NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! unless...

Producer's Letter has this to say:

"By 1.3.6 players will have the capability to play as both Order and Destruction on the same server. We did this in Camelot, because we wanted to give players more choices about where they wanted to play and who they wanted to play with. We’re aware of the possible downsides (such as cross-realming) and we’re aware that people have a lot of realm pride, which we believe is very important, so we’re going to be introducing a significant lockout timer to switch between realms. Warhammer has a lot to offer between Order and Destruction and we want to give you the opportunity to experience all of WAR with a single account while still maintaining ties to the community of your home server."

If as Wasdstomp suspects is to aid the introduction of a third faction, then I can accept it and will welcome it, it is probably the only way to get a third faction in and give it a chance of high population. In which case I can take the negatives this brings in exchange for the HUGE improvement that a third faction would provide.

BUT if we're not getting a third faction, then this is absolutely not required, shafts realm pride even further and changes the game in a bad way for people that have stuck with it through, to be honest, a lot of crap. So unless they announce plans for a third faction expansion soon I can only consider this as bloody terrible news. And I don't mean "awww shame terrible news", I mean absolutely fucking terrible, game ruining, re-consider my subscription news.

I loathe cross realming. I like my enemy players earning their reputations in-game and being somewhat enigmatic, it's why I don't have a particularly high forum post count and don't go on IRC or anything. I don't want to know them, I want to fight them in game and have them (and if I'm lucky, me) earn respect from that. Not from some epeen circle jerk outside of the game. I don't want them logging onto our side and trolling me after I kill them, tthough I have actually had this happen from some guy with 2 accounts already, but at least he paid for the privilege.

First Mythic ripped up realm pride with the changes to a "no downside" and high speed, ping-pong campaign, but this... yikes... it could decimate it further.

For the first time in ages I'm really worried for my future in WAR. Mythic if you want to prevent people like me spiraling into negativity, then please, PLEASE, either cancel this (as if...) or give us something solid to hope for.

More than ever I hope the Red Plague is not just a rumour.

Busy day :( So have a very angry man and some giant teddy bears

Old vid, but still amusing, in a OMFG I'm glad it wasnt me phoning him kind of way. Nobody can swear with quite as much passion as a Geordie lad. It's a skill really.

Obviously this features naughty words and lots of anger. Seriously don't watch it if you're easily offended, or a little 'un or something.

RAAAGH!

And this is clever, trippy and slightly hypnotic.


And finally I'm gonna pimp our latest guild video again. It's so damn... uhm... pimp!

For WAR reading check the blog roll, lots to read as ever. I'll get a proper post up in due course.

Go check out Werit's video from testing tomb of the Vulture Lord, WAR's RvR enabled instance (yay for new purge changes!). You can see a few new things in it including the (optional) combat damage/heal flashing on characters.

Also if you've not played WAR for a while or never dabbled at all, this video does a good job of showing off some of the high quality graphics inside the game's premier dungeon experience. I'm a big fan of the way The Land of the Dead and it's dungeons look. It's just so right, not one of those over-stated WoW fairy glowy crap things (which are impressive in their own way, but totally wrong for WAR), it's an ancient yet maintainted tomb of evil egyptian style buggers. Mythic absolutely nailed the Tomb Kings theme.

Horned rat is horny

Whilst trawling forums and the like I've seen a few folks asking “why do so many people want RATS as a playable race???”

To answer this I shall quote Pandemic of Karak Norn Brightwizardy fame:

“Who doesn’t want to play a race of paranoid racial supremist psychotic cannibals?”

Being a rambling long post type person myself, I could waffle on with a larger explanation, but why bother when that sums it up perfectly!

If you’re still not convinced then perhaps this collection of Skaven imagery will convince you…

And if even that doesn't drag you onto the ratty train of love, then I recommend you use the mighty power of wikipedia for their background story.

Youch! It burns!

There’s been WAR bloggers popping up all over the place lately, as my ever growing blogroll can testify to. I’m going to give an extra special shout out for Krosuss who’s been a regular commentator on my blog for a long time. He’s recently started his own blog called “Krosuss says burn…” and from his past comments I know the dude has plenty of ideas to share.


WAR’s resurgence continues!

Oh and on another topic... if you want to see the new city being tested live, check out Mykiel's site for streaming video uberness.

