Warhammer Woes at 60 Days

I feel compelled to do another installment here on how Warhammer online is progressing a little past the 60 day mark of going live. Those of you who have followed my writing on MMORPG.com and MMOCrunch may remember that I wrote my review of the game right before launch, and at the 30 day mark I wrote about the Top 5 Issues with the game. Now past 60 days, Warhammer Online finds itself struggling due to what I believe are 3 main problems that need immediate fixing.

1) Itemization

This is the first issue that is crushing my motivation to play. This is one of the 5 points I touched on in my previous Warhammer article and it remains to be a major problem. The stats on most if not all of the high end gear is horrible. I am almost inclined to think the stats were picked by a Mythic Dev throwing darts, they make little to no sense for their respective classes and seem almost random in the stats and set bonuses.

This is a major problem because the high end gear is one of the primary motivators to play. Unlike DAOC which had interesting realm abilities to chose from, Warhammer uses RvR gear as the carrot at the end of the stick to keep you wanting to advance and participate in RvR. The fact that the stats are so poor on these items completely takes the wind out of the player’s sails to participate and chase the carrot. Unfortunately this problem is not only limited to the RvR gear. I was fortunate enough to get 4 of my Sentinel pieces for my Shadow Warrior in a single run through Sigmar’s Crypt. In any other game I would be elated to be this lucky, but the excitement was quickly diminished when I realized none of the items were an upgrade, and the set bonus was actually worse then a lower level Bloodlord set. This needs to be fixed immediately, and if not before the end of the billing cycle, then there will be a further bleeding of subscriptions.

2) Overworld RvR Mechanic

The overworld RvR mechanic simply is not working. In a recent patch, Mythic claimed they made changes to the “Victory Point” system which determines how and when a zone will flip to the control of one team or the other. The patch claimed it would make scenarios carry less weight, thus putting more weight on the overworld and making zones flip faster. Yesterday my guild had an ORvR day to make a real push on the Destruction territory. After taking all the keeps and battle objectives in all 3 pairings, I was shocked to see that we were only halfway to flipping in 1 zone, and even less in the other 2 zones. Nobody wants to be forced to run public quests, which offer terrible rewards and are tedious, in order to flip a zone. Scenarios other than Serpent’s Passage still are not popping as needed, and I play on Skull Throne which is widely viewed as the highest pop server in the game. This leads to all the objectives being taken and being unable to progress, so people log off or go run mindless scenarios.

Another problem is practice of keep trading that has been developing as of late. In a recent patch, Mythic decided to make all keep lords to drop 3 gold bags 100% of the time when defeated. Unfortunately, players will always take the path of least resistance when trying to get stronger. It has become a common practice to see an Order Army and a Destruction Army deliberately avoiding each other and attacking undefended keeps for the easy gold bags. If you are out for loot, why would you attacked a defended keep when you can attack an undefended one a lot easier and get the same reward? On the flip side, why defend a keep if there no tangible reward for doing so? It is actually better to let them take the keep so you can take it back later and get 3 more gold bags. Even if I did want to defend, the keeps are taken so fast that the battle would most likely be over by the time I arrive. This entire system needs to be looked at quickly.

3) Contribution System

In case you haven’t been reading various Warhammer related forums, someone seems to have come up with a theory about how contribution is calculated that I have been unable to disprove after testing with my guild extensively. The theory states in short, that whenever you zone into an area, you are given a randomly generated contribution number before you do anything. This randomly generated value will stay with you until you zone or relog. I can enter a zone and be given a value of 900 while my friend gets a value of 100. We can attack a keep together and if I do nothing while he does all the work, I will still beat him in contribution when the keep lord dies. If we move the second keep we see the same exact thing happen, but only if he relogs or zones will his contribution rating change.

After collecting data from my guild, I can conclude that this theory not only seems viable, but likely. Knowing this, it makes it hard for me to want to try and help anyone during a keep fight since my contribution rating has been predetermined no matter what my actions are. I wouldn’t expect Mythic to comment on this because if they admitted that this was how the system works, the outrage would be massive. Now as much as it pisses me off to think this is true, the blow is softened by the fact that the itemization is so bad that the rewards are often times worse then most of the green items I have of lesser level.

