I’m not playing WAR right now so I probably don’t count as a WAR blogger, but I came across this in the usual meandering internet way and since many of you are WAR bloggers, I figured you should see it.
Syp wants YOU! (if you’re a Warhammer blogger)
Category: WAR
Warhammer: Age of Reckoning stuff
Honey Pie
Okay, there’s no way to work “Patch 1.1b” into a White Album title, damn those inconsiderate Mythic patchy types. I just hope this title doesn’t get me too many spam porn links.
Anyway yes, 1.1b is in the process of patchinating (technical term) as I type. It’s not earth-shattering in terms of excitement, patch-wise, except for an interesting note on RvR renown point awards. Since I’m not quite sure how it worked before I can’t really tell you what the difference is, except that the awards seem higher than before. Presumably, now that we’re seeing more R40/RRxx folks coming up, Mythic are starting to get better info on the general RvR grind. I can’t comment much on it, since I haven’t done any significant RvR in about 6 weeks, for various previously documented reasons.
Either way, if it means that renown ranks will be a teeny bit easier to get once you pass 20 or so, that’s a good thing, right?
Notes are here, and for the access-challenged, here’s the text:
WAR 1.1b notes
Greetings!
1.1.0b is almost here, and while the notes may not be very long there are some great fixes that make a lot of significant improvements to the game. We’ve got some additional fixes in the wings so stay tuned for more as we continue to work on enhancing content and improving stability!
1.1.0b will be going live Tuesday, 12/16. All North American servers will be brought down at 7AM EST with Oceanic servers to follow at 9AM EST. We expect all servers to be back up and running by 1PM EST.
As always stay tuned to the Herald for the latest news and updates and continue reading for the 1.1.0b Patch Notes…WAAAGH!!!
- We’ve added additional messaging to the Inventory Overflow system introduced in the 1.1a patch. This was done to aid players in understanding what the Inventory Overflow in fact does and how to utilize this new feature.
- Fixed an issue that was causing the Nordenwatch scenario to crash intermittently.
- Fixed an issue that would cause the wrong realm name to appear in the center-screen Keep or Battle Objective capture message.
- Renown, experience, and Influence rewards have been added for attacking and defending Fortresses.
- Renown gains: This patch includes a significant fix to the amount of Renown gained in both open Realm vs. Realm combat and Scenarios. The intent of this change is for players to gain Renown based on the differential between a player’s Rank and Renown Rank. The examples given below are based on solo Realm vs. Realm confrontations without any sort of bonuses and with both players being of the same Renown Rank (differences between RRs also affect RPs awarded):
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- If a Rank 40/Renown Rank 1 solo kills a Rank 31/Renown Rank 1, the Rank 40 will receive 206 Renown as a reward.
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- If a Rank 40/Renown Rank 1 solo kills a Rank 18/Renown Rank 1, the Rank 40 will receive 70 Renown as a reward.
Notice that this is a larger reward than the Rank 40 would receive with the previous system (51 and 5 respectively).
- To discourage exploitation of this system, if a player is killed repeatedly in a short amount of time they are worth less Renown each time due to the existing diminishing returns system. Also, please keep in mind that the difference between players’ Renown Ranks will also affect the amount of RP rewarded.
- Nordenwatch: Reenabled access to this Tier 1 Empire vs. Chaos Scenario. Fixed an issue with this Scenario that affected server stability.
Helter skelter
It’s been a while since I played WAR seriously, and as a result it seems my PvP-meter has declined back to its usual “OMG NO!” state. I’ve been avoiding scenarios on all characters and making sure I play at times where no oRvR is likely to be going on (i.e. 6 o’clock in the US morning).
PvP is not a natural playstyle or choice for me, and as soon as I stop practicing I retreat to my comfort zone, which involves not doing it if I can help it. I’ve been dreading T3 scenarios ever since Ysh turned 22 and couldn’t go into T2 anymore — I’d just got used to Mourkain Temple, dammit! Well, I say “used to,” but what I really mean is “able to stand 7 minutes of chaos without comporting myself too poorly or soiling her velvet-nap SW outfit.” All I’ve ever heard about T3 is that there’s only one scenario — Tor Anroc — and that it involves spending most of your time boiling in lava. Not being one of the classes that can pull victims in or one of the classes that can then AoE them to death, and given my utter inexperience with it, I suspect I’d spend 95% of the time in lava and the other 5% running back from the respawn point.
