Warhammer Online 1.1 hits the Test Server

No sooner have we received 1.0.6, and the plague of newbie tanks that has accompanied it, than 1.1 has hit the US test server.

Lets have a rummage through, and I’ll interject as we go.

Continue reading Warhammer Online 1.1 hits the Test Server

The arrival on Burlok. Hell is (some) other people.

So, a few days ago, the folks of Makaisson began their journey to Burlok. We now have many of our guilds rebuilt, and are slowly regaining our sense of place.

It has been strange to see so many people online at once, and being able to get into scenarios for the first time in a month has been a pleasant change for me. But things are far from perfect, and in many ways I am missing Makaisson.

Myself, I have been suffering from a sort of culture-shock. Gone is the idea that the Order faction should work together, and play nicely. Burlok seems to be a hive of ninja-looting, and other anti-social activities. People routinely abuse eachother. And I’m not talking about the faceless unguilded, but members of supposedly the leading guilds.

So far I have had cause to contact five different guildmasters over their member’s ninjalooting antics. A couple have reacted in the way I would hope, and I thank them for that. The others have acted as if I was the source of the problem, or at best an inconvenient timesink.

Yesterday, for example, we were in a warband fighting the forces of destruction in High Pass. The Devastator Steadcaps (a very rare drop needed for the t3 RvR armour set) for the Ironbreaker class dropped, and three people “needed them”. Two Ironbreakers and a Shadow Warrior, and the Shadow Warrior won. I pointed this out in the warband chat, and the Shadow Warrior immediately logged off.

Now so far this is fairly normal. Any game has players who take advantage of others. What upset me is what came next.

The Shadow Warrior was in one of Burlok’s larger guilds so I contacted another member to try to get in touch with his leader. Meanwhile, his guildmate in the warband started attacking me. “Osgard stop crying! It’s just a pixel!” Aye indeed, pixels that his guildmate thought were worth stealing. BTW, saying that something shouldn’t matter because it’s a pixel is a bloody stupid argument in an MMORPG.

On Makaisson, a ninja-looter would have been roundly condemned by the whole band, but on Burlok his guildmates were prepared to defend his behaviour. And almost everyone else in the warband stayed quiet.

The guild leader I spoke to seemed rather more interested in making me go away than looking after the reputation of his guild. After I had asked him to make sure the boots were given to the right person, he stopped responding to any further communication. Eventually the Shadow Warrior stated that his guild had decided they did not need the Devastator boots (Do they have a standing order to ninja all Devastator gear, I wonder?), and he would give them up. Seeing a thief trying to characterise being forced to return his spoils as generosity is always somewhat sickening. The highest rolling Ironbreaker was finally given the boots, and thanked me for my efforts, so it ended correctly, at least.

I have screenshots and names, but that’s not what this is about. There is little to be gained in trying to shame the shameless. I’m used to viewing members of Order all as part of one big team, and it has been a shock to my system to see people willing to openly defend ninja-needing, and outright disrespect of the rest of the faction. If it’s like that on an RP server, I shudder to think what things must be like elsewhere.

I won’t stop calling people out for it, even if it does mean that certain guilds despise me. They don’t have the right to steal from the rest of us, no matter how elite they think their guilds are. Do they really care so little for their reputations?

Many of the Makaissonians I know are pining for home. I had, until recently, been opposed to creating a Makaisson guild alliance, as I had felt it would be better for us to integrate into our new server. Now I am beginning to feel that we might be better off banding together for our own safety and sanity.

Almost everything I’m not enjoying about WAR at the moment is a result of player behaviour, rather than anything wrong with the game itself. Perhaps I’m getting old, and I’m too out of touch with how people think these days to carry on playing MMO. Maybe I just need to find more nice people on Burlok so I can avoid ending up in PUGs with thieving scoundrels and their enablers.

Classy, Vault Network. Real classy.

The Warhammer Vault has an front page column titled “Kid kills family because he is unable to dye cloak, Warhammer to blame”. That title has been appearing on feeds around the internet, which is where I saw it, and followed the link to find out what sort of tragedy had occurred..

