Warhammer Server Chaos

Well, the last couple of days in Warhammer Online have been a bit dramatic.

Casualties Destruction guild has had a bit of a turbulent time. It turned out that our initial choice of server was also going to be inhabited by the Goons.

The Goons, for those of you who don’t know, are a guild that rose to prominence on Eve Online and has the declared aim of making life so bad for other players that they quit the game. To a Goon, that’s PvP. To everyone else that’s griefing.

The members of Casualties felt, that even if they are on the same side, we didn’t want to be associated, or even close, to them. So we decided to set up on another server, Volkmar.

Due to some pretty poor planning on Mythic’s part, Volkmar and three other servers, turned out to be completely packed minutes into the Standard Edition head-start. At this point the guild officers started to discuss what could be done. That decision was made for us later when Mythic announced to the world that the four packed servers were at capacity and that players should not create any more characters on them.

Since that meant that the folks in CoW that were going to start at normal release would be discouraged from rolling on Volkmar, the officers decided to bite the bullet and reroll the guild on yet another server. That was done yesterday. So we are now on Thorgrim.

Sure. There’s been a bit of grumbling, after all people have invested a few hours into their characters already, but it’s a generally supported decision across the Destro CoWs. And if something like this needs to happen, it’s best to make the cut early.

However… now Mythic has announced that they are cloning the four overcrowded servers. This means that every player and every guild is duplicated on a new server. This allows guilds and players to choose to stay on their old server or just start playing on the new one. It’s a seamless process and the players shouldn’t notice any difference.

It’s actually quite an elegant solution that is much better than offering character transfers since those can get messy quickly.

The pity of the matter is that this had to happen at all. Personally, I reckon the guild officers made the correct decision based on the info they had.

In this case, Mythic didn’t really provide the info in a timely enough manner to assist players and guilds to make the best decision. It’s an unusual case since Mythic has generally been pretty good with the timeliness of their news updates.

Oh, and the Order side of CoW. No drama there at all to speak of. I still need to get my order alts in. I’ll do that now I think.

Popularity: 13%

Warhammer Online SE Head Start Only Minutes Away

Warhammerites start your engines.

After years, months, and days of waiting, the time is almost here.

Warhammer is go…

Popularity: 7%

DRM = Dumb, Rude, and Mean

Some of you might be old enough to remember back to the 80’s when computer games weren’t released on massively spacious DVDs, but came on one or more 1.4MB floppy disks. In fact the first FPS I ever played, System Shock, came on twelve (iirc) floppies. I might even still have them somewhere.

At the time, piracy was as much a problem as it was today. It was pretty easy to copy a floppy since everyone had a floppy drive. Games were routinely uploaded to bulletin board systems (BBS) for anyone with an account to download and play.

So the game publishers decided to put in some of the very early DRM features. When the game booted up, it asked a question that could only be answered by using the manual. What’s the third word in the second paragraph on the fifth page? That sort of thing.

It was fairly inconvenient. Even more so if you had lost the manual.

When pirates started photocopying and distributing manuals, the questions asked were about colors in the manual. Nice if you were colorblind.

In the end, most publishers ended up dropping these sorts of schemes because they hurt the customer more than they solved the problem. (Uncopyable — at the time — CDROMs also helped a bit.)

Jump forward to a few days ago.

EA release Spore with a DRM that only allows players to install the game three times, and despite what is actually written in the manual, only allows players to make one account per purchased copy.

So to game publishers, I’m looking at you EA, here’s a possible new meaning for the DRM acronym.

• Dumb because it doesn’t work. Sure a little copy protection will prevent a customer from innocently breaking copyright. But the level of DRM in modern games is akin to forcing your wife or daughter to wear a chastity belt when they are just going down to the corner store to buy milk, it has no point. And besides if your spousal unit were going to play up, they’d find a way out of the thing. That’s exactly what happens with DRM. The real pirates break it in a minute. Your customers are left suffering the inconvenience.
• Rude because you are accusing your customers of being thieves. There’s no other way to say this. Your paying customers are not stealing your games even if they are installing on multiple computers. They are not stealing your games if they are allowing their significant other, or brother, or child to create a separate account. They are not stealing your game anymore than letting a family member borrow a book is stealing.
• Mean because you are showing that you could care less about your customers. You don’t care about ruining the game experience, or even about just taking their cash and leaving them in the lurch. This Securom, as I understand it, is about as close to being a rootkit as can be without actually being one. So yeah, take the cash, make life difficult, and while we’re at it potentially compromise your customers computers.

