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.
I love Warhammer. Being an aged and famously irritable fellow though, that does not stop me from getting rather annoyed with it from time to time. Here’s my current top five gripes, as heard in our guildchat!
1. Public Quests. I love Public Quests! I love the way they are woven into the storyline. I love that everyone who participates has a chance at some class-appropriate loot. They’re a satisfying and substantial way to spend time with your friends, working towards a common goal. PQ are dripping with awesome-sauce. What I hate about them is that I hardly ever get to do any.
As you get further into the game, if you want to do PQ appropriate for your level, you will need an increasingly large team to deal with the insanely grim hero that is going to turn up at the end. On my low population server, it is frustratingly hard to get enough people together to get them done. The idea that was put about by the developers that they’d be active all the time and you’d just need to drop by, is a lot of twaddle. I also hate that I’ve never received anything higher than a green bag with my engineer. Curse you, random chance!!!!
2. I hate the friends list. Because there isn’t one! I can /friend people, and I get a message when they log in, but can I see them in a nicely organised list? No. No, I can’t. Which makes it kind of hard to get them all together for a Public Quest now, doesn’t it. It’s a basic system that players expect. I expect it by 1.1.
3. I hate the various UI bits that insist on fading. You can turn this fading off in the options, but it won’t stick. Stop fading my text window! And stop fading my group-members health bars! What’s with that? Why was that ever considered a good feature to add? The full green bars weren’t bothering me at all. Actually I find them quite reassuring, so please leave them alone. If you want to get rid of something, by all means remove their action point bars, because I genuinely don’t give two hoots about those.
While you’re at it, please make it so that when I turn off the visibility of my cloak, it doesn’t come back every time I zone.
4. I hate that I am accumulating a long list of things that CSR cannot do. They cannot return items that have been looted by my warband, yet gone mysteriously missing during the rolling process so that no-one got them. They cannot launch scenarios for a server which has never, so far as I can tell, had a tier 3 scenario. I don’t blame the CSR crew at all. Having been in tech support myself, they have my complete sympathy. They have been uniformly polite, and knowledgeable. They’re just not being given the tools they need to do their job properly.
5. Hmm. I’ve run out of things I yell about. Oh, I know! Gyrocopter ticket prices! In tier 3 it’s 25 silver a pop! When you’re chasing (or fleeing) a constantly moving adversary, that can seriously start adding up. With the absence of scenario to make some cash in, Makaisson RvRers are being reduced to, *cry*, hunting NPCs. Perhaps if taking Battlefield Objectives gave you a little bit of cash, that might help a bit. Alright, thats more of a grumble than a yell.
Anyhows, those are the things that currently have me hot under the collar. Well, apart from the things I’ve written about before that I’m sure you didn’t want to hear repeated.
What’s getting your goat at the moment? Or do you go placidly amidst the noise and haste?
My server, Makaisson, has been down for about an hour in Prime Time now, without comment from GOA. I’ll take the time to bring you up to date with my adventures!
Osgard, my Engineer, is now level 21, with a renown rank of 20. The renown rank means that he pretty much doesn’t get any renown from tier 2 scenario and RvR any more, so he’s been hanging out with the tier 3 folks.
The problem is, nobody I have spoken to has ever gotten into a tier 3 scenario on Makaisson. We are one of the lowest population servers but that can’t be all of the problem. We’ve had warbands of 24 folks, who’ve all said they’re permanently signed up for all the tier 3 scenarios. There are certainly enough destruction players in tier 3 to have a scenario, so what on earth is going on? There is something screwy with the way the game is deciding when to launch a scenario.
It’s so hard to find a fight in tier 3 that many people are playing their alts, and a vicious cycle ensues.
I will write more about the Engineer in the future. There has recently been a lot of nonsense written elsewhere about us though, so I’ll say this. We are one of the most powerful RvR classes around, at least for the three tiers I have so far experienced. We may not always look that impressive in your parsing, or in the scenario report, but that is because they do not mention all the times we kept the healers alive, rooted the enemy flag-bearer, or slung someone off the roof of the keep. We’re more than capable of scoring solo RvR kills too. A smartly played Engineer is a bringer of woe unto those who oppose you. So do try to remember to heal us once in a while, eh?
We are, however, probably the most appallingly bad PvE soloer that there is. In spite of using potions galore, I got the snot beaten out of me by 2 different level 7 heroes yesterday while slumming it on the Blighted Isle. Most of our best tricks (such as knockback) don’t work on these wily mobs, and with WAR’s respawn rate, using AOEs is often the fast way back to your bind point.
Osgord, my Ironbreaker, found my first ever Decimator chest piece last night. He singlehandedly went through all the tier 1 RvR zones, taking 10 Battlefield Objectives in all. That a single level 9 (He was halfway through 10th by the end of the spree) Ironbreaker can go around soloing Objectives, while my Engineer gets beaten up by champions half his level is a story for another day. On the last objective he found this lovely bit of kit on the level 10 Champion.
Hurrah! Except that it is the Bright Wizard one, the Decimator Flamerobe, and it’s bound to Osgord. I’ll try to make this the last time I go on about this, so I’ll spell it out really simply. Given that:
- You only get Decimator Chestpieces from the Level 10 Champions that guard the tier 1 Battlefield Objectives.
- These Champions drop them excruciatingly rarely.
- These Objectives are only available to take if your opponents have bothered to take them back of you.
- There are 10 possible chests. Soon to be 11 in December.
- Once you hit level 12, you can no longer fight in the tier 1 RvR zone without turning into a 1 hp chicken.
- Each piece of an armour set for your class is a tome unlock.
Given all these things, as it stands, there is precious little point Decimator armour even exisiting. You could, perhaps, grind away at these Champions in the hopes of getting the right chest, but all the time you are doing that, you are moving towards level 12, at which point your chance of completing your set is lost forever. Stuff that hard to get belongs in the end game. This is horrible design, and it makes Tome completists like me very very sad.
Aha, at 7 pm GOA have seen fit to bring my server back up. Time to see if I can get into a tier 3 scenario tonight, or whether I’ll be chasing Waroboros again.
The Warhammer Wikia has received a new look. Or maybe I just didn’t notice until today. Either way:
That is more than a random advert. That’s a whole deliberate theming of the site portal, clearly specially designed for the purpose, and whether it is the owners of the wiki, or wikia themselves who have done this, I consider it to be pretty poor behaviour. I wonder how much Blizzard are paying them for such base treachery. A wiki is put together by a great number of people willingly sharing information and content, because they love the subject. How many of the contributors would be happy to see their work used in such a cynical way?
Maybe the privatisation of wiki, by companies like Wikia, was not such a good idea. Far better to use some of the perfectly functional public domain wiki software. By ceding control to a company that is quite naturally in it for the money, rather than out of love of the wiki-subject, something has been lost of the spirit of the enterprise. At any rate, I don’t see me ever contributing to a Wikia wiki ever again.
Neither the Age of Conan wikia, or even the WoW one has received such an extreme makeover. The whole thing smacks of a dirty tricks campaign by Blizzard. Certainly, as Lum recently pointed out, there is little love lost between the two companies.
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