In case you’re wondering it is just a rant piece about not being able to dye certain items. The child killing his family is just a shock tactic designed to get people to bother to read such drivel. The possibility that it might cause bad publicity for Warhammer, the Vault, or our hobby in general does not seem to have been considered.

As the title of the piece has appeared on every site that has an RSS feed from the Vault (For instance), it will have been seen by thousands. Many of these will not have clicked through to find it was simply a rant with a lack of taste. They will have taken away the belief that someone did harm their family as a result of playing the game, and that could affect parents willingness to allow their children to play. Do we really need to put fuel on the anti-gaming fire?

I sure hope the large number of extra clicks that this shock-jock style posting generates is worth giving up the pretence that the big gaming sites are any classier than the rest of the blogosphere.

The columnist, White-Orb, said:

“The only thing I can say to you who feel this was an inappropriate post is that I am sorry you did not get my joke, or that you did not think it was funny, but perhaps personal columns should be taken with a grain of salt.”

If it had been written on some little backwater blog (such as this one) nobody would have noticed or cared. Instead it appeared as primary content on an IGN website. Different rules apply, if only because IGN has actual relationships with advertisers and game companies to consider.

The Vault staff are backing White-Orb to the hilt, which I approve of on one level. Unfortunately, they too are suggesting that critics lack a sense of humour. As so often, they are not sorry about what was said, but that our reaction was incorrect.

It is not the writer I take issue with, in any case. He should be allowed to write whatever nonsense he likes. However, whoever has editorial control over there, and chose to publish him on the massive IGN platform, has extremely questionable judgement. And if I were Mythic, I would be writing a very strong letter to IGN about making untrue statements about Warhammer.

Once again, I suspect I’ve just demonstrated how horribly old-fashioned I am. I just can’t bring myself to consider family-killing to be an appropriate source of humour.

Update: Looks like the column has been renamed, and the IGN forum thread relating to it that contained all the defiant writer and staff responses has been scrubbed. Good thing I took screenshots, really.

Some thoughts on Contribution in Keep Sieges

I wrote part of this as a reply to a discussion over at Wizards and Wenches. Folks were discussing the contribution system that is used to determine the loot at the end of a Keep siege. Currently the system decides how much you contributed, via some equation that nobody understands, and gives you a bonus number of points between 0 and 500 that is then added to a random number between 1 and 1000. There was a poll there, and most people felt that more weight should be given to the contribution, and less to the random number. Many felt the random roll should be removed altogether. I could not disagree more.

The problem is the contribution system does not work. The system is mysterious, and usually it is hard to tell whether it is working or not. Occasionally we come across a clear example that it is not based on any measure of contribution that rational beings would recognise. For instance this recent example of a chicken getting a silver medal for contribution.

Contributionwl5

Even if it was not completely broken, and I know opinions differ on whether it is or not, different actions are weighted differently. Think of all the different ways people can contribute during a Keep Siege. There are the obvious things like doing damage, healing, and tanking. But also you have the people who actually bring the rams, organise the troops, keep the enemy players off the backs of the folks fighting the Lord.

As an Engineer, for instance, I am treated harshly even by a non-bugged contribution system. I don’t heal, I certainly don’t tank, and I’m not going to be out-damaging a lot of folks. I do root, I throw our foes off the battlements, I knock the Keep Lord and Champions on their backs as often as I can, and I protect our healers with my life. These things are not really rewarded by the contribution system, and it would be very difficult to programme one that did give proper credit for all possible actions that help the goal.

I would further move that a fair contribution system is impossible to create. All you can do is take some very crude metrics. People being people, some will focus on raising their score in those metrics even if it is not actually the most useful thing they could be doing. That penalises the people who really are concentrating on doing what is right for the group.