The ironic thing is that EA might have actually shot themselves in the foot over the Spore DRM. Over at Amazon the majority of reviews (2133/2369) for Spore are rated 1 out of 5. This isn’t because the game is bad, on the contrary I’ve heard only good things about Spore. Most of the reviews are citing the DRM as the reason, saying that they’ve been burned by draconian DRM before, and won’t be again.

Is this the start of a consumer backlash against draconian DRM schemes?

I hope so. Abusing legitimate customers didn’t work in the eighties. It isn’t going to work now. At some point, they just won’t take the abuse anymore.

The crazy thing is that EA have probably lost more Amazon sales because of this than they have lost sales due to piracy. Dumb.

Will Wright would have to be really pissed at what EA has done to his game.

Popularity: 6%

Warhammer Online Goes Live - To Two Hour Queues

Since I wasn’t able to lay my mitts on a Collectors Edition of Warhammer Online, I’m not able to start playing WAR until Tuesday evening my time (that’s provided the servers open for Standard Edition preorders of course.) However, a lot of my guildies from Casualties of WAR were fortunate enough to order, (or had enough foresight to order early,) a CE version and are currently playing.

Well some of them are anyway.

Over the last couple of days there was a lot of guild discussion going on about which servers we were going to roll on. We needed one each for Destruction and Order since there is a rule in place that prevents you from creating a character of the opposite faction on a server that you already have a character on.

Unfortunately, the server list that Mythic provided is rather thin.

To make matters worse, Mythic have also chosen to have somewhat low population caps on the servers. Normally this would be a good thing since it reduces the load on each server and makes the game more responsive.

But with 50000 Collector Edition players wanting to start on a handful of servers, it leads to just one thing. The dreaded queues of doom. Some of my guildies are reporting being in queues of two hours.

I can’t understand what Mythic are thinking.

They know how many copies of the CE have been sold. They know that CE buyers tend to buy because they are hardcore players who want to soak up everything about a game, or are players who want in to a headstart, or both. They know that Warhammer Online has received some really good reports from the majority of bloggers which would encourage people in to the game. And they are going live on a Sunday afternoon when everyone can rush in and not have to wait to finish work.

Yet they get stingy with the servers.

It boggles the mind.

Popularity: 9%

Blogiversary 2

Two years ago today, I installed my first Wordpress blog, picked a theme, and wrote my first post. As first posts go, it wasn’t much more than a simple hello, but it was the number one.

At the time I was just starting to get interested in the whole blogging concept, and I had read a number of posts by various bloggers that the best way to start was to pick a subject that you are passionate about and just start writing. At the time I was playing way too much World of Warcraft, so I picked that.

Since then I’ve migrated away from being a simple WoW blog, to something more generalized around the MMO Games niche. I’ve been reasonably good at staying on topic, even if sometimes I stray into other areas. Occasionally my hot buttons get pressed, and you’ll see a rant about censorship and game politics, or how the media perceives us.

So. Two years. Wow.

I completely missed the date last year, and by the time I remembered it was too late to even note it. Somehow my memory didn’t let me down this year.

In the last two years, I’ve fiddled around with the layout of the blog and had several themes. The current one seems to be sticking in spite of my obsessiveness with fiddling.

I haven’t been Dugg at all, though I have had some interest from Digg, but I’ve been Slashdotted.

I’ve changed from just playing WoW, to playing a variety of MMO games, to what looks like my new number one — Warhammer Online.

I’ve beta tested a couple of games, but in truth I haven’t been able to get into as many betas recently. It might be because I tell them I’m a blogger at the beta signup. We’re not that scary are we?

I’ve had a few ups and downs. There was a several month period in 2007 where I had absolutely no motivation to post that corresponded with a period of severe MMO burnout.

And one small post about World of Warcraft Addiction, posted back in November 2006 remains my most searched, viewed, and commented post ever. Another post called Beefed Up Blood Elves where I criticized the prettiness of the Belf is the most commented, and where the most bile has been directed at me.

More importantly, I’ve learned a whole lot about blogging, and writing. From my perspective I’ve improved my skills dramatically. I now take less than half an hour to write a decent post. When I started it took up to ninety minutes.

In some ways it’s hard to believe I’ve been going this long. When I started, I honestly wasn’t sure that blogging would stick.

Now, it’s hard to consider not doing it.

Popularity: 5%

Untainted Fallout 3 Not Available In Australia

Bugger.

I just checked the Amazon website for Fallout 3, and the page for it states that currently the item can only be shipped in the US.

