Blagged myself a quality guild again

I was reminiscing recently with some of my old cronies about our past MMOs, which got me thinking about how much our guild has evolved over the many years and the factors that shaped its current form in WAR. The guild has changed with each game, but there’s a group of us that have moved together since Ultima Online. Anyways I’m gonna ramble a bit now about how my guild evolved, so you have been warned ;)

My first experience of MMO guilds was in Ultima Online, just before the 2nd age hit. In my first few days of UO I got talking to people from a guild called The Eternal Knights of the Circle (EKC). The EKC was an awesome guild, it had its own city, fought the good fight against PKs (players that had gone “red” from murdering so many other players), was very well structured internally and had a strong moral code. You simply could not be an arsehole and stay in EKC, it was all about a community of sound people. Interestingly it used a Monarchy system, no guild council or democratic malarkey, the king was the king, end of story.
I could write a whole article just about EKC, it really was the best guild I’ve ever been in (technically I’m still a member) and was where I cut my teeth in guild management as I moved up the ranks. It’s fair to say that EKC formed the foundation for everything I’ve done with or wanted out of guilds since. Just without the roleplaying bit…

I dabbled with loads of other MMOs, but the next one to get a grip was Dark Age of Camelot. Whilst playing on the beta, with a real life friend of mine “Filthius” and bunch of other ex-EKC, we started grouping with a collection of new people regularly. This naturally led to us deciding to form our own guild at launch. Soon as the game went live we got the cash together and formed the Legion of Darkness (LoD). We decided on Filth as guild master, with myself as co-GM. Filth was the main man for the in game leading, where as I focused on guild admin work and sorting out structure. With our EKC past we knew we wanted a guild that was again about the people, not the l337ness, we sure as hell didn’t want a guild full of wankers. Which led us to the development of guild rule no1 “No wankers”.
This simple, yet effective rule helped us form a great guild, which went on to become a fairly big player in the whole RvR scene. Obviously what qualifies someone as a wanker is totally subjective, but if you want a guild of likeminded individuals, then not taking in people that you would consider wankers does the job for you.
As ever with MMOs, you move on. With a new born daughter I didn’t have much spare time for running guild stuff and the temptation of dabbling with other new MMOs teased me away from DaoC. This eventually led to Filth and I jumping ship and surfing the new sea of MMOs.

Filth and I again ended up leading a guild, this time in World of Warcraft and once again with the “no wankers rule”. Yet again we had a friendly and fun guild. Over time WoW taught me a lot about running guilds, particularly as the MMO world became obsessed with loot. What a bloody nightmare, we had to write loads of sodding rules or risk watching turd hit spinny things. Like most guilds we had to make the move to a DKP variant and all the hideousness that entails.
As WoW changed more and more into Animal Crossing, I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the game. The co-GM thing was no longer perfect, Filth and I as ever got on perfectly (we’ve been RL friends for like 15+ years), but at times our guild policies could lack clarity, as it depended on which one of us you spoke to.
In the last few months before WAR I decided I’d had enough. I stepped down from my co-GM position. WAR was approaching; I was pissed off with WoW, bored and only logging in to chat with my mates.

I’d decided with WAR that I’d set up a new guild as sole GM with a small number of rules (8), tightly controlled recruitment and suffering no fools. I had my core players from Blazing Phoenix coming along with us and this time I got the website, structure and everything sorted out well in advance. Filth of course would be on my officer team ;) Blood Pact was created on launch day with everything in place. Rule no1, was of course set in stone.

Since then Blood Pact has grown to become one of the premier Destruction guilds on our server, in size, activity and most importantly, quality. We’ve had 4 other guilds merge into us, all being ones where we knew them beforehand and we were certain of the quality of their members. The guild has a great atmosphere and it’s on its way to building another awesome online community. I imagine its more luck than judgement on my part tbh, but assuming I did something right in the last 10 years of guild management, here’s 7 things that I think might have helped…

1) Don’t recruit wankers. If any get in, kick them.
2) Democracy is over rated. A strong but fair leader means swift, decisive action. Plus the existence of rule 1 means if your leader is a wanker they have to kick themselves. :P
3) More than 10 main guild rules are too many. People won’t remember them, if they even bother to read them.
4) A nice website, clever charter and fancy uniform are all good and well, but it’s your guild member’s actions that define how your guild is actually perceived.
5) Don’t take on everything yourself; share your workload with a balanced officer team.
6) Officer ranks should have clear roles and responsibilities identified. If officers don’t fulfil their role, demote them, even if they’re your best mate.
7) Quality > Quantity. Always.

