In a recent post at Worldofwar.net, they mentioned something about “Paid Character Customization” which frankly I’m surprised more people haven’t been talking about.

Jay Allen Brack was asked about the Paid Character Customisation that has been found in the game files. At first, he dismissed the question, and would not comment on it, then a few minutes later, he brought up the subject and said that there is going to be paid character customisation. No details yet though.

Now the big question is what exactly does this mean?  For me the first thing that came to mind is that I would be able to literarily buy a customized character directly from Blizzard.  Lev 70 Warlock with full epic gear and 50 Gold, baaam done!  Could this possibly be what Blizzard is planning?  I mean after all the powerleveling, account and gold selling services are big business and if Blizzard can’t beat them, then why not join them.

In essence Blizzard would be doing more positive then harm.  For one, there would be no more gold farmers and in-game spam.  Blizzard can just click a button and add 100 gold to whoever pays for it.  Same goes for powerleveling.  If you want your lev 32 toon boosted to the max, pay a bit and two seconds later you have a lev 70 character.  Not only would it make in-game experience more pleasant by elimitation gold farmers and spam, but it would be safer for players that decided to participate in these types of transactions.  The’re going to do it anyway, so why not do it with Blizzard where you know you’re safe.  The only gap that would be left open would be users that want to sell WoW accounts.  Perhaps Blizzard will eventually open a service where users can sell and trade accounts to each other.

If this is what Blizzard is planning it would be interesting to see how the community reacts as up until now most people seem to despise they types of services.  Or I could be way off base and what Jay Allen Brack really meant was that you customize your character with new clothes, items, etc, in a purely cosmetic way that would not effect gameplay at all.

So recently I really took notice that blizzard has slapped up some enticing rewards for recruiting a friend. As with most offers of it’s kind it is worded in a very general manner, almost slippery in a sense- like there’s fine print without there being any. Probably the most popular reward is bonus exp.  You get triple experience points—- when you are in the party with your recruited friend. This means your getting about the same xp as before, just a little bit faster. However there IS one part of it that doesn’t have any catches, due to triple xp and the fact that when in a party you do not have to share quest experience you are provided straight up triple quest experience. Well as you can imagine, or can confirm from previous experience, this leads to some fast leveling. Just make sure that your friend can play according to your schedule or vice-versa. Don’t be fooled by the shiny levels though, this service has other pitfalls.

Don’t you just hate when you see a new level 70(cough* night elf hunters) or one that just has no idea how the hell to handle/play his or her class? It’s quite obvious really, just look for the most powerful, non-efficient moves in the game (sorry to all the lowbies/ noobies reading this). Well for those who agree with that last sentiment, I have news for you my friends, It’s about to become a lot worse. Fast leveling equates to learning to skills at a higher frequency, giving the player almost no time to learn and get used to their new skills. We end up back in gold shire looking at that stupid noob of a night-elf hunter, except he has even less of an idea of what to do than before!

So far this offer is mucking up our player base and community, let’s see what else it can do. Ooooh, if they stay for a month or two, I get a free epic land mount. Well let’s see that takes about 600 gold out of the economy’s pocket. If the players don’t have to work, why would they contribute and make money? This mount isn’t even that cool.

And finally With player- summoning the player will not have to travel and see the world he’s playing in, with this they won’t stumble upon realizations about the game and how to get here or there or anywhere, they’ll simply wait until their buddy logs on. These players are already going to be half-baked; blizzard at least give them some chance and let them grow a work-ethic!

P.S.  Maybe this will add a more fun pvp experience for the Warcraft veteran?Easy kills anybody? Meh maybe not, their recruit‘ll just jump you.

Warhammer: Top 5 Issues

Well here we are about a month after the release of Warhammer Online, and I wanted to take some time to talk about some of the top issues in the game at the present time. I have previously written about two of the early issues already which no longer seem to be glaring problems to me, Server Queues and Goldspammers. I want to preface this article by saying that I do enjoy the game so far, but for the purposes of this I will be zeroing in on what I see as the top issues that I feel have the potential to derail the success of the game. If you read my early review of the game, which has been published on a variety of sites, then you should know that my goal is to be as objective as possible. Let’s start the constructive criticism.

