A comment I made in the post before this one deserves some explanation. This is what I was referring to, from an interview with Paul Barnett.
“I was in charge of hiding all the crazy things around the world for people to find,” Paul confirmed. “I can safely say that no one has come anywhere near finding even two percent of them. There are years and years of finding all the nonsensical gags that are hidden within the game!”
There are two possibilities.
A. Large amounts of content was created that is so impossibly hard to find, that 98% of it has been completely invisible to even the most hardcore player, 2 months after release. This is apparently a good thing, as it allows the developers to think how jolly clever they are in hiding it. I disagree. Content that is that hard to find may as well not exist, and was a complete waste of development time that could have been used to flesh out the parts of the game that normal people do in fact experience. It was especially useless in persuading people to stay on after their first month.
In fact, how does Paul even know that “no one has come anywhere near finding even two percent of them”. Did they not only waste dev time creating this stuff, but then also spend time creating some method to track how many of them we’d found?
B. That the claims are untrue, or at best, wildly exaggerated. This may seem an unkind suggestion, but I have been here before. When EQ2 was released, one of the races that was supposed to be in the game was the Froglok, but upon trying to choose that race you would be confronted by this sight:
The depths of the deceit can be seen in a post I did back at that time. Suffice it to say, the race did not in fact exist in a playable form, and the suggestion we could find and unlock them was not true. A great many people wasted a whole lot of time trying to find something that did not exist. I did, uncharacteristically for me, eventually forgive them and go back, mostly because deep down I do love Everquest 2.
My point is, when an MMO developer says that something is in the game, but we, the players, just haven’t been smart enough to find it yet, I am filled with suspicion. It is true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it’s a whole lot easier to say something exists than to make it so. It is a great delaying tactic.
So we have a choice between A) An awful display of time-management, wasting precious developer resources that could have been used to improve the game in tangible ways, or B) A claim designed to make us think that something exists, when it does not.
I do not know whether A or B is correct, but I find neither possibility particularly admirable. I am genuinely perplexed that anyone would be boasting about it. Or perhaps I’m just a cynical old bastard who doesn’t understand.
There has been a rash of Warhammer bloggers leaving Warhammer recently.
I didn’t beta WAR. I didn’t even really follow it at all. I was perfectly happy playing EQ2 again, after the debacle that was AoC, when I started getting emails from friends to come along when WAR came out, and I agreed. Basically what this means is that I did not spend months or years thinking about how awesome a game it was going to be.
I only played WoW for about a month, when it launched, so my thinking is more or less unaffected by it. I don’t love or hate WoW. I simply don’t care much about it, or use it as a benchmark.
I had no expectations to be dashed. What I’ve found is that Warhammer is a basically stable game, with notable strengths and flaws. I may write a lot more about the flaws, as I perceive them, than I do about the strengths. That’s natural, as I desire to draw attention to problems, so they can be rectified. Drawing attention to WAR’s many strengths is the job of Mythic’s marketing department.
WAR is a game that, like Pirates of the Burning Sea, relies heavily on having a critical mass of players. and this is not the case on my server, but I hold out hope that this will be sorted out, one way or another. Currently I am enjoying Warhammer Online, mostly due to the RvR, and I will continue to play it. I will also continue to complain loudly when I think things could be done better. Such is my nature, and we’re basically stuck with that.
The sense of betrayal that many bloggers are giving voice to at the moment is understandable. To an extent, Mythic has themselves to blame by talking a lot of hyped up tosh over the last couple of years (and it still continues. I simply don’t believe that 2% claim.), but that seems to be how all MMO promotion works these days. I’ve been there myself, on a number of occasions, but I think at present, emotion is taking too great a role. and the bar is being placed unfairly high.
Warhammer Online’s Witching Night is upon us! I posted a few days ago that I was worried it might be excessively hard to get our hands on these fun fluff item rewards. How is it turning out?
There are four masks you can get.
The Leather Mask of the Gobbo has been duly gained. It drops quite often from restless spirits, and is tradeable. This is good, as it means that everyone is pretty much assured one of the masks at least. I got enough for all my alts while trying to fill my influence bar.