Getting my arse kicked and why audience participation is not always a good thing

Last night there was another 6v6 event on Karak Norn. I always like to attend these events (if I real life doesn’t get in the way) and yesterday I was happy to ninja myself onto the PC without causing too much marital strife. In the past I’ve always entered these events with an almost completely melee group (other than healers) and have done fairly well, our win/loss ratio normally around the breaking even mark. Pretty much every event we’ve cobbled a group together at the last minute, but it’s still often had the same pool of people to select from and we managed to get my desired melee theme. Last night though the people I’ve usually gone with weren’t available and nor were the type of careers required for a melee group. Not wanting to miss the event we built a group up anyway from who was online and decided to give it a go. We knew the group wasn’t quite right and really we should have changed things, but over confidence stepped in and we just went for it.

BIG MISTAKE

We got the shit kicked out of us and ended up with a 1-6 win/loss ratio before we decided to call it a night. Ugh… this was by far the worst result I’ve ever had in an event like this. I’m not going to make excuses for this poor result, as we were outplayed by Order and the speed of some of our losses said it all. However I want to ponder on it a bit, since this was such an unprecedented arse kicking for me and losing a fight is not just about how well your opponents play, but also about other factors like how well you play, your group synergy and the environment you’re fighting in.

To be clear then, /salute to all our opponents, in each fight you outplayed us and fully deserved your wins.

Our group looked like this:
- Chosen (shield)
- Chosen (great weapon)
- Disciple of Khaine (heal specced)
- Disciple of Khaine (DPS specced)
- 2x Sorcerer (single target specced)

First off, this is no sleight on the people in my group. They were all good (or even excellent) players who don’t make a habit out of getting their arse kicked. We just didn’t play well; our assisting was sloppy, ventrilo was a muddle, changing to better targets was off and our use of crowd control was rubbish.

I respecced great weapon for this event, which was a mistake, I’ve been sword and board for ages now and I discovered I just didn’t quite know anymore where I should be and what I should be doing in a situational sense with this type of group when using a great weapon. For the last 2 fights I went back to my shield spec and did a lot better (which included the one win lol). No escaping though, I was shockingly shite for most of our fights. Oh! The shame… Meh I'm no epeen ego monkey, I'll freely admit when I played like turd :P Anyways, I don’t know if other people will think that group should work ok, but for me there was no synergy. It’s a set up that didn’t seem to know what it was trying to be and it felt very squishy. The squishy bit I’m a little surprised at, since there’s this impression of DoKs as un-killable monsters, but it was Slayer central last night and they were absolutely tearing through our DoKs. In previous groups we always went with 2 proper heal specced players and I think this was our biggest mistake in creating the group. To summarise my rambling, on top of just plain playing badly, I think we made 3 key mistakes in our “setting up phase”:

1) Overconfidence based upon past performances meant we didn’t put enough thought into setting up the group. In an event that will have some opponents in absolutely perfect “FOTM” (as people on forums like to call them) set ups, be cocky and over-confident is asking for an arse kicking. This is the root of the other 2 key mistakes.
2) The group didn’t have an overall purpose or theme; we didn’t consider synergy of careers or anything other than having 2 healers (1 ½ as it turned out), 2 tanks and 2 DPS.
3) Individuals not being clear on their role and responsibilities led to headless chicken moments. Changing to unfamiliar specs in an unfamiliar group was not my brightest moment.

Important to state again that I’m not saying had we sorted ourselves out better we would have won. Order outplayed us and judging by the score on my Casualties of WAR mod they outplayed quite a few others too, but had we got our shit together we would at least have had put up a better fight and not got steamrolled so much. A lesson in humility learnt perhaps.

There was one other thing that was a complete fucking headache. Idiots in the audience.
These events attract spectators, which is cool and normally not a problem. Spectators sit naked on their mounts and watch from a distance. Unfortunately last night the audience (from both Destruction and Order) decided it wanted to get a bit closer to the action and in some cases join in. We had people circling the fights at close range, running through the middle, adding onto fights, throwing in resses onto our opponents and all sorts of other crap from a mixture of people who weren’t all naked either. This meant that for a bunch of our fights I couldn’t tell who was in the enemy group and who was just some random bell-end trying to screw things up; in fact there was one fight where I had (by a rough count) 18 red names in tab targetable range. It also looked like Order was having similar difficulties. At another point what appeared to 2 groups worth of spectators tried to gank us, we killed them mind you, there’s a big difference between puggies and the proper Order pre-mades. In your face psycho spectators! :P

(update) for fellow Nornites, this was in Praag ;)

It was incredibly annoying though. With us realising our group just wasn’t working at all and the idiots amongst the audience making everything a headache, we decided to call it a night after just 7 proper fights.