1) Overworld Rewards

This is issue one for me and a lot of the community at the moment. The entire premise of Warhammer Online is the war in the overworld. I don’t think anyone bought this game to do instanced battlegrounds, but at the present time they seem to be the most rewarding option in regards of using RvR to advance your character.

Scenarios are by far way too beneficial and the overworld is far less rewarding at the present time. Scenarios require no effort to get into, you simply sign up and wait for it to let you know when to zone you in. The longest any given scenario can run is 15 minutes, and can yield large amounts of experience and renown. Overworld RvR requires you to physically travel to the front in hopes of serious combat going on. Overworld doesn’t lay a finger on scenarios in terms of experience points, and unless you are in a major bloodbath you won’t be coming close to the same amount of renown, especially when compared to what can be earned in a 15 minute scenario.

The good news is that Mythic seems to have been reading the feedback. They recently announced a 50% increase in leveling experience in the overworld RvR areas, and they are promising to announce some changes in the next week about renown. This issue is critical because most people will opt to take the fastest route to advancement, and if the overworld becomes empty this game will fail.

2) Class Balance

Since release we have seen a variety of bug fixes go in, but we have seen little in regards to class balance. Now I understand where they are coming from in this regard, but there are some balancing problems that need to be addressed or people will get turned off from RvR. If people are finding themselves saddled into a class that is extremely weak, it may lead them to cancel out of frustration with their class if they don’t have the strength to tough it out or reroll. These are my observations as someone who plays Order in Tier 4, so take it with a grain of salt as I will try to be fair.

Shadow Warriors and Squid Herders are in desperate need of a boost. Both of these classes are one of the rarest played from my experiences, and for good reason. These ranged DPS classes as they are marketed need a bit more DPS or a bit more range. I play a Shadow Warrior in Tier 4, and it is a hard life compared to some of the other classes that are capable of far more damage and have much better survivability. A Shadow Warrior wears the same level of armor as a Bright Wizard and does far less damage. If I am at my maximum range and shoot at someone running towards me, they will be in melee range by the time the move is finished executing. Kiting is not even close to being a viable option in RvR. My root barely works and is a melee attack, so by the time someone is close enough that I need it, I’m dead anyways.

Magus and Engineers need to be looked at as well. These are also uncommon classes because they suffer from similar problems. Both of these classes have an ability that is going to ruin this game if it is not fixed. Electromagnet on the Engineer and the Magus version is an ability that sucks in all plays from 65 feet away, has no casting time, only has a 20 second cooldown, has no line of sight check (can pull people through keep doors in sieges), and snares!  I wasn’t surprised when I found out that the addition of this spell was something that happened right near the end of beta, so probably has not undergone the proper testing. The sad thing is that this is one of the few good tools these classes have at end game, so they need to be brought up a little while this ability gets fixed.

Witch Elves strike me as a bit out of control. I often find myself unable to fight back almost every single time they attack me, even with all of my counter-measures up. They can kill me in about 4 seconds flat while incapacitating me. Now as someone who wears light armor I guess that might be feasible, but Ironbreaker guildmates of mine have been destroyed almost as fast.  The ability that damages you for moving has no limit to how much it can do, and when factored with how easy they can kill when you aren’t moving there is little anyone can do in most cases.  There is nothing fun about not being able to fight back, something DAOC was notorious for.

3) Performance

This is another major issue that needs to be worked on as soon as possible. The end game envisioned by Mythic and its customers is large scale overworld fights. If your computer crashes you to desktop, or reduces you to watching a slide show, then people will eventually quit. My computer is an absolute beast, and even I have found it being brought to its knees in some of the battles we are seeing in Tier 4 at this point. These battles will only get worse as more people level up, so they need to continue to tweak the code. Nothing sucks worse then crashing to desktop during a city raid, then logging back in 1 zone back and unable to rejoin because all of the guards have respawned blocking your way.

I have heard rumors that the game is sending too much data as a reason for some of the performance issues. Some have said that buff refresh data is being updated too frequently, or that chat being logged too often could be possible causes. There are some mods out there trying to experiment with these issues, but I have yet to try any to see if they work. The good news is that the game is running noticeably better after the last patch when I am in large scale battles, so I look forward to seeing if there are more changes coming that will help streamline with before everyone else gets to Tier 4.