I was counting on Amazon to get Fallout 3. I’ve previously been able to buy some of my games from them. It helps when they are half the price of Aussie games and the US dollar is close to parity. In fact, I can still get Spore from Amazon. They ship that one outside the US. So it looks like it’s just Fallout 3.

The thing is I’m not going to buy the Australian castrated version of Fallout 3 out of principle.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to play it. I just want to play it as the designers intended.

It looks like I’ll have to find some other way of getting the uncensored version.

Popularity: 5%

Chroming My Browser

I’ve been a Firefox user now for several years. I prefer it far over Internet Explorer which as far as I am concerned doesn’t offer anywhere near the browsing experience that FF does.

The problem with Firefox though, is that it’s really buggy. I haven’t been able to watch any Flash based videos using it for a while now. I have to use IE to do that. It even seems to have problems with forums, not marking threads I’ve visited as read.

And don’t get me started on the memory leak problem which has just got worse in Firefox 3. Once it starts building up, and that happens quickly, the browser starts thrashing the disk. Even closing tabs and windows doesn’t help. What makes this so much more annoying is that the Firefox devs refuse to admit a problem, let alone do anything about it. Sort of like the Age of Conan devs I guess.

Last week, out of the blue it seems, Google released their own browser called Chrome. I decided to try it out over the weekend. Even as a beta, it seems to work perfectly. I can watch video again without using IE. Forum marking is behaving properly. It even seems faster than FF and IE.

So I’ve been slowly migrating the pages I visit over. I reckon I’ll be using Chrome for most of my browsing needs now. It’s not perfect. It’s not even finished. But aside from the lack of plug ins that you get with FF, it’s a superior browser.

You know the crazy thing about all this?

I don’t really trust Google. To me they’re just another big company trying to make a buck (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and they, by law, have to maximize profits for their shareholders. All this ‘Do No Evil’ talk is just that — marketing speak.

I’d much rather give my browser luv to Firefox. They have a great product that has lots of third party support. But their refusal to fix the issues with the browser kills it for me.

Just like the games that I play, I want a solid stable product.

Popularity: 5%

No-one Told Me Marilyn Manson Was In This Game

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Open Beta is Go

As of a few minutes ago, Mythic has launched the Open Beta.

All the servers are plugged in, the switches have been turned on, and the cords anchored down so no-one can trip over them.

I’ve heard, only a rumor since I’m just about to log in, that all player characters created over Preview Weekend+ have been preserved. I guess I’ll see if that’s true in a couple of minutes.

See you in there.

Popularity: 8%

Lot’s Of Changes In Warhammer

So. The preview weekend has once again started.

I logged in last night a bit after 10:30pm my time to see what was going on. I ended up finishing up a little after 1:30am.

You can see that over the two weeks since the last preview weekend, the Warhammer Online team hasn’t just been sitting around drinking coffee. Although, I suspect that large quantities of caffeinated beverages have been consumed. Warhammer almost seems like a different game.

The first thing I noticed was the user interface. Mythic have made a lot of changes here. Some user interface elements have moved position, changed color, or now use different icons. It looks quite a bit neater.

The Tome of Knowledge has also had an extreme makeover. Rather than using links in the text to get pretty much everywhere in the Tome, there are now a lot more bookmark tabs on the side of the tome. There are also a few new entries, such as armor sets that give you a Tome view of the armor sets for your class. Of course you have to find them before they appear in the book.

Now to combat.

Pathing for NPCs has dramatically improved. Now when I attack from range, they come straight for me, which is the way it should be. However, I noticed on a couple of mobs that there was an appreciable delay before they reacted. Not sure if this was intentional, bug, or lag. I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the issues with the previous weekend.

The combat controls are much more responsive now. Fighting, pressing those buttons, just feels that much smoother.

I did, however, experience some lag. That’s not unusual for me since the packets have further to travel. I didn’t think of checking the ping time last night, but for reference, in most games I get between 200ms and 450ms ping times. Even though that’s a lot compared to most folks, I’ve never found it has made much of a dent in performance. Either last night I was getting bad ping times, or the new client/server configuration doesn’t handle lag as well. We’ll just have to wait and see I guess.

Possibly related to the lag. I was finding my mouse movement very choppy for a while. It was so bad at one point that I ended up plugging in an older corded mouse. I use one of those wireless rechargeable mice and I’ve had similar problems with them before, but it worked fine after I logged out.

I’m pretty impressed with how much the Warhammer Online team has achieved in the last two weeks. With the launch just over a week away, it’s looking pretty good.

Popularity: 9%