What to do with 2 weeks of double influence, renown and XP?

That was the question inadvertently put to every player on the EU servers recently, myself included. At the beginning of the 2 weeks I was all set on doing the sensible thing; getting my Chosen main (who was at RR68) as close to 80 as possible. Within just a few days I was up to RR72 and the renown was still flying up, but then with a resounding thud, I fell off the pixel painted wagon.

My name is Bootae and I’m addicted to alts.

That’s the reason why my Chosen was only renown rank 68 after 2 years of playing WAR. I’m just so easily distracted. It’s learning how other careers work, revelling in their different appearances, styles and themes. It’s being able to really understand other player’s career concerns and issues, finding out if the allegedly gimped is really gimped or just grass is greener syndrome. Plus it’s always a nice challenge seeing if I can be competitive with low renown alt versus all the 80s.

So over the last 2 weeks I got my Squig Herder to 40 and discovered what a fun class it is to play at 40, even in annihilator/devestator armour. One of WAR’s most atmospheric and entertaining careers to play for sure, I highly recommend. Having got the Squiggy to 40 and with my Black Orc building up rest XP, I figured I might as well finish my Witch Elf off. I levelled her to 33 a looooooong time ago, then for a reason I don’t remember I stopped playing her. She was then pretty much forgotten as I was distracted by the (at that point) newly released Choppa. With these 2 weeks of boosted XP I figured “what the hell” and levelled my Witch Elf from 33 to 40.

It was then that the unexpected happened. I discovered that I bloody love playing my Witch Elf. It’s awesome fun, not because of it being over powered, it’s actually pretty well balanced (versus other careers, though debatably underpowered versus its own mirror). The Witch Elf is fun because it is squishier than the squishiest squishy squish, hittier than the hittiest stick of hittydom and all wrapped up in a bundle of sneaky pie. The career really suits my play style too, since I do quite a lot of solo roaming. Not only is solo roaming fun and challenging generally, but it’s also a great way to learn a career. If you want to be able to consistently win 1v1s and stand a chance in 1v2+, the only way is to get out there and fight on your own, lots. Having said all that, on a bad day solo roaming can be very frustrating. You just have to learn to roll with the punches.

My little WE with one of KF's well known roamers Biggsie (For Norn people; yeah he's been grabbed by the green).

Anyway, I ended up playing my Witch Elf a lot, getting to the mid 40s in renown rank so far and my plans to hammer up Bootae’s renown rank some more failed. Not that I care to be honest, as I’ve been a bit worried about running out of carrots for my Chosen. I’ve only got one bit of Tyrant and two bits of sovereign left to get, at which point there’s little left to achieve. Other than grinding scenario weapons, but other than with the ladies, I’m not good at grinding. Easily distracted… So all in all the 2 weeks of boosted XP, etc worked out well for me. I now have a slightly bonkers 7 level 40 characters and a new Witch Elf obsession.

Of course I now have a new problem… I’m curious about levelling a Black Guard, but I’d have to delete either my DoK or Marauder. Doh.

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.

Actually something to add, now I've had a little ponder

So in my post a little while ago I updated it to say

"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 ;) "

Thinking about it, I should have dwelled on this more. Its not something that bothers me much, but then I'm unusual and whilst I like loot, character progression, etc, I will still play just for shit and gigles. Most other people probably are not like that. From what I've read and heard just now, a lot of people are planning a break from WAR until the XP gain is back online.

What maybe a bit of a factor to consider here is for up to 9 days those people are going to be distracted by other things. So after those 9 days one has to hope that those distractions (I'm thinking about APB here, though I dont rate it myself) remain temporary and people leap straight back to WAR. To ensure this, if Mythic are clever, they will hit us very, very soon with some lovely tempting news about the future than gives people a special distraction fighting carrot.

Alas, I've a dubious feeling they wont say a word and not even considered this as a potential issue. I could of course be wrong about any of this. What do you think?

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 ;)

Open RvR Closed

The Eltharion server is about to go bye bye.