The Billing Cycle

Warhammer’s issues are starting to catch up.   A week ago we crossed over into a new billing cycle for those of us who started at release. As I mentioned earlier, even on Skull Throne I am noticing some of the guilds disappearing, I looked up some of the biggest instigators of RvR on the opposing side, and a lot of them have large portions of their roster who hasn’t been on since the new billing cycle started. While I am sure some can be attributed to the Lich King, I can’t blame those who have decided to sit this out until the big patch.

If nothing changes during this cycle, this game is going to sustain serious damage to its subscriber base. Even if the diehards decide to ride it out, the premise of the game requires a lot of people to be playing and participating in RvR. The incentive to do so is not there with the 3 problems above. Mythic needs to prioritize issues that will drive people to quit. That new sound for the horn when I get on my mount is nice, but 4 of the classes are severely underpowered, the items are junk, the RvR system is flawed, and 2 new classes are not going to steer this away from the edge of the cliff.

Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com

Blizzard has released its one day sales total for Wrath of the Lich King, which total 2.8 million copies sold in its first 24 hrs making it the fastest selling PC game of all time.  This destroys the previous record also set by Blizzard of 2.4 million when the expansion The Burning Crusade was released in January 2007.  This of course it is no surprise to anyone as World of Warcraft has been hovering around the 11 million subscribers mark and it seems that a good quarter of users are addicted enough to go rush out and pick up the highly anticipated expansion on day one.  Which further proves that 25% of World of Warcraft players have no life j/k

Since were talking about World of Warcraft anyway, check out there new TV ad with Ozzy Ozborn.  Not as funny as the Mr. T ad, but still pretty good.

We’ll I’ve been playing my Dwarf Iron Breaker (tank) for about 2 months now and have reached level 28, I don’t game everyday so don’t kill me that I’m not lev 40 yet.  From early on I found my character very well balance but as I’ve been playing more and more I feel my tank is getting the short end of the stick, mainly in RvR and PQs.

The main problem is that tanks have low DPS, because of this when doing a public quests or a Keep siege, I always finish in the bottom of the list when it comes to participation.  My tank is meant to take massive damage, which it does, but when the roll comes for loot bags, I almost never get one, which is complete bs.  Healers get participation points for the amount of points they heal, but tanks don’t get any for the amount of damage they take.

In the upcoming 1.05 patch, there are 2 significant changes for Ironbreakers which will make us even weaker.  We have a Grudge meter where every time we get hit it builds and the higher it builds the more effective our attacks or buffs become.  So optimumly we’d want this to be 100% at all times.   Currently Grudge builds 5 points every time we’re hit, then after 30 seconds of not being hit decays at 5 per second.  The change in 1.05 is huge, instead of 30 seconds it will be 10 seconds and instead of 5/sec, it will decay at 10/sec.  This basically means if we stop to loot or need some time to heal, were going to start at zero for just about every fight.  The only time my Iron Breaker does any sort of decent damage is when I’m at 100 Grudge, so this will not only make my character much weaker, but it will also mean I’m going to be getting even less participation points in keep sieges and PQs.  How are tanks supposed to win loot if we can’t get any points in participation because our attacks are so weak?

Binding Grudge & Heavy Blow are the two attacks I use the most with my Iron Breaker, mainly because they do the best damage.  However damage depends how much Grudge you have built up and both are length of time attacks.  For instance Binding Grudge at 100 Grudge might do 700 dmg over 15 seconds. The problem here is when doing PQs or Keep Seiges, most enemies don’t last 15 seconds unless it’s a champ or hero.  So while people that do high DPS get a ton of participation points, I don’t because the enemy dies in 5 seconds so the damage dealt was only 230 and I get much less points.

The second big change is with our Oath Friend.  As a Iron Breaker you can select one ally and deem them your Oath Friend which will grant them and yourself bonus buffs.  One of the big pluses is that every time your Oath Friend gets hit, you gain 10 Grudge points, making this is a great way to build and maintain your Grudge points.  Not so in 1.05.  Not only is this reduced from 10 points to 5, but it’s further reduced the more Grudge you have built up.

