I enjoy Warhammer

There. I said it...

For all the time I sit there wanting to go in a sulk, or turn the game off. I come back or find something else in WAR to do. I think too many people focus on just the RvR Zerg and get sick of it, thus burning out on it.

I'd rather be in a small guild warband, roaming the streets of Praag, using Snikkit the gobbo as bait to lure groups to us before smushing them. Jumping around, finding sneaky paths (nothing cheaty) to have a bit of fun. Polishing my RvR skills (you can polish a turd.. but it's still a turd) in single combat or hunting small groups. Jumping into some premade scenarios with guild mates and running instances no matter how buggy or boring they are. Getting tokens for gear (it's a step closer). Checking out new lairs or live event stuff.

Yes, the game still needs quite a bit of work done on server stability, class balance and squishing dem bugs but I'm enjoying it still. I feel I have a choice in what to do (though I'd like a bit more...) and as the servers mature and communities strengthen the game will bond the players together more (or that's cause someone put a Sticky Squig on me thinking stone). More rivalries will come together, the nemesis system will make players stick in your mind more.

There is still a huge amount of untapped potential in WAR and I hope EA gives it the long term support it needs to really grab a chunk of the market. No, I don't think WAR will ever top 1m subs, the chance has now gone, but I do think that we can reach 500k and stick to that, but we have to stick with the game.

Sure, it's shitty having to put up with server crashes and lag, it's incredibly frustrating to play sometimes with the constant crowd control locking you out, but yet, most of us, stand up, dust ourselves off and get stuck back in.

WAR will only improve over time, it will get better and more playable if given the chance. No game is a shiny beacon of perfection, WoW's Lake Wintergrasp PvP zone is a laggy turd ball if you ever play it at peak time, it IS worse than forts with less people in it so we're moving the right direction. But I think at this stage the crucial thing is for people to not burn out and hate the game. There's no harm in taking the odd day or two off, sneak on for a few hours each week if you like. WAR has that instant fix about it. It allows you to grab a few quick scenarios and log off without waiting for a 1 hour Warsong Gulch to finish because sides are turtling.

I look forward to seeing what's coming after the Tomb Kings and what changes will be made. We still have missing cities to go, plus who knows what else... Maybe a trip to Lustria or Athel Lorn. Whatever happens, I still see WAR raging on for years to come...

World of... Fight? / Warhammer: Age of... Fight?

Over on the Asian continent a major event happened with Blizzard stopping partnership with The9, its Chinese operators of Warcraft and moving it to someone else. By the looks of it, The9 aren't going down without a fight and could be trying to launch their own version of WoW with this recently launched website apparently promoting "World of Fight", which has a very familiar looking font *cough* Warcraft *cough*...

http://www.wofchina.com/


Now this is where it gets really interesting. Take a step back, re look at the picture in the background. Does it look familiar to anyone? Might do for say.. Chosen, Marauders, Zealots and Magi... Still unsure?

Co-incidence? Well WAR already has it's Chinese operators in GigaMedia, so we know it's nothing to do with a change of operators, but the second interesting part of this story comes now. Electronic Arts (Owner of Mythic Entertainment) actually own substantial shares in The9 apparently (couldn't find the exact details but you can see on the website they also operate Fifa Online (an EA license) ).

So what does this all mean? Possibly a bait and switch coming as the place holder website leads onto Warhammer Online China.. Possibly just art theft.. Maybe The9 will be ripping the WoW code, mixing it with Warhammer and making one hell of a mess?

Could be interesting to see what happens...

And so, the winds of chaos have blown away.

So Mythic have apparently scrapped the Winds of Chaos 'fix' for laggy zones. If you haven't bothered to read up about it then don't worry. It basically came to... Too many people in zone = Random people get teleported to another zone.

Basically it was an utterly pants concept (learn from Ultima Online... They implemented the same when Trammel opened up and it wasn't popular then either, only it was called Telestorming) which deserved all the rage threads due to it being an absolutely pathetic idea to punish the players for the piss poor server performance. But hands up to Mythic and they all but admitted that yes.. It was a bad idea... And pulled it from the server that it was being tested on. Gz Mythic on listening. Negative Gz for actually thinking we'd be happy to see this implemented because of your fault.

So what could Mythic have done to prevent the lag and crash pits (we had a keep siege last week on Norn that crashed the server two or three times) that we have been suffering from. Well my immediate thought to the lag in the capital cities is "Well, aren't we really supposed to have a choice of which city we siege when the fortresses goes down?" But of course, we're still missing 2/3rds of the endgame with no sign that Mythic will implement it any time this year. Spreading the player base onto more zone servers would make sense as you could have a bunch of warbands attacking Altdorf and the others attacking the Elf city (forgotten name :( ), all these players would be on two different servers and not interfering with each other, instead we are cramming them onto one server which clearly can't take the load.