GOA will shortly start transfers away from the last open RvR server in Europe. Eltharion's player base has only Karak Norn and Karak Azgal left to choose from. It’s always a shame to see a server die and WAR has certainly had more than its fair share of server deaths, but this closure brings us to a very unimpressive 2 English speaking European servers. This news raises lots of questions and isn’t exactly the positive news we wanted to hear after all the Mythic lay offs.

Will this be the last transfer?
Is this a consolidation of a stable population?
Or is it only a matter of time before we have 1 European server?
Will the future see us being transferred to US servers?

I don’t know the answers, but let’s just say it’s hard to put a positive spin on this. Mythic really need to announce something big to promote confidence in the game’s long-term prospects. An expansion announcement is about the only thing that would do to be honest. Unless the fortress replacement is bloody amazing, but their last comments about forts gave the shocking impression that they’re undecided on what to do with them…

As for the here and now… I don’t know about Azgal, since my Order alts are on Eltharion, but Norn is still very busy and it will be interesting to see what effect the transferred players will have. I just hope we get more new Destruction than Order. Norn still has both cities being sieged, but Order most definitely has an edge and from recent events it would appear an advantage in active and motivated numbers. It would be tragic if our server had its balance ruined by a mass of Eltharion Order arriving. That would no doubt accelerate us towards a single European server.

Right back when WAR launched we came very close to starting our guild on a oRvR server, but people who were in beta for longer than I were saying the chicken mechanic made oRVR a joke, so we decided not to risk it. A shame really, because over time it seems it was nothing more than scare-mongering. There’s little difference between core and oRvR to be honest (other than levelling), it still has masses of wasted terrain outside of the central RVR lakes due to the lack of objectives or incentive to go there. Anyway it’s a shame it’s going, I had some fun messing around in the lower tiers with my Order alts.

All in all, another bleak few days for WAR.

[ update ] Something I'm wondering after a discussion this evening...
How many active European servers are there in total?

I'm looking at the server list now and I can see:
4 English language
4 German
1 Spanish
3 French
1 Italian

The list is odd, since it includes Karak Eight Peaks which is a dead server having had transfers off it and tbh I thought was already closed, it's certainly marked for death. Obviously it's still got Eltharion on it for now... but in reality it will very shortly be 2 servers only. So how many of those other language servers are actually active? Anyone know?

3 is the magic number

My boundless optimism took a blow over the last week or so. GOA announced that the Karak Eight Peaks (KEP) server is being closed and its players have the choice of transferring to Karak Norn or Eltharion. This closure will leave WAR with just 3 English speaking EU servers.

I was quite shocked by this, I’m sure people will have seen me state before that whenever I look at the server list the majority of servers were med/med, including KEP. I guess this just means that was a fluke and the time of night I looked were the moments of KEP’s peak server load. It must be dropping off dramatically at others. Obviously this is not a great sign for the health of the subscriber base.

I would point out that I’ve played plenty of MMOs that only had 1 or 2 English speaking servers, but I don’t think WAR’s player limit per server is anywhere near as high as those were. We can all see that subscriber levels are falling, but perhaps at a rate closer to the hate brigade’s estimations. Whatever the reality, it’s fair to say that Mythic desperately need to liven things up. Which in turn means that once again the next patch is critical for the health of the game, but this time even more desperately so. Mythic can’t afford another shockingly bad patch day. Hang on, did I say patch “day”? I mean week…. Oh wait, no not all the bugs that patch introduced have been fixed yet, so perhaps it should be patch “month”.

Other than that there’s one thing they need to do, the obvious thing that for ages now players, bloggers and anyone with an interest has been crying out for…

MYTHIC YOU NEED TO ANNOUNCE DEVELOPMENT OF A THIRD FACTION NOW!

It would sort out everything. Put aside the silly idea of not wanting to make DAoC 2, because DAoC 2 is exactly what WAR should and still could be.