The Delicate Silver Mask is gained by filling in your influence bar for the event. So far Osgard has gotten his cloak as the medium influence reward, but this is certainly doable. I don’t think you’ll be getting the influence from killing players in the PQ, unless you’re extremely lucky, as the influence you get is tiny and the bar doesn’t move. Your best bet is to find some restless spirits, and sit down to kill hundreds of them. Not especially entertaining, which is why Osgard’s only up to the cloak. He will summon up the mental fortitude (I am very grinding averse) to finish that off before the end of the event.
On a positive note, I would like to say that the cloaks are pretty darn cool. So is the basic reward, though it is a shame that it was given only five charges, instead of having infinite charges with a cooldown. Looking spooky is hardly an unbalancing ability, and having charges means that folks are always reluctant to use it, and it’ll end up getting stuck in the bank and forgotten about.
Osgard decided to get his spirits by beating up old women and smashing their cauldrons, which brings forth a few restless spirits. He did that instead of finding a faster, spirit-only, spawn-spot, as there are tome unlocks for slaying the crones, so he might as well kill two birds with one (high velocity) stone.
Osgard used this cauldron spot in Chrace, but there are a number of other locations scattered about the world.
The Gaping Skull Mask is dropped by enemy players in RvR. I have yet to see a single one drop, so I’m not rating Osgard’s chances in his scenario-free tier. If I’m lucky I might be able to find one with a tier 2 character, and pass it up to him, as it seems tradeable.
The Mask of the Bloodletter comes in the gold bag for winning the opposed PQ. So to get a Mask of the Bloodletter you have to:
- Kill 100 players before the other side kills 100 players, under conditions I will describe in a moment. Do this before the PQ resets back down to zero kills on each side for no apparent reason.
- Kill the Witching Lord. Or let the other side kill it, if they’re going to be daft.
- Roll well enough, against probably a lot of competition, to get the gold bag.
- Within 2 minutes, get to the the magic chest, and loot your bag while under enemy fire
My server has managed one completion of the PQ so far in tier 3. There are a lot of problems with it. Even if fixed, I think we can safely say that we ain’t going to be seeing a lot of Mask’s of the Bloodletter.
Primarily, it seems that Keeps and Battlefield objectives use a similar system to PQs, and cannot overlap. So if you are anywhere near a keep or objective, your kills will not count towards the PQs. As BO and Keeps are the natural places that fighting will gravitate towards, this is pretty unhelpful. Black Fire Pass has Bugman’s Brewery smack in the middle of it, and it is all too easy to end up too close to it. Warhammer technology needs to be improved to the point where these things can overlap.
The other area that combat with gravitate to, especially if you can’t use the former areas, is the warcamps. This was mental agony, as I saw our forces, time and again, walk over to the enemy NPC guards and be killed. This would, of course, grant the enemy another kill towards their tally. Unfortunately, too many of our team seemed to be getting their LOLs that way. “LOLs” is not a word I would normally use, but I very much wanted to use the above post title. Usually I would just call them “witless”, and be done with it.
After Destruction beat us in stage one, the Witching Lord appeared at Bugman’s pub, which we held. I have no screenshots, as I was too busy yelling at people not to attack it. All too soon, we had killed it, completing the PQ for Destruction. The roll took place, I am told, but no-one has the faintest idea where chest turned up, so none of them managed to get their hands on the reward bags. I would strongly suggest that the chest appear in the camp of the winning warband, rather than some mysterious contested area.
With all the difficulties, we only managed that single completion of the PQ.
Anyways, that is the state of play after day 1 of the Witching Night on Makaisson. We’ll be having another try at this PQ today, hopefully with less of a display of ineptitude. I’m fairly satisfied with the event, as it goes. With us still being in the second month after launch, I would not have wanted to see too many developer resources poured into temporary content at this stage. I have no doubt that this will all be back again next year with more polish, more features, and more atmosphere.
Yes, I’m grumpy at the moment. That is because Mythic keep making bizarre design decisions that seem to fly in the face of reality. Also, I need caffeine.