Events like these can be great fun, but it requires more than just respect from the teams taking part. It needs those watching it to not act like total twats.

Crest rolling rules are like political manifestos

In case you’ve been under a warcrafty rock for too long, crests are a type of RvR currency that drops from enemy players. There are different types of crest, Conqueror, Invader, etc and each type of crest can be spent on it’s associated armour set. These armour sets have renown rank requirements to equip and that in turn relates to the level of player that has a chance of dropping the relevant crest.
 
There was a bit of debate recently within our new alliance about who should be allowed to roll on what type of crest. The guilds in our alliance have very different rules internally regarding crest rolling rules, but thankfully a compromise was quickly decided upon, so it’s not a big issue anymore. However this is a debate I’ve seen many times before, with some guilds seeing things our way and others not, but in some of the discussion after this latest event I saw something that amused me greatly: accusations of greed from both sides of the debate.
 
I found this amusing because both sets off rules can be viewed as greedy, depending on your perspective. I know which system I believe is fairest, but I think I can argue a good case both for and against, should I feel like it. To say followers of system A are greedy people and system B is the only fair way of doing things is somewhat naïve, as there is more to it than that. The definition of what is the fairest way of doing things is totally subjective, it is not set in stone. That’s why in the real world we have different political parties to vote for; we want our governments to define the rules of our society fairly, but we don’t all agree on what is fair.
 
A lot of guilds restrict what their members are allowed to roll on based upon the players renown rank. So for example if you were renown rank 55 you could roll need on Conqueror and Invader crests, but would have to roll greed on Warlord and Royal crests.
 
In KF we have an open rolling policy. Anyone is allowed to roll need on any crest, it is never restricted and everyone has an even chance of winning. If people want to opt out on crests then that is entirely up to them.
 
Supporters of restricted rolling say their system is fairest because it makes sure the people that have the most need for those crests are guaranteed to get them. They’ve earned the renown rank, they should get their just rewards. It is frustrating when some level 32 alt, that’s only played once a bloody month, wins a royal crest that he/she will probably never use. Having restrictions also helps the guild as a whole progress quicker, with the higher renowned players getting their armour sets as quickly as possible.
Wanting crests before you have earned them and before you can use them is greedy.
 
Supporters (like me) of open rolling say their system is fairest because it ensures that everyone regardless of time played has equal chance of getting geared up. Renown rank is not earned, you log in and you get it. It’s an indication of how much you play WAR, nothing else. That’s why not having a job and/or other real life commitments often coincide with high renown rank, not that I’m saying it’s an exclusive relationship, as that too is more complicated than a simple assumption. Anyways, if you’re playing often enough to get high renown rank, that also means you take part in more loot rolls than other people and as such already have a far higher chance of earning your required crests. Allowing people to get crests in advance also helps the guild progress as the people that only get to play once or twice a week on guild event nights will have a chance of getting higher tier armour, that otherwise they simply will not take part in enough crest rolls for.
Deciding you want all the crests all the time because you play more than other people is greedy.
 
I find restricted rolling to be reminiscent of Conservative values in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, the system is set up to benefit those with the most opportunity of gain in the first place. Where as open rolling is rather left wing, with equal opportunities regardless of your gaming background (and some may say work ethic), which is more of an 80s Labour party thing. But by saying this I don’t mean it as a slur on either point of view, because that’s all this is, a point of view. The era of Thatcherite Britain is revered by some and hated by others. Right, wrong and everything in-between (Paddy Ashdown ftw) is entirely subjective. You may say that comparing real life politics and online world politics is silly, but I don’t think so at all. The way people behave in-game and the rules they expect the world to work by are a reflection of their real life opinions. This reflection is not a perfect mirror image, it’s distorted by the anonymous nature of the Internet (hence all the tough guys and foul mouthed bigots), but it is a reflection none the less. Over here in the UK we’re about to elect our next government, but in WAR we already voted, it was the moment we joined and decided to stay in a guild.