Taking a more positive outlook, for my own personal gaming, I’m very pleased to see a lot of KEP guilds coming to join us on Karak Norn. On Norn Destruction have been the most powerful faction for a while, not to the city farming extent seen on other servers, but we’ve had the edge. It doesn’t help that many players suffer from a log off rather than risk losing syndrome, which with Norn's Order on the backfoot only makes things harder for them. Where as on KEP Order have been in an utterly dominant position and I imagine they’re coming here expecting to pick up where they left off.

Heh… Either Order or Destruction is in for a bit of a shock and if the Destro from KEP choose to support our well-established command set up, then I don’t think it’s going to be us ;) Whatever happens long term, Karak-Norn is going to see some serious fighting.

Pre posting update!

I wrote the above comments before yesterday’s transfers. Unfortunately the reality of the transfer has then stamped all over my positive dreams and demonstrated that the game still can’t handle a truly busy server. It was evidenced perfectly, when within 2 minutes of logging in I was subjected to a good old-fashioned zone crash. At which point I logged off with an arsehole on. Oh happy happy joy joy.

To be fair I have since heard there was some amazing fighting to be found and people had a really good time, but I was also warned of epic lag and the brutal death of small group skrimishing due to zergs EVERYWHERE.... Which would be a shame, but if Mythic wake up and sort the zones out then it could be solved.

Anyway, it’s early days and we’ll have to see how things go. It is however absolutely critical that GOA/Mythic get their code/servers/hamsters able to cope with so many people on Karak Norn crammed into 2 factions and the bottlenecks that this promotes. Otherwise this very high population server will do more harm than good.

Mythic & GOA, heads up folks, the pressure is on.

The Guild is dead. Long live the Guild!

Well that's a transfer done then... Karak-Hirn's Blood Pact is no more, the name was taken on Karak-Norn. So we formed Kill Frenzy today! Same quality people, just with some renaming for both the guild and some of our characters.

It's going to be very interesting on Norn over the next few weeks. It looks like all the destruction and order alliances from Hirn have moved there, I can't think of any that didn't off the top of my head. It's certainly going to mix things up a bit! I don't know what Norn is like for organisation currently, but as both factions have a load of very organised alliances (in fact really it's alliances of alliances) arriving today, well it can only complement or even enhance the server's existing factions.

Putting aside GOA's rubbish promoting of the transfer, I was impressed with the ease of the process. Only difficulty was at the time we tried to create the guild, IC was under siege and that complicated things somewhat :P

Looking forward to some hot Norn action ;)

Community spirit is alive and well ;)

Well it looks like all the big guilds (including mine) are moving from Karak Hirn to Karak-Norn. Representives from both Order and Destruction met up on a ventrilo server to discuss how to keep our community together and between them decided on Norn.

There were big events on our server last night as people said goodbye to it. Lots of fighting, emote banter and some fun between enemies. I'm really impressed with the attitude of people here and it bodes well for people on Norn to have us heading there. Check this screenshot taken by Svengrom from last night:
http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/1858/svengrom007.jpg

Fair play to everyone there. Stay classy Karak Hirn ;)

GOA: How to break up friends and influence people (to leave)

I’d like to say in advance, if this comes across as a rant, then I apologise now ;) Since WAR launched I’ve not once ragged on GOA, but alas today I have joined the masses drowning in frustration and misery brought on by their inept customer service.

Yesterday patch 1.2 went live on the European servers. Big news indeed, but for players on Karak-Hirn it’s turned out to be just the “and in other news” moment. You see directly after the GOA announced the patch had gone live, they then declared a new round of server transfers. Starting the following morning! So we’re talking about no more than 12 hours notice of server transfers and the icing on the cake is, they didn’t state what time limit the transfers have.

Panic has ensued.

Now this is clearly badly done by GOA and more than a little bit rubbish. How GOA expects guild and alliance leaders to coordinate a transfer with only a few hours notice, I don’t know. However for me what’s increasing my annoyance is the manner of their announcement regarding Karak-Hirn. There has been no discussion previously about population problems, yet their announcement basically says get out now your server is dying. We then also had a bit of inside information leaked to some of our server’s influential players that the population is decreasing badly, confirming the “get out of Dodge” message.