WCPI - Another selection of quality reading for you

So here's a couple of sites for ya...

Blame the Healer is well worth checking out. It's regularly updated, covering all sorts of WAR related topics. Whilst it's obviously written from a healers perspective, there's something for every WAR player there. There's loads of posts I could have linked to, but here's a couple I've picked out..
Having played a healer myself in games before, I highly recommend this post for those that haven't.
And from a week or so ago, check out some WAR extreme tourism ;)


Next up is Snort's blog Tuffmudda. Snort is on the same server as me and is one of the guys that stepped up to the plate to get Destruction organised. As such, this blog is not just written by a WAR player, but a leader of men, women, geeks and questionables. ;)

He often posts about the big events on Karak Hirn, so you get some action replays :) You maybe interested to read on this cunning diversionary tactic for keep defenses.
Snort being a Black Orc player there's often posts about the class and thankfully always from a considered and objective viewpoint.
Also I must link to this post. One of his guildies has made an excellent Lost Vale guide.

Chosen gets some (sweet?) loving

It seems Mythic have made some amendments to the 1.2 patch. Quite a few classes effected too: http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=652

Chosen stuff being my main concern, lets have a butchers then...

Bug Fixes
· Mixed Defenses: Fixed an issue that made the parry bonus of this ability a multiplicative bonus instead of additive. (cool, BIG improvement to this tactic)
· Repel: Fixed an issue that limited the knockback distance of this ability. (YAY! About time eh!)

Balance Changes
All Chosen have undergone changes and as a result will need to reallocate their Career Mastery Points. Be sure to speak to your trainer right away to regain your abilities!

· Discordant Fluctuation: The base damage on this ability has been increased and will now deal Spiritual damage. The ability will not receive benefits from stats nor will it do critical damage.
· Dreadful Agony: The base damage on this ability has been increased and will now deal Spiritual damage. The ability will not receive benefits from stats nor will it do critical damage.
· Bane Shield: The base damage on this ability has been increased and will now deal Spiritual damage. The ability will no longer receive benefits from stats nor will it do critical damage.
(For all of the above 3 abilities we'll have to see this in action to judge, it might be a buff, might not)

· Touch of Palsy: The value of the barb damage has been increased and will now deal physical damage. The barb will no longer receive benefits from stats and will no longer do critical damage. (On the PTS prior to this change Palsy was god awful, I hope this fixes that. I would expect so as this appears to be Mythic's reaction to feedback on it)
· Tainted Wound: The base damage on this ability has been increased and will now deal Spiritual damage. The ability will not receive benefits from stats nor will it do critical damage. (another wait and see before judging)
· Hasten Dismissal: This tactic is now a level 35 Core tactic. It reduces Repel's cooldown by 50% and turns Repel into a long knockback. (this sounds awesome)
· Corruptive Power: This tactic is available at Corruption x11. All Corruption abilities cost 35% less action points. (this also sounds awesome)
· Baneful Shielding: This is no longer a valid tactic.
· Dire Shielding: This ability will also increase the duration of Bane Shield by 7 seconds.
(Nice one Mythic, merging those 2 tactics frees up a tactic slot for bane heads, which is only a good thing)
· Bane Shield: Multiple Chosen with this ability up will no longer prevent each other from dealing damage to the same target. (good good)
· Oppression: The disorient effect has been removed. This ability will now reduce incoming damage on the Chosen by 15% for 10s. The cost has been lowered on this ability. (woah massive improvement to this ability, corrupting is getting interesting...)
· Rending Blade: No longer requires an active aura to receive a bonus effect. The ability is now a Point-Blank Area of Effect ability that deals Spiritual damage. This ability requires a Great Weapon and no longer has a cooldown. (double woah, if this does respectable damage then Dread is looking much more appealing)
· Relentless: The cost and damage has been increased on this ability. (sounds good)
· Dreadful Fear: The cost of this ability is now free.
· Corrupting Wrath: The cost of this ability is now free.
· Discordant Instability: The cost of this ability is now free.
· Discordant Fluctuation: The cost of this ability is now free.
· Corrupting Retribution: The cost of this ability is now free.
(no such thing as a free lunch, but I'll settle for an aura)


This certainly appears to be a big buff for Chosen. If the damage, avoidance and mitigation improvements are more than just token increases, then for the first time we might have viable mastery specs that do not include Discord. I've had a bit of a play with potential mastery specs with these changes in mind and I can see some interesting Dread/Corruption specs I'm very tempted to try out. My only concern with them is not having Quake from Discord, it's such an awesome ability for RvR, I don't know if I'd like playing without it.

