World of Warcraft Copies Off Warhammer Online

The last few days have seen the release of Blizzard’s Achievement system for World of Warcraft. A system that has been copied directly from Warhammer Online.

Okay. Maybe it’s not quite that bad. I am being a little facetious.

There are a lot of similarities between Warhammer’s Tome of Knowledge and Warcraft’s Achievements. But then, there are similarities between the system Warhammer uses, and the Lord of the Rings Online Achievement and Title system.

Even LotRO doesn’t get off cleanly regarding plagiarism charges. They are certainly not the first gaming system out there that has titles based on in-game achievements.

But… I reckon Lord of the Rings Online has the best achievement system I’ve seen in a MMORPG.

In LotRO, not only do you get a title from an achievement, you get a trait that you can apply to your character development. While Warhammer Online has the Tome, all you get is a title that you can give your character. I’m not sure what Warcraft’s achievement system achieves.

So yeah. I’m being tongue in cheek when I charge WoW with plagiarism. For players, it’s not a bad thing for developers to take good ideas from other games, and then give us a better version.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Previews R Us

Just saw an announcement from the Warhammer Online Herald that they are holding another preview weekend, called Preview Weekend+, for all the players who participated in the preview weekend two weeks ago.

According to the announcement the PW+ dates are Friday the 5th and Saturday the 6th of September. Considering that Open Beta starts on the 7th, the nice people at Mythic are giving us an extra couple of days.

My guess is that the particular bugs that caused so much embarrassment for Mythic on the first preview weekend have been fixed, and that Mythic is handing us a small reward for putting up with them.

I don’t think I’ll thrash the game so much this time. I’ll definitely be logging in around 5 hours from now (if it starts at the same time as before) and spending some time this weekend. Unfortunately, I’m busy at the moment and can’t spare much time.

I wasn’t planning on doing much during OB anyway. I will be waiting until the head start before I dive in fully. The OB for me is to get a feel for the game, not to create and become attached to a character that will be deleted at release.

I guess I should go patch the client.

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Titles Are Not Worth Anything Unless They Cost Something

At the moment I am very busy. I’m between contracts and it’s dragging on a little more than I’m comfortable with, so I’m setting myself up to do some freelance work over the Internet. It’s something that would mesh nicely with any short term software development contracts that come along. And it would give me the chance to set my own hours for once!

Hence, the lack of posting. But I’m still checking all my subscriptions regularly, including my Mythic account. I’m just keeping an eye on it, in case, you know, I get a special invite or something.

So yesterday when I logged in, there was a notice telling me to validate my email. So I did.

And I got "The Validated" as a title I can use in the game.

Big Yawn.

Too harsh?

I like the idea of achievements and titles. I think that Turbine have done this particularly well in Lord of the Rings Online. It’s a fine idea.

I’m not entirely sure of how I feel about the way Mythic has implemented their achievement and title system, but I’m leaning towards feeling that they’ve overdone it.

Firstly, there are a bunch of early titles that are just there. Get killed a certain way and you get a title celebrating it. Validate your eMail and get a title.

Then there are just so many of them, it’s almost impossible to keep track. I guess that’s a minor point though. After long enough in the game, most players will have an intuitive grasp of all the names.

To me, titles should be earned. If you made the first 5 levels in LotRO without being defeated, you were given the title "The Wary." For every five levels after that you were given another title. I only made level 10 once, iirc, the title was "The Invincible."

What an achievement to get the level 50 undefeated title, whatever that is!

So when Mythic give me "The Validated" as a reward for receiving an email and clicking on the validation link, please forgive me for feeling rather underwhelmed.

PS. Just 10 days to go until the early access. Woo hoo!

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It’s Been A Lovely WAR

First off, my apologies in taking so long to get to this Warhammer Preview Weekend write-up. I was completely thrashed after the weekend. I didn’t time it, but I think I spent close to 36 hours playing the various classes on offer. Consequently, the next couple of days were veggie mode.

Funny thing. I used to be able to do really stupid hours without paying the piper. I must be getting older!

