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Two blog posts in as many days… I better check my temperature after I finish this
In my haste yesterday to write about the upcoming keep upgrade system I missed what is probably the best idea GOA have had yet… The Wildcard System
In a nutshell for us EU players (how weird is that for me to be able to write about something thats for us EU players) they have granted 3 wild cards to every account, these wild cards are the remedy to that age old mmo situation when you log into your forums and see the post entitled “Guys, I did something really stupid” they act as an instant remedy to a variety of calamities, like errors in transfering your character to another server… a guild master moving an entire guild to the wrong server, buying things you shouldnt have, or selecting influnce rewards that you didnt mean to, play one of your wild cards and GoA will fix it, no questions asked.
I think this policy is brilliant, although it could be expanded to cover a few more areas, such as mistakingly deleting things, like items or heaven forbid characters, Nice Job GOA!!!
The latest bit of news to hit the Mythic website is the upcoming keep upgrade system where by guilds will be able to make any keep they claim tougher for the opposition to take back.
Having read the article this seems like it is going to be a nice little system, for the price of increasing the upkeep costs of the keep a guild can make their doors tougher, increase the numbers of guards, hire static NPC merchants that their guild can use (including banking services) and later down the line a utility so the guild can bind themselves in the keep.
Now me being me, I started thinking of things that could be implemented that are not as yet trying to connive a means by which to add functionality that would make people go “Woah nelly, thats some nifty keano stuff”, okay I admit it, chances of someone actually saying that are slim but you get the drift. Well saying that I do actually know someone who uses the phrase Nifty Keano on a regular basis but we wont go into her vocabulary here. these idea are thus:
- Defend when you log out - have a utility set so you can pay for slots in the keep which would allow for your guild members to log out in the keep and when they do an NPC version of them would spawn and proceed to defend the keep, following an AI protocol based upon their class. For example a ranged DPS would stand on the front battlements and nuke away untill the door was broken, then he would move to the inner balcony and nuke on those attacking the lord, or a healer would simply heal nearby injured guards.
- An Armoury - have a new class of drop introduced to the game, armoury weapons/armour, a series of weapons and armour which in effect are useless to players, however when placed inside the guild armoury increase the power and effectiveness of guards in your keep, obviously these would have a limited individual lifespan and the armoury would have to be restocked. Taking this further you could have it so additional battle objectives are strewn across the lands in the form of workshops which when held periodically add items to your armoury.
- Unique racial defences - have each keep have a defence method which is unique to the racial element of the land it is in, I admit I have this in mind from the original cinimatic trailer, would be more than just a little cool if on top of greenskin keeps there was a catapult that a player could hpe on, aim up and fire himself at attackers, this would in effect be a self sacrifice however if it also supplied a nice little AoE on attackers it could rock. A nice thing here is that conquering nations could still use these, so a guild takes this keep and we could have elves hurling themselves at the same greenskins who built it.
Well there is my food for thought on how to take what looks like a really nice addition to the game and make it completely kick arse, if you have any ideas yourself please, please, pretty please let me know in our forums (the handy little link below regarding comments should take you there)
And by Gyrocopter I mean my ability to play at the moment.
The credit crunch resulted in me losing the temp gig I had and no new ones came along, so went into the mode of using up my meager savings for a while and with christmas this is now tapped so tighten the belt straps time. Basically it came down to being a case of I could afford the £10 a month for WAR or the £10 per month share I pay for my households ADSL, well truth be told I can’t really afford either of them but I will scrape enough for one.
As you can see without internet access having a WAR account on the go is a little pointless, so the WAR account is on hiatus untill my situation improves, now I reckon a fair number of you are sitting there thinking “what the hell has this got to do with me?” and it is a fair question. An truth be told it means good things. As I am not playing anything now I have more time to spend scouring the web for content for Warhammer Geek ! ! !
And it starts now, the following are the bits and peices I found interesting in the world of Warhammer fan sites today
- Warhammer Online Wins Big in 2008 - It is really quite incredible just how many awards WAR has gotten from around the web this year, just go and take a look at their Awards Page theres 15 awards for 2008, granted I consider a couple of them to be a little prestigious than some of the others but theres some impressive awards there.