0 – 30 Grudge you gain 5 points
31 – 60 Grudge you gain 3 points
60 – 100 Grudge you gain 1 points

So not only are we going to lose our points much much faster, it will be harder to build it up.  In essence their turning us into tanks with BB guns.  I would have no problem with these changes if they also made changes to participation points.  It’s going to be much harder for Iron Breakers to win loot once these changes hit the public servers.

If you ever talk to a non MMORPG gamer, you’ll most undoubtedly hear them call MMOs a timesink, a skillless game where it doesn’t really matter how good you are as how much time you spend playing it.  Hell, you’ll hear some MMO players make this arguement from time to time.  But does this arguement hold any water?

First thing everyone needs to agree on it that no matter what game you’re playing, the more time you spend on it the better you’ll get.  This is true for every genre of gaming, even adventure games where you’re only really solving puzzles.  The more puzzles you do the better you’ll be at solving them.  Sort like the grandma that can rip up a 1001 jigsaw puzzle in 30 mins.

Now that we agree on that premiss we can move on to the argument that in the great majority of MMOs you’re simply clicking a button and watching your character fight.  Yes, clicking a button does not take skill, but as any MMO player can tell you when you’re in a combat situation hitting those buttons at the right time and deciding between 20 different actions in a few seconds can be life or death.  Someone who is very familiar with their character and all their moves is vastly superior to a player that isn’t, even if there 100% evenly matched.  No different from a FPS, RTS or sport game.

Some argue that those that spend the most time playing will get all the best weapons and armor giving them an unfair advantage over players that cannot spend as much time playing, hence taking the skill out of the fight.  Now this is true to a certain extent.  If two players built their characters 100% the same and one player has much better gear, yes the fight does become unfair.  But this is why we play these games, to get an unfair advantage over others them pummel them with it.  If your playing football and the other team has a quaterback that’s much better than yours, are you going to sit there and whine about it.  NO, you come up with a plan to get the advantage back in your favor.  Same goes in this situation, if you’re getting your butt kicked by someone stronger than you, you come up with a different plan to beat them.  Get a friend to come help, lure them to a area where friendly NPCs jump in to help, have more health potions in your inventory.  If you want to play a fair game, maybe you shouldn’t be playing a MMORPG.

I won’t argue that their are elements in MMORPGs that do not take any skill.  Having to travel across the map to deliver a basket of bread takes zero skill.  Having to kill 10 bears that are around a camp takes zero skill.  However this is not why we play these games.  Being a PvP gamer I can say I play for the trill of killing the other player.  I’m a big FPS gamer as well and I get the same type of feeling when I take someone out in a MMORPG as I do playing TF2 or CS.

But what about PvE?  For me it depending on the game, if the vast majority of quests are boring and take no skill to complete, I won’t play the game or quit.  However some of my best moments in MMOs have been doing PvE quests or raids.  When you’re working together with a group of people doing a very challenging quest, the feeling of completing it is like taking your last final for the semester in college and knowing you aced it.  Just a great feeling.

For me the perfect MMORPG would be one that cut out all the fat and keeps everything that makes these games exciting.  A good PvP system with good, challenging quests and raids, no quest grinding.  However it seems that I’m in the minority with my opinion as PvE is what seems to be driving MMO’s these days.  Perhaps the social aspect of has outweighted the skill aspect of MMOs and we should be argueing that instead.

It’s been a while since a major online game has been completely packed up and taken away from the public. Auto Assault? It wasn’t really a major game, it was one of NCSoft’s many “side” games. The Sims Online? I’ll bet very few other than me knew the game even existed. Whether you experienced Hellgate: London for yourself or not, though, you knew it was out there. You weren’t sure exactly what kind of game it was, and that’s quite possibly largely in part to the fact that it couldn’t decide on a specific genre. I’m writing about it now, since the general opinion was that this game was an “MMOG” at the very least. Hellgate: London won’t leave any innovative gameplay features in its legacy, but it’ll serve as yet another example of how to not make an online game.