Campaign Adjustments
Tier 4 zones now require fewer scenario victory points to be captured. The mechanics of capturing a zone have not changed however. Zones which have no scenario opposition can still be captured if players join the queue for scenarios based on that Zone. Victory points towards zone control will be granted if a realm has enough players in the queue to launch the scenario and the other realm doesn’t. If players in those queues join a launched scenario or leave the queue, the victory points towards zone control will be forfeit.
In other words, using “Join All” to queue for all available scenarios is still the fastest way to get into a scenario, but joining the scenarios in a specific zone will have the greatest impact on control of that zone, and by extension the greatest impact on the campaign in that pairing.
Wooh, woh!!! Stop right there! If one faction has enough people queueing up for a scenario, and the other faction does not, the faction with the most queuers gets victory points?
Are you insane? Do you understand that on many servers, one faction or another simply cannot muster enough people for a scenario in certain tiers. On my server we have never had a tier 3 scenario. I don’t know which faction, maybe it’s both, does not have enough players signing up. But, Mythic, it was you who decided the minimum number of players needed to launch a scenario, and set it so high. How are we going to balance the populations if you explicitly go around rewarding the higher pop faction?
Not only that, but you are forcing people who care about the overall war to sign up for scenarios, even if they’ed rather do Open RvR. If they don’t, there is a risk of allowing the enemy a free victory. You have been saying that you want to move people out of scenarios, into open RvR, but this will have precisely the opposite effect.
If the higher numbered faction, on low pop servers, is going to be receiving a constant stream of extra victory points from failed scenario launchings, that makes a complete mockery of the war. The lower population sides are already having enough trouble in open PvP. Now you want to make it so that they auto-fail scenarios?
I was really hoping for a scenario fix in 1.04. One that would have allowed me to actually play in a tier 3 scenario. Maybe a scenario randomiser so that in tiers that do have scenarios happening, we don’t keep doing the same one. Instead, I hear that I may be going to be punished for Mythic’s own bad scenario launching design that won’t let me play. That annoys me.
Here’s my proposed fix. First, only grant victory points for scenarios that actually take place, as happens now.
Next, figure out how many people each side has signed up for a scenario. Launch a scenario with equal numbers on each side. Use the blasted Nordenwatch map if you think the tier 3 maps are too big for the number of players available. If Nordenwatch is too big, make a map for smaller numbers. But, and this is what I care about, LAUNCH A SCENARIO!!!! Let us fight! I’ll fight one on one in a cardboard box if that is all you have time to design. That is preferable to our opponents just being given free victory points.
Update: Hello to Book of Grudges, and Tobold readers!!! Some more thoughts.
The supporters of this change seem to be convinced, when they want a scenario and it doesn’t launch, that it’s because of some sinister plan by the enemy trying to deny them victory points. They are trying to suggest that the opposing faction is so organised, so dedicated, so of one mind, that none of them sign up, even though scenarios are fun and grant good rewards.
That is one possible explanation, but I can think of a lot of simpler ones.
1. Population being low.
2. The requirements for launching a scenario being too high. I spoke to a CSR this week and he told me that the tier 3 scenarios need 18 people on each side.
3. That there is something wrong with the way scenario launching works. I especially suspect this with regards to how it decides which scenario to launch when everyone hit the join all button. Also, if everyone hits “join all” but one single person picks a specific scenario, presumably that would be the one you would get every time, as it would reach the launch criteria soonest.
4. That it is far fiddlier to sign up for a scenario than it needs to be. Why can’t I sign up for a tier 3 scenario when I’m in a tier 2 area? Or when I’m in Altdorf? And if I do get into a scenario, or if I crash, I have to travel back to the specific tier in order to sign up again? Ridiculous! Before you start punishing our realm for not signing up for scenarios in sufficient numbers, hows about you remove all the pointless barriers to signing up?
Update 2: And hello to Kill 10 Rats readers!
The human mind is wired to find patterns everywhere. Often we ascribe intent and purpose to these patterns. That is how superstitions begin, and I believe that in a similar way, people are assuming that the enemy faction is responsible for the scenario situation, when it is simply an artifact of a poorly designed system. Unfortunately, this patch note appears to be attempting to resolve a superstition, a mere illusion, instead of fixing the very real problems with scenario launching that lie at its root.