- Content Removed - I was going to highlight one of the coolest projects in my mind out there in the fansite ‘verse untill I noticed just how many HUGE gold selling adverts were on the site. So I deleted the paragraph I just wrote on it and put this instead.
- Old News is still News - I know this bit is a little old but you’ll have to forgive me for covering it. Book of Grudges unveilling the closing of their active blogging was a sad day for me, not only was one of my top visit almost every day blogs, but the guys behind it Arbitrary & Spinks (and their sidekick Badjawa) are all great people who I was fortunate enough to play with over here in the EU.
- Waaagh! - Syp made a cool blog extolling the virtues of returning to WAR, it makes very valid points to the point that if you quit WAR and are still reading this, he probably has a point to convince you to return.
Well this post is being cut short due to an unexpected phone call promising an intrigueing meeting, vague? well yes, gotta keep you guessing *grin*
I will endeavour to have more for you in the near future
I have something new to gripe about today, and this may well (actually more than likely will) descend into a rant, but no fear, I have solutions in hand.
My gripe today is on the topic of those pesky little players, and in my experience on the side of order it is those anti-social Bright Wizards, who in a scenario leave the groups they have been assigned and go it solo. Now I understand why they do it, when your in a group you share your XP and renown with the others in your group, and they in turn share theirs with you. Now this is a Team game, where your along side your fellow players against an enemy.
BE A TEAM PLAYER ! ! !
These players are in effect through their actions telling the rest of us that they do not need us, we are beneath their awesomeness and they can do it on their own… But wait this cannot be right, as these are more often than not the same players who are constantly screaming in scenario chat “HEAL ME”. Well tough, want to be on your own? Be on your own.
Now I think there is a simple fix to this problem that mythic can do that will solve this anti-social, better than thou playstyle, on one hand allow the option and just take the nerfbat and beat the hell out of any xp and or renown they get if they go on their own, just run a script which checks how many in your group, if theres enough players for you to have more in that group and if not, half or quater their renown/xp gain.
Or on the other hand theres the less controversial, at least in my eyes, route. Simply have a similar script which runs every 15-30 secods and moves people around the groups to ensure they are full at all times. This would solve the issue and it would just be a part of the scnario and not a nerf of any fashion.
In the mean time I have a method to self police the situation, If you see a player join a seperate group on their own, simply join him, keep doing so if he moves untill he either leaves the scenario parties completely (and thus will not show on any healing addon) or joins a proper group. Rise up and fight this scummy behaviour, people do it because we let them!
/rant off
As you probably know by now, my main is a Witch Hunter on the Burlok server in the EU. I have become a bit of a scenario fiend of late, mostly Tor Anroc as it pops the most. In general as I am guessing on quite a few servers, unless you have a guild heavy make up, Destruction seems to win most of them.
Now why is that? Could it be the balance of chosen classes, how Destruction has a hell of a lot of tanks compared to Order’s few? Could it be that the Destruction classes are unbalanced compared to their order counterparts getting an unfair advantage? Could it be that the scenarios layout is designed in such a way that gives the Destruction hordes an advantage? Are Destruction just plain better full stop?
I have heard all those reasons given in the various channels I frequent, however I do not agree with any of them, the reason as I can see it is very simple and can be summed up by a single word…
Are you ready for it?
Aggression
Simple as that, how many times have you been in a scenario and seen at least half the destruction players running in a mob straight at you? If your like me the answer would be most the time.
Now how many times do you see Order doing the same thing? Well from where I sit I see Order standing there very non-commital hoping to get a shot in here or there, Hate to break it to you guys but we are not playing “Kiss Chase”Hammer: Age of Bumbling, no this is WAR!
Get stuck in, thats all it takes, if your side commits in full force and gets stuck in, you may not win every time, but you wont lose everytime either and beleive me you will have a lot more fun.
As I said to a scenario party the other day; You have 3 Choices - 1) Death, 2) Glory or 3) Stand around like a Lemon and let Destruction win the match.
The Choice is yours.
Orlock
I don’t think there is a person out there that reads the various WAR sites that to put it nicely, GOA dropped the ball with their handling of the EU open Beta. I wasn’t even going to blog on this untill I log on this afternoon and see the following on the WAR-Europe homepage.
