Ehhh? What's all this happy stuff about?

Of late there has been a distinct lack of WAR grumbling affecting my gaming time.  For someone who is now I guess classed as a long time WAR player this is a unique and novel experience. I don’t know if this phenomenon is limited to the circles I move in, since I can only guess what the ambiance is like in other guilds or on other servers, but at the moment Kill Frenzy is a rather contented place.
 
But why this ridiculous happiness in an allegedly “failed” game? Damn you Boots why?
 
1) Mythic have made huge improvements to the game. Particularly performance. I now run the game with fairly high settings and full spell effects on at all times. Be it small scale skirmishes or big battles, the games is now much more able to cope and runs pretty well. Yes there are still times when the lag kicks in badly, but the number of players it takes to do this is much higher than in the past. And to be honest, I can understand it lagging when 350 enemies attack a keep with 150 defenders. I’ve yet to see any MMO cope with that, other than EVE, but then EVE has the advantage of space and bugger all graphics and landscape to deal with.
 
Also in other areas Mythic have delivered a lot of good work. The game is feeling more polished and has developed its character with subtle little things here and there. Character balance still isn’t perfect (name a game where it is), but it’s probably the best it’s ever been and as a result we’re starting to see more of the “gimped” classes on the battlefield.
 
That said, AoE is still far too powerful and still needs toning down. Though it is at a point where it’s no longer the dominating factor in small scale fighting. AoE remains a serious issue in large scale fighting, since it hits that instant death critical mass of Wizards/Sorcs. A warband of 24 Bright Wizards would be unstoppable. :P However, since we do far more small scale fighting than zergy stuff, I think it’s a bit less noticeable for us a lot of the time.
 
2) The campaign is knackered. It swings back and forth from PvE farming Altdorf and the Inevitable City like a metronome out of its mind on Columbian marching powder. If metronomes had minds, and could snort class A drugs, and had a form of income to pay for the habit… uhm… random… aaaaanyway, the campaign has lost all meaning or value and is dissolving any care or realm pride. It is utterly ruined and needs serious changes. So why the hell am I listing it as one of the reasons why we’re happy?
 
Because we got to the point a while back where we quite simply don’t care about the campaign at all. Not even bloody vaguely. If you pay attention to it you will just get annoyed, so we don’t. We log on, we fight people, and we have fun. Sure, if people in our alliance that do care about the campaign need help, then we’ll help them straight away, that’s what alliances are for after all, but we don’t actually care about the campaign, just the fun and the fighting. If the campaign provides some fun, yay, bonus! But if the enemy kills our king, why care? It doesn’t mean anything; there is no real downside or any ramifications. It is utterly irrelevant. The sooner you stop caring, the sooner you enjoy your game time and just get on with smacking things in the face. A strange situation perhaps, but the fighting in WAR is really, really good... it's just that the framework around it is dodgy.
 
Of course this is not an ideal situation in the long term. Mythic really must fix the campaign. BOTH Altdorf and Inevitable City twice every day is insane. Hardly an epic campaign, more like some Unreal bloody Tournament map. For now though, ignore the campaign, focus on the fighting and enjoy. We certainly are ;)