Rubbish new GOA CSR policy regarding loot

A bit of a rant coming up, I'm going to get all emo about missing pixels. So I'll apologise now. Sorry ;)

This week I won my first ever loot bag in a fortress. However the chest wasn't visible to myself and several others winners. I raise a help ticket for a CSR, surely they must be able to reimburse us. I'd presumed they would have logs they can access for contentious things like fort loot. It would be, you know, like a sensible thing to have.

CSR response via email much later was this:

Dear Customer,

After investigating your case we regret to inform you that we are unable to restore your loot bag. We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused.
As we can understand this can be frustrating, this issue will be escalated to our quality assurance department for further investigation, in the hope that we can avoid this situation in the future.

For any further issues please do not hesitate to contact us via the ingame appeal system.

Kind Regards,

Warhammer Europe Customer Service Team.

Obviously I was not happy about this at all. I know several people that have previously had missing or unlootable gold bags mailed to them. Hell, even people that didn't loot cos they were bloody dead or outside the keep have had them replaced in the past. So I raised another ticket to point this out and that this is purely the game at fault, so why don't I get equal treatment. This time a GM gets back to me quite quickly. Alas, he simply says that their policy has changed and they don't replace loot bags anymore "sorry". Hmm that's a crap new policy, but ok...

Unfortunately, the tale doesn't end there. Today I was the only choppa in an alliance warband when the Conqueror choppa gloves drop. I click need, everyone else clicks pass or greed. But oh joy, nothing happens. No rolls, nothing. The loot simply vanishes into the ether. Ok thinks I, this is a different situation, I'll raise a CSR ticket and hope for the best...

Dear Customer

You recently placed a support request concerning a missing item. We are sorry to hear that you have lost an item, however until further notice we are not reimbursing items in your situation. Should you require further assistance please feel free to place another support request.

Kind Regards,

WAR European Customer Support Team

AAAGHHH!!!

Ok excuse caps, but this needs saying loud.

WHY HAVE YOU GOT THE OPTION IN YOUR TICKET SYSTEM FOR LOOT BASED REQUESTS, WHEN YOU REFUSE TO BLOODY HELP?

In both situations the game screwed up. Nothing to do with players doing anything dodgy or stupid, the game simply cocked up delivering the loot. Yet the CSR's wont do anything? WTF is that about?

Considering the various issues being leapt on by disgruntled rage quitters of late, the last thing Mythic/GOA need to be doing is pissing us about when the bugs skank our loot. Either replace things or get rid of the option in the help menus, because at the moment it just raises false hope only to replace it with annoyance. Alternatively, make it so loot doesn't bug out. Whilst discussing this I discovered it's not exactly unusual. :(

What makes this doubly annoying is now that you can't buy any conqueror, etc for gold, it's now MUCH more difficult to get the gear. The token system takes ages to get any armour with, compared with how you couold quickly get a couple of bits before. Which means if the items drop from players, crap like this is immensly annoying. I am not paying 650g for conqueror gloves from the auction house.

It's easier to get bloody invader for crying out loud.

It's all about the Zerg! Uhm, no.

It's not too uncommon to hear people complaining that WAR is just about zerging. Certainly it's a game where the zerg features high up on the menu, but if you look around you'll not only find the daily specials, but you'll also find the kitchen door is open and you've got a Chef's hat.

Pushing my dubious culinary themed anaolgies a bit further, this boils down to a simple choice; you can join the zerg or with just a little effort, cook up your own fun...

Obviously a handfull of players can't take an entire Zerg head on (tightly organised warbands using voice comms can though), but a single group of players can make themselves a nuisance and if you're really cunning, you can change the course of the campaign... You see as well as loads of players, zergs bring a couple of other things to the table: Personality clashes and laziness.

Personality clashes.
Good old fashioned, greenskin style animosity in the ranks. How often have you seen open warbands descend into arguments as players disagree over bloody everything? Half a group go there, the main zerg goes here and 2 randoms sit in the warcamp and every 15 minutes ask where everyone is.

Laziness.
The zerg moves on, but Billy-Bob just carries on sitting there AFK at the battle objective. He cba you see. Bugger it says Billy-Bob, let the others do the work. Much easier to just leech renown, whilst alt tabbing to troll forums. Eventually Billy-Bob realises he's getting a bit far behind and runs to joins the other stragglers who are milling about confused. It seems everyone is still bloody arguing over what to do next. Meh, time to go on /follow.

Full on, tightly organised guild or alliance warbands rarely suffer from the above, but they're not immune. With those type of professional zergs, people still get separated and have to run back. However, experience tells us that the majority of warbands do not fit into that category. They're either PuGs or are from less focused guilds/alliances. They are your target.

Be one with your inner Ninja
Ambush stragglers, ninja BOs and keeps, charge their healers in the arse just as they attack the champion mobs or just skirmish for the sheer fun of it. Don't just use the usual routes to get places, fly to other zones and cut back to your target zone. Use the PvE areas to sneak through, send 1 person off to tag keep A while you send a ninja team into keep B. Use every annoying bloody trick you can.

