Epic fights on Norn

That’s been my weekend really, in between real life stuff of course. There were some truly epic fights in Chaos Wastes, Eataine and Caledor. Some of the fighting in Caledor was just brilliant, the bridges providing the choke points, but as the zone has plenty of alternate routes it was never a simple single choke point fight.
We ran with a mixture of very different set ups over this weekend, from Witch Elf+pimp groups to the occasional bombing set up. Numbers wise we were normally about 1-2 groups, peaking at 3 briefly, but we tried to fight around the HUGE zergs from both factions where possible. And it was just plain bloody awesome. We kicked much arse and we also had a few proper slappings in return, but regardless it was all fun.

What was very cool was how the new server coped with the large fights. They really can deal with far larger numbers of combatants in a zone than the GOA servers did. However it’s still not all sweetness. We are occasionally getting the crashes when zoning and I’ve had 2 random crashes to desktop this weekend, which I think is 2 more than I’d had earlier this year… Also a few people are complaining of regular lag, I’m guessing this is something to do with the route between their PC, ISP and the new servers, but I’m only guessing. Certainly when they complain of lag most of us are not getting any at all, which suggests it may not be the fault of the server per se.

Still, overall it’s been a great weekend of WAR, after a pretty good week too. Hopefully as Mythic continue to improve our new servers, this will only get better.

Of course now we are all looking forward to seeing the patch notes… I wonder how much drama they will provide ;)

New servers are great! Oh wait... What? No! Noooooo!

I had a post planned; a nice, happy and congratulatory post for Mythic after what had been a very smooth and successful transfer from GOA to the Mythic servers. And then this weekend happened…
 
It started with ever-increasing mailbox and auction house lag, with some people reporting having to wait minutes for their mail to load. And then with a resounding DOH the crashing started. When changing zones, be it from using a flightmaster or a scenario, the game started crashing. Sometimes crashing to server select, sometimes to character select and on occasion right back to desktop. And I’m not talking about the occasional crash, oh no sir, this was consistent and constant crashing. It got to the point where most of us just gave up, as WAR was simply unplayable.
 
It’s real shame, not because of a bit of lost game time, but because this is yet another opportunity to further WAR’s resurgence utterly squished. You see this coincides with Mythic reactivating every EU player’s account for 2 weeks free and by the looks of things this was taken advantage of in a huge way. Over the last few days I’ve seen entire guilds return to see how WAR is doing, seriously loads of old faces popping up everywhere. These are people that when they saw all the improvements to WAR would quite probably subscribe and enjoy the game, at least for a while and Mythic’s next patch could well have kept them here longer. We’d told them the lag was so much better, that the new servers were so much more stable and at first they really were, but then BOOM! Server meltdown, with crashing eventually became so constant and epic that WAR no longer functioned at all.
 
Gutted.
 
Prior to this I’d maintained a comfortable FPS in fights that were on a scale our old GOA servers could not have dreamed of running. I remember at one point looking at the map of Chaos Wastes and seeing the entire RvR lakes covered in fight symbols, WAR was indeed everywhere. It was brilliant, the new servers a joy.
 
Now I’m sure Mythic will get this sorted out. It’s just a crying shame that all those returning players return to WAR was met by such massive server problems. Perhaps all those returning players cramming onto our servers were the cause of the problem? I don’t know, I can only guess. I know a lot of those people quit because of a combination of the dominance of AoE and poor game performance, they come back and discover AoE is still dominant (albeit point blank) and it would appear to them, the game performance is actually worse.
 
Yet it isn’t. WAR is soooooo much better now; the game normally does run extremely well, in fact in the moments when the server stopped dicking about, I had some great fights this weekend. For me Sunday night ended on a real high with brilliant scrapping in Black Crag with 2 groups of KF and about the same from Tainted working together to fight an Order zerg, really tremendous fun and drama. And Mythic genuinely are finally starting to make and talk about the right kind of changes for WAR. It’s just such a crying shame that all the improvements and future potential has been utterly overshadowed by a weekend of epic server failure.

GOA to Mythic, some rambling thoughts

OK then since we now have some details about the transition (read this too) from GOA to Mythic for the EU players, I reckon it’s about time that I chime in with a few thoughts.