In my opinion, the only thing you can do is assume that everyone present is doing the best job that they can, which is, if we’re honest, usually true. That being the case I would remove the current contribution mechanism. Perhaps you could instead simply give a bonus for being there from the beginning instead of turning up at the keep late, as well as removing obvious AFKers from the roll completely. That would at least be easily understandable and rational. Because our classes are, by their nature, unequal, and our roles during a siege different, the contribution system as it stands is inherently unfair and should be removed.

Were it up to me, everybody who participated in the successful Keep Siege would be given a token. These tokens could be saved up to buy the rewards that currently come out of the various bags we get from the Keep Lord chests. Maybe it is the liberal in me, but I just feel that an equal reward for participation is the way to go. When I lead a warband to take a keep I think of us as a team, and I reckon it would be a good thing if the reward system thought of us as a team too.

Heavy Metal Poisoning

Dev : Right. For the next Event we’ve built a great new scenario. We’ve also made these nifty cloaks as a reward, and our players will have the opportunity to unlock the two new classes a week early. Pretty awesome, eh?

Boss Dev: Awesome indeed. Perhaps a little too awesome. Could you make it a bit more frustrating?

Dev: Umm, OK. Like how you made us add that massive influence grind to the Witching Night event?

Boss Dev: Exactly, but this time, design it so that many of our players can’t even take part! And for those that can, force them to play every single day for a week. So they have to choose between completing the event, and doing anything else with their lives! *Cackle*

GOA and Mythic know that there are many European servers that do not have scenarios any more. Makaisson, my server, has never had a tier 3 or tier 4 scenario, and I don’t imagine that it ever will.

Yet they designed the Heavy Metal event’s scenario, Reikland Factory, to need 18 people on each side. They also designed it so that you had to complete every daily task in order to gain the elite reward.

Predictably, on Makaisson, as well as many other servers, we cannot complete the daily tasks because we cannot get into the scenarios. (On Mak we can’t even get into the t1 version). Even on more populated servers, if you happen to play outside of prime-time, you have little chance of getting into the Reikland Factory.

On top of that, the Event is designed so that you have to play every single day, and complete every single task, in order to complete it. Punishing your players for taking a day off is not a healthy thing, and should not ever be considered as a mechanic for something like this.

The sensible and easy thing to do would have been to allow the Reikland Factory scenario to launch with fewer than 18 a side. That would also have been the solution to our never having had any t3 scenarios. For some reason, this option was discarded, causing a large proportion of WAR characters to not be able to participate in this much heralded live event.

Of course, last week GOA promised server transfers this week. This week there has been no information, and they chose to release Heavy Metal in Europe before enabling transfers. Leaving those of us on the dead servers (Frequently dead BECAUSE of the announcement that we were going to be transferred off) trapped, unable to take part in the event.

I shake my head. They take something that is good, a fun event, and through short-sightedness and apparent obliviousness to the state of their own game, they manage to turn it into something that brings annoyance rather than joy.

I have created a level 1 engineer on another server who is going to be trying to get the elite reward, as unlocking that will unlock the new classes on every server.

But I should not have to. And it does not help all my established characters, the ones I WANT to play, rather than the throwaway alt, get their cloaks.

On Makaisson, the global channels are filled with nothing but people being upset they can’t participate. THAT is what the Heavy Metal event means to those of us on underpopulated servers, while we wait for GOA to get around to letting us transfer. It is something that reduces, rather than increases, customer happiness.

US transfers started, what, a month ago? Europeans have still not been allowed to move. Equal service? Ha! It is like they are deliberately trying to make people not enjoy the game. I would actually like the opportunity to write a happy Warhammer post once in a while, instead of ones born of extreme irritation.

Mythic has good people making good things, but at some point in the process, someone is coming along and poisoning them with bad ideas. This person needs to be found, and put in charge of something less important than player enjoyment.

Makaisson: A Post-Mortem

Makaisson has died. Those of us who remain wait for the server transfers to begin that we might once again find enemies to fight.