I. Release Date – Ooh, scary!

Hellgate: London was released just in time for Halloween last year.  No, the game wasn’t ready, but it was Halloween! It fit the “gloomy feel” of the game, and so it had to be released on that date. I did buy this game as soon as it was released, and so I’ll note some of its most redeeming features at the time of release(remember, it was Halloween, so it had to be scary!):

•  An awful patching process that didn’t really patch anything. When it launched, the patching process was absolute shit. I remember disconnecting a couple of times, and the patch would start over from 0%. Come on! This wouldn’t have been so bad if the client itself didn’t crash for no damn reason at all. Side note: I did try to play the game again recently. When I went to patch it, it asked me to manually download a multiplayer patch. I didn’t see a reason to, but did it anyway. I eventually gave up once I realized the game couldn’t decide on whether it wanted to be patched or not.
• An amazing introduction cinematic. Once you got to play the game, in-between crashes, you realized where they spent most of their budget. It wasn’t on developing the actual game, it was on creating that cinematic. Everything about that cinematic was great, but I sort of wished there had been more things in the game itself than an intro.
• A lot of crashes to the desktop for no reason whatsoever. Sometimes the patching process would halt randomly if you tabbed out, or failed to please the game client in some other way.
• OFFICIAL FORUMS!

I realize most of the times the deadline isn’t set by the development companies, but by the publisher, or the person putting all their money into the project. Either way, publishers and developers alike need to realize that if something isn’t ready, it’s sometimes better to spend a little bit more on it to ensure that the game has a healthy lifespan, than to release it two weeks early so that it will be shut down a year later.

II. You worked on Diablo, we get it.

The game itself wasn’t as hyped as the people that were working on it. The first thing I ever learned about the game a couple of years back was not that it had guns, or that it took place in a post-apocalyptic world. The first thing I even saw on their website was “We made/worked on Diablo. You should buy our game.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. Still, if the best thing you can come up with to hype your game is “we made a great game in the past” you’re not showing a lot of promise for the game you’re currently trying to hype.

Hellgate: London had the following things in common with Diablo:

• Zombies
• Items
• Wirt’s Leg. Real original, guys.

Other than that, they were two completely different beasts, and should’ve been treated as such. This is another thing game companies need to stop doing. I’ll even say this got Mythic into some trouble when hyping WAR, since a lot of players ended up thinking it would be DAoC2. I, as a gamer, don’t really care about your game development resume. Even the often-hated-for-no-reason SOE has released really good games, despite their bloodied past. Likewise, if you made a really good game in the past, you could end up making a terrible game now.

Just stop. Work on your game, hype its features, do what you want. Just make sure you’re always focusing on your current job, not on your past. Imagine you have a child, and it grows up to be a success. If you then have another child, would you ignore or skip certain parenting aspects just because you made “a really good one” before?

III. We have guns, swords, and everything you didn’t ask for.

Hellgate: London stuck to its vision from the beginning. They didn’t want you to be able to “respec” your mastery trees in the game, just like you couldn’t do it in Diablo. I, for one, was behind this one hundred percent. The problem in this particular case, was that you didn’t need any damn points in anything. You could go the whole game without spending a single point into anything. This was especially true for Hunter classes. Your survival depended on how well you could aim in FPS mode and how powerful your gun was. That was it. You had points to spend on things, but they weren’t any useful in helping you shoot things down better or faster. It’s cool that you wanted us to think carefully about what to specialize in, but when nothing was useful, it didn’t matter if you offered the option to “respec” or not.

This game had everything: rocket launchers, sniper rifles, automatic weapons, and…swords?! I didn’t get this bit. It makes sense in steampunk-type games: not every soldier wants to spend an eternity reloading a rifle manually after each shot, and as such some will favour melee weapons. In this setting, it didn’t make much sense, though. You had automatic weapons. There’s absolutely no incentive or benefit to using a sword, or a shield against zombies when you could be gunning down or blowing up the masses with little effort. I guess templars felt the need to be “stylish” and using rocket launchers was beneath them. The game doesn’t give you the impression that a catastrophe has occurred and everyone is doing their best to survive when you have assholes running around hunting zombies with a longsword for sport.

Another thing a lot of people were pissed off about was the lack of a LAN option for the game. I’m sure they’re even more pissed off now that the servers are shutting down and they’re going to be stuck with a single-player game they can’t return to the store. It seems Flagship wasn’t really interested in letting players play their games with friends unless it was on their server. They had reasons for this, and they were posted all over the official forums for time to time, but damn if I remember them. I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast.