I did get to the stage, in T1, where I can cheerfully die and just run back to the fray. In T2, I still lose the pedals now and then and just end up running around like a headless chicken, prey to whatever Chosen or Witch Elf fancies a slice of High Elf for dinner. In T3… I dunno. I don’t like being ignorant (of the landscape, of tactics, or other folks’ choices), I don’t like being confused (though you’d think I’d be used to it by now), and I don’t much like being dead all the time. I had a bad time in Stonetroll Crossing — half a dozen attempts and confused and/or dead almost all the time, except for one time I got the bloody pacifier, alone, just in time to see 8 Destro come up on the knoll and wonder where the hell Order was; and I had a fairly bad time in Phoenix Gate — and I *still* don’t get the point of that scenario. I understand what we’re supposed to do, I just don’t understand WHY anyone would want to do it. It’s a giant empty scenario map with mini- or mega-mosh stages and… that’s about it.
My intense and probably irrational hatred for game-death is part of what’s kept me from enjoying PvP all these years (aside from, you know, the asshats who tend to gravitate to it); it’s not really that onerous in WAR, but after 5 or 6 chain deaths I do start getting a bit frustrated. To my credit, at least I don’t vanish from scenarios the way lots of people seem to be doing now when they don’t like the way things are going.
/tangent — and WTF is up with that anyway? You join a scenario to play a time-limited game and you bloody well stick with it, win or lose. You don’t fark off when you’re losing just because you can’t stand the thought of not obliterating the enemy, or because the NPCs on your side aren’t providing you with whatever service you think it is they owe you. (I’ve already ranted about player tendency to see anyone else in a game as “not real,” just a bunch of quasi-NPCs who are there to heal them, tank for them, or otherwise provide whatever it is Joe Q Asshat thinks he’s owed — but I may rant about it again, just for fun.) I may have had a horrible time in some scenarios — the ones where everything goes wrong from the start, for whatever reason, or the ones where there are 5 of you and 11 of them, or the ones where your side is all level 1 and they’re all level 11 — but it has never, not once, occurred to me to bug out of one because it wasn’t going the way I wanted. Serisouly — WTF? /tangent
The thing is, there isn’t a whole lot to WAR if you don’t do at least some RvR on the side, and I know from past experience that it can be fun, even though it also tends to be l-l-l-laggy and crash-to-desktoppy. Besides, Ysh has some Devastator boots and I wouldn’t mind a) being able to wear them someday, which isn’t likely since she’s RR17 and they’re RR23 req to wear and b) getting some of the other set pieces someday, preferably before Ysh hits 40 and they’re no use to her. That’s sort of what happened with the T2 Tracker set — by the time I got even the first piece, I was levels and levels above having a use for it.
On the whole, fun as it can be, RvR is something I have to force myself to do. The more I’m confronted by people who just don’t understand how someone couldn’t love it (or whatever activity it is they’re hawking), the more obstinate and contrary I get — actually, the more anyone tries to get me to do anything, the more contrary I get, but that’s another story and the reason why I never joined the armed forces.
So now I’m wondering — could I just get Ysh to 40 and worry about RvR then? The Devastator shoes are just shoes, and I don’t really care about items. I can always pass them on to someone more deserving. And in the meantime, I wouldn’t have to agonise about stupid PvP and could just PvE — as long as I don’t make a big deal of it, people might not notice. (Does blogging about it count as a big deal? Oops.)
Happiness is a warm sword
Update 1.1 is with us, crashes and bug-flinging spacechimps notwithstanding, and so far I’m loving it. Caveat: I’ve only been in game an hour or two, in quiet areas, and I’ve done no RvR of any kind, scenario, open or otherwise.
With that out of the way, I can say that so far the client update seems great. I was able to select ful-screen AND minimise the client to the desktop, which isn’t something I’d been able to do since beta, or at least not without a side order of crashy lockup; it did take the textures a little while to reload when I came back to the client, but that’s okay. I was also able to turn the lightmaps and the grass back on, which makes such a difference to how the game looks; I’d try turning all the frills back on, but I know what that would do — the game would look marvellous and I’d get about 0.34 frames per second. (I don’t actually measure my FPS in games much — my general measure is, does it seem smooth? If it doesn’t, doesn’t really matter if it’s running at 900 FPS.)
