The Straw

As in: The Last Straw

For the most part I have enjoyed my time in the Warhammer. I am happy to accept that in MMOs there is never perfection and the quest for balance is an ongoing process, rather than one big event that takes care of everything. My subscription runs out in a day or so and I won’t be renewing.

The part that has made it hardest for me to decide to continue  is the community. We’ve got a cracking good community and I’m proud of all the people in our alliance and partly because of one rarely mentioned thing: In all our time n the lead-up to WAR launch and in the time since then we have not once had a squabble that has led to a guild leaving the alliance. As player numbers have dropped, guilds have merged within the alliance into other guilds within the alliance. Placeholder toons have been put into the closing guilds and then removed from the alliance to make space for other players. Especially in our alliance we enjoy a lot of cultural and ethnic diversity in the people we play alongside which is an absolute treasure, especially some nights on voice comms.

So what was the last straw?

So, when not playing Warhammer…

I watch stuff like Chuck. I decided to redo the opening credits for a giggle:

I had planned to use my cover version of Cake’s Short Skirt Long Jacket for a future WAR vid but I couldn’t resist messing around with the opening credits. 30 secs of trippy and somewhat meatier sounds than the original opening credits. I didn’t bother to put the sound effects back in :)

March of the Magi

The video is successfuly uploaded to YouTube at last.

I bet by the end of it you are humming the tune the rest of the day

My thanks

… to everyone that showed up in IC last night and on the other servers where people gathered. It seems Karak-Norn Destro had the biggest turnout and the videos floating around the intarwebs do not disappoint. Caz has made a good one, linky here:

http://www.wegame.com/watch/magus_protest_march

My own is just finished, I’m about to check it over one last time and then I’ll be at the tender mercies of the YouTube uploader.

The Art of Babelfish

In the end I had to resort to Babelfish to get the Italian and Spanish translations done for Europe Stand Together, since I don’t really know a lot of people capable of doing the translation in the first place and the one person I know who can do both is currently 5000 miles away and uncontactable.

It didn’t seem appropriate to ask the GOA Community Managers to do it

I shudder to think what mangled message is going across and what cultural nuances are being missed out. Fene kindly did the German translation and found loads of fox paws that needed to be removed. Salvion did the French one. So the Italian and Spanish translations are unleashed and goodness knows what they actually say. My language abilties are confirmed to be made of fail.

STOP!

Coffee time.

<floats off to get a coffee>

Europe Stand Together!

To Order and Destruction on all European servers:

Monday 27th July, 7pm UK time / 8pm Server time:

Europe Stand Together!

Every Destruction player log a Magus on into Inevitable City.
Every Order player log a Shadow Warrior on into Altdorf.

Stand together for 30 minutes.

Mythic: Stand and Deliver

Well Mythic seem to have gone ahead and put 1.3.0b live. Its interesting how fast they turned this around after putting it up on the PTS. There was barely enough time for the Magus community to point out their devs had mistaken a single target spell for an AoE before Mythic blasted ahead and deployed it. What I personally take from this is that Mythic weren’t interested in feedback, only in checking that nothing was particularly broken this time out.  I’m trying to keep a straight face as I type the words ‘particularly broken’. The Magus has never been brilliantly effective. Want to know how it looks now? Some initial feedback from our US cousins:

http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=chaos_mg&thread.id=4396

Not pretty.

Mythic about now should be posting about how exciting this patch is. Its probably the kind of excitement that requires Leonard Cohen songs to fully express.

Its not live in Europe yet, I would expect that to happen tomorrow. It would be foolish to think Mythic don’t listen to feedback. ‘Listening’ of course is not the same as ‘acting upon’. Sanya Thomas has posted a very interesting article recently regarding feedback:

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/3299/page/1

To the average Magus player, there has not been a single promise fulfilled. Always marginally effective, we’ve had to put up with vague promises and delivery dates from Day 1. A minor patch late last year brought our dreadful DPS up to just under par DPS and we were expected to make do.

This is how you treat your customers? Seriously, you think this is GOOD business practice? Enough talk. Enough bland videos with bad sunglasses. The jokes are getting old and stale. STAND AND DELIVER.

1.3.0b PTS Has Concluded

http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=pts_announcements&message.id=62#M62

“Our Game Update 1.3.0b Public Test has come to a close, and Warpstone is currently down in preparation for the launch of 1.3.0b this week.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 1.3.0b Public Test. Your feedback and contribution is much appreciated.”

So it looks like they are going live with 1.3.0b as it is.

Memoirs of a Maniac Magus: Part 5

This is one of those moments that it will be extremely hard to fully convey. Anyway, here goes…

We’d been running around a large part of the evening generally just causing trouble. We were running as a warband but just going with the flow. We wander into Dragonwake after locking Praag and decide to go help at the west keep. We killed an awful lot of Order but were eventually beaten back when they produced a rather frightening number of people. All good. We reform up at Covenant of Flame and wait for the inevitable attack. I grab a coffee (yes coffee, not beer). Just as I get back to my PC, Order arrive at CoF.

Game on.

The Big Six Zero

Got to RR60 yesterday late afternoon at around 39 days /played…

…and had a hoot. There is so much more flexibility as to what you can do with your character just by having that one precious extra mastery point. I forsee me spending much of the next few weeks respeccing a lot while I tweak and fiddle as much as I did when I was around rank 40 and desperately trying to find a spec that didn’t have pitiful damage output. At the time that wasn’t possible as it was before the first patch post-launch of WAR but it was very helpful later when I finally settled on Changing to have tried different (and sometimes crazy) things out.

Possibly for the first time ever I feel my toon is making an effective and useful contribution to the team, rather than being the cripple that is brought along out of sympathy. Many guilds openly admit they wont tolerate a Magus that is not pure rift spec. I can’t speak as to other classes but RR60 is a seriously major landmark for anyone playing a Magus. I’ve kinda ambled there in a casual way. The irony I find is that its easier to play. If you spec for the big spell on 2 mastery paths you effectively cut out all the toys below them that you might spec for, thus resulting on less buttons on your toolbar. The upside is that the tactical options available are biggies.

I’m glad to have achieved this pre-nerf so that I have something to compare to when it hits. I don’t think there is a Magus player in Europe or America that isn’t seriously considering the status of their subscription.