The winds of chaos have swirled and swooshed through the Old World, and none of us will be left untouched.
These update notes are fairly huge, and every class has been altered. Without numbers, it will be hard to judge exactly what the effect will be, so I encourage everybody to get onto the public test servers, once they materialise, in order to provide Mythic with quality feedback.
Let’s see what has become of us: Continue reading Warhammer Online 1.0.5 patch notes. The Class rebalance is upon us.
On January 20th, 2009, President Barack Obama will be inaugurated.
I’m sobbing my eyes out here with relief.
Let us see if we can get this planet back on track.
Now I can sleep.
A friend asked me a couple of days ago why some people have avatars in my comment sections, and some folks don’t. A fine question!
This site uses Gravatars, globally recognised avatars. These are avatar pictures tied to the email address you enter in the comment box, and a great many sites use them now. By setting up your gravatar, your picture will follow you around the internet with no effort at all!
You can set up your free gravatar over at Gravatar.com.
So, yesterday, a group of us decided to have another go at the Witching Hours Public Quest in Black Fire Pass.
We fought like demons, destroying wave after wave of Destruction players, and once our total got to about 60, other members of the faction started turning up, so we formed a warband.
Unfortunately, many of these new arrivals didn’t seem to really understand what the hell they were doing (in spite of being repeatedly told), and kept attacking the Keep, forcing our foes to go defend it. Kills anywhere near the Keep do not count towards the PQ, so this was completely useless to the original goal of the warband, and meant we took far longer to get the necessary kills than we would have otherwise.
By about half past midnight, we got to 97 kills, to destructions total of 67. At this point, destruction decided to retire from the field. It took us two hours to get the last 3 kills. As soon as we did, and the demon appeared, lo and behold there were destruction everywhere again. A completely pointless and mean-spirited waste of everyone’s time, because gods forbid a member of the opposing faction should get a neat-looking red mask. It is also a funless tactic that the PQ’s designers should have foreseen, and compensated for.
We killed the demon, and this is what we saw.
Out of our entire warband, only one of us was considered to have contributed enough to even get a roll on the bags. It was not even someone who had been there from the start, though he’s a good lad, and was perfectly deserving of getting a roll, just not the only roll. If ever there was proof that the way Public Quests score contribution is completely fubared, this is it.
We spent over 7 hours on this, including a lot of extremely boring standing around waiting for destruction to stop delaying. This bag roll was the final insult for the day, and a lot of us went off to bed feeling rather let down by the whole affair.
I have placed a complaint with the CSR, though I strongly doubt they will do anything to compensate us.
We (as a server) have been managing one or two completions of this PQ a day, so by the end of the event, maybe ten tier 3 characters spread across both sides will have gotten their hands on the Mask of the Bloodletter. Does it need to be that rare? Would it have been so terrible to put one in the green bags, instead of only the gold?
Do better, Mythic. Holiday events are supposed to be fun, not frustrating and disappointing.
Update: It’s Monday afternoon, and I spoke to a CSR a little earlier. As usual, they were very polite, but could do nothing to actually help. They told me that there has been a hotfix to fix the issues we encountered, and that we should try again. Of course, the event ends today.
I would have liked my warband to be compensated for what we lost. As it is, the chances of me finding people who want to put themselves through that PQ again are pretty darn slim.
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.
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