It was not like this until the last few days. It is true we had a low population, but we could always get a decent bit of RvR going. Once transfers became certainty, some people started alts on Burlok while they wait to be able to move their mains. Others, not wishing to move to Burlok, have rerolled on other servers already. Quite a few are so annoyed at being messed around that they’ve stormed off in a huff. No doubt some are trying out the new WoW expansion.

So why did this happen?

Staggering the launch of Makaisson to three days after Burlok meant it would always be the sickly sibling, instead of the healthy twin. Folks will gravitate to the highest population server, unless it is so full that there is queueing. I’ve seen this happen every time an MMO staggers its server launches, but they keep doing it. I would have been on Burlok myself if my guild hadn’t decided Burlok would be its destruction server.

Words have power. Words from a Dev can kill. The moment Makaisson was included on the list of transfer servers, our population nose-dived, which in turn caused the transfers to become necessary. A sort of corporate fait-accompli which really gets under my skin.

So it is with a certain amount of schadenfreude that I noticed this understated comment by Mark Jacobs yesterday:

As to our EU players, I know I’ve been rather quiet regarding Europe lately and I apologize for that but know that it isn’t because we aren’t paying attention or don’t care what is going on there. When we signed the deal with GOA we were assured that our European customers would be treated in the same way as our North American customers. We are aware of the issues that have been raised here and in other places. And that’s all I can say on that subject for now.

Maybe he is just making noises to pacify customers. Perhaps he is finally going to raise hell with GOA, and force them to either not be rubbish, or find a new partner. Given EA’s worldwide reach, I never understood why they can’t host the darn thing themselves.

It could be the final straw for Mythic was the situation this week wherein cancelled European WAR accounts were reactivated and put onto recurring billing. This has been rather lightly breezed over by the official GOA statement on their website, but I suspect it was quite impressively illegal.

Anyway, I’m sitting here in Altdorf, waiting for the server transfers to begin. We have been given a rather nebulous “probably this week”. The US, of course, had it’s transfers almost a month ago, once again bringing into question the commitment to provide Europe with an equal service.

Will Burlok be as much fun as Makaisson was? From what I hear, there is a lot of bullying and nonsense within the Order faction from the larger guilds towards the smaller ones. If that is the case, then we’ll have to see what we can do about it. I’ll be trying to help keep Makaissonians in touch with eachother, so we can stick together if confronted with hostility.

Destruction has all but evaporated on Makaisson. We could not find a single person to fight last night. But soon, perhaps. Soon I shall hunt again.

Warhammer Online: Save Our Server!

In a week or so, our players will be encouraged to move to Burlok, Europe’s only other Core RP server.

Most of us, the people of Makaisson, like our server fine. Our only issue was lack of scenarios, which could have been dealt with by fixing the parameters by which scenarios are launched, and a growing population.

Servers have to exist in pairs, because you cannot (and rightly so) have characters in both factions on a single server. That being the case, it is the height of foolishness to sacrifice one to save the other. BOTH must remain viable. Other server rulesets will be left 2 or more viable servers, but if the current plans go ahead, there will be only one viable Core RP server.

Makaisson’s problems originate from Burlok being opened 3 days before, instead of launching simultaneously. That unwise move ensured that Makaisson would always be behind on population.

We hoped that over time our population would build up, especially once we got the the holiday season. We’ve seen an influx of new folks recently, but with the news of transfers, we are doomed to dwindle away to nothing. New players will not come to Makaisson if they see everyone being encouraged to transfer away. Already we have been stripped of our low population xp and renown bonuses, to discourage people from starting here.

GOA could have helped our server by running some of those RP events that they’d promised us. They could have helped us by launching the servers simultaneously, instead of three days apart. They could have enough respect for their players to consult us before pulling the plug.

If people are allowed to transfer off Makaisson to Burlok, Makaisson will become completely beyond hope of fixing. So what will be the point of Makaisson even existing?

Save Our Server! Please, GOA, do not kill our community. Give us a chance to grow.

Please take the time to sign the Save Makaisson petition

Update: As it turns out we failed. Transfers will be going ahead as planned.