For me, the weekend started at 10pm on Friday night Australian central time. I was expecting it to be a later start, but decided to login to get any patches that might have been available. At that point the servers were up with already a few hundred players on each. I ended up playing to around 3am before finally going to bed. It was pretty much that way until the end of the weekend, which for me was Monday evening.

The only real break, apart from sleep was a birthday celebration on Saturday evening.

I posted on Monday afternoon that I had enough and was quitting. Well, after a couple of hours the itch got to me and I logged back on to create a Witch Elf. I finally logged off around 10:30pm Monday night. I fully expected to be kicked off well before then, but was surprised when the servers just kept on going.

Anyway. Let’s meet the gang.

I ended up creating twelve characters over the weekend. Since each server only has place for ten player characters, I deleted a couple of them later on. Those were ones I couldn’t really get into anyway, they were the Archmage and the White Lion.

I took three PCs all the way to the grand total of rank 7. The remainder I got to level 5 or 6 with one or two at level 3.

That was my intention. I originally wanted to concentrate on seeing what the Destruction classes were like since I was intending to play Order. So I aimed to see as many as possible without leveling too much. However, I changed tack on Sunday and decided to look at some Order classes as well.

Big mistake. If I originally intended to go Order, well, sampling the Destruction has changed all that. Destruction has some of the best starting areas in the game, especially the Greenskins. The Greenskin area was totally chaotic. New players running around. Dwarves in barrels. And two big Orcs banging on drums. The area had a lot of atmosphere. And that’s not mentioning the Orkapult.

Anyway. Let’s talk about the big three issues. Stability, Polish, and Gameplay.

Stability

This is one of the issues that came out of the weekend.

While I had one of the most stable beta experiences since LotRO, which still holds the title for stable betas as far as I’m concerned, a number of players didn’t. Casualties of WAR provided a vent server allowing our guild to chat. Over the course of the weekend, there were quite a few cries of anguish as guildies crashed to desktop (CTD) some far more often than others.

It turns out a lot of these CTDs occurred on laptops. I believe this is a result of incompatible drivers and laptop graphics chips. Mythic have already responded to a number of player concerns about this problem, and this is what they have at the top of their fix list.

I ended up with a single crash to desktop right at the end of the weekend around 10pm Monday night. Since I hadn’t experienced this at all before hand, I first of all thought that the PW was over and Mythic had turned off the servers. Logging back in proved this notion false.

I also didn’t experience any appreciable lag, even at the start on Friday night when there seemed to be 15 million people in the Dark Elf starting area. The fact that I was playing on a US server, not an Oceanic server (not sure if they were up) meant that the lack of lag was a good sign.

The PW certainly wasn’t bug free either. There were a number of issues that came to light. The worst of these was the NPC pathing issues. It seemed to be more a problem for ranged classes. I found if I hit a NPC from range, it wouldn’t behave properly. It would sit there and take a few hits, or run off and then back, or both. It was a little unpredictable to say the least.

Pets, the White Lion and Squig, behaved similarly. This was likely the reason I didn’t end up liking these classes.

Mythic also acknowledged the pathing issues, saying that they had broken something just prior to the weekend. Fixing this was their second priority.

Polish

There is a definite need for more polish.

Actually I think the game is in a pretty good state, aside from the issues I mentioned above, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be made better.

1. The User Interface. The UI could be a little better. While it does everything it needs to do, I personally feel that it could be a little better. Having said that, it’s a lot more flexible than the AoC UI which I thought was pretty bad.
2. Sluggish Controls. Also on Mythic’s hit list, the controls at times felt a little sluggish. I’d hit an attack and it wouldn’t happen, or a command seemed to take too long to execute. Often I’d hit an attack and get a message stating it wasn’t ready yet. That was often because it wasn’t ready, but sometimes I’d hit the attack the moment it cooled down just to get that message. It was a little frustrating, especially in RvR.
3. Slight Graphical Anomalies. Some icons were missing. Some graphics were a tad glitchy. Nothing too serious. The missing icons all had placeholders too, so it’s not a bug, the actual graphics hadn’t been implemented.
4. Spelling. Only one or two occasions did I see misspelled words. Okay, am I being too picky here?