First off, sorry GOA I got it wrong and I am now aware that Mythic did know GOA would be announcing on Friday AND that it was GOA that prompted the whole split. With Mythic knowing of such an epic announcement being released on Friday, I’m a touch disappointed with Mythic’s one sentence that day. To be honest I’m a little disappointed that Mythic barely commented on this, haven’t acknowledged Josh Drescher going, aren’t giving us any real news on the future (always just next patch news doesn’t cut it) and in general suddenly seem a bit quiet. Even the front page on the Mythic website hasn’t been updated for over a month. Now before you think I’m getting all negative, I was recently reliably informed that WAR is doing very well and there are zero concerns there, so I’m not doom and glooming here, but what’s with the lapse in communication? It just feels a touch odd.

Anyways, onwards!

Am I happy to get away from GOA?
Yes and no. In DAoC I loathed them, the service was shocking, but in WAR I’ve not really had any problems that I can put squarely at the feet of GOA. Well, other than in the first 2 weeks anyway and I’m not going to develop long term hatred because of a ropey launch, after 14 years of playing MMOs I would have lot of people on my hate list if I did.

When contacting support the response has been slow and when it’s eventually my turn in the queue, the CSRs have all been polite, chatty and mostly useless. Yet that’s like every MMO I’ve ever played and from reading the American forums this experience isn’t going to change when we move over to Mythic. I can’t hate them for that, so on to the next common complaint about GOA; server performance. WAR EU suffers from a lot of lag spikes and not always related to lots of players being around, but is that really down to GOA’s servers or is this the fault of WAR itself? I’ve no way of knowing, at least not yet (we will all find out soon). I’m not going to hate GOA because it might be their fault.

I don’t know them well or anything, but I’ve liked the posting style of GOA reps like Kaxzane and have no issues with any of them, quite the opposite. They seem a good bunch. So once again, there is nothing that I can rationally start ranting about.

Patches being delayed by a day or two… Is that worth whinging about? Absolutely bloody well not! We’ve had the American live servers as our unofficial live test servers for every patch since launch. Believe me, that is nothing to be unhappy about.

The only thing they’ve really done to annoy me is the website. And actually no longer having to look at that flash ridden hunk of utter shite is enough to edge me towards happiness. Being able to access a website that actually works properly and has the Mythic developers reading, well that can only be a huge step forwards. But then with a resounding thud, you think of billing disasters, which surely must have been a one off, but even so there’s a little hint of discomfort and nagging doubt. To put this into perspective, I recently had a problem with my DAoC account, not billing, something else and nothing scarily complex or security based. I contacted Mythic’s support by email and they refused to help me unless I phoned them. I’m a European player, playing on the recently transferred EU to US DAoC servers and they wanted me to phone a US phone number for a fairly basic thing. I dropped that account and didn’t bother with it. I am not making expensive phone calls to America for my basic customer support, especially when it could easily have been dealt with by email. This is a slight concern should anything go pear shaped again, which I honestly doubt it will, but a concern none the less.


Will the new service be better?
Now that is the big question and not one I can answer, anything I say here would be a guess and nothing more. This is where the pressure is really on Mythic to justify the last 2 years of people whinging about GOA. BUT if we have the same lag spikes at random and if dungeon runs are sill buggered by random massive lag spikes because someone, somewhere, logged into Nordland, then we know it’s wasn’t GOA’s "hamster powered" servers to blame, it was WAR. However, and this is only my personal opinion, I suspect we may see an improvement in lag. How justified it really is I'm not techy enough to say, but within the gaming community France Telecom (owners of GOA) don’t have the best reputation for latency/lag issues.

Oh and our new servers are indeed hosted in Germany. Good! Being in the US may have been a deal breaker.

What about the transition itself?
I am very pleased to have it confirmed that our server will be moving as one and will not be merged. Our population is certainly big enough, it’s very competitive and has been waging WAR together for quite a while now. As such I’m very pleased to hear that Karak-Norn and our wonderful rage filled community will continue! That is my single biggest concern addressed and routed.

