. And then move ONCE AGAIN because even the second-choice server is gone wrong and it becomes overcrowded or deserted.

But if you allow players to move, following some capacity rules, then they spread out if the server is full, and they converge again if it happens that the population decreases.

It’s the rule of communicating vessels they teach in school. Every vessel is a server, they communicate with each other under set rules:

Most persons would call this a system. If we add water to any vessel, there is a movement of water (a flow of matter) until the water has levelled out. There is also a flow of potential energy until each milligram of water on the surface has the same potential energy as any milligram on the surface of another tube. An increase or decrease of water in any tube affects the water in all other tubes according to well-known laws of physics.

This happens BOTH for population balance AND faction balance. Spread out among all servers.

Yes, having rules means that the portal/beacon is closed sometimes and so you can’t always move where you want. But this is preferable to not being able to move AT ALL.

Technically it isn’t simple, but I think this is a problem so significant to deserve the work it requires. Obviously it can’t be easily done now, but it was (and it’s years I’m repeating this) doable if this was set as an original goal.

We saw it’s possible. My idea sits between WoW’s “manual” transfers and Guild Wars immediate ones.

Warhammer would have been a MUCH better and more successful game if it was developed with that goal. Because players activity and factional balance are indispensable to have fun in this game.

Since IainC is a nice guy and helped me behind the scenes on a couple of occasions, I’ll spend some words on what is going on.

Lum has a piece on the specifics (Warhammer Euro open beta not starting exactly well), I agree wholeheartedly with that, so won’t repeat.

It seems instead that Mark Jacobs found his scapegoat:

3) I have read IanC’s post on the situation and I have just communicated to GOA my thoughts on it. I’ll simply say this, I do not agree with what he said, I do not support what he said and his comments were, in my opinion, way out of line.

Now I hope that “communicated to GOA my thoughts” doesn’t correspond to “FIRE HIM, FIRE HIM NOW!”, because I really don’t see how a community manager is responsible of a database server not working well. Especially a community manager that wasn’t there that day.

In particular he’s probably the most dedicated CM they have, as he posts frequently all over the internet (including f13.net, quite a feat) and seems overall a nice guy that does the job well (frequent updates, clarity, helpful).

But what is even more incredible is that MJ is blaming him for saying THE EXACT THING he just posted on the blog. But he is Mark Jacobs, and obviously does not fear that someone steps in his office and fires him.

This is the blamed passage written by IainC:

I wasn’t at work yesterday, Magnus was the man on the scene covering the situation, but I did keep a close eye on forums and was in contact with the guys in the office. A lot of what was said yesterday here and on other forums was entirely out of line. Of course you were disappointed and criticism is certainly warranted but frankly many of the posts made about the situation were borderline sociopathic. If having delayed access to a beta test really drives you to such depths of anger and fury that you felt compelled to make the death threats, racial slurs and other deeply unpleasant posts then – and there is no polite way to put this – there is something wrong with you.

And this is what MJ wrote himself:

Why do some people feel it is okay to threaten, curse, abuse and be downright hostile to other people over a game, especially in this case when it is only over access to a game that is still in testing (Open Beta Test = Not Yet Ready For Prime Time Players)? While I’ve become quite cynical over the decades, I still find myself amazed at times at certain people’s reactions to stuff like this. I don’t mind when people get upset but to treat other people in such a callous, mean and immature manner is really a bit much.

Now I know that there’s this stupid, but motivated, rule that wants Community Mangers not being able to say WHAT PASSES ON EVERYONE ELSE’S MIND, but I really don’t see what’s the sense in MJ’s remark. He SURELY agrees and supports what IainC said, since he wrote exactly the same on his blog.

A matter of form:

However, as a Community Manager telling the players that were disappointed about not getting into a game because of the errors of your company were “borderline sociopathic” is as over the line as some of the comments that were posted here and other places. Saying that some of the players were “way out of line” is one thing but the “borderling sociopathic” bit is quite another.

Ghislaine (CEO of GOA) did something that she has never done before for GOA and we are in constant touch with them about what happened yesterday, today and what we need to do to straighten things out before launch. I would hate to see those efforts be tarnished in any way by an ill-conceived and ill-considered post by any member of that team.