IV. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

Rumors are going around that the game will live on. People still aren’t sure of the game’s fate in the US or EU, but for Asia, at least there has been an announcement that they will try to keep the game alive. You can read about it here. The servers for US, and EU, currently hosted by NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. will issue their final breath on Jan 31st, 2009 at midnight.

Though we should never celebrate people losing their jobs, or someone’s dream shattering before them, we should at least try to learn from it. Game development companies need to learn to take the right steps in hyping their product, preparing it for release, and take feedback from their communities. At the same time, publishers should realize that if something isn’t ready, it isn’t ready. Waiting a couple of months without income can net you a lot more in the long run.

Let me start off by saying, yes I know Farcry 2 is not a MMO and yes I realize I’m reviewing a FPS on a MMO blog.  However I do play games other than MMO’s and while normally I would refrain from posting about them here, I just could not resist considering how hyped up Farcry 2 was and how horrible the game acutally is.

Here’s a quick introduction to what the game is like.  Drive 5 mins to a mission point, spend 5 mins getting your mission, spend 5-10 mins driving to your mission, spend 5-15 mins completing the mission and finally spend 5-10 mins driving to the next area to get another mission.  Rinse and repeat for the rest of the game.   Think of it as GTA except driving around is not fun at all, it’s the worst part of the game and you’ll spend about 50% of your time doing it.  Then think of having to do basically the same mission over and over, with almost zero variation.  What fun!

To make things ever better, you need to buy all your own weapons, which are mostly pointless.  Here’s a great example.  I used a “silenced” pistol to shoot a guard, before anyone saw or heard me, I ran behind a mountain and made my way to the back of the base.  Without so much as a peep from me I had about 10 guards running to my exact location.  WTF Ubisoft?  Is there no AI at all?  Does buying a silienced gun even matter if the comp knows exactly where I am regardless of how stealthly I’ve been?  But what I like even better is when I’m outside a building with no windows and the guys on the inside shoot me through the wall even though they should have no clue that I’m there.  No it’s ok, I doing mind playing a game with AI from 1995.

Moving on to the game map.  This is a map you’ll use a lot and the best part is that it covers about 45-55% of the screen depending if you’re driving (45%) or walking(55%). No mini map at all unless you’re driving. However the minimap in cars is pretty much useless as it only shows about 200 yards around you, so you’ll have the main map open anyway and have about 1/3 the road blocked by the map.

Next up are diamonds, the currency that you’ll need to use to buy shit.  You can either get diamonds by completing missions or by finding breifcases randomly thrown about the map.  To finds a breifcase you need to use a radar that will beep green when you’re near a case.  Best part here is you only have the radar if your map is open.  WoooHooo!  Why there is no radar on the UI is beyond me.  I think developers goal here is to frustrate the gamer to a point that they take their mouse and shove it into their eye.  So as a fun mini-game you’ll be opening and closing the main map about ever 10 seconds you’re walking to see if there are any diamonds near by.

Gun shops are by far the best mission givers in the game.  There’s a handfull of these places around the map and guess what?  Every mission is EXACTLY the same which you have to do in order to open up new weapons.  Seriously it’s the same exact mission over and over again!  I did 4 or 5 of them before deciding I would just use the weapons that are currently available. I couldn’t stand doing the mission again, it was that boring.

Jeeze, this list is getting long.  Next we have the game animations.  There’s basically an animation for everything, which you HAVE to watch.  Off the top of my head there’s knocking on a door, opening a door, sitting down, standing up, getting padded down, healing yourself, fixing a vehicle, even a dying animation which is about 30-40 seconds long that cannot be skipped!  The fact that you’re constantly doing all these things and have to watch a 1-2 second animation every single time takes some getting used to.  While I love games that are realistic, please cut the crap that makes gamers bored as F@#K. I don’t mind the animations that are 1-2 secs, I can live with that.  But when I die and have to sit there for 30-40 seconds as I watch my character fall to the ground, black out, get rescued, watch as they stand back up and get ready to fight again, it makes be want to quit playing the game.   At least put in a skip button.