I’m not keen on the server downtime being on Tuesday afternoon to early evening (2pm to 6pm CET), simply because that’s the one day of the week when I get home from work early and I normally log onto WAR mid afternoon GMT. Purely selfish reasons, though I have to say I expect quite a few European players to be unhappy about this one, particularly people a couple of hours or more ahead of CET. As far as I can recall every MMO I’ve ever played had EU server downtimes in the (often very) early morning. Still, this isn’t something to make me rage, just a mild irritation.

Speed of the transition? WOW! It starts like tomorrow?? Impressive and I’m pleased it’s not being dragged out. As for the rest of the transition details, it sounds good and if it all goes to plan it should be a smooth transition.


As you can probably tell, I’m on the fence about this whole thing. It would be easy to join the people leaping with joy at this news, but I’m very aware that “the grass is always greener on the other side”. For now I think I’ll remain perched comfortably on the aforementioned fence and see what happens. Hopefully Mythic will do a good job and in just over a week’s time I’ll be posting the praise they deserved.

UPDATE! I didn't mention the no XP, loot, etc gains for a week. This was kinda half intentional, it just doesnt concern me and my subconcious ignored it :D We get 2 weeks refund which more than covers it and unlike many (most?) people, I can quite happily continue to play for a week just for fun and not pixel reward ;)

The best thing about sieging Altdorf was...

...seeing this: The worst bit? Everything else.

Just like when Order attacks IC, our first Altdorf siege was also a laggy pile of crap. I've got a good system, my mates have good systems, but these city siege instances run terribly.

Why are city siege instances so bloody laggy?

Why did the zone crash twice?

Why was there numerous zone crashes before people even got to Altdorf?

Again today I had people comparing it with Alterac Valley in WoW, which doesn't lag anything like WAR with roughly the same amount of people. Bad comparison? Not really. I'm sure from the dev's perspective there are a million and one reasons why we shouldn't compare the two, but purely from a gamer's perspective its an 80 person PvP instance and it doesnt run like a lame goat.

The worst bit is that I can't even tell if the public quest set up is ok or not, because the game runs so badly in these situations it's not being given a fair trial.

Amazing really, in 24 hours I've had some refreshingly brilliant moments in T4 and then been rudely slammed back down by what should have been a large slice of awesome pie, with custard. It's such a shame that reaching the end game tarnished all the great work put in by Destruction to get there.

There was some entertainment to be had out of it, but not any thanks to the game itself. After the 2nd crash we ended up in an instance against what appeared to be a full 48 Order from one of their powerfull alliances (some of the same faces from last night). We were down to 3 groups in our warband after the crashing, but thankfully there was another warband of destruction in there too. The first battle for the PQ was a real tough one, with us failing to kill the Lord. Clearly this wasn't going to be a loot farming instance, so what did the other destruction warband do? They quit and left us with just our 3 groups against the Order. Hah bit lame tbh, but it sure left us with a challenge... :P

We obviously got battered, but we put in a pretty good show for ourselves IMHO and at the least managed to stop the Order warbands farming the PQ. Think we gave them a few scares when we charged their healers in the back a few times :D

It seems that getting to Altdorf was exactly what we needed and at the same time, the worst thing that could have happened.

I saw people that until now had stayed positive about WAR become very disillusioned. This was the carrot they'd be working towards, the light at the end of the tunnel, but it turns out the carrots actually a bit of a turnip.

The pain of daytime Fortress/City sieges and AoEhammer

Lately its become fashionable for Order on Karak Norn to do fortress and city raids during the morning and afternoon on weekdays. Something which has been very depressing for those of us with normal 9-5 jobs, as by the time you get online for normal prime time gaming at say 7 or 8pm you're already at least one fortress down and Order are about to cap a second or even worse, you log into an IC siege.

How Order manage to have so many players that are students, school kids, unemployed or working night shifts I don't know, but you would presume Destruction would have a similar amount. I've read before that younger players tend to pick the goodies in fantasy genre games, but even if that's true it surely wouldn't be that many more players and they'd still have to be at school until like 3 or 4pm. So without any census data to go on and nothing but shit throwing flamewars on forums, I can only presume that the Destruction players that are on during the day times are on alts and not bothering to defend. Unless Order are actuallly recruiting at a local job centre :P But I walked past it this morning and didn't notice any pointy eared tree hugging gits...