I just passed another Kojak with a Kodak, this place is crawling with bears, where the hell are you?
Voice comms, should not be underestimated. In some ways voice communication is actually more powerfull for a small group than they are for larger ones... Organising a warband in a hectic fight even with voice comms can be hard work, lots of people listening (sometimes talking too) and it's not always clear who something applies to. With a small group communications can more easily be direct and efficient, with less room for misunderstanding. It's one of the reasons you will sometimes see small groups cut through bigger groups of players with devestating effect.

So that's all fine for me to say, but what about putting into practice?

The proof is in the pudding
Unusually today I was online during the day, but the guild is very quiet at this time, so we could only run a small guild group. For much of the day there was only 3 or 4 of us in the group, the most we got to was 6. There was a destruction warband RvEing, but we left them to it and decided to do our own thing. Order were very active and pushing for multiple zone locks.

Yet it was our small group alone that delayed the Kadrin Valley lock for a couple of hours against vastly superior numbers. There was no other Destruction in KV at that point, but there was at least 1 Order warband. We still pulled it off.

It was also us that stopped Dragonwake and Reikland locking. I can safely say it was us too, as we alone took the objectives and keeps that stopped Order's domination timers with minutes to spare. Maybe Destruction warbands were elsewhere keeping Order busy in those zones, but regardless it shows how 1 small group is far from useless in WAR. When I logged off, Order had still only managed to lock one of those zones.

We were sneaky, cunning and tbh total gits, but we had an awesome time. We capped keeps, took BOs and led people on a merry dance. We took down groups twice our number and bravely went down fighting against the big zergs. From some of those fights I'd like to think a few players may have been given a bit of an eye opener regarding Kill Frenzy. ;)

So next time the zerg gets you down, put on your chef's hat and go cook up some trouble.

Winds of Change all puffed out

http://forums.war-europe.com/warhammeronline/board/message?board.id=generalannouncementsEN&message.id=32#M32

Good news! It's always pleasing to see that Mythic do listen to their players. Lets hope they can find a better solution.

Oi! Mythic! Spread 'em!

No! Not like that you dirty perv :P Or maybe that's just me... Anyways I digress.

A little while back I was posting about a time when it felt like the entire Order faction arrived in Caledor’s western keep. One of those “OMFG 10+ warbands!” moments... As previously discussed this crashed the zone big time. Now, I’ve no idea if it really was the mythical 10+ warbands, but it was by far the most Order I’ve ever seen in one keep. As such I don’t think anybody should be surprised the zone crashed. To be honest, I can’t see this type of MMO ever being able to handle that many players in one small area. So assuming there’s an element of truth in that statement, the question is what could be done to stop so many people congregating in one keep?

There’s always the option Mythic have gone for with the Fortresses. This is where the zone has a limit to the amount of players that can be inside, but in my mind at least this is as much a pain in the arse as it is a benefit. When all the action is in one area, but you’re not allowed in, that’s just no fun. There’s also the new idea to teleport people out if the zone is going to crash, which is fine in that it stops the zone crashing, but rubbish for anyone actually playing the game.

In fact this new Winds of Change is worth a few words. Firstly:

I can not stress enough how terrible this is as a main solution to the end game lag and crashing. If I've worked towards a keep or fortress take, only to be teleported out and basically told "Bugger off you can't take part", I will be absolutely bloody livid. I've encountered this in games before and always loathed it. They had similar things in Asheron's Call and even Ultima Online (if you remember the warping when the 2nd age went live and everyone rushed to place new housing) This may mean Mythic can do the whole positive spin bit and say how they've reduced zone crashes, but it will also piss a lot of people off and generate more bad press if this is alone is the solution to zone crashing and lag.

What Mythic need to do is give us much better reasons to fight over multiple zones. If I log on and see Fell Landing is under siege, that shouldn’t effectively cancel out all oRvR because everyone is rammed into one zone and everywhere else is dead or lagged to crap as a side effect. There should be multiple oRvR things we can choose to do at any time. It should be a war on multiple fronts, with multiple goals and not so focused around Inevitable City/Altdorf or when it arrives the Land of the Dead. If we can’t fit everyone into one zone now, are Mythic really confident that Land of the Dead will stand a chance? Keep in mind this zone starts at level 25, so there could potentially be even more players there… I do not want to be all doom and gloom about Land of the Dead, but it does make you wonder.

Obviously we don’t know the details of how LotD will work; perhaps there are things in place that will prevent it being a sandy lag pit from hell or perhaps by it’s very nature it will spread players across the other zones too. However I would suggest that Mythic need to go further and also implement some of their original plans for WAR and put in the 4 missing capital cities. This is something they said could well happen, way back in the early days after launch it was mentioned and again, if I recall correctly anyway...

Think about it, if you could capture a fortress and you then siege it’s relevant city, but without locking down the ENTIRE campaign and focusing every bloody player to one area. So say Order take Fell Landing, then they get to siege the Black Ark, but crucially the Empire/Chaos and Orc/Dwarf campaigns remain open should players prefer to do them instead. Genuine options to push multiple zones, but this time it doesn’t lead to one giant clusterfuck as everyone is rammed into IC or Altdorf.