Finally you have everyone in the entire country trying to kill you regardless of what you’re doing.  You start the game in a taxi who magically is able to drive around without being fired upon, however as soon as you try it everyone shoots first and asks questions later.  It doesn’t matter what time of day, where you are or what you’re doing.  You could be on a cliff viewing the wildlife and randomly a jeep will pull up and open fire.  This is the most ridiculous attempt at trying to break up the boring and tediousness of driving around. Good job Ubisoft.  Also thank you for making quick saves not actual save files.  I very much enjoyed it the first time when I exited the game and came back the next day only to find out the last hr and half was not saved.  ..|..

Being a huge fan of Farcry this game was the biggest disappointment in 2008.  An absolute pile of shit, I only wish I could get my money back.  On another note I see PC Gamer gave this game a 94%.  Having been subscriber for 8 yrs going, I can only assume a huge pile of money was dropped on the table to get that score. To be very very kind, I would give the game a 60% tops.

Rant: Guards!

What is it about MMO developers and their inability to implement guards in their games in a rational manner. Going all the way back to the very first MMOs, we have seen paranoid developers either use guards to try and stop their players from running amok in their games, or for merely decorative purposes.

I was playing Warhammer Online recently in one of the scenarios when I became witness to a guard from the other team going berserk killing most of my team. I think what bothers me is not so much that the guards attacked us, but the fact that the guards are level 55 champions! I mean seriously, what the fuck are there level 55 guards for?! These bad boys are handing out 30,000 damage a hit to a level 40.

The scenario “Serpent’s Passage” revolves around the idea of 2 boats crashed on the same island fighting over some salvage part to repair their ships and get off the island. That is all well and good, but if the task is that important and critical, why would you send out the level 40s to kill each other and not send the level 55 super hero guard?! Hell, I’ll take it a step further! Why don’t they send out this guy to single handedly win the entire war?! He hits for 30,000 damage a pop, which sure to be enough to bring most keep lords to their knees in a few hits, and probably decimate the enemy king.

What were they thinking? Developers are so paranoid that players might actually have some freedom or inconvenience the other team that they have to use this as a method to keep us contains from going out of bounds. It reminds me of people who play Dungeons and Dragons with a Dungeon Master who uses one of the box adventures instead of giving their players the freedom to make their own decision. Unfortunately this problem is not just limited to recent games.

As far back as Everquest 1 we have seen guards gone wild, but even worse were vendors! I remember when Everquest first came out that I would sometimes accidentally attack the baker selling rations by pressing the wrong button on the keyboard. The result was me getting obliterated for obscene amount of damage. This also made me wonder why this lady is selling bread and not out hunting dragons, and what she is doing with that loaf to cause so much damage.

Final Fantasy 11 took a different approach to guards as a PvE game. Their guards looked bad ass usually sporting some amazing looking armor. You would think if there was ever guard that should be doing massive damage it would be them. Unfortunately we will never know because they are merely decorative. I will never forget my first night in FFXI where a bunny rabbit crit me and chewed my face off while the nearby guard stood motionless as I clung to him for dear life. It’s a good thing the police in real life didn’t train at the Vana’diel police academy!

World of Warcraft took yet a different approach. Their guards did not do massive damage and were very much killable. The bad news is that there seemed to be more guards in the town then people whenever one is attacked. My guild used to attack Red Ridge when the game first came out, and more guards ran out of that place then there were people living there. They just magically seemed to appear out what must have been a mysterious portal that connected to the biggest barracks of all time.

Age of Conan gave us Funcom’s take on the idea. The guards were not super high level and they did not hit terribly hard. The bad news is that you could not hit them back! We used to murder people in the Noble District on the FFA server, at which time the guards would usually chase us. I found it ironic that my character had the will to murder innocent players in the street, but did not have the will to defend himself from the town guard. Players were often left to finding ways hide from the guards, but sometimes this would result in Funcom handing out a suspension. Clearly the Funcom CSRs thought it as more important to prosecute people hiding from guards instead of those exploiting the raid content in the game, nice work there!

Can we please stop having developers try to box us in with guards? Let us have our freedom, these are RPGs after all. God forbid the players should do something the developers never thought imagined we would. God forbid another player might be inconvenienced by another on a free for all server. Look, there is nothing wrong with having guards in your game. I wouldn’t expect to be able to kill someone in real life without them coming, but be sensible about it. If you are a pure PvE game, then at least have the guards lend a hand if I am coughing up blood on them. If you are making a PvP game, the guards should be killable and in limited supply.  The use of guards in most MMO’s so far has hurt immersion and has served as a virtual bitch slap by the devs to keep their players inside the box.