It’s not the first time we see a CM blowing up because of the pressure, it surely isn’t justifiable as it’s part of the job, but let’s not be *completely hypocrite*. That part of IainC post could have been spared, as you really can’t be surprised at some reactions if you aren’t an internet noob. But I also do understand the intent that drove those words (bring back the discussion within civil bounds).

It was a misstep of form, not of merit, and putting the blame on that is about being simply hypocrite and just find a scapegoat to burn only because you need one handy.

What went wrong was responsibility of the engineers who are supposed to make the thing work and anticipate stress issues. JUST THEM. But of course you can’t blame or fire them, because in a 3rd party company they are the only ones who really are indispensable. So let’s blame the Community Managers, because they are disposable. Easily replaced. And you can burn them publicly so that the players can cheer up, so that you can demonstrate how seriously we are taking things.

The truth is that the real errors were made days ago.

Those errors were about the overconfidence and lack of humility in the way things were presented. And these were errors of BOTH the engineers for being caught off-guard, and the Community Managers for passing over that overconfidence without blinking.

It’s indispensable for every business that the REAL problems are recognized and acknowledged. Not the wrong, but handy for public display, ones.

What I said about the game’s future development being hard to foresee still applies. Mythic went with a smart strategy by previewing the game in small chunks. They show some little bits of the game just to entice, then wipe the characters and take down the servers again. They show just enough to test the stability and make you want more, but without spoiling it all.

It’s very hard to understand how the game will do in the longer term. There are issues of factional balance and overall RvR flow, there are issues of character growth. Most of these remain completely hidden at the moment and this situation would encourage a prudent approach to the game.

What I suggest, though, is contradictory. If you want to play this game, do not wait. Play at release. Despite the bugs, servers going down and all sort of problems, the most fun in a MMOs, especially a “social” one like Warhammer, comes from being there with everyone else and enjoy the rush. Get over the bugs, have some patience, but do not wait.

The best tip is to start when everyone else does and try to keep up. Don’t level too fast, don’t level too slow. Find a server that is well populated because waiting in a queue can be preferable of getting stuck in Public Quests or RvR due to the lack of players.

I don’t expect Warhammer will do a big splash. Despite the feedback is much, much better than the one preceding Age of Conan’s release, the amount of “noise” and interest doesn’t seem as high. For the kind of game it is, the potential is in a slower growth, over time. A better retention overall. Piercing through the release of WotLK is the biggest challenge for this game.

The problem, again, is that this potential slow growth is crippled by the game design itself. Because if from a side the game promotes the socialization and collaborative gameplay like no other MMO in the market (and so that slow growth in subscriptions I expect), from the other it cripples it because as the playerbase moves through the content and levels the new players will find a game that is a lot less welcoming and vibrant.

Warhammer’s biggest strength and biggest weakness in one.

This is first and LAST. The proof that I could start here and rant for the next years. Instead it is going to be the last. I promise I’ll never rant again about Mythic’s design. EVER. After this.

I patched the client for the second preview weekend. Despite the beta center, where, quoting, “Please note this page is where all important information and announcements will be posted”, and where all servers are shown as “down” (despite being all up), and where the last message is still from the 20 August and completely wrong.

But beside all this. Beside the fact that the unresponsive combat is the first issue reported everywhere and acknowledged as so.

They fucking added a sound when you press an hotkey. Kinda like I suggested. Problem is that it’s USELESS.

It plays when the action FAILS. It plays when you press an hotkey corresponding to an EMPTY slot.

WHY FUCKING WHY?

Who’s the one behind this awesome design decision? Who’s the genius?

This is another blatant example of how, Warhammer as any other MMOs released recently, they just try to copy WoW without having a clue about WHY things work that way. They just copy without knowing what they are copying, and the results suck.

/rant off, forever.

—
Day after edit: I was drunk when I wrote that.

Besides, it’s really true they only listen to who’s louder. I didn’t notice anyone on forums pointing out the same problem I did.

Of course players aren’t game designers, they won’t perceive exactly where the problem originates and why. They’ll end just saying that the combat feels sluggish. When instead the sluggishness is due to the UI giving incorrect, non-discrete feedback.

This is why game designers actually exist and are paid for, and do not seem to be doing their job at this moment.