It's a number I didn't really expect to see this soon.

The publishers of MMORPG's tend to keep subscriber numbers away from the public eye... unless of course the numbers make them really happy.

Blizzard is really happy that it's the biggest show in town.

CCP is really happy that they are breaking records for server populations with Eve.

Funcom was really happy with the number of Age of Conan sales... for a while.

From what I gather Mythic and EA aren't too happy even though they have a respectable number of subscribers.

Zubon over at Kill Ten Rats makes the case that 300,000 subscribers is a good number, and he's right up to a point. There aren't too many Western MMOG's around that can claim those sorts of numbers, so Mythic is in pretty good company. Most smaller MMO publishers would be pretty happy with half the subscribers of WAR.

But the EA/Mythic team are also right. They bet the farm on Warhammer Online having at least 600,000 subscribers, and managed their development accordingly.

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.

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.

Warhammerites start your engines.

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

Warhammer is go...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.