4) Itemization

This is a minor annoyance at the present time, but could be a big problem as we move on into the coming months. If you go to the merchants in your capital city who sell the high end RvR gear, you can take a look at some of the rewards and stats on the gear we get to look forward to earning.

The problem is a lot of those high end armors have stats that don’t make a lot of sense. Many of my guildmates report to me that they are seeing the epic RvR gear with very odd stats such as willpower and intelligence on melee class armors and weapon skill for casters. Some of the items are not only lacking in the primary areas for their respective classes, but they have stats on them that are of little value to their class. If these items are deemed as junk by the player base, it will diminish the reward from RvR, and make people less motivated to try to earn them. Now I understand that a lot of these items are sets and have set bonuses, but a lot of these just flat out suck without the rest of them. Maybe they rushed them because the game was close to release and they knew nobody would get them for a long time, but they definitely need to be gone over again.

5) Bugs

These most likely won’t make people quit, but they will test the nerves of the players. The guild interface is absolutely amazing, but it has bugs that need fixing. Some players in my guild have to be manually promoted by typing out the command because the interface hates them. The alliance tab has some glitches making it hard to read at times. The guild heraldry shows to other players, but on my screen I don’t see it unless I toggle it off and on every time I zone. Altdorf still causes me crash almost every time I go there for no real reason.  I still can’t join a scenario from some zones randomly. I could go on but you get the drift.

By far one of the most annoying things is the current state of the mail system. It literally took me 5 minutes to open 3 mails and remove the items attached to them. As someone who is in a guild where people are always sending each other stuff, this can make going to the mailbox a dreadful experience. Every time you buy an item at the auction house you have to go get it from the mailbox, so if you buy some material for crafting or a set of new armor, you might as well go to the bathroom and drop a duece while you wait for your mail to get sorted out.

Conclusion

Overall the game remains solid for what it is. The overworld RvR is enjoyable when it happens, and the gameplay is overall good. When you compare this game in its present state after 1 month to games like WoW and Age of Conan, it definitely has a lot going for it. These issues however summarize what I believe are the top concerns of the community, as you can find on most forums and in game whining.

The good news is Mythic is definitely listening to the player feedback. Recently they made a change in a patch that has reduced the number of gold spammers noticeably. People were upset about the leveling curve in certain tiers of the game and Mythic reacted by increasing the quest experience in these areas of the game. They are keeping a sharp eye on the community and reacting to their needs. If they continue to maintain this level of communication and honesty with the players, this game will be around for a long time.

Paragus

Co-Leader of Inquisition

www.inqguild.com

Yesterday Turbine announced the official date for the first expansion to Lord of the Rings online as Nov 18th 2008, just over a month from now.  While I haven’t played my hunter for about 8 months now, some of the additions to the game sound very exciting.

All the information on the upcoming Mines or Moria expansion have already been available online for many months, so I’m not going to cover what’s new,  you can read my Mines of Mora announced post for details on that.

The one new feature I will talk about are the new Legendary items.  These are weapons and class-related equipment that the player can forge themselves and that level up along with the player. Turbine was kind enough to provide us with some screenshots of these new legendary items so check it out.

Definitely a cool new feature and if I wasn’t having so much fun with Warhammer Online, I’d be thinking about coming back to LORTO once the expansion hit.

It seems with the success of Warhammer Online and it’s impressive RvR (PvP) system that PvP is back in a big way.  So big that the almighty juggernaut Blizzard is considering changing the way their current PvP system works.  In a recent post on the Blizzard forums, it was stated “we want to give you the ability to queue for Battlegrounds from anywhere in the world”. 

This is one of the best features that Warhammer introduced, being able to join a PvP battle from anywhere at anytime.  Not only will Blizzard be adding this to WoW, but I’m sure this will become a must have feature for all future MMOs that have PvP.

Apart from adding this feature, it seems Blizzard is reconsidering its entire PvP system.  After all if PvP is back they don’t want World of Warcraft to be left in the dust.

You can give some credit to Age of Conan for being the first big title to reintroduce PvP back into a stale MMO world, however considering the absolute debacle that followed, that’s all the credit that can be given.  Warhammer Online not only brought back PvP, but did it right straight out of the gate.  Having been there since launch on a open RvR server I have to say I’m having a blast.  While there was some skepticism that doing regular quests would turn into a ganking party, I can say this is not so.  While you do run into the enemy once in a while it’s not frequent enough to get you all riled up, in fact I enjoy it.  Finally PvP is back!