Extend the city downtime after a successful siege, bring in realm wide buffs for each enemy city you control (say 20% renown/XP bonus per city), sorta like we used to have in Camelot and yay! A proper campaign, that has players fighting over loads of different areas at the same time. And crucially, tangible benefits not just for winning in one zone, but for controlling the campaign as a whole.

Kinda like what WAR was meant to have in the first place.

Ugh

I'm in the worst IC city siege I've ever been in. We're facing the usual who's who of Order that I always seem to end up against, which would be fine if it wasn't for the most pathetic Destruction performance I have ever seen.

Lets all run through one doorway and get farmed, yes that's a good idea... sigh.

There was a few attempts at going round the side from people, but the amount of times I ended up on a solo flank attack was just depressing. The poor sods on our side that tried to organise things were just ignored.

Double sigh.

CHOP! CHOP! DING! DONG!

Hit level 40 on my Choppa today. :)

I've decided to respec away from path of Da' Wrecka. It is very good, but I'm finding it not particularly challenging to play. You run in, spam AoE, use git to da choppa to pull people in and that's about it. It's been a lot of fun and it made leveling VERY easy, but I'm wanting a bit more variety in the abilities that are worth using. Perhaps I'm missing some subtle details with Da' Wrecka, but there you go. I briefly dabbled with Da' Savage before, but it just didn't feel right to me so this time I've decided to try out Da' Hitta, which is the great weapon based mastery path.

It's themed around big spike damage with a range of what appear to be quite potent debuffs. Unfortunately I've not been able to properly get a feel for it tonight, as with 2 forts down (1 each) all the oRvR was focused in Kadrin Valley. A zone now simply known as bloody Lagville. Thankfully I managed to get a few scraps in before the 2nd Fort went down and everyone and his wife descended on the zone. It got pretty messy from then on and after the northern keep battle crashed the zone for a third time, I decided to call it a night :/

First impressions are positive in that I've got lots of abilities to choose from and I brutalised some people in 1v1, but I'm not so sure how it will play out in large scale fights. I imagine I will miss Da' Wrecka's more powerfull AoE in those situations, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Hopefully I'll get some time to really experiment with Da' Hitta over the next few days

One of those moments of RvR awesomeness

So last night there was all sorts of action going on across Tier 4, I was logged in with Gashface my choppa and decided on going to Black Crag with an alliance warband (we're part of The Evil League of Evil). The zone was rapidly turning blue as Order appeared to be pushing for a lock, giving us a lot of options, but since one of the guilds in our alliance had claimed Ironskar keep in the north, we decided we best try and hold it. As we rode through the winding canyons the alarm sounded, 21 enemies were attacking Ironskar. Clearly we'd made the right decision to push for the last Destruction controlled area.

At that point we had around the same number in our warband, so rather than rush inside the keep, we planned on charging the Order from behind. They were like lambs to the slaughter (or is that Slaughtererer? Nornians will get that :P ).

They must have been a PuG not using voice comms, because it was an utter, horrific massacre. We romped through their healer camp, cutting a bloody swathe through their lines and forced the rout in moments. Much cackling was heard on our ventrilo, but we knew we'd been lucky to face unorganised opponents. We withdrew to the keep and waited to see what Order did next.

We didn't have to wait that long, as shortly after roughly half of the same bunch returned. A group of us melee types went out to deal with them, which we were in the middle of doing when we heard yelled from the keep walls (ok ventrilo) something along the lines of "Order! Bleedin' thousaaaands of 'em!".

Those of us outside left the small combat outside and ran like buggery for the keep door. A few of us were cut down, but thankfully in res range.

We were now up to a full warband, there was about 1 group of random Destruction that had just arrived and a shit load of Order had arrived. GAME ON!

From here on there are so many tales of awesome PvP combat I could tell you, but this post would become insanely long. We successfully held the keep against 86 Order with just our warband and six others, almost 3-1 odds and we held. It was truely epic, we dragged the fight out for over and hour by destroying every battering ram they deployed and using coordinated melee assaults to clear the doorway... Their ninja teams were caught and killed everytime, were gave no quarter. We rained death from above and thrust sharp pointy sticks in their squishy bits. I saw some of the most gung ho ressurection missions ever as our brave Disciples of Khaines accompanied by melee fighters rushed into the enemy to retrieve our fallen. In the end as the door respawned, we wiped them to a man and won a monstrous defence bonus (don't remember the numbers, but it was BIG).

I can't do the fight justice, it was the best defence I've been on since the early days on Karak Hirn. I salute all my follow Destruction that earnt their victory and also the Order who didn't give up despite our brutal defence. Wether you were on the winning or losing side, it still provided a long and entertaining battle.

It's nights like this that show how awesome WAR can be.

PS it also meant I got 1.5 more levels of renown and finally got to equip my Annhilator chest and helm ;) Just need the shoulders now. "Woot"! or some other such geeky expression :P