Paragus

Co-Leader of Inquisition

www.inqguild.com

Happy Halloween, everybody! Yes, yes, I realize it’s a couple of days late, but better late than never, right? On that note, I wanted to take this opportunity to properly introduce myself. My name is Malcom, and I’m one of the newest writers here at MMOCrunch.com. If you’ve read some of my previous posts here, you’ll know that I mostly write about the world of Warhammer: Online, as well as some free-to-play MMORPGs that I happen to come by every now and then. Other than that, there’s very little about me to share, and since you’re here to read about MMORPGs, let’s move on! Today, I will be describing my experience with the Witching Night event added to the world of Warhammer: Online on October 29th to honor the real-life celebrations of Halloween. Not only are we going to look into the event itself, and the obtainable rewards, but Mythic’s ulterior motive behind this event. Was Witching Night Mythic’s way of pushing people to the open RvR areas? Was it the miraculous kick-start that we’ve all been hoping RvR would get, or simply yet another item-driven and soon forgotten event?

I. Content Additions

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking “oh god, here comes another holiday event,” but much to my surprise Mythic didn’t simply add two or three items, a quest in Altdorf/Inevitable City and called it a day. Witching Night included one important addition: the Live Events tab to the Tome of Knowledge. We could spend a lot of time speculating what it will be used for in the very distant future, but it does show promise. Mythic has already announced that they will have more live events during the Heavy Metal content update set to take place starting November 17th. The potential for this tool shouldn’t be underestimated in the right hands. For instance, if you were to have a team of people working on live events constantly, you could add a lot of flavour to the game. You could have daily, or weekly events to try to get people away from the daily scenario grind.

II. Influence and PvE

The main event included goals and rewards for both PvE and PvP. When accessing your Live Events tab on your Tome of Knowledge, you would see an influence bar and a “quest” showing your progress on the PvE aspect of the event. In order to complete the PvE side of the live event, you needed to kill: 50 Restless Spirits, 25 Withered Crones, and 10(?) Witching Lords. You would also get basic, advanced, and elite influence rewards as you would obtain from any regular PQ. To obtain influence during the event, you either had to kill the monsters listed on the live events tab, or players. Players seemed to give a minimal amount of influence, and from my experience they were not the best way to go about obtaining it. If anyone had a different experience, I’d love to hear how it worked for you. I would’ve preferred obtaining full influence by killing players than grinding mobs.

The PvE rewards included:

• Mask 4/4 – Obtained as the elite influence reward.
• Mask 3/4 – Obtained as drops from Restless Spirits, and Withered Crones.
• Gift of Dark Tidings – 4 cloaks in total you could choose from, one for each archetype. Each one had different bonuses: one for melee, one for ranged, one for healing, and one for offensive casting.
• Witching Potion – Obtained as the basic influence reward. This gives you an aura for 10 minutes and has a 60 minute cooldown. I don’t know if this was intended or not, but my charges kept resetting at random intervals allowing me to always be at 5/5. You could also obtain a title from using this potion.
• Witch King* Title – Obtained by killing all the required mobs on the Live Events tab.

*To obtain the Witch King title, you actually had to do some or keep track of the RvR PQ. The Witching Lords you needed to complete the “quest” appeared only after one side killed 100 players of the opposing faction. I don’t know if I was the only one this happened to, but whenever I killed a Witching Lord, it gave me credit for five. Not sure exactly how that was intended to work, or if Mythic originally intended for players to only have to kill two and the live events tab displayed ten.

As far as the PvE event, it wasn’t anything spectacular. You had to grind mobs to get items. The rewards weren’t really “rare” or difficult to obtain. It took me an hour and a half of grinding restless spirits to get full influence, and the result shown to the right. Man, I wish I was good enough to edit or manipulate pictures. That’s actually how many masks I ended up with in my quest to full influence. Anyone who did the same can tell you it’s a pretty accurate depiction of the drop rate for the gobbo masks. Now, I’m not going to complain; I plan to make a killing once the initial appeal of this holiday has passed and most everyone has sold their masks on the auction house. Still, it made me feel weird equipping this mask when I knew that everyone else on the planet was also wearing it. The mask model was actually my favourite out of the four, so you can imagine how disappointed I was when I realized how easy they were to obtain.

