I’m not convinced that it’s not just the elven blues (elf players whine more – scientifically proven, 8 out of 10 cats agreed with me when I bribed them with cat food).

So, I have created one on Karak Azgal to see if it’s gimpy enough for me to play, and am a mighty level 5 already. However I’ve noticed one glaring thing that shows just how big of a bias the devs have towards order…

The titles! The order title for dying to the Chosen is “The Chosen One” – awesome, and the title for dying to a squig herder is: “Squig Bait”.

Naturally the latter is now my title on my new little Shadow Warrior and it’ll probably stay that way till 40. Best. Title. Ever.

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?

The Last Straw

An undocumented nerf to Dissolving Mist. Specifically: previously it was a 30 sec spell that you cast on the ground and just kept ticking. It did the territory denial job reasonably well. If the other side got 10 people clicking on the flag, they still got it due to the maximum target limit. If you died, it just kept on ticking until the 30 seconds were up. Once in a while you’d get a heroic last gasp defense on a battlefield objective as you were swarmed by hordes of Orderand if they were lax getting people to the flag. Now though, when you die, it just disappears immediately. There are no more last gasp heroic defenses for the Magus. This straw broke the camel’s back.

The Magus Bits

This nerf highlighted the overall frustration with Mythic’s process of revising class balance and brought into sharp relief what is driving me (and many others) completely crackers when we try to play our Magus characters. For the most part, we’ve had our toons eroded. Bug fixes aside, arguably now the Magus class is in a worse state than it was at the launch of Warhammer.  One year on the class is going backwards in terms of playability and reward factor, the reward factor being the good feelings you get from feeling useful and being able to achieve things for your team. A character class in an MMO should bring something useful to the group or raid and be able to slot into its role on par with any other class that fulfills that role. That would not be the Magus then since its utility role gone and its DPS is very sub par on every spec line. Squiggy or Sorc will do single target better, sorc blows it away in the AoE department and Daemonology has become the sad kid that nobody wants to pick for their football team (useful for those that like duelling as it takes longer to kill but not much cop otherwise).

I don’t want to spend another year gearing up and getting renown ranks on another toon. I just want this one to work. And it doesn’t. No amount of blandishments or marginalising the class issues by Mythic will make it go away. The common term for classes such as this is ‘broken’ which I try to stay away from and yet it is wholly appropriate in this case.

I played the Magus in beta along with most other classes. I decided I liked the playstyle more than the others. My personal preference has always been caster/pet classes such as the Spiritmaster back in DAoC and the Warlock in WoW. Although disappointed with what passed for a pet I decided to stick with it. The Magus looked cool and had some interesting tricks. Thats the lure of lower DPS toons. You expect to have a big bag of dirty tricks, going for utility and sneakiness over raw damage output. Most of the dirty tricks are useless now. Some, such as Perils of the Warp weren’t even that strong to begin with but were good for catching out the occasional unwary enemy.

I’ll keep an eye on WAR to see if Mythic get around to delivering long standing promises. If the main issues of the endgame and class balance are put into some semblence of decency I may resub to check it out. For now, I am no longer going to pay to test this product on my very precious recreational time.

The Mythic Bits

There are many good things in WAR. Mythic have repeatedly put imagination and clever touches into it which are often forgotten and not given enough credit. Unfortunately they always seem to not quite get it right, wether its just in terms of polish (bugs and such) or if they make a balance error that means a chunk of the community ends up suffering for several months until they address it. Every patch is followed by days of frantic hotfixing. So, often it is Mythic themselves that undo their own attempts at greatness. This is a shame because it must be as frustrating for them as it is for us for them to constantly nearly get it right.

It is often said that we, the players, just don’t understand how terribly terribly difficult it is to make an MMO. Well… why should we have to? We’re paying the MMO Provider to do it. Get on with it. If its too difficult, stop bleating and find another job. There’s plenty of companies out there vying for monthly subs. This is where my empathy for the hard working designers, programmers and testers stops. There is no try: either do or do not.

