Monday 9 November 2009

Warhammer has weathered the storm... But losing its creative arm?

http://bitemyreview.com/2009/11/warhammer-online-effectively-dead-in-the-water/

From the above article...

"Word of mouth has 80 people being laid off from EA Mythic today. The information started coming out on Friday, and folks officially got the axe today.

Our insiders tell us that EA corporate may be laying off up to 1000 people worldwide, and that the Mythic properties themselves are going into “maintenance mode”. Seeing as most of the folks laid off were in the creative departments at Mythic, this makes sense — you can’t be producing a new expansion or writing new content if all of your writers are gone."


I'm sure we'll find out more over the next week or two if this is not only true, but what the future holds for WAR.

Update: Seems to be confirmed now from a few different sources. Wishing all those who have lost employment the best in the future and hopefully a quick return to work, good luck folks and thank you for your time and effort put to our community.

As a side note, the numbers will be spread no doubt over WAR, Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online so to stem the inevitable "the sky is falling" posts, by all accounts WAR might not be seeing any lay offs at all.... maybe....

Broken Blockas & Cracked Choppas

My Blocka o' da Doombull and Choppa of da Chieftain are starting to look a little battle worn and run down these days. The Blocka has been in use since the middle of February and the only upgrade for it comes from Land of the Dead after killing the Colossus a gazillion times (funnily enough a PvE thing). The Chieftains choppa has an upgrade, in the Warlord PQ (good luck getting there on Karak Norn) but the better two are a Sandstorm (from land of the dead grinding) drop or from... again... the Colossus.

See the theme here?

Barring the tier 4 RvR influence rewards there's no real way to get weaponry in RvR. And those weapons are quickly replaced by PvE weapons.

The two logical choices would be to expand the influence rewards or allow weaponry to be purchased with all those tokens starting to build up in people inventories. I'm in favour of the influence system, it's guaranteed that you will get them if you work towards it rather than waiting on lucky drops.

Start a new influence bar... Basic influence you can only gain if you are renown rank 50 or above, advance influence only gains when you are RR60 and elite influence you can gain from RR70. The reason for this is to stop people being all influenced out before they can even wear conqueror to help the sense of progression. Keep a renown requirement on them so you have a dual goal, your rank and influence then let people go smush!

The same can be done for jewellery items, barring the dreadful Warlord and Sovereign pieces (seriously, who thinks +8 will power is of ANY use to a tank?) all other jewellery pieces come from PvE.

Let us gear up and progress in RvR, not stare at the same items for almost a year because there's nothing left to get other than rare PvE drops...