A lot of us who play MMORPGs have been either playing video games online, or strictly MMORPGs for a long, long time. Take me, for example. I got my first computer when I was 7, and my biggest accomplishment by age 10 was that I could kick your ass in an Age of Empires DM Cho War. Before the days of games with dynamic content(i.e.: content that is constantly being patched, changed, or updated), there were only games with static content(i.e.: most RTS games, FPS, etc.). These games were designed by developers the way they wanted to, and the gamer either liked it as it was, or hated it. People didn’t stick around Warcraft III a year after release hoping that their experience would change; they knew whether the game appealed to them or not during initial gameplay. These days, most of us are spoiled. We play games that are constantly seeing new updates, and so it is not uncommon for us to stick to the mentality that there is only one game for us, and that we must fight the developers to the death to implement the changes that we want. This makes me wonder: are games owned by the developers, or is the direction of the game decided by the community? Who should decide where the game is going?

The Vision

Most game developers have a vision when creating a game. They decide what type of game they want to make, and where they want to go with it. This isn’t any different with MMORPGs, and we seem to forget that sometimes. When companies create and develop a game, they want to take it in a certain direction, they want to do what they think is best for the game. Let’s take World of Warcraft for example. World of Warcraft at this point is a game that is owned by the community. Blizzard implements things that the players want to see, completely overlooking their original intentions often forsaking their characters, and their lore to create a simplistic type of game-play that will earn them a ton of money

I believe game development to be an art. Not just the programming, but the graphic design, the music, the writing, etc. All of these components, when combined properly can create an overwhelming alternate reality for players to explore and enjoy for hundreds, or even thousands of hours. That said, the direction of this interactive art, and its ultimate goal should be decided by the creator, not by the ‘fans’. It’s fine to have an opinion, and it’s fine to hate something. However, when it comes to the MMO world, we seem to want to change everything in a game to our liking rather than hate it and go play something else. We pressure the artists, the creators, we threaten them with our money to create a world that we like, rather than follow their vision and see where they’re going with it.

Think about it. What if we went around altering the original intentions of every artist out there? We’d update the Sistine Chapel to feature tribal painting, or random Japanese characters. If we start altering art at the rate we want to alter video games, we’d end up living in a cultural wasteland where we eventually wouldn’t even be able to remember the great minds of the Renaissance.

Some clarification:

I’m not saying we need to go back to the days where games never saw any updates, or that we should simply learn to deal with what developers throw at us. We have choices as gamers, and we decide what to hate and what to like. There’s no point in sticking around in a MMORPG you say sucks,  when all you do is sit there on the official forums writing about how much it sucks. Try playing something else.

I’m also not saying that creators shouldn’t expand on their ideas. I always love learning more about a certain fictional world I enjoyed reading about or playing in; developers should release expansions that explain the history of the world we’re playing in, our role in it, etc. However, they should do so if they’re willing to put as much effort into their expansion as they have into their original work. For example, The Burning Crusade was a very different game from the original World of Warcraft. Many people felt they just added ten levels, and threw on more stats on everything and called it a day. The Burning Crusade caused many people to leave, in the same way The Wrath of the Lich King will cause many people who enjoyed The Burning Crusade to leave. Blizzard’s vision was altered by their community. They wanted more items, more levels, easier-to-obtain epics, etc.

To conclude:

We have a ton of choices when it comes to video games, much in the same way we have a lot of choices in real life as to where to eat, what ISP to use, etc. We don’t live in a world where you have to play one game, and I don’t think we’ll ever hear anyone say “There’s no Warhammer: Online coverage in my area, I have to play World of Warcraft.” We should be thankful for this. If you like sci-fi games, go play something with a Jedi. Don’t campaign to have Guild Wars include Jedis in the next expansion.

In my opinion, games belong to the creators. They share them with the community. We pay for a service, but said service includes constant content patches, server usage, and support within the game. We’re not paying to lead the game in the direction we want it to go in. In the end, we need to realize that just because we’re paying for a service, let’s say…a hamburger, doesn’t mean we have a right to decide that Burger King should suddenly start making pizza.