We’ve been hearing about it for a while, and no doubt it has some former players considering a glorious comeback. Warhammer Online’s Patch 1.3.6 dropped today around noon, and it’s selling point centers around RvR changes. Major player grievances have often stemmed from imbalanced and un-incentivized ORvR (Open Realm vs. Realm) battles, and Mythic hopes to address this with “Against All Odds”.

Against All Odds is a passive buff that is activated upon a faction that is outnumbered by more than 20%. All members of the outnumbered faction that are participating in an RvR Lake battle will receive an increase to Experience, Renown, and Influence proportional to the odds stacked against them. Needless to say, this should encourage more activity on the RvR front – the very essence of Mythic’s vision for PvP.

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The new DAoC patch has gone live, and Bioware Mythic has plenty to show you.  For starters the new UI (user interface) will allow you to upgrade your skill lines without using any mouse clicks.  A new slider bar has been added that will show you what skills are being upgraded, and how many points you will be spending.  Not only that, but styles and spells will now be immediately displayed to the player so that you can make informed decisions in order to build your character to the best of your abilities.  Stuart Zissu; the producer behind Dark Age of Camelot, goes into more detail regarding the new training UI here.

Here are some other major updates to come with the patches release:

·         Bainshee class balance

·         Increased number of displayed buffs

·         Continued dungeon itemization updates

·         Epic Armor upgrades

For more information about the new DAoC patch, click here.  For all other MMO news and info, remember to follow us at mmocrunch.com

With BioWare Mythic offering Ultima Online: Stygian Abyss at the low price of $29.99 USD (including 30 days gametime), efforts are at an all-time high to revitalize this classic game. UO’s “Call to Arms” will feature such festivities as lore-based Live Events, which are slated to bring back several memorable characters from both Ultima and Ultima Online. Players will help drive the story arc as they work together to return the town of Magincia to it’s former glory. Also, new to the UO universe is an exciting PvP Arena feature that will allow players to face-off in 1v1 combat at either of two new arenas.

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Heroes of the lands of Albion, Hibernia, and Midgard should keep their eyes peeled for merchants offering the spoils of war. In particular, the spoils of the Infernal Awakenings event that occurred last month. The Infernal Auction has been announced by Mythic as the next in a long line of planned Live Events. Resourceful salesmen can be seen in areas around each realm, peddling rare goods and soliciting each passerby.

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July has been a busy month at BioWare Mythic. Stuart Zissu (Producer, DAoC), Andy Belford (Community Coordinator, Mythic), and WAR’s very own Producer, Carrie Gouskos will be making their way across the Atlantic to attend GamesCom: Cologne. The team plans to talk about the future of WAR and DAoC at the event, as well as player suggestions and input. Carrie invites fans to keep track of the group’s activities via Twitter as they visit Germany and meet up with players. This will all take place between August 18th and August 22nd. Mythic hasn’t forgotten the States either, as they plan to make an appearance at Games Day in Baltimore. The Warhammer Online development team will be holding a Q&A session at the event, which will be held on August 21st.

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Bioware Mythic has just revealed the new payment options coming to all European Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot players.  Players are told that they will still have the option to purchase game time codes from the EA online store, as well as some new payment methods that may be preferred.  The game time codes will still be sold in 30, 90, and 180 day packages for both Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot.  European players now have the option to set up an automatic billing plan by using a valid Visa, Mastercard, Discovery or American Express card.  Mythic is currently working on a wider selection of European billing options, but in the mean time Mythic will be providing introductory pricing.  This will only stick until they have released their full line-up of billing options.  The current prices have been posted by Mythic and are all in USD with the additional “Added Value Tax”.

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BioWare Mythic has just announced that the transition for all Warhammer Online character and guild data from GOA servers in Europe to their new home servers at Mythic (US) has been completed.

The new servers are exact copies of the previous GOA servers from June 29, 2010.

European players of Warhammer Online will access their account centers now through the main Mythic Accounts website using a “_EUR” suffix, and will also be catered to by a boost in French and German foreign language customer server representatives.

Josh Drescher, a producer at Mythic Entertainment (also known as EA Mythic and BioWare Mythic) who worked on Warhammer Online, was laid off today. This has sparked rumours of it being an indication of Warhammer Online suffering difficulties, or that there is trouble in Mythic’s future. This is coming despite Josh himself remarking that “WAR isn’t dying. The game is better now than ever before and more goodness is on the way.” It may be a simple reaction to the fact that layoffs are generally a sign of economic downsizing, but there are no solid details on how many other Mythic staff were let go, if any.

The full story, such as it is, can be found on Drescher’s Twitter page.

DAOC Origins: 6 Months of Silence

A long time ago old Dark Age of Camelot fans were rejoicing when Mythic announced that they were going to be releasing their “Origins” server. Many of the game’s original fans had become disenchanted with DAOC after the release of some controversial expansion packs, and fans had been longing to relive that original DAOC experience.

