Thoughts on Warhammer Online: The Third Week

Strange though it may sound, I was actually somewhat looking forward to attending E for All this past weekend.

EA was one of only a handful of large companies exhibiting at the con’s inaugural event in 2007, and one of the biggest games at the entire show was Warhammer Online.

I was, in turn, one of the few media types dumb enough to attend. As a result, I got to spend many an hour just casually playing the game and speaking to members of the development team, something which rarely occurs at larger events where every last available block of time is divvied up between a thousand different bloggers, fansites, and media outlets for maximum PR exposure.

Last year when I arrived I’d only played the game for a couple of hours–back at Games Day LA. This year, with several solid weeks of WAR retail under my belt, I was looking forward to a lively rematch.

That is, until I contacted Mythic’s PR company and discovered that they weren’t even planning on showing up.

After several more calls to several other PR companies returned similar results, I was forced to arrive at the conclusion that E for All 2008 wasn’t even worth making the thirty minute drive to LA and paying $12.00 to park. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

But, life goes on, and my adventures in WAR continue, nonetheless.

I tend to prefer leveling purely through PvP means: Killing people, completing scenarios, and turning in the repeatable quests for them.

This is oftentimes a problem when either no one is queuing up for them or participating in world RvR. The fact that there are several posts on every (unofficial) server board I’ve read, stating things to the effect of, “Hey, Order, get on our Vent and let’s organize a time and a place for some fighting!” reveals one of the serious design flaws in the game.

Unless a keep is under attack–and, now that I think of it, another serious design flaw is that if one person hits one guard standing outside of a keep, a message will be broadcast that it’s under siege, even if no one ever got within a hundred yards of the gate–the battleground areas within each tier oftentimes feel like ghost towns.

No one wants to bother venturing inside if there’s no one fighting, and no one is fighting because no one wants to go inside–because no one is fighting.

The strategic objectives on the map seem to be purely for bragging rights or to harvest renown (you get 800 in total for capturing a Tier 3 objective, not too bad for killing five mobs), as the zone-wide rewards they offer aren’t substantial enough to get people to bother with retaking them on their own initiative.

This leaves us with keeps, which generally get taken in the dead of night or very early in the morning when no one is on, as a defended keep is nearly an impossible objective to take without serious organization–which most of the pickup groups attempting them do not have.

We attempted to retake the two keeps in Dark Elf Tier 3 last night, and faced stiff opposition–from the game itself. Although the attackers and defenders might have had one raid group between them on both sides, the game’s FPS at times slipped into slideshow mode for me, even after I went into Options and set everything to the lowest possible rung.

After that, I’m not really looking forward to city sieges unless they patch in some serious performance improvements.

But, even in the dead of night and with no defenders, taking out the keep lord the honest way seems to be a bit too much of a hassle for many players, and so two competing methods have cropped up to do keeps in easy mode:

“Bring so much DPS the lord dies in five seconds,” and, “Pull the lord outside of his room so that we don’t have to deal with his guards.” As I don’t want to encourage exploiters, I won’t mention just where people are pulling him, suffice it to say that it’s very, very cheap.

Such exploits and performance going into the tank during large battles cast something of a pall over the whole game, and I hope they’ve got the cat o’ nine tails out in the programming department, working them sixteen hours a day until fixes are produced.

I’ll continue this post tomorrow with the story of my adventures in AE grinding, and why the people who designed the Tor Anroc scenario should be tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity.