...and it's well worth a read. Bit of an insight into Mythic's current state of mind and some clues to career balance changes that we'll be seeing in the next patch.
The 4 specific points mentioned for career balancing sound very sensible. I'll be most interested to see what else those much maligned classes get.
And see the bold red bit for the key point in this comment "The first phase of our city siege revamps have occurred, making the end-game even more entertaining and action-packed."
There's more clues to what maybe in the second phase further on in the interview.
Oh and underdog system! Could be good :)
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Saturday, 29 August 2009
Adapt or wipe
As you probably know, the keeps in WAR now have 2 ramps up to the Lord room. This has totally changed keep defence. No longer can you pile a tank wall at the top of a lone ramp and rain down AoE, to do so is a wipe waiting to happen. You can try putting up 2 tank walls, but quite often when defending you’re going to be outnumbered and even when not, it's difficult to make both walls strong enough.
The old tried and tested methods are null and void. It’s time to adapt.
I’ve seen a few keep defences where a tank wall was built at the main keep door, with mixed results. It’s a lot easier for the attackers to put a lot of AoE down on a front door, since the ranged attackers don't have the same awkward line of sight issues they faced with ramps and it’s more straight forward for the melee DPS to get stuck in. However, if the defenders keep the oil manned, have some ranged fire coming from the walls and most importantly stay organised, then this type of defence can work well.
It’s not the only way mind you. A night or two ago at a keep in Dragonwake I saw Order try out various strategies. Whilst at the time none of them completely worked, there was definitely potential to build on. And btw /salute to the Order involved (think it was Crimson and friends), you kept us on our toes and we were impressed to see you trying stuff out.
Normally when defenders sally forth from a keep, they leave the healers and ranged inside, but that night they appeared to be trying a full warband assault from the front entrance, before we’d got the door down. It was a good scrap and we did kill them, but there was a trickle of players coming out long after the main assault, so I think it didn’t hit with the full force it could have. Seemed to me that they had a lot stragglers not paying attention. I’m used to seeing (or being one of the) melee charging out of keep doors, but that was probably the first time I’ve seen an attempt at such a large scale counter attack from the front door against a greater number of attackers.
They also tried the same thing by coming out of the rear postern door. Luckily for us we had Nulfmatwo the squig herder of doom watching the side of the keep that they moved round. As they were trying to sneakily form up, thanks to Nulf's warning we managed to counter their own counter attack. After a big fight around the side of the keep we pushed them back through their postern. Had they not been spotted, then there was a good chance they would have annihilated our healers before we could stop them.
I’m sure most of us have tried these kinds of tactics before, but perhaps the difference is now they should be the focus of a defence, which will require a bit more organisation than just lining tanks up and spamming AoE. Undoubtedly defending has become harder, but I think potentially it’s got a lot more interesting too.
The old tried and tested methods are null and void. It’s time to adapt.
I’ve seen a few keep defences where a tank wall was built at the main keep door, with mixed results. It’s a lot easier for the attackers to put a lot of AoE down on a front door, since the ranged attackers don't have the same awkward line of sight issues they faced with ramps and it’s more straight forward for the melee DPS to get stuck in. However, if the defenders keep the oil manned, have some ranged fire coming from the walls and most importantly stay organised, then this type of defence can work well.
It’s not the only way mind you. A night or two ago at a keep in Dragonwake I saw Order try out various strategies. Whilst at the time none of them completely worked, there was definitely potential to build on. And btw /salute to the Order involved (think it was Crimson and friends), you kept us on our toes and we were impressed to see you trying stuff out.
Normally when defenders sally forth from a keep, they leave the healers and ranged inside, but that night they appeared to be trying a full warband assault from the front entrance, before we’d got the door down. It was a good scrap and we did kill them, but there was a trickle of players coming out long after the main assault, so I think it didn’t hit with the full force it could have. Seemed to me that they had a lot stragglers not paying attention. I’m used to seeing (or being one of the) melee charging out of keep doors, but that was probably the first time I’ve seen an attempt at such a large scale counter attack from the front door against a greater number of attackers.
They also tried the same thing by coming out of the rear postern door. Luckily for us we had Nulfmatwo the squig herder of doom watching the side of the keep that they moved round. As they were trying to sneakily form up, thanks to Nulf's warning we managed to counter their own counter attack. After a big fight around the side of the keep we pushed them back through their postern. Had they not been spotted, then there was a good chance they would have annihilated our healers before we could stop them.
I’m sure most of us have tried these kinds of tactics before, but perhaps the difference is now they should be the focus of a defence, which will require a bit more organisation than just lining tanks up and spamming AoE. Undoubtedly defending has become harder, but I think potentially it’s got a lot more interesting too.
Friday, 28 August 2009
Thursday, 27 August 2009
First visit to the new Altdorf
I’ve been a bit worried that the last few days might have been somewhat disastrous for WAR. This patch was another of those where it really needed to be good; it needed to be Mythic making a statement, showing us that they CAN produce quality goods. That the naysayers were just that, naysayers. But due to a myriad of bugs it proved to be the opposite. Instant ressing, poor performance, random teleporting, broken campaign, broken dungeons, and the list goes on…. I know quite a few people that are “taking a break from WAR until the campaign/my class/whatever is fixed”. So it’s fair to say that up to now this patch has done nothing but piss people off and highlight in BIG RED LETTERS that Mythic’s quality assurance/testing/whatever is not good enough. Right now it’s as bad as Funcom’s patching and as an ex Anarchy Online and Age of Conan player, I don’t say that lightly. Though in fairness Mythic do hot fix much quicker and better than Funcom did.
The big saving grace would have been the excellent on paper city changes, but thanks to the fortress lords becoming un-attackable, on Karak-Norn at least, we didn’t get to see the big new changes. It has been impossible to take down a second fortress, which of course meant no city sieges for us. However, last night we discovered they had been fixed and despite some determined defending by Order, we made it to Altdorf.
And now I find myself really torn on what to say, it could be “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it” and it could be “this is bloody awesome”. City sieges are now much more about the RvR. The first stage of the initial PQ is a giant Nordenwatch where you gain points by holding the 3 objectives and killing Order. The next PQ stage you can kill the Lord PvE style, or you can continue the fighting. There’s more of course as the city state changes, but I’ve not seen that yet. On entering the city it’s immediately obvious that this first PQ/scenario/thing will work brilliantly; we have now got what we asked for and in city sieges the focus is on killing enemy players. Great stuff I think. However, as you’ve no doubt guessed, he comes the “but”... But what about if you’re in an instance with no enemies?
Oh… bugger... We got to Altdorf late last night and with Karak-Norn Order having a much larger daytime than night presence, it meant some of us had empty instances. There just wasn’t enough Order to go round. Unfortunately for me, I was in one of those instances. So this meant we spent 15 minutes sitting at an objective doing nothing, then killed the PQ stage 2 lord, PQ resets and it’s back to sitting at the objective. Not overly exciting for me, but I heard from people in another instance that was packed with Order, that for them it was absolutely bloody awesome.
I’ve just heard that the daytime dominating Order are in IC right now. Having been online during the day before myself and witnessed the low Destruction turn out, it’s a safe bet that many Order have spent their afternoon in empty IC instances.
It’s quite amusing really, prior to this patch people would try and get into empty city instances so they could farm the PvE PQ for loot, but now everyone will want to be in the full instances because it’s actually a lot of fun. Mythic have turned the whole thing on its head and mainly in a good way. It will mean late night city sieges are less appealing (which is no bad thing in my book), we’re not reliant on dodgy PQs and are less likely to be shafted by low level characters, the poorly geared or bloody ignorant (I’m not implying that they’re one and same ofc). However to make the most of the change, for everyone in a city instance to have a good time, then we really need both factions to be equally active at the same time.
With whatever real life factors defining when we can or can’t play, is that going to happen? Let’s hope.
The big saving grace would have been the excellent on paper city changes, but thanks to the fortress lords becoming un-attackable, on Karak-Norn at least, we didn’t get to see the big new changes. It has been impossible to take down a second fortress, which of course meant no city sieges for us. However, last night we discovered they had been fixed and despite some determined defending by Order, we made it to Altdorf.
And now I find myself really torn on what to say, it could be “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it” and it could be “this is bloody awesome”. City sieges are now much more about the RvR. The first stage of the initial PQ is a giant Nordenwatch where you gain points by holding the 3 objectives and killing Order. The next PQ stage you can kill the Lord PvE style, or you can continue the fighting. There’s more of course as the city state changes, but I’ve not seen that yet. On entering the city it’s immediately obvious that this first PQ/scenario/thing will work brilliantly; we have now got what we asked for and in city sieges the focus is on killing enemy players. Great stuff I think. However, as you’ve no doubt guessed, he comes the “but”... But what about if you’re in an instance with no enemies?
Oh… bugger... We got to Altdorf late last night and with Karak-Norn Order having a much larger daytime than night presence, it meant some of us had empty instances. There just wasn’t enough Order to go round. Unfortunately for me, I was in one of those instances. So this meant we spent 15 minutes sitting at an objective doing nothing, then killed the PQ stage 2 lord, PQ resets and it’s back to sitting at the objective. Not overly exciting for me, but I heard from people in another instance that was packed with Order, that for them it was absolutely bloody awesome.
I’ve just heard that the daytime dominating Order are in IC right now. Having been online during the day before myself and witnessed the low Destruction turn out, it’s a safe bet that many Order have spent their afternoon in empty IC instances.
It’s quite amusing really, prior to this patch people would try and get into empty city instances so they could farm the PvE PQ for loot, but now everyone will want to be in the full instances because it’s actually a lot of fun. Mythic have turned the whole thing on its head and mainly in a good way. It will mean late night city sieges are less appealing (which is no bad thing in my book), we’re not reliant on dodgy PQs and are less likely to be shafted by low level characters, the poorly geared or bloody ignorant (I’m not implying that they’re one and same ofc). However to make the most of the change, for everyone in a city instance to have a good time, then we really need both factions to be equally active at the same time.
With whatever real life factors defining when we can or can’t play, is that going to happen? Let’s hope.
Monday, 24 August 2009
Does WAR need more PVE instances?
Lately I’ve seen a few people say it does. At first this puzzled me greatly, I mean come on, this is meant to be an RvR game, surely it needs more RvR? But after pondering on it a bit, I think I see where they’re coming from. Let’s say you’ve cleared Lost Vale earlier this week, when you log in and for whatever reason there’s no decent RvR going on. The problem you now face is that there’s not that much else to do.
There is Tomb of the Vulture Lord (and LotD Lairs), but that’s not a dungeon you can always get in and it has the odd issue that is putting some people off going regularly (including me), but that’s a topic for another post. For now I’ll “just” say that access to Land of the Dead isn’t always available, the main dungeon itself is tricky enough to not be somewhere you can easily take random groups to, the scorpion boss fight is ridiculously badly implemented and the place has a certain burning irritation…
Out in the rest of Tier 4 unless you’re grinding XP, you’ll only do each PQ once if at all, for the sake of seeing them perhaps. There are the lower dungeons for taking alts and new people through, but there’s nothing relevant to most of our main characters. In the modern MMO we don’t do dungeons just for fun, we do them for fun AND loot. EQ/WoW turned us into materialistic bastards, whilst we still want to have fun; the desire for shinies is often the driving factor. If you’ve cleared a dungeon or PQ once, unless there’s loot to be had, why bother going again? You’ve already met the challenge and beaten it to death with it’s own shoe. MMO PvE just isn’t that much fun on its own. To have any interest in doing something more than once, for us to want to farm it, then it needs to have incentives, be they XP, cash or loot.
Anyways, back on topic and now apologies for another Warcraft comparison, but it’s easy to do so meh :P If you compare WAR’s end game dungeons with WoW’s vanilla dungeons (prior to The Burning Crusade expansion) it looks like this:
WAR (6)
Bastion Stair
Bloodwrought Enclave
Bilerot Burrow
Lost Vale (3 wings)
LotD Lairs (think its fair to group these as one)
Tomb of the Vulture Lord
WoW (12)
Blackrock Depths
Scholomance
Stratholme
Dire Maul (3 wings)
Lower Blackrock Spire 10-man raid
Upper Blackrock Spire 10-man raid
Molten Core 40-man raid
Onyxia 40-man raid
Blackwing Lair 40-man raid
Zul Gurub 20-man raid
Ahn Quiarajthingy 20-man raid
Other Ahn Quiarajthingy 40-man raid
Obviously within those dungeons there are paths of progression, but in WoW there are a lot more options for your progression. It doesn’t matter that you were locked out of Molten Core; you could still do Onyxia or Zul Gurub, etc instead. In WAR there are other things like the King fights or the instances in city sieges, but they’re not things you can just arrange to do on any given night, where as with WoW you free to do stuff anytime. Clearly then, at present WAR doesn’t have anywhere near this PvE luxury, which is understandable as an RvR focused game, but if people are asking for more PvE how can this be addressed?
There are 2 basic solutions:
1). Add more instanced dungeons. For me the danger here is it makes a comparison between WoW and WAR’s PvE more relevant. Unless something dramatic happens with Mythic’s bug squashing, this comparison is one that WAR will lose every time.
2). Give us new and improved RvR options. Make tier 4 zones fully RvR, give us more objectives, open field scenarios, RvR PQs, non-instanced RvR enabled dungeons, open-RvR scenarios, fortresses that don’t suck, better (and actually relevant) influence rewards, more siege weapons and destructible walls. Get the game to a point where there’s so much awesome RvR going on that people don’t have time or a care for PvE.