The daytime raids are a problem, but not because the players on at those times are taking forts and sieging cities. Certainly not in fact, as there's no reason why those guys should be exempt from parts of the game. Maybe thats the only times they can play after all. The problem is those events that happen whilst the majority of players are at work can then bugger up the game for the majority of players, whose only option when they get online at more "normal" times is to either defend in a lagpit or suffer a city siege. At present its a bit like the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

This could perhaps be avoided if the lock down timers for fortress and city sieges were smaller. That way the poor sods working nights could come online in the morning, take forts, cities, etc and then by the time the rest of us get on we'd be able to do the same. Or at least have the option to try. I know I'm sure tempted each time to just go play an alt, tier 1-3 doesn't have these issues and has been epic fun lately.

Having just been on a primetime fortress attempt and having first hand experience of the ridiculous power of Bright Wizard AoE now (I'm sure the same applies to our Sorcerers), I can perhaps understand why Order are reluctant to push for 2 fortresses in prime time. Monstrous AoE spammage that can take my 9k hit points away in under 3 seconds, can not be healed through when your healers are suffering with 4+ second delay cast times due to lag. This is meant to be Warhammer, a predominately melee based game, not AoEhammer.

Mythic please do something fast with this whole situation. It's spreading rampant negativity at a delicate time and not all of it is an over reaction.

EDIT - found some census data from tonight:
Order: 966 total, 236 rank 40s
Destruction: 960 total, 202 rank 40s
Interestingly there were 112 BWs - more than any other class, including Slayers.

Nuff said tbh

Tank wall crushed, the Fortress Lord in sight... Character screen?? GAH!

People got all excited when it was announced Dawn of War 2 had Tyranids, but tbh if you want to fight some Bugs, try a Fortress take :P

Tonight on Karak-Hirn Destruction guilds & alliances, big and small, worked together and Operation Snotstorm went into action. It had been planned it in advance, our faction's leaders had worked hard to get everyone involved and still keep it secret. Unfortunately it started a bit too early for me, but soon as the sprog was sparko I grabbed a particularly good bottle of Merlot, a comfy chair and got online for an evening of pixel death and mayhem.

I logged in just after the Reikwatch Fortress fell to our forces. Awesome result this, being the first time Destruction have taken a Fortress on our server and possibly the first time one's been killed on Hirn without the Lord being bugged down to the lower floor.

The attack then moved to Kadrin Valley, for a mixture of big fights and then sitting around doing nothing for ages. Same mixture of excitement, lag and then boredom as with all with lock down attempts, at least until the patches come in. After a while it became apparent we werent going to get KV (stuck between 90-96pts for like 2 hours), so the order was given for us to move on to Etaine. We switched zones quickly, Order were on the backfoot and in no time at all, blam! We had the zone locked. With a coordinated large scale attack on Shining Way Fortress, we quickly battered down the doors and got ready to hit the Order tank wall by the keep room.

Our mob smashed into their tank wall, our DPS raining pain on them. Order put in a good attempt at holding us, but it didn't take too long to break their wall. We started moving to clear all the Order from upstairs and then...

You are bloody joking me... Everyone gets kicked back to character screen.

But ok, we'll cope, we can get back in quickly and continue. Loading... come on... Yes! We're in! Hmm, loaded in at the warcamp, but ok we can still do this! Oh wait... No we can't. Not only are the Fortress doors back up, they are now UNATTACKABLE. lol :P

It had been a cool night, the moments of boredom were being forgiven due to the big chance of our server's first City siege being in sight. But it turned into a massive anti-climax when, first the game couldn't take our numbers in the fortress choke point and then the game bugged the forts to make any futher progression impossible.

On our server the vast majority of Fortress attempts have either bugged out, zone crashed, lagged to hell or been captured through cheating (accidental or not). Tonight I've logged off mildly peeved, but still positive as I'm confident Mythic will sort things out. However I saw a lot of people who were logging and were very pissed off. Understandably tbh too.

The next patch needs to bring some serious improvements to oRvR. Fortresses don't need sorting in a couple of months, they need sorting out right now.