Since we launched our new validation system yesterday, players have been flooding onto the beta servers. We’ve been working on the systems constantly and at the moment more than 70,000 fans are able to play. Some of you however have tried to validate your codes and have received a message saying that they were invalid. If this is the case, please take note of the following points:
The letter ‘I’ can sometimes look like the number ‘1′
Likewise on some printed sheets, the letters ‘D’ and ‘O’ may be hard to tell apart
A zero will be printed as an ‘O’ with a line through it.
Please ensure that you are only trying to validate an open beta code, headstart or bonus item codes are not valid at this time, the system will now reject these codes immediately to make it easier for you and to prevent the wrong codes from being submitted.Previously when you validated your code, there was a delay between the confirmation email and you being able to access the servers, our technicians have worked to remove this delay and now you will be able to patch and play as soon as your confirmation email is received. The last remaining 10,000 players who were waiting for access can now join the action on the servers
What’s wrong with this you may say, 3 days and GOA are getting the ball rolling, little late but better late than never right?
My issue is this, I am one man, and by the law of averages my experiences are going to be echoed by the experiences of a fair number of other EU players out there and Guess What?
I havent gotten my Open Beta Access yet!
Now the way I look at things there is one of two things going on here, either I am incredibly unlucky and my activation, which I filled the form out within an hour of it going live with the alternate activation, being lost in the shuffle. Or GOA are sugar coating exactly how quickly they have gotten their hands on the ball.
As I said I am a bit of a numbers person, and by the numbers the sugar coating of the truth seems a far more likely scenario than the chance that I am one of very few people that have fallen through the cracks.
Sure this could just be frustration talking, and yeah when Mark Jacobs made his blog post about how people are reacting he had a valid stand point as to “it is only a Game” however take into consideration what Paul Barnett said way back at E3 2006:
What we are making is a total hobby experience, we want you to buy this game and never buy another one,We want you to spend all your time playing it…
…Imagination is, I’ve played the game and then I want to talk about it, go on to websites, draw pictures about it, have T-Shirts, I want to think about what I am going to do when I play next week. I talk to my friends all about it.
If you get skill, commitment and imagination you get a hobby ecperience and a hobby experience and a hobby experience should grab you to the core of your being and be the only thing you want to do and that’s the game we are making.
Now we all know the Dev’s at Mythic are doing a fantastic job and if they have created half the product that Paul enthuses in that presentation, is it really any wonder that there are fans out there that have spent the past year counting down the time till they can FINALLY get their hands on a working (if not released) copy of the game for themselves? And then get hit with a series of episodes which so far has taken 3 days out of the 11 day beta period away from them. Personally I can see why there is are a lot of proverbial sniper scopes aimed at GOA right now
Well I guess I just wanted to share my hurt really
Orlock
PS. Keep tuned we have plans for the next Podcast of Reckoning in the works… oh and another Parody
I was reading the interview with Josh Drescher over at gameindustry.biz and Josh made a few comments relating to the success of WoW and quoted the magic “10 million Subscriber” number a few times, most of this to me made a lot of sense. What got me thinking was one line of it and that line was:
So you don’t need 10 million subscribers to be successful…that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t love 10 million subscribers.
Now my gut reaction, and I don’t know why, was NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooOOOooOOoooOOooo
Then I thought to myself, hey why do I have an issue with a game becoming THAT successful, so I sat down and had a little think on the topic.
Now the benefits for such a large subscriber base for a company are pretty darn obvious… enough green every month to buy a small island in sunny climes that you can start your own utopian society on. With this money the company is then free to do pretty much what they want as the financial security allows them to develop games that there is an unsure market for, they can also ensure they have the brightest and the best developers in the biz working for them as face it, Big Talent = Big Pay Packets.
Let me preface the rest of this article with the fact that I am speculating, I in no way am saying that any of the scenarios below will happen, I am just trying to convey the ramblings that run through my brain when I over think a situation.