For me it’s option 2 all the way. I like RvR in WAR now, despite the odd (heh) problem its PvP is still miles ahead of most MMOs, but we all know it could be so much more. Mythic are moving in the right direction here with the changes to city sieges and fortresses (whatever they’re doing with fortresses must be better than the current rubbish), so there’s potential.
There is Tomb of the Vulture Lord (and LotD Lairs), but that’s not a dungeon you can always get in and it has the odd issue that is putting some people off going regularly (including me), but that’s a topic for another post. For now I’ll “just” say that access to Land of the Dead isn’t always available, the main dungeon itself is tricky enough to not be somewhere you can easily take random groups to, the scorpion boss fight is ridiculously badly implemented and the place has a certain burning irritation…
Out in the rest of Tier 4 unless you’re grinding XP, you’ll only do each PQ once if at all, for the sake of seeing them perhaps. There are the lower dungeons for taking alts and new people through, but there’s nothing relevant to most of our main characters. In the modern MMO we don’t do dungeons just for fun, we do them for fun AND loot. EQ/WoW turned us into materialistic bastards, whilst we still want to have fun; the desire for shinies is often the driving factor. If you’ve cleared a dungeon or PQ once, unless there’s loot to be had, why bother going again? You’ve already met the challenge and beaten it to death with it’s own shoe. MMO PvE just isn’t that much fun on its own. To have any interest in doing something more than once, for us to want to farm it, then it needs to have incentives, be they XP, cash or loot.
Anyways, back on topic and now apologies for another Warcraft comparison, but it’s easy to do so meh :P If you compare WAR’s end game dungeons with WoW’s vanilla dungeons (prior to The Burning Crusade expansion) it looks like this:
WAR (6)
Bastion Stair
Bloodwrought Enclave
Bilerot Burrow
Lost Vale (3 wings)
LotD Lairs (think its fair to group these as one)
Tomb of the Vulture Lord
WoW (12)
Blackrock Depths
Scholomance
Stratholme
Dire Maul (3 wings)
Lower Blackrock Spire 10-man raid
Upper Blackrock Spire 10-man raid
Molten Core 40-man raid
Onyxia 40-man raid
Blackwing Lair 40-man raid
Zul Gurub 20-man raid
Ahn Quiarajthingy 20-man raid
Other Ahn Quiarajthingy 40-man raid
Obviously within those dungeons there are paths of progression, but in WoW there are a lot more options for your progression. It doesn’t matter that you were locked out of Molten Core; you could still do Onyxia or Zul Gurub, etc instead. In WAR there are other things like the King fights or the instances in city sieges, but they’re not things you can just arrange to do on any given night, where as with WoW you free to do stuff anytime. Clearly then, at present WAR doesn’t have anywhere near this PvE luxury, which is understandable as an RvR focused game, but if people are asking for more PvE how can this be addressed?
There are 2 basic solutions:
1). Add more instanced dungeons. For me the danger here is it makes a comparison between WoW and WAR’s PvE more relevant. Unless something dramatic happens with Mythic’s bug squashing, this comparison is one that WAR will lose every time.
2). Give us new and improved RvR options. Make tier 4 zones fully RvR, give us more objectives, open field scenarios, RvR PQs, non-instanced RvR enabled dungeons, open-RvR scenarios, fortresses that don’t suck, better (and actually relevant) influence rewards, more siege weapons and destructible walls. Get the game to a point where there’s so much awesome RvR going on that people don’t have time or a care for PvE.
For me it’s option 2 all the way. I like RvR in WAR now, despite the odd (heh) problem its PvP is still miles ahead of most MMOs, but we all know it could be so much more. Mythic are moving in the right direction here with the changes to city sieges and fortresses (whatever they’re doing with fortresses must be better than the current rubbish), so there’s potential.
Sunday, 23 August 2009
I'd like to give you an update on the patch's major changes, but I can't...
...because we can't get to Altdorf.
/rant mode on
And whilst Order to their credit put up some tough defence this evening, that wasn't the thing stopping us. The intensely irritating reason was that, along with the constant crashing and other bugs, this patch has brought a bug where once you capture one fortress, the NPCs at all the others become unattackable. So even with a coordinated push to get all 3 enemy fortresses under siege at the same time, as soon as that first one fell the others became impossible.
