WCPI - Land of the Dead info at Gaarawarr Gabs

A load of Land of the Dead info over at Gaarawarr Gabs, be sure to check it out.

BTW I've updated my post below with the second video from Xplay.

Land of the Dead video. It's dead good. hur hur

Thanks to Werit for spotting this first.

It's new (to me at least) Land of the Dead video with some great footage of actual gameplay. The *cough* secret *cough* boss in this video looks abso-bloody-lutely awesome.

Video Games - E3 2009 - X-Play

I am now officially "hyped" for LotD.

UPDATE! video 2

Video Game - E3 2009 - X-Play

Ping! Pong! Ping! Pong! Ping! Pong!

It’s a tribute to the balance and quality of the guilds on Karak-Norn (EU) that we have one of the few servers where neither side dominates. On several occasions we’ve seen Destruction rampaging through the streets of Altdorf and then Order returning the favour in the Inevitable City, within 24 hours... Almost every day there are multiple fortress sieges, one day it’s Order on the offensive and then the next it’s Destruction. A frantic defence can be transformed into a major offensive, the tides of battle changing as the day goes on. We’ve had a fort falling to each side, leading to a battle for the last fort so large it brought the server to its knees.

Of course it’s great that the war flows like this and I can’t stress enough how great the battles leading up to the cities can be, but there’s a problem nagging at a lot of us. Surely Mythic didn’t plan for it to go quite so quickly?

We raided Altdorf 3 times in one day recently, 3 bloody times on a balanced server. I’ve also seen Order doing multiple IC raids in a single day. That can’t be right. Weren’t city sieges something that you would build up to slowly? Getting to the enemies city should be a big deal, an epic achievement we can gloat about for days. Yet on my server I get to do IC and/or Altdorf more often than I can sodding Bilerot Burrow.

So is this a good or a bad thing?

Pros
· You have more chances to get your hands on some Invader armour, or at the very least some Invader Crests.
· For the more casual players, it’s a lot easier for them to be involved in city sieges.
· Event organisers can plan a full offensive for one day. If it took longer it would be a lot more difficult to manage due to late night/daytime activity.
· The fast zone locking means faster renown for everyone involved.
· More zone locks means more zone capture loot for guilds with claimed keeps. This can make it worth the cost, beyond just achieving the lock.
· It stops us sitting in the same zone all week, so that we get a regular change of scenery.
· Different scenarios become available.

Cons
· It dilutes the entire campaign’s importance. It’s going to reset in a bit anyway, so why care?
· As we’re racing through with our VP locks, for me its yet another thing reminding me how small the RvR lakes are. Not that locks taking longer would prevent this feeling, but it’s still there.
· Lots of identical keeps in quick succession highlights… lots of identical keeps…
· As soon as a city is under siege, the entire campaign locks down and there’s nothing else to do (in RvR anyway).
· City sieges still have a lot of problems. It’s slowly improving, but they need a LOT of work. Do we really need reminding of this every day? Familiarity breeds not only contempt, but also a large dose of apathy.

So we have a situation that is good for material rewards (in pixel form anyway…), good for renown levelling, is accessible and provides variety. On the negative side it sometimes feels hollow and is emphasising the games weakest area (city sieges) and the copy+paste keeps.

All told I think despite it not being the pace I expected from the game, it’s actually working out better than if it were to be slowed down. The RvR lakes are too small to keep us entertained fighting in one zone for days, we need the variety to stop it being dull. That said, if the RvR lake size and quite a few other issues were to be addressed, it would make me a lot more comfortable with the feel of the campaign. That's worthy of a post in itself, so I think those issues and ideas can wait for a future write up.

Land of the Dead arrives in June; it could potentially turn a lot of the negatives above into non-issues. However, it would be hopelessly optimistic to presume it will make everything perfect. We’ve seen the forum rage enough times already after each “wonder” patch, this time we should know better and not expect the world.