The GOA Bits

Nothing to report. Sorry GOA-Haters. Nothing here for you today. GOA have mostly provided a decent service and I blame the underlying code for most of the problems even though I am at times suspicious about how they tackle load balancing on their server clusters. I should once again apologise to the CSRs as I’m hellish for not responding when they get in touch.

And Its Goodnight From Him

I wish everyone that continues to play all the best and specifically to the players on both sides on Karak-Norn I leave with a lot of fond memories and will miss you all. I cannot thank enough all the people in the Evil League of Evil. All our outings are completely a team effort. At times I might stand at the front but its the input from everyone and the team support that make it fun and successful.

This might be a break, it might be permanent but regardless I will benefit from stepping back from the increasing frustration that is entirely under the aegis of Mythic to solve if they are able.

Note that I don’t agree by any means with everything Michael says in his article but one thing stood out and made me think “aha! that’s it!”.

Realm pride, defending the realm, or “For arthur!” as the 8v8 l33t-club would sneer.

In Dark age of Camelot – if I logged in and saw that Caer Benowyc was in enemy hands I’d think “hmm, that’s not on, might go help kick them out.”
If I saw that Caer Boldiam or Renaris or one of the other inner keeps was in enemy hands I’d be rallying the alliance (assuming they weren’t already out there) to defend/attack.

To be fair if all the frontier was taken I’d be thinking “oh…” but if someone suggested retakes I’d be up for it.

Attacking enemy keeps was fun and all but it never had the same draw that “holy **** mids at Renaris!” had.

Cut back to WAR: we have zones that get locked and fought over – technically the two zones on either side of the middle belong to their respective realms but it never feels that way – Caledor isn’t “moi laaand!”, neither are Black Crag or Chaos Wastes (heck in CW the enemy have a warcamp closer to IC than we do…). If the enemy are beseiging Spite’s Reach it’s just another keep, one of the two in the combat zone of the hour.

Bring back the concept of territory – remove the zone locks so that we can fight over the whole frontier at a time, remove the warcamps in the enemy zones (or restrict the ability to fly to them based on keep control). Suddenly Caledor, Black Crag and Chaos Wastes are the heartlands of our empire, the battle lines would shift based on the ebb and flow of the battle not based on how long one realm can camp out the battle objectives…

There would be opportunity for a deep behind-enemy-lines strike: awkward to set up with the travel time but adding a whole new dimension which just isn’t present at the moment. Currently the T4 endgame is almost exclusively a case of cramming two big zergs into the one zone and hoping you brought more guns to the knife fight.

If the leaked 1.3.1 patch notes are close to what the real ones will be then it sounds like they’ve sorted City fights out (barring what happens when the new system is in contact with the playerbase of course ), leaving Fortresses as the obvious toothache to be tackled next – but the rubbishness of Forts isn’t the only problem – they may just be a symptom of the current T4 zone locking system.

Lets hope Mythic take a look at the whole system next, and can give us a little bit of our realm pride back. I want the news that “Order at Thaugamond Massif” to fill me with anger and zeal to defend, not with indifference.

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 :)

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

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.

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>

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 have bungled every step of the way since the release of WAR. They are in many ways no worse or better than any other average MMO provider but we do not pay for mediocrity. We pay for excellence and Mythic’s deployment of the much loved Warhammer intellectual property has not been a crowning achievement in the history of either Games Workshop or Electronic Arts.

Mythic make vague promises which are never delivered and they have appalling patching processes where they hurry versions through on the test servers without proper testing. Then we are subjected to all kinds of problems such as lag and shockingly unplayable gameplay conditions. They produce sloppy programming which inflicts misery on elements of the community for up to months at a time before they get around to doing ill-considered fixes where they tend to break nearly as much as they fix. All the while they dangle the carrot of ‘better times coming / good stuff on the way’ to appease people while their developers scratch their heads and hope.

There is not one thing that Mythic have implemented in the short history of this MMO that has been deployed to live servers and ‘just worked’. Every single update has been marred by shoddy quality control and embaressing bugs that should have been caught way before hitting production environments.

Mythic need to make their processes more transparent to us, the paying customers and show they are directly including our feedback in updates, not just bugs they missed because of poor internal quality procedures.