Anyhows, the the rest of the 1.0.4 Warhammer Online Patch Notes continue below. There’s nothing else in them I feel strongly about either way, apart from the Witching event that I’ve already written about, and am looking forward to.
Continue reading Scenario Insanity in Warhammer 1.0.4
Warhammer’s first special event is almost upon us. Wednesday for the US, Thursday for Europe.:
A chill is in the air. The twin moons Morrslieb and Mannslieb wax full, bathing the land in an eerie, pale light. The furtive footfalls of creatures unknown crunch on dead leaves deep in the dark woods. Strange apparitions half-glimpsed between the skeletal limbs of trees wander in the shadowy hollows. The souls of men are filled with dread, for the Witching Night approaches!
We are pleased to announce the first live event for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The Witching Night will bring to life one of the Warhammer world’s most mysterious and dangerous times of the year, when the veil that separates the realms of the living and the dead parts, and tormented souls wander the land in search of a peace they will never find. For some, it is a time to cower fearfully behind locked doors, praying to their gods for protection. For others, it is a rare opportunity to practice forbidden rites of dark power.
New Conflicts
The constant warfare and the approach of the Witching Night have awakened ancient horrors from their slumber, daring brave warriors from the armies of Order and Destruction to conquer them in the name of glory!
Four new Public Quests will be added to the game, spread across all tiers and pairings. Unlike the game’s current public quests, these will be set inside of the Open RvR areas, allowing players to compete directly against each other to earn influence that will earn them rewards offered by one of the new Herald NPCs we’ll be adding to the capital cities.
These new public quests are different in two important ways. First, they’re located in RvR lakes, rather than in PvE areas. In particular, the locations for the new public quests are as follows:
* The Tier 1 Public Quest will be located in Chrace
* The Tier 2 Public Quest will be located in Troll Country
* The Tier 3 Public Quest will be located in Black Fire Pass
* The Tier 4 Public Quest will be located in Caledor
Also, because of the special nature of these Public Quests and the rewards that players can earn by participating in them, the quests will reset less frequently than you might be used to. Expect a few hours to pass after a Witching Night Public Quest is completed before you’ll be able to try it again.
The Ghosts of the Fallen
Keen-eyed players will spot the ghosts of fallen warriors roaming the battlefields of WAR. There one moment and gone the next, these fleeting apparitions are not hostile, but if caught and killed, they have a chance to offer one of the Witching Night’s special rewards
Beware the Witches!
Witches and cultists long in hiding have come out to perform unholy rituals that capture the souls of the dead for some unknown, nefarious purpose. They gather around great cauldrons, chanting the names of blasphemous entities. Those who stumble across these secret cabals can free the trapped sprits of the dead and then claim their rewards for themselves.
Courage has its Rewards
The wearing of masks has long been the custom of Witching Night, and WAR will offer four such costume masks that players can obtain by participating in the event. These masks will be difficult to obtain: one is an Elite-level influence reward and the others are very rare drops on enemy players and the witches and ghosts who will inhabit the land for only this event. All four masks can be worn by each of the game’s playable races.
Also, a special cloak with unique art will be offered during Witching Night, and players can also earn a unique title. In addition, there will be new potions and trinkets to claim. All rewards for the event can be used by players of any level.
OK, here’s my problem with this, as designed. These events are supposed to be a bit of fun. Generally, in MMO holiday events, as long as you take part you can get whatever fluff items are available.
The event is going to last about 4 days, and they’ve given the special Public Quests a reset of several hours. The Public Quests are in the RvR zones, so only one of them will be available to any given character. Not only that but they state that the mask drops are going to be “very rare”.
Here’s the deal, Mythic. If I take part in a holiday event, I don’t want to be told, “No, you can’t have this neat time-limited festival stuff, because you are unlucky, do not play enough, or your server is too low population.”. That’s a fine reason (to me) most of the time, but not for fun holiday events. Seriously, lighten up, and let the folks who are still with you in Warhammer’s second month have some flippin’ masks without having to grind solidly for four days with no guarantee of success.