Lets just hope it's as good as it sounds :)

Instanced PvP Scenarios are so last year

Instanced scenarios are bloody rubbish. I think they’re one of the factors ruining WAR’s RvR, in fact to take that further I’d say they should just be removed from the game. In their current form at least…

Open RvR in the lower tiers can be sparse, not because people don’t want to do RvR, it’s just easier to queue for a scenario instead of finding a fight and the XP/renown rewards are more reliable than in open RvR. People will nearly always take the easy option after all. Of course if those people already in scenarios weren’t in there, then they’d be doing their RvR out in the open world… You know the whole open RvR bit that WAR is meant to be about... Instead we have Tor Anroc over and over, and over, and over again. There’s a big molten bore reason why despite me having a lot of alts, not one of them has made it through Tier 3 yet.

In tier 4 scenarios are an epic pain in the arse. As well as the above issues, they also count towards zone locks, which means people get all stressed if anyone below level 40 and/or with crap gear dares join them. I’m sure we’ve all seen the region chat stuff with people trash talking those damn noob lowbie scumbags that had the temerity to join a T4 scenario. That’s a real problem, people getting shit just for playing the game the way it was designed to be. Those people leveling up are the future of WAR, it's not exactly promoting the game if we give them grief for getting XP. And regardless of who the community decides is allowed to do what, it’s still just more people taken out of open RvR and dumped into instances.

Of course if there was no scenarios, then the lack of variety in open RvR would become more obvious and it would also slow down the levelling process. So clearly they can’t just be removed, without enhancing the whole open RvR experience. So what to do?

I’ve an idea for a solution, based around the public quest concept. Lets get the scenarios out of the instances and turn them into public quests, and voila! Public Scenarios! Public quests without any PvE element, just the same requirements as the current instanced scenarios have. To a point WAR already has this sort of thing with Fort captures, BOs, etc, working in a similar method, but currently it's just so limited and I would suggest, an opportunity to improve.

Lets take for example Stonetroll Crossing. Grab a section of Troll Country’s barely used PvE zone, remove the mobs and update the landscape with a Stonetroll Crossing style area, complete with troll pacifier and angry rock throwing trolls. Replace the scenario timer with a revolving PQ timer and we’re good to go.
We’d need to avoid making these another way to RvE, but perhaps that could be done by having the XP/renown reward using a multiplier related to the number of enemy players killed in the area during the Public Scenario’s timer. So if you did it solo while Order are in the other zone, nil points for you sunshine, but get stuck in and scrap each other? XP and renown for all yay! Or something like that anyway. :P

How then to stop the enemy refusing to fight in that scenario? Hmm needs some incentives…
What if a Public Scenario was then linked somehow to a Battle Objective, or even a keep? Say if you win the above scenario, then the aforementioned angry trolls attack Stonetroll keep, attacking players and NPCs alike.
How about if each zone had a battle objective that actually was a Public Scenario? If I recall correctly we have 36 identical battle objectives in Tier 4. Seriously, that needs livening up. So rather than yet another kill 6 NPCs, click flag and wait snorefest, how about Artisan’s Gift was say a Serpent’s Passage style Public Scenario? What if Defensive Boon had a capture the flag type system for controlling it?
There's a wealth of options here, it doesn't have to be the 36 identical battle objectives it is now.

But, but, but there won’t be an even number of players! It won’t be fair!
Personally, I couldn’t care less. It’s Warhammer, not HappyClappyHammer. Why in the world would bloody Orcs turn up to Nordenwatch and say “Youz lot stay ‘ere, we iz only takin uz 12 ta fights dem fair like!”.