For fortresses you could have possibly split it into a couple of instances balanced over a couple of servers, but instead of it being a duplicate fort - which lets be honest, is just a glorified keep take - we could have two instances, one for building siege weapons and breaking down the walls into the keep and the other could be based on disrupting the enemy garrison/reinforcements (I'll leave the details to your imagination). In affect making them into large scenarios where the side that has the most points after an hour from the two will win the keep and the attackers can then assault the inner keep with minimal enemy defence or the defenders drive back the attackers resetting the campaign as it currently stands.

While having mass RvR is what the game is about is very clear that the game cannot handle this number of players in one zone. If you make new servers you risk spreading people about too thinly making it PvE. It's a tough balance. Worrying also when you realise just how many people will be packed into the tomb kings zone. If a fort or mass keep siege can get laggy, imagine what will be happening the first few days (weeks?) of Tomb Kings.

And here's a though to end it with.. Surely all these addons that use chat channels to communicate data must be causing a portion of it. 200 players all sending the status of a keep every 15 seconds or so must be contributing to server load, add in players DPS/HPS and anything else that gets communicated and I wonder how much of the lag is actually self inflicted...

Still 'ere... Jus' thinkin'

Just a heads up that I've been crazy busy with work this last week so brain is in a vegetable state (well more so) these nights, but I'll keep posting away, just maybe not so often over the next week or two until it settles down. Dun worry though grots... I'm still smushin'... Or getting smushes :S

Magical Mythic Minutes and the 105 Minute Fortress Siege

Not sure if this is a Karak-Norn thing or not but anyone noticed the Mythic minutes appear to affect fortresses in particularly negative way. Right now, the timer has been at 0:00 for the last 10 minutes as we hold off the siege, my collectors camp cool down is about to tick over to be reused and my liniment has just ran out. New arrivals into the fort are advising the timer is at 25 minutes or so now.

When did forts get changed to over 90 minutes sieges? Is this a Mythic minutes issue or just lousy GOA servers again?

Update:
It finally ended after 105 minutes.... thank goodness... and #1 placed \o/

Bollocks... Not again

So after finishing the blog post I decided to pop over to Reikland to see how the battle was progressing there. Upon zoning in from the flight patch I got kicked to the character select screen. Now upon trying to log in with Lokax it kicks me back to the character select screen once the Reikland load screen shows up and after the second time I try it, the client crashes completely.

Ran a file check - no luck.
Disabled addons - no luck.
Can log any other character in fine.

Time to login my choppa and send in one of those appeals again... *sighs*

Update #1 21:26 I found this while waiting on my appeal on the GOA forums, just so anyone else may discover this...

Hello everyone,

We have seen an unusual number of reports regarding players being unable to connect to their characters in-game.

If you are being sent back to the character selection screen after pressing play please contact our Customer Support Team so that they will be able to investigate and rectify the issue.

As this is a character specific issue please log into an alternative character and file a CSR Appeal, ensure it is filed as a "Stuck Issue".

You may also send this appeal via the Help-form.

Thanks guys, we are working on it!

Update #2
Well, got a response from a CSR who believed he had resolved the issue, however this wasn't the case, poor Lok was still stuck in the warp and now so was my Choppa who lodged the appeal. Logged in with my Shaman (yeah.. all my characters are greenskins and pitifully low levels) and the CSR realised straight away there was something not right and found it odd that my Choppa was visiting Gork (or Mork). Still he asked me to log for 5 minutes (about 7 minutes ago) so lets have another look!

Update #3
This is starting to look bad... Can't log into my four characters (bank alt squiggy is now locked out as is my Shaman). CSR was able to logon succesfully onto the characters. Wondering if a pc reboot and router power cycle will do the trick.... Thinking anything is worth a shot right now

Update #4
And Loky is bag in business! Major thanks to CSR Arcalstraaz who waited patiently with me and managed to find my myriad of stupidly named alts to help me through this one. Really nice and polite person.
Orcy Rating:

How many scarabs shall we find in Land of the Dead?