Mythic need to produce better scheduled reports of progress. RELIABLE information on what is going through the change process. Not just pipe dreams from developers who floated an idea at a meeting which hasn’t been tested but they felt it was cool to waffle about on a video blog.

Mythic need to show they are responding to player concerns directly. Rolling out comedians with silly sunglasses just doesn’t cut it any more.

Mythic need to increase the quality of their output drastically.

Mythic need to remove the knee-jerk balancing mentality prevelant in every patch to date. This is probably one of their biggest WAR crimes.

Electronic Arts need to show they are on the case and support the community. Because it is the community on which any MMO stands or falls and thus EA’s income. Mythic’s behaviour is killing the community. It is being eroded day by day as the players lose faith in Mythic to ever deliver.

If enough of us stand together before Mythic completely blow all confidence in Warhammer’s MMO incarnation we will send a clear message to this and every other MMO provider out there that we the gaming community want those who intend to create and provide MMO services that we will not just be fobbed off with vague promises, vague hints of future fixes if we just put up with the mediocre performance for now. We pay to play now. We pay for YOU, the MMO provider to deliver now.

We want and we have a right to expect.

I propose that every player in every guild in every alliance on every server in Europe stands together.

Most MMO providers listen to those that scream the loudest.

We’re not going to scream at you, Mythic. We’re not going to rant about how poorly you have handled this community and its ongoing concerns.

We’re going to stand quietly for 30 minutes, all of us…

…With the gaming media of the entire world watching.

As well as these fringe benefits it also lets me infuriate the high level guild members who like to strut around in IC showing off their armoured mounts (by strutting around in IC showing off my winged mount ). But there’s a trade off – having one of these little beasties gets you an unending torrent of /tells (or /whispers or /sends or whatever you call them) – with people desperate to know how you got one…

I’m a bad goblin… I’m not always completely honest when I reply…
My favourite responses so far:
1. I answered the quiz question on WAR europe: “Why did the manticore cross the road?”
2. My wolf ate one too many squigburgers and mutated.
3. By excelling in two areas: Surprise, Cunning and a fanatical dedication to Tzeentch. Oh hang on…

However now and again I tell people it’s from a magical special quest involving swimming in the river in the Necropolis of Zandri or searching the wild wastes of Dangerous Territory (or better yet, both).

Last night we had a raid into a lair, which was delayed and then called off due to some RL issues affecting two of the group – so there was a little bit of downtime that’s not usually there… and I let the joke run on a little longer than I normally do (I’m normally rubbish at pranks).

Our sorcerer was desperate to get a Manticore… so desperate that he believed every word about the “Harness of Enslaving” locked in a secret casket in the delta of the river Zandri.
After his first five attempts at diving failed, and a few more with the help of a shaman healing/buffing with damage shields he was starting to give up hope.

Till I “remembered” the quest to get the resistance to the water damage… the one that starts in a very rare port from the Winds of Chaos (for those who haven’t seen it it’s well worth a visit. A portal behind the arena ports you to strange and interesting worlds, including a remake of Cotswold village and a 1/10th scale version of the empire starting zone).

This is where I show how rubbish I am at pranks though…. after his many deaths in the water (and finally a zone-port to Dragonwake when he swam to the zone wall) I took pity and decided to throw some hints before he spent hours and hours jumping through the portal in the hope of luckily getting the one with the quest giver….

I said “hmm yeah you need to get the Wind Up Clock from that quest”, to which he asked how many times could it be used…
OK, that one didn’t send any alarm bells.
Me: “If I remember right you have to collect dung from the Bull gors in the Bloodwrought Enclave”…
Still nothing:
Me: “collect the bull dung and get the wind up clock”.
Still nothing… now he may have been distracted or just so focused on getting to the IC….
Me: “yeah, so to get the windup you need to collect the bullshit”

Still nothing other than a repeat of the question about how many times the item could be used…

At this point I decided I’d been mean enough and just came clean but a teensy little evil part of me likes the idea of someone somewhere jumping through the portal in IC repeatedly in an effort to get the bullshit quest to collect a windup…

As I said, I’m a bad goblin. Sorry to my poor victim but I could have just let you keep searching

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.