For those of you that are wondering where I’ve been, there have been a lot of things going on over the last couple of months. Unfortunately, that meant that the blogging took a hit.
I’ve still got some things to say, so please keep coming back here. I’ll get started just like old times in a week or two.
If you read MMO blogs, it will come as no surprise to you that the denizens of WAR are restless, and many of them have already hung up their swords. WAR is a fun game, but a fragile game. It’s population sensitive, activity sensitive, and it’s machine sensitive. That adds up to people getting unsatisfying play sessions more often than they should. It’s not helpful that Blizzard timed the Wrath expansion to launch 3 days before most WAR players had to decide on whether or not to resub for another month. It’s led to a mass exodus off of the servers to the point where Casualties and their allied guilds are getting a fraction of the usual player numbers we were used to. At the start, it wasn’t unusual for CoW to run with a full warband or better, now it’s hard to fill one even with our allies.
WAR could come back. I’ve never seen a live team work and react so quickly to changes that need to be made. I’m encouraged by the effort and results they have been getting. But it’s not enough. I think WAR is going to have to struggle a little and people are going to have to leave and try other things, then come back, before WAR starts to gain ground again.
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In the War Herald this morning, Mythic has announced that two of the classes that were cut from the game during beta will return before the end of the year. It’s interesting that they are announcing this so (relatively) early on in the life cycle of the game. I’m guessing that the pressure from WotLK is starting to come to bear, and they need to have something to announce at this time as well.
Let’s start with what we know is some truly exciting news. I’m happy to announce that in December, the Black Guard and the Knight of the Blazing Sun will officially be part of WAR. We have very special plans around their appearance and in our next newsletter we will provide full details about that exciting and rather novel event.
If there was any doubt that greed rules the day over in Irvine, or that the who…, er, executives there have round heels and a flat back, that doubt was removed today when this story hit on videogaming247. Basically the gist of it is that someone was poking around in Lich King’s data files found a graphic for a button that said; “Paid Character Customization.”
Looks like the Billion-dollar-baby isn’t satisfying the execs at Actiblizzard, so they have been directed to exploit, er, take advantage, I don’t know what to call it, other than get still more cash out of their golden goose franchise. Here is the heart of the article;
One of the big problems that Mythic has had with Warhammer is that when one side (almost always Destruction) has greater numbers the other side levels faster because they have more readily available opponents. This is specifically true in scenarios.
On the Destruction side it hasn’t been uncommon to wait in a queue for a scenario for an hour or more, and you would frequently have to wait a minumum of 15-20 minutes. They just weren’t available.
All of that seemed to change last night. Whatever they did in patch 1.0.2 to change the queue experience for Destruction on Thorgrim at least, it worked. The result? For me it was quite dramatic. One full level of experience (20->21) and renown (same) ensued. I haven’t done a level in a day since around the low teens.
In an article on Kotaku today, it’s been announced that Warhammer Online has surpassed the 500K subscribers mark. This is a great start for the game, indeed. Now, we all know that they aren’t going to retain all of that half mil, so how the game is going to perform from a subscriber count perspective is now up to how well the gameplay is received. From my observations, the servers as they are could mostly benefit from an increase in populations.
According to Mark Jacobs of Mythic, this makes WAR the fastest-starting MMO in history;
In just one week we have a half a million people playing WAR online, and the ranks of Order and Destruction are growing at a record-breaking pace for a new MMORPG,” said Mark Jacobs, co-founder and general manager of Mythic Entertainment. “We spent years working to provide players with the most stable, epic, and polished online world we could, but it is the players that have truly brought the Age of Reckoning to life.
Over at Nerfbat.com, Shwayder has declared the battle for supremacy on the Thorgrim Server of WAR to be OVER.
I have to agree with him. It does seem that there is a dearth of worthy opponents on the server, although a couple of guilds recently saw a spike in membership (maybe the order saved up their lunch money? The bus near the game store only runs on Sunday? I dunno.) I can tell you that in T2, where most of the action is right now, Order is mostly standing near level 55 hero mobs taking potshots. In the Phoenix Scenario, they just turtle, fearing what happens should they step off the lawn.
Pitiful.
First of all, let me say that I know this isn’t going to be my most read column, because this has been done ad nauseum out there in the blogs already. But it’s time for me to get this blog going again, and what is on my mind is Warhammer. Warhammer and Casualties. So here goes.
Before we get too far along. I want to tell you guys what an honor it is being the GM of a guild like Casualties Destruction. The game isn’t a week old and we’re already getting communication from other guilds about alliances and running things with them. It’s very cool. That’s because that guild is filled with some of the most exemplary people that I have ever played with. The only thing I really need to do as a guild leader with them is provide a little structure and try to focus their enthusiasm. Great stuff.
So the game has been “officially” live for about a week now. In all the other games I have played, at this time we would still be doing noob tasks and maybe running some lower level dungeons for dungeon gear. In WAR, we’ve been able to run T1 and T2 scenarios, participate in Open World RVR, we’ve done 2 nights of siege warfare, we’ve run our top 2 local Order guilds (/wave Clan of Shadows) out of their keep assault attempts, plus all the other stuff that most games offer.
I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but;
Congratulations Mythic. You’ve made a game we all want to try. We’re so anxious, in fact, that when you put out 60,000 copies of the Collector’s Edition back in March that it sold out almost immediately. In fact it has been going for over $250 a copy on Ebay recently. Nice for you. Good on ya. By all accounts, you also had a couple hundred thousand pre-orders for your game. You had what is practically a million applications for beta. Your hype machine has been unparalleled in recent memory. Good on ya.
Then launch comes along and you try to let your first 60,000 most rabid customers in on WAY too small a list of servers. You promise that as need arises you will add servers. You say that you don’t know what to expect.
Back in July, I wrote about the plans EA had to include the SecuROM “Digital Rights Management” rootkit with Spore when it shipped. I was not the only one who wrote about this to be sure, but the voices of the masses got EA to back down. A little bit. In the end, they went ahead and limited you to 3 installs of the game and included SecuROM.
Well the gaming community has spoken with one voice on how it feels about EA and SecurROM. In spite of Spore being, by all accounts, a wonderful product it now has a user rating of 1 out of 5 stars on amazon.com. Looking at the Spore review page, it appears that over 1000 people have rated the game with 1 star due to the included DRM. A cursory view of some of the reviews found them to be thoughtful and well-reasoned. Some examples;
The latest edition of Shut Up, We’re Talking is out and available for your lsitening pleasure. This week, they had the poor judgement to invite me to participate. Here is the lineup:
Subjects:
Hosts:
I know I haven’t written anything here in forever. I apologize. I think I’ll be writing again soon. I think.
Here’s the thing; Casualties of WAR has taken up what little time I have had lately. Besides working and redecorating the living room (which turned out to be a much longer project than we had hoped - don’t they always?) I’ve been doing organization, planning, and working on the web site for CoW.
Please don’t give up on the blog. We’re getting there and soon I should only be overwhelmed as the Destruction Branch GM, not that and all the other stuff too.
Stay tuned.
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