Whilst writing this, I’ve just heard that now when you log into WAR and Hirn, a message from GOA warns you this is a low population server and go play elsewhere. Magnus the GOA rep has also just posted on WHA talking about the “decision to close Hirn” being tough, etc. So GOA is well and truly ringing the death knell for my server. With just a few hours notice…
Link here to Magnus' post: http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3672406&postcount=110

I have mixed thoughts about the transfer (transfer? I mean closure), as whilst our server’s community was recognised as one of the best in Europe, it is smaller and the difference in server activity particularly in the lower tiers is monumental. You can forget open RvR in tier 1, it just doesn’t really happen and tiers 2-3 are only marginally better. In tier 4 there’s regular action, but it’s nearly always focused in one zone at a time. There’s not the numbers to effectively attack multiple zones regularly, apart from those nights where we pre-arrange attacks. So in that respect, I’ll be happy to move and get more WAR action. I understand and accept that something needed to happen.

However, that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about the situation we’ve been put in. Something needed to happen, but it should be done in a sensible and planned manner. Transferring guilds and alliances causes hassle both in and outside of the game world, hassle for your paying subscribers; we deserve more respect than this.

As a guild leader I have to stay positive to try and keep my guild together, there’s no option but to move and now I have to make this work. But frankly I’m stunned (perhaps naively) at how bad GOA’s timing and communication has been. Let me elaborate:

· It was bloody patch day! Emotions are running high as the nerf debates rage, so obviously dumping a short notice transfer on people is not a good idea. Imagine you’re a Witch Elf player and you’ve just discovered not only has your character been nerfed beyond all sanity, but you’ve also got to move server and quite possibly have to lose your characters name, is that perhaps going to annoy you? You think? What a wonderful incentive to log in that is eh? People that were verging on quitting are being nudged over the edge.

· Guilds that transferred to Karak-Hirn now have to transfer AGAIN. People are not happy.

· Any server’s members being told to transfer would ask this, but with Hirn’s competitive tier 4 and decent community and instead of killing it, why is Karak-Hirn not a destination server? I presume there are valid reasons, but why could they not have been shared?

· Players may have to change their characters names. Whenever there’s a server transfer this comes up, but again with the short bloody notice it exaggerates the annoyance.

· Guilds may have to change their names. This hits my guild and it sucks. What do we do then; call ourselves “The REAL Blood Pact”? Or how about “Karak Hirn Blood Pact not to be confused with this servers Blood Pact?” Sigh… so it’s basically time for a new name, which means changing our website, graphics, logos, everything. A bit of our identity gone. Blood Pact was created the first day of the Collectors Edition headstart, we like our name :( And you can bet your bottom dollar the destination server’s guild with our name isn’t even bloody active.

· I’m fairly confident all my active members will wait for our alliance’s confirmation of where to go, but not everyone will be this lucky (and I’m only confident, not certain). GOA has rushed this through; because of which lots of guilds are going to loose players in the move. People will move to the wrong server in the panic, plus people will be left behind. For some this will be a guild killer. And what about your friends not in your own guild? With time and a little thought, this could have been avoided.

· What if you’re in a Destruction Karak-Hirn guild, but you have an Order alt on the destination servers? Sorry bud, you can’t move it first. Tough shit old boy, delete your Order character or you can’t stay with your Destro friends anymore. This could have been totally avoided with transfers allowed between destination servers BEFORE launching the full transfers, allowing people to prepare.

· There’s a lot of bloody admin and organising work for guild officers and leaders. In fact our whole alliance wants to stay together, that complicates things. Hell, our whole bloody server wants to move as one. Why oh why could you not have given us time to prepare?


In a months time I might be thinking that moving server was the best thing we could have done, but right now I have a total nightmare to organise with hardly any time to do it properly. I'm pissed off and so is everyone I've spoken to about it.

I really wish GOA had handled this better.

Perfect Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.