This is something that will get Mythic into trouble if they don’t address it. Players like their games to be responsive, the graphics to be crisp (and all there). If it’s not polished, the complaint levels rise, rightly or wrongly.

Gameplay

The gameplay that Warhammer Online offers is good solid MMORPG gameplay. That means that it is the same MMORPG that we have all come to know and love. There are some differences though. New or improved features that add value to the genre.

The first of these is the RvR. At first glance, RvR in Warhammer is similar to the Battlegrounds in Warcraft. At the low levels you get to participate in scenarios which involve capturing and holding objectives in a BG-like instance. When you get a little higher in rank, there are open world contested areas where you can fight players of the opposite faction. In fact, there is the opportunity to attack or defend keeps and use siege weapons doing so. I didn’t get the chance to do the World RvR, but I did find the scenarios a lot of fun.

Public Quests are something new that Warhammer Online offers. My first character was a Dark Elf Sorcerer, and at level 3 I entered the first public quest area. This PQ and the others that I tried had three phases. Kill a number of NPCs that spawn in phase 1. Phase 2 is similar. Kill another set of NPCs, and then phase 3 is to kill a hero (elite++) boss.

In the DE starting area the hero boss is a stinkin’ dragon. Yep. At level three I got to nuke, or help nuke, a dragon.

Of course the second PC I created in the DE area late in the weekend had only five other PCs to help in this quest and could barely scratch a dragon scale. I guess that’s why the Public Quests are… public.

You’ve probably heard about the Tome of Knowledge by now. The Tome stores all your quests, and also keeps track of what you’ve done, who you’ve met, and how many you’ve killed. It also reveals a story as you progress into new areas and complete quests. That’s a real plus for someone like me who likes story in his games.

Like I said before, WAR is your standard EQ/WoW style MMO in many ways. You’ll have the usual quests to kill ten rats, and you’ll get quest chains to complete. Personally, I don’t mind the quest grind. In fact I kinda like it.

However, you don’t have to do that to level. Doing scenarios or open RvR will allow you to level as well. Maybe not as quickly as doing quests, but RvR is a viable option to leveling. I added a couple of levels myself just killing enemy players in scenarios. Some players do all their leveling doing RvR. It’s nice to have that option.

I should also say that I found leveling a little slower than other games. It took me a good three hours to get to level 6, and close to four hours to get to level 7. In WoW, I can generally get to level 6 in under an hour, and ten within three hours.

I think this is a good thing. There’s been a tendency lately to allow players to power-level their way to the level cap. WoW has recently accelerated leveling, and Age of Conan was designed to reduce the time to the cap. That’s all well and good if all you want is players raiding, but I’ve always considered the journey as the game, and exploration the goal, not just racing to 60 or 70.

What Now?

On a scale of one to ten, I’d rank this preview weekend a seven.

It’s clear that Mythic have a good game on their hands. If they can fix up some of the problems that showed up during the preview, and apply more polish, they’ll have a great game on their hands.

And that sounds a little pessimistic. If they can fix it. There’s nothing I’ve seen to suggest that there are any insurmountable problems in the game. This is not Age of Conan two months after release when the devs still haven’t fixed the memory leak. This is a game still a month away from release that is almost ready for primetime.

While Warhammer Online is not a mythical step ahead in the evolution of the MMORPG, it is a good solid example of the genre that throws a few new neat ideas into the mix.

I had a thoroughly good time playing over the preview weekend. You sometimes go into these things wondering if you’ll come out wanting to cancel the preorder. I had no such inclination. Rather, I’m now hanging out for the game to go live. When that happens, I reckon there’s a list of at least ten classes I want to play.

These are, in no particular order.

• Iron Breaker
• Witch Elf
• Bright Mage
• Sorcerer
• Warrior Priest (still got to try out in OB)
• Witch Hunter
• Black Orc
• Chosen
• Sword Master (still to try out in OB)
• Shaman

Let the Altitis go mad!

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