On June 2nd, 2008, Mythic announced on the Camelot Herald the Origins project and revealed their plan:

“This server is designed to return DAOC to the great game experience it was in 2001/2002, while also applying wisdom from the lessons we have learned since then. DAOC is still a great game, but this server has its own appeal that we ‘old school’ players really enjoyed, and our goal is to get back to that while also continuing to support the other rulesets. Origins will not exactly replicate the game as it was is 2001; we are keeping as a part of server the ‘best features’ we have put into the game since launch, such as housing, horses, the market explorer, UI changes (to name only a few) and many of the improved systems introduced over the years.”

The announcement also goes on to lay out their timeframe for the project:

“The most common question continues to be, “Is this really going to happen?”

Origins has been in development for a couple of months now. We have been working with our Team Leads (as part of the Team Lead program) to work through the various gameplay details, ideas, and issues, while also collecting and reading your feedback. Our schedule requires around four to five months of development. This means that since the server has been in development for two months already, we still have another two to three months before it’s ready for primetime. Right now, launch is slated for the August/September timeframe.”

On July 29th, 2008, Mythic amended their stance regarding their plans for origins by releasing another announcement:

“Initially, we had an aggressive timetable we wanted to meet in order to get this into the players hands as soon as possible. Now, looking at all the feedback and re-examining our own internal goals and objectives for this server, we realize that it’s better to take a step back and take our time with Origins. What this means in practical terms is that you won’t be seeing Origins in the original Aug.-Sept. timeframe. When we are happier with the overall design and functionality, we will begin talking about a launch date. Until then, we thank everyone for participating during this phase of the Origins project.”

It has been almost 6 months, and DAOC fans are left scratching their heads wondering, “Is this really going to happen?” Mythic has yet to give their fans any official updates on the status of the project since then, and now it appears that Mythic has been hit by personnel cuts EA has made due to economic concerns. Mythic no doubt has their hands full with Warhammer Online, which has been wrestling with its own issues. Mark Jacobs made this comment on the Warhammer Alliance regarding the layoffs in regards to Warhammer support:

“It isn’t any more complicated than that other than to say that we have a very large studio and pretty much every person there has been and will continue to work on WAR for quite a while (meaning we haven’t started work on another game yet),” he continued. “When we launched, we had over 400 people working on the game in one capacity or another so it’s not like we had a small team at launch or even a small team now.”

There definitely seems to be a demand for Origins, and you would think that given that demand, Mythic would recognize the opportunity to generate some more revenue from their DAOC brand. I find it amazing that there hasn’t been much of an update on the official site in almost 6 months, and one has to wonder if the revenue opportunity is getting smaller the longer they remain silent.

Hopefully the economic turmoil and layoffs have not derailed Mythic’s original plans to give their old fans a taste of DAOC’s original glory.  Perhaps Jacobs is telling the truth about “pretty much everyone” working on Warhammer, but you owe the DAOC customers who made your company successful at least some form of an update on if and when this project will see the light of day, or if it has been canceled.

Paragus

Co-Leader of Inquisition

www.inqguild.com

Rant: Warhammer RvR Population Capped!

Mythic released an announcement on the WAR Herald today that I find stunning.  Here are some excerpts from the announcement:

“When the Fortress population reaches certain population thresholds, players who are attempting to enter the area of the besieged Fortress that are Rank 35 and below will be teleported to the warcamp for the region they are in. When the next area population threshold has been met, players that are Rank 37 and below will be teleported to the warcamp. The final population threshold applies to players that are Rank 39 and below. Once the total population cap has been met for the area surrounding the Fortress, all players that attempt to enter the area will be teleported back to the region’s warcamp.”

“Because of the strategic advantage that players will always have when defending a Fortress, the attacking forces will have a numeric advantage when attempting to wrest control of a Fortress from the opposing realm.”

“The purpose of this change is twofold: to improve server stability, and allow even more players to participate in, and benefit from, capital city sieges.”

Now I know some fans of the game and Mythic are trying to spin this into a good thing, but take a step back a moment and think about what is going on.  This game was marketed as a massive RvR game.  The servers are capable of holding thousands of players online at the same time.  Did it not occur to anyone at Mythic during the design phase of Warhammer Online that most of a servers online population of several thousand players would be in Tier 4 at any given moment?  It also seems they are prematurely stacking the population numbers in favor of the attackers.  Can someone explain how capping the population levels will allow even more players to participate?

Mythic finally seems to be admitting what the rest of us knew all along.  Their servers simply can’t handle massive amounts of people fighting in one area at the same time.  Fortress sieges have often times led to the crashing of zones and servers leaving both side throwing their hands up in frustration.  Just like the Contribution System debacle, they are sending out their PR monkeys to try and make their subscribers feel better about the fact that the game was launched fundamentally flawed.

The question going forward now is where is this going to end?  Forums are stirring with speculation over whether or not instancing will be an inevitable step to stop the servers from crashing, or if Mythic can really do something on the hardware end of this problem to make their game work as advertised.  Even if instancing does not happen, capping the population on participation in a siege will make Warhammer Online’s fortress sieges not much different than those found in Age of Conan (which is not a good thing).

The fact that they are trying to spin this by saying “to allow even more players to participate” by capping population in a given area only makes me feel better about pulling my guild out of this game.  I’ll be waiting for the flames from Warhammer fans.

Paragus

Co-Leader of Inquisition

www.inqguild.com