Since the campaign was knackered, we decided to go to the Tomb of the Vulture Lord, but we couldn't get in. Not because the zone was Order controlled, oh no. Instead because the PQ outside is bugged and the "dig" button isn't appearing for stage 1. Great... Though apparently some guildies got it to stage 2 earlier because the button appeared for a couple of people, but then the runes you stand on weren't activating at all, so they were still stuffed.
There's all sorts of other bugs and problems being reported on forums and in game. That's a tad ironic considering that this patch's big selling points were: bug fixes and city siege changes.
The bug fixes are probably great, but they're overshadowed by the monstrous new ones. And as for City sieges, well they remain great on paper. But that's all it is so far, on paper, since we can't get to the bloody city because of bugs.
Here's a tip. Don't release bug ridden patches just before the weekend, so like maybe you'll have enough staff in to fix the bloody thing before it gets hammered with the weekend's heavy gaming numbers. A bit like with the previous not at all buggy patch, where you didn't release it just before thanksgiving and have by your own admission most of your staff on holiday. Oh wait... :P If that's a misconception of events on my behalf, then apologies and yet at the same time, yikes! The situation is worse if so.
I hope this is all a bit embrassing for Mythic, but unless the US is suffering the same we won't know as they don't comment on EU issues. That's left for GOA to reply with the generic "sorry, we'll send it to Mythic" style response, followed of course by sweet FA. We still need shared US/EU forums.
Continuing this whinging tangent compare:
http://www.warhammeronline.com/
and
http://www.war-europe.com
Even after all this time we're still stuck with the much despised, browser unfriendly, bugger all information holding, pile of turd, Flash (is it 1998 in France still?) website. It's like a constant digital reminder to us EU players of the old classic GOA comment "equal does not mean identical". Also known as "meh screw 'em, what do the customers know anyway".
See Mythic? See what your bug ridden patch has done? It's drained my positivity and turned me into a grumpy old twat wallowing in my internet misery.
/rant mode off
Yipee! Happy thoughts!
/rant mode on
And whilst Order to their credit put up some tough defence this evening, that wasn't the thing stopping us. The intensely irritating reason was that, along with the constant crashing and other bugs, this patch has brought a bug where once you capture one fortress, the NPCs at all the others become unattackable. So even with a coordinated push to get all 3 enemy fortresses under siege at the same time, as soon as that first one fell the others became impossible.
Since the campaign was knackered, we decided to go to the Tomb of the Vulture Lord, but we couldn't get in. Not because the zone was Order controlled, oh no. Instead because the PQ outside is bugged and the "dig" button isn't appearing for stage 1. Great... Though apparently some guildies got it to stage 2 earlier because the button appeared for a couple of people, but then the runes you stand on weren't activating at all, so they were still stuffed.
There's all sorts of other bugs and problems being reported on forums and in game. That's a tad ironic considering that this patch's big selling points were: bug fixes and city siege changes.
The bug fixes are probably great, but they're overshadowed by the monstrous new ones. And as for City sieges, well they remain great on paper. But that's all it is so far, on paper, since we can't get to the bloody city because of bugs.
Here's a tip. Don't release bug ridden patches just before the weekend, so like maybe you'll have enough staff in to fix the bloody thing before it gets hammered with the weekend's heavy gaming numbers. A bit like with the previous not at all buggy patch, where you didn't release it just before thanksgiving and have by your own admission most of your staff on holiday. Oh wait... :P If that's a misconception of events on my behalf, then apologies and yet at the same time, yikes! The situation is worse if so.
I hope this is all a bit embrassing for Mythic, but unless the US is suffering the same we won't know as they don't comment on EU issues. That's left for GOA to reply with the generic "sorry, we'll send it to Mythic" style response, followed of course by sweet FA. We still need shared US/EU forums.
Continuing this whinging tangent compare:
http://www.warhammeronline.com/
and
http://www.war-europe.com
Even after all this time we're still stuck with the much despised, browser unfriendly, bugger all information holding, pile of turd, Flash (is it 1998 in France still?) website. It's like a constant digital reminder to us EU players of the old classic GOA comment "equal does not mean identical". Also known as "meh screw 'em, what do the customers know anyway".
See Mythic? See what your bug ridden patch has done? It's drained my positivity and turned me into a grumpy old twat wallowing in my internet misery.
/rant mode off
Yipee! Happy thoughts!
Friday, 21 August 2009
Karak Norn = Crash, crash, crash, crash, crash!
Sort it out Mythic/GOA pls. It's pathetic how often the entire server is crashing since the patch. Multiple times every day, every night.
Not good enough.
Not good enough.
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About Me
- Bootae
- Half man half pixel. Music obsessive, likes a drink, occasional bastard.