Not to mention that by using the PQ mechanic, you are once again penalising the classes who don’t rank well.
I can see you’re using the event to try to move folks into the RvR zones. That’s good for folks like me, but do you really want to be alienating the non-RvRers, even if they are a small group. I hope that it is possible to gain the Halloween gear without entering the RvR lakes.
Nevertheless, I am excited about the event, and will certainly be trying to snag myself a set of masks for as many of my characters as I can.
Avast ye!!
Greetin’s, denizens o’ the Old World. I be Osgard Blatterzarn, Dwarven Engineer, and today I’m going to be answering a few questions from the beardlings and beardless about the miracles o’ modern technology that are the Engineer Turrets. So often, on the battlefield, I’ll be beset by damn fool questions, and told not to be so noisy. Now I can just be tellin’ ‘em to read the manual!
Your turrets’ll get better as you level, but, and this is a great big but, and I cannot lie, each turret falls into a different one o’ our mastery paths, and the turrets from the paths you don’t put points into will slowly fall behind. So, after a time, likely you’ll have one turret thats significantly better than the others. T’is a shame, but you will still find situations where you’ll be wanting to use one of your less powerful turrets.
So, let’s be introducing ‘em!
The Gun Turret
This here is the first turret you get, the Gun Turret. This is part o’ the Rifleman mastery path. With a range of 100 feet, you’ll find yourself relying on this workhorse a lot. It does regular damage, blocked by armour, and has 2 special attacks.
Penetrating Round’ll do a single target a whack o’ damage, but more importantly it’ll strip a lot of armour from your target for 20 seconds.
Machine Gun fires a lot of small shots at your single target rapidly. It makes a hell o’ a racket, and the dainty elves will complain constantly about it, mark my words!
This is the turret you want to be using any time you’re facing a single opponent in RvR. Stripping their armour will allow your own regular damage attacks to work a whole lot better. This is also the turret to use when you’re concerned about upsetting more enemies than you can handle. The following two turrets will invariably end up pulling additional enemies.
The Bombardment Turret
Next up, it’s the Bombardment Turret, part o’ the Grenadier mastery path. This is our middle range turret, with a reach of 65 feet. Bombardment Turret’s do Corporeal Damage, and once again they have two special attacks.
Shock Grenade does corporeal damage to a single target. It’s really not very interestin’.
High Explosive Grenade is much more like it, doing corporeal damage to all enemies within 20 feet of the target.
I use this turret the least. Mostly I find it useful when I take part in attacking a Keep. I set it up to attack the oil machines above the gate. As turrets are not blocked by obstacles, it can often shoot the oil even in keeps where I ‘ave trouble finding a spot to shoot the oil meself.
The Flame Turret
Finally, here’s me favourite. A turret worthy o’ the name! The Flame Turret! This is part of the Tinkering mastery path.
Flame Thrower does damage to all targets within 65 feet in front of the turret (depending on which way it’s facing at the time). This can snag a whole lot o’ enemies. It doesn’t mention a damage type, so it might be normal damage. I suspect it’s elemental or corporeal though. Either way, they won’t be likin’ it up ‘em!
Steam Vent is the reason I like this turret so much. By releasing a cloud of superheated steam it blasts all enemies within 30 feet with corporeal damage every second. If some greenskin be beating ye up, I can be strongly recommending standing next to me flame turret.
I use this turret in RvR all the time. Any time theres a decent clump o’ enemies in hand to hand with your mates, is a time to nip over there, drop a flame turret, and run like heck. And as I said earlier, they make a great bit of back up for your wizards and healers if they get in trouble. The damage ain’t massive, but can make all the difference.
 Whooosh! Taste steam, evil-doers!!! It’s important to note that in no situation do our turrets ever do impressive amounts of damage to individual opponents, though the AOE attacks can certainly add up, and the armour debuff of the gun turret can facilitate a large amount of damage indirectly.
So there now, that’s me notes on turrets. I hope ye be findin’ that useful, and if ye have any questions, well, ye can be askin’ ‘em below.
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