So with shattered confidence in Mythic and GOA at the moment (though damnit.. I still really enjoy the game you gitz!). I started to think about Land of the Dead and how it's going to hold up upon release. Mythic are rightly taking there time with it, but they do have a deadline and they cannot risk delaying it and thus the game being heavily impacted by the inevitable Summer Slow Down that affects all MMO's, and you wonder with the current buggy state that the other instances are in, how many little scarabs (being beetles and being bugs... see wot I did dere?) will creep into the zone.

Zone.. that's the crucial thing to remember, it's not a small patch at all, this isn't 1.2.1 nor even 1.2, but the biggest content patch that will likely hit WAR before an expansion is released. To drum up interest over the summer and tide it through the summer months when people rediscover the outside and beer gardens. Going back to what I said, when I step into Lost Vale, Bloodwrought Enclave or Bilerot Burrow I fight as many bugs and glitches as I do mobs, our goblins get stuck in terrain and down the back of the sofa, mobs warp or reset and encounters are about as balanced as a see-saw with a Black Orc on it. Add the RvR mix, an entry mechanic, lairs, PQ's and Mythics current reputation of publishing buggy content as I think we have to assume that a good portion of the zone won't be working right, or we'll find some busted areas in general.

This isn't a hugely bad thing, I don't think any content patch by any company goes live with no bugs or broken parts, it comes with 30 programmers competing against 500,000 players that want to win (though don't all want to cheat). The real test will be how quickly Mythic can react to the broken parts and fix them without breaking another aspect of the dungeon. Will we see emergency patches and the minor things (buggy PQ mobs, broken tome unlocks) also fixed quickly. Then we still wait for the bugs to be fixed in the existing instances, in the cities, the careers, the professions....

Hope you still have the resource to keep on top of the existing bugs as well as a whole new instance and zones worth Mythic!

SIX Server crashes in one night... (at least)

So destruction made a push today, we hit all the zones and managed to get to Shining Way, half the warbands went and battered down the doors while the rest of us hopped between Reikland and Kadrin Valley to secure for a second fort assault.

As we waited in KV, the elven tier 4 pairing crashed THREE times causing it to reset and the destruction warbands having to start knocking down the gates from scratch again. Eventually we took Kadrin as well and almost simultaneously we took down both forts leading to Altdorf... No thanks to Mythics lousing net code and GOAs dreadful servers...

So we get to Altdorf and immediately our instance is full, lots of us wait and I'm the first one ine. Then 2 minutes later, the Altdorf server crashes kicking me out the game (and crashing me as soon as I log back in for 10 minutes). Finally, Lokax gets logged back in, after waiting forty five minutes to get in the server crashes again as I watch the rest of the guild get booted. After waiting some more time I get another spot in basically a puggy instance and with 10 minutes left to go in Altdorf... It crashes again.

At this point, by the time I log back in there's 3 minutes and I'm back in the queue for Altdorf, staring at the portal and thinking I just wasted two hours of my life, and we won't even get an apology, nor any sort of admission of fault by either Mythic or GOA.

It must actually be quite embarrassing being Mythic right now, or are they living in perpetual ignorance where everyone is happy and the servers are running beautifully?

Well the guild has basically agreed on this... The games pride, the end game.. The major selling point...

EPIC. FAIL.

WCPI Blog o' da week.

Drum roll please....... No, that's a Dwarf skull you're beating on.. Wait... carry on.

This weeks Blog o' da week goes to Bootae and his Bloody Blog! A fellow Norn player on Destruction side I always give him a WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH when I pass as we charge into the massed ranks of Order.

So what better time than to read this Chosens blog than now? Eh? Go on... Go visit!

Bootae's Bloody Blog

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The WAR Community Promotion Initiative, or WCPI for short, is a player-wide effort for WAR fansites, blogs, forums, and other WAR community efforts to cross-promote and expose content to everyone who visits them. Members of the WCPI regularly promote each other through links, spotlights, and other features. If you have a WAR site and you’d like to join, check out the WCPI thread or PM PhoenixRed on the Warhammer Alliance forums.

How to bypass every keep wall.

Well was browsing the Karak-Norn forum on Warhammer Alliance and this popped up as a new post. I won't be linking to it, nor posting the video, but suffice to say that it shows ways of getting into every tier 4 keep without taking down the wall through wall jumping, print screen client jump (you know when you hit print screen it 'stutters'.. I thought they fixed that in DAoC... how foolish of me to believe that it wouldn't occur in WAR) and some clever terrain exploration I will admit.

So how long will it take Mythic to look at this? Probably not for a long time and then they'll just throw barricades at certain areas and not actually fix this. I don't actually think this happens too much on our server despite the video originating from it, at least not at peak times anyway. Don't know what the 3am Domination Point Players do mind you :P