Just because instanced scenarios were in World of Warcraft, doesn’t mean we need them in WAR. If you look back at when WoW’s PvP wasn’t rubbish, it was back when there weren’t any scenarios, back when people used to turn up at Tarren Mill and just kick the crap out of each other. It wasn’t always even, it was very rarely fair, but it was a lot of fun. Far better than the “lets lose this quick” crap you have in WoW today. Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot had some of the best PvP ever in MMOs, with no scenarios needed.

This is far from a new idea either. World of Warcraft does actually have Public Scenarios (Eastern Plaguelands, Silithius, for example), just no bugger does them because WoW’s open PvP is pointless and everyone lives in… yup, instanced scenarios. Where as WAR’s open PvP is far from pointless, it’s just suffering from a lack of variety.

Thing is, that variety is there; it’s just needs moving out of those bloody instances.

BBB joins the WCPI! Now have a butchers at these sites

If you've not heard about it yet, the WAR Community Promotion Initiative (WCPI) has been created by the good folks over at Warhammer Alliance. It's a chance for us WAR community website type folks to spread the word about other WCPI sites and help everyone with a bit of publicity. Cool idea me thinks. There's a load of great WAR websites out there and anything that gives them a bit more traffic is all good. So without further ado, he's my first couple of links:

If you don't already know Syp and his mighty Waaagh blog, 1) where have you been and 2) get over there!
It's one of the first blogs I check each day with Syp commenting on both the state of WAR now and ideas for the future. Interesting post up at the moment about Murder night here: Bounty Hunting
He's got an idea there which reminds me of the old bounty hunting we used to do in Ultima Online. Man I loved Ultima ;)
Full website url is: http://chaosmoon.gameriot.com/blogs/WAAAGH

Other site I'm posting about this week is Wizards and Wenches. Another of my personal favourites and it was actually on there that I read about the WCPI. One of the things I particularly like with Regis' blog is there's always something to raise a smile, a little bit of humour :) With the world of WAR at times being blasted by negativity and Blizzard sponsored anger monkeys, we need blogs like this to read :) As for what's on there, it's a real range of stuff. From tips on setting up a UI, to WAR news, to an Orc's version of YMCA, great stuff all.
Full website url is: http://wnw.blogwarhammer.net/

So we sailed onto the sun 'till we found the sea of green

If you've not been onto a public test server yet, this is what you're missing out on:

Choppa testing has certainly proved popular, as has the Choppa itself. I've only really dabbled a little bit so far, as unfortunately I've not had that much spare time to put into the test server, but everytime I have been on, there's been a lot of discussions in region chat about the Choppa.
People seem to be really liking it. And I mean really, really, really liking it. Loads of people talking about re-rolling.

Obviously it's all low level stuff, so it's not that indicative of end game performance, but it would seem to have very pokey DPS and looking through the skill lists it's certainly got some funky stuff. If you then look at the discussions going around about Witch Elves and Marauders, people are making out those classes are now redundant, particularly with Witch Elves. Hmm, I don't totally buy that myself, a class is only redundant if you choose not to play it. They will still have decent DPS, they may not be no.1 melee DPS anymore, but they're not gonna be useless surely?

That said, the 1.2 patch is nerfing Witch Elves and the changes to Stealth worry me a fair bit I have to say. Yet with so many changes to other classes, resists, pick lock, etc, will it all balance out? I'm really hoping that the new working pick lock skill is going to shake up keep sieging, something where Witch Elves could potentially be awesome.

I don't think we'll have any real idea of the impact of this patch until it hits the live servers, the PTS is too random and the various forums are so covered in bile it's hard to work out what's actually true.


One thing's for sure though. When 1.2 goes live, the Choppa is going to be hugely popular and we're all gonna be sailing on the sea of green.

BTW if you want an easy way of seeing all the new goodies the Choppa brings with it, go check out Wizards and Wenches. There's a great post up with the abilities, tactics and morale all on one page.

New Chaos Mounts

Well I've just got myself copied over to the PTS and as I know a few folks have been asking about mounts, here's screenshots of the new Chaos standard ones. They're 15g from the usual mount vendor.

First off for comparison purposes, the current mount.

This new one is called the Maroon Marked Steed

And this is the one I'll be getting, the Decayed Flesh Marked Steed.

Unfortunately it's not copied over my guild, so can't get the guild rank 25 ones to show you. Also it appears the mail isnt working on the PTS, so I also can't send enough gold to my alts to get shots of other races mounts.. doh. But still these are quite cool.