I won’t go any further into the upsides but rather, again, why my gut screamed in terror at the thought of 10 million global subscribers to the Game I am preparing to devote way too much time, money and calories towards. The first answer that came to mind was this, normally when a company gets bigger you start to get an extended line of communication between the guys at the bottom who deal with the player base and the guys at the top who call all the shots. This extended route of communication leads to the fact that in a lot of companies it certainly seems that the guys calling the shots have absolutely no clue what their customer base actually want or how their company actually works. This to me seems like a bad thing as the guys making the decisions could very well make decisions which may seem logical but are without the input of those of us who actually pay their wages *grin*
Then there is a line that would run very close to this, that of where EA who untill now have pretty much let Mythic do their thing and have complete creative control. Question is if the game was to become a screaming juggernaut of player base and revenue, would the Fat Cats be able to resist sticking their thumb in and trying to use the product in some nefarious scheme to increase the market share of other titles “WARSims” anyone?
Ok so maybe I am being a little cynical about the way things work within the company, but here’s a thought thats a little less cynical… Manpower… as the success of the game increase so too will the need for aditional manpower in all sectors of the company, from development to accounting to customer support, the whole kit and kaboodle.
My question is this, as it grows how can you ensure that every last person that is employed has the same drive, determination and love for the title that the current staff has? You start getting people in the boat that aren’t “in to” the game and then you will start to lose that magical glow that comes on things when they are hand made by the blood sweat and tears of the truely devoted.
What about when the customer support department becomes so overworked and someone thinks… “oooh dear look at how much we are paying for support, I know LETS OUTSOURCE!!!” and as a result we get customer support that may well be able to speak understand and communicate English, just not in the same manner as the rest of us and as a result general feelings of dissatissfaction arise.
Ok heres something that I think has tanked many a MMO and with a HUGE MMO I can see this being more of an issue. The vocal minority screaming for change that when implemented reduces the enjoyment for the silent majority.
With a smaller title I can see it being a lot easier for people to go “well it’s only a handfull of people saying it” but what about when instead of a handfull it’s “HOLY MACKERAL ONE MILLION complaints about this” thats still only 10% of the player base and yet I could see it being hard to resit bowing to that kind of pressure.
Anyway head over to the forums and let me know what you think on the subject, whether being a Gaming Juggernaught with 10 million subscribers is a good or a bad thing?
Warhammer online is certainly not lacking for fans… How do I know this? well put simply the sheer number of dedicated fan sites out there which have people visiting them on a daily basis. I mean I have well over a dozen bookmarks that I visit daily and around the same again that I visit less frequently.
Now this is what spurred my brain into thinking about this edition of the Orlock Perspective, the area of community building. Not the building of the community that is the role of the folks over at EA Mythic or their oversea partners, rather the way by which the community itself is building itself up through the various fan sites and blogs and other endeavours.
Now in the past with other games and hobbies I had noticed that sites seemed to be fairly isolated affairs, they would post official news and events as well as their own, but the only real place to get info on anything happening elsewhere on the web was through the various forums that sprawl across cyberspace. Now though the situation is turning 180 degrees, it seems that the WAR community sites are very happy to be trumpeting a fan fair at any and all of the cool things that others have done.
On a side note part of the reason Svoald and myself wanted to do our very own fan site was because of this isolationism, we felt it was about time fan sites tried a different approach and thought along the lines of “lets work together to make all of us stronger”, but hey as it happened the WAR community was already there with us.
Now we haven’t managed to pull off a complete Community revolution here, there’s still a few sites out there for WAR that are keeping to themselves (some even have a fair amount of traffic). Now hear my cry people, let’s turn our community into the strongest, the smartest, the brightest, the [insert adjective]est and spread the love.
I have a vision of one giant community living happily together among any and all the various quality sites out there!
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
Welcome to the first posting in what will hopefully be a semi-regular series of musings by yours truly, Orlock Bloodthorne co-founder of Warhammer Geek.
I have recently been involved in a lengthy discussion with the great community over at Warhammer Conflict revolving around guild size, and I would like to go into detail about a specific element within that conversation.
That element being about whether or not alts should be allowed in the guild or alternatively excluded. Now the obvious answer for most guilds (the casual, family and middle of the road ones) would be yes, there is no issue with alt’s in guilds.
The issue arise when it comes to the hardcore guilds, those that live on efficiency and want to make their mark on the world by being the strongest, fastest, smartest and overall the first to achieve various goals. Now parts of this means having their guild advance at as fast a pace as possible.