III. Get thee to the RvR area!

The RvR PQ was actually fun, and it looked like it could’ve been even more fun if it had been planned a little bit better. I’m on a medium population server, and the amount of people that showed up to the RvR areas for the event was absolutely staggering. I had to tinker with my settings for a few minutes to make sure that I wouldn’t miss a second of the plentiful action. It reminded me of why I wanted to play Warhammer: Online in the first place; this bloodshed is what I signed up for.

I sharpened my waraxe, polished my armour, and set myself on the path to combat. Leaving behind the makeshift defenses of the Troll Country warcamp, I steeled my nerve and prepared myself for battle. The land itself had been scarred by tools of war, and the marching of hundreds of heavily-armored soldiers. Bodies lay scattered across the war-torn field where each faction had planted their own seeds of enmity, in preparation for their harvest of death. In the distance, the fighting screams of elf and greenskin alike could be heard, many silenced half-way by arrow or blade. Ready for the coming bloodbath, I rushed to aid my fellow soldiers in battle. Arriving closer to the battle cries, I could now see the fight more clearly, and that’s when I witnessed the most horrifying event of my life.

Now that you get the basic idea, let me tell you what I witnessed without role-playing. What I saw in the coming minutes were the forces of Destruction sitting safely at the border to (in this case) Ostland/Troll Country shooting arrows or spells at our dim-witted melee classes who could not understand that we needed them to back up so we could get credit for the kills. Here’s the deal: The event consisted of both factions fighting to see which one could obtain 100 kills first, so that a Witching Lord could spawn. That sounds easy, right? There were, after all, at least one hundred people constantly respawning and showing up to the RvR area on my server. The problem was that most of the kills we got were outside of the designated PQ area. As such, about three quarters of the kills we got didn’t count towards our overall progress. This meant that we had to spend close to four hours completing stage I, constantly telling people to back up, so that one person could walk away with a gold bag, and the rest of us with suicidal thoughts. I’ll be honest, though. I didn’t really much care for the PQ itself. In my mind, I was happy that there were that many people in the open RvR areas, and that I was getting so much experience and enjoyment from doing open RvR. Early one morning, I was able to get 4140 experience for killing a single chosen solo. It made my day. Okay, that wasn’t in the RvR area, and it was a 1 on 1…but, still!

The rewards for the PvP side of the event were the following:

• Mask 2/4 – Obtained as random drops from players.
• Mask 1/4 – Obtained as a reward from a gold bag after the PQ ended.
• A large amount of satisfaction.

I had a lot of fun. Whether we were completing the PQ objective or not, it encouraged people to actually get to the RvR areas, and that was enough for me. If the PQ wasn’t happening, people would still show up, and we would take the area’s objectives, or a keep. I loved every minute of it.

IV. Conclusion – Success or flop?

Having witnessed the event first-hand, and spent many hours participating in both aspects(PvE and PvP) of the event, it made me wonder: Did Mythic really give a damn about Halloween, or were they just using that as an excuse to add a couple of items to convince people to get out to the RvR areas? If the event’s ultimate goal was to get people to do open RvR, then it’s safe to consider it a success. Who cares if you got a gold bag from the ORvR PQ or not? As mentioned previously, even when the PQ wasn’t happening, people would still show up, and we would then take objectives and keeps. It made organizing warbands a lot easier, since you knew where to find the people you needed. Normally, if you want to take a keep, you have to spend a staggering amount of time organizing a warband, and trying to find people in the right areas. With the event, you knew where people were, all the time. Even if you didn’t want to do the PQ, you could go poach people there, and off to another area you go!

If you are to judge the event’s organization, the way the PQ was laid out, and the originality and effort put forth to create a holiday event, then I would call it a flop. The ORvR PQ was poorly laid out, with people usually sitting away from the designated area shooting arrows or spells, or one faction chasing another one away from the area and refusing to back down resulting in hours and hours of lack of progress.

What did you guys think? Was the event entertaining or not? Are you looking at it from the PQ-completing perspective, or simply for the fun factor? I, for one, am looking forward to the Heavy Metal content update, and the events that it will bring.