Sometimes they really are cheating

Bloody hell! Arseholes are on a mission to ruin other people's fun by installing the latest cheat add on for WAR. But this time it's not a little thing, it's a huge game breaking, OMFG thing that Mythic need to address NOW.

Worryingly I'm hearing that if people post about their concerns on the official forums, Mythic ban them! Seriously... it's the internet, you can't play head in the sand, ignore it and hope it goes away. If people want to cheat, they'll already have this installed. Far better to have someone senior reply to the decent people playing the game, raising very valid concerns and confirm to them that you're dealing with it. Blizzard sued the bastards that made that botting tool, pay attention to that I'd say.

To get the low down on this and what you need to watch out for, I urge you to go listen to the excellent WARP podcast. I've just seen a video of this cheat on youtube too, woah... Not hard to spot it would seem.

If you see anyone using this crap, please for the good of the game screenshot it, report them and hopefully they will get banned.

Embracing my inner git

Over the last few days I’ve had what could perhaps be an epiphany. I’m going green.

I’ve always liked my Chosen. It looks great, has a solid feel to it and performs well. It’s a good class and I’ve had a lot of enjoyment from playing it. Only recently I was saying how the Chosen would remain my main character and my Choppa would remain just an alt. Wrecka spec was great and all, but it never really grabbed me by the short and curlies. I’m not into playing a class or spec because it’s uber or the current flavour of the month, I just want it to be at least moderately competitive, have a cool appearance and most importantly be a good laugh to play.

As I posted before, this week I hit 40 on my Choppa, but decided to respec away from path of Da’ Wrecka. Sure Da’ Wrecka is the uber Choppa spec of Doom for large scale oRvR and it’s AoE damage in PvE is immense, but I just wasn’t enjoying it enough. No disrespect meant to the VAST amount of people using it, but I was finding it a bit boring. This led to me changing to path of Da’ Hitta and since I’ve had a bit of time off work this week and few evenings free, I managed to get a lot of practice in.

I’ve had an absolute blast.

It’s been immense fun and the playstyle instantly clicked with me. I’m still learning obviously, but already I’m very competitive and had some great fights against some decent players too. It’s not that the Da’ Hitta is stupidly uber or anything, but it seems to be the perfect spec for me. I think a lot of this is because it feels very similar to an Arms spec Warrior from World of Warcraft. I played a Warrior throughout my years in WoW and most of that time I was Arms specced. I went Fury at level 70 in the Burning Crusade, not because of enjoyment, but because fury was so dramatically superior for DPS. Even so, whenever I went PvPing I would respec back to Arms.

All of which gave me a bit of a dilemma. Do I carry on with Bootae (Chosen) as my main character, or switch to Gashface full on? A tougher choice than it may seem, since I've put a lot of time, thought and effort into Bootae's progression. After much pondering and several changes of heart, I've decided to switch to Gashface. I'll still be using Bootae for PvE with my LV group and log him whenever needed in RvR of course, but for general play I'm gettin' to da Choppa.

Teasing me with your Orcy goodness. Ya gits! (updated!)

Not going to be quitting my campaign for bringing back the missing cities, regardless of how fruitless as it may prove to be. Just in case you've not had a butchers around the Orc Fortress, if you go for a look behind it this is what you see. Click the image to see the full picture...



The gate to the Orc city... Just sitting there, teasing us with it's magnificent Orcy glory. What a waste :(

Want it! Want it now!

UPDATE!

Thanks to Kolapz for sending in some screenshots of the Dwarf and Elven City gates. Check these beauties out (again click for the full picture):

WCPI - It's all about the green

As even occasional readers of my blog will know, I'm a bit into writing about ideas for improving WAR. I'm not alone in this and the mighty Snazfg from the Greenskin has just started a new series of posts called If I was Mark Jacobs.

The first of these posts is about the problems of gear grinding and as ever with the Greenskin, it's well worth a read. So chop chop, get a move on :)