Here’s a shot of Kaltlauf in Black Fire Pass, just because it looked good in the moonlight. I have a 1900×1200 version of it too.
Cloaks have acquired — in some? all? cases — furry bits around the shoulders, which I’m not certain I like, but I *do* like that Ysh’s cloak went from solid darkish blue to patterned blue. 
CoW is a third of the way to 20, so in a few days we should be able to display our guild heraldry, which I’m looking forward to. I’ve also turned off her helm… we’ll see what happens when I log her back in.
I killed a few orcs and gobbos here and there, as one does, and — after I got over my shock of seeing him saunter past — chased Alan Cartwright The Really Creepy Seed Guy all the way down a dungeon ramp (which is in fact a way from Black Fire Pass to the Badlands). Again, it’s not much to test by, but it certainly felt like Ysh was doing better than before. Damage felt good, and the amount of damage I was taking felt about right; meaning it was more than I would like to take, because I actually have nothing against being godlike versus my puny little foes, but still felt about right for a squishy class using her armour-boost stance. I was taking down 2 levels higher than me with ease, which isn’t something I’d have said before the career change… though since I also changed to Assault spec at about the same time, it’s hard to say what’s having the most influence there. I’ll get back to you when (if) I hit 40 and spec back to Scout.
As an aside regarding combat, the new cooldown animation is — still! — just a little TOO glitzy; I feel I should be able to notice it without having my eye drawn to it involuntarily, but it’s better.
The patch did reset a bunch of things, like chat text colours, separate chat windows, font sizes and other chatty stuff, but given the number of changes they made to the system that’s not too surprising. It wasn’t all that difficult to get set up again, and I’m glad they finally brought WAR-chat into this century.
Another thing it did, which presumably wasn’t intentional (hee!) is to make some mounts attackable. There were a bunch of apparently abandoned, apparently aggro attackable horses in Altdorf this morning — maybe they’re pissed off at being dumped in the middle of the street and not in some cozy stable.
Hrm, what else. Like I said, I wasn’t on for very long. I did tool around Black Fire Pass looking for the “easy” chapter 12 Dwarf PQ, but couldn’t find it (not that I looked too hard). I *did* notice that the PQs now have indicators on them — like “Normal” or “Hard” — when you enter the PQ area, and if you mouse over one of the PQ-chest icons on the map, it’ll give you that info as well. Downside is, not all PQs have such chests on the map — Grimbeard Station is certainly marked on the BFP map, but it doesn’t have a mouseable PQ-chest icon, and neither does the Moonfang PQ not too far down the road. EDIT — oops, RTFPatchnotes… EasyPQs are only implemented in Tier 1 at the moment. Ahem — I knew that!
Still, they’re trying, and even if it’s two steps forward and one step back, I at least appreciate the effort. I never used to be as arsy about games being perfect as I became in the last few years, and I’m trying to abandon that ‘tude. MMOs are evolving entities and as long as there’s at least a willingness to eventually get it right, I’ll put up with some backstepping (though promises will only take you so far even with me).
Number 9, number 9
(For those who visit the actual site — are the snowflakes a pain in the arse? If so, I’ll turn them off, though I figured they wouldn’t be too bad since the background is mostly pale already. Let me know if they’re making your eyes squeal.)
Despite — or maybe because of — my raging altoholism, I’d actually left myself a couple of character slots free. For one thing, even the most dedicated dilettante would have a hard time playing that many, and for a(related)nother I tend to only make alts when I intend to play them; as it is, most of my characters have that sharp naptha smell alts get when they’ve been kept in the cupboard for too long. And of course when they announced the return of the previously cut classes, it was pretty clear we wouldn’t have slots for all the career types and that I should therefore save some for the tough choices ahead.
(I’ve noticed something, tangent-wise: games companies would rather chew off their own arm than allow either of two things: 1) more character slots and 2) appearance changes. Why? Okay, char slots I can maybe understand, but why this brutish, moronic, short-sighted insistance that once we’ve picked a look, we’re stuck with it? Or mostly stuck with it except for brief, heaven-sent periods of grace where we may alter our appearance for a short time before they snatch the ability away again? Seriously, are ALL games created by 23 year old males who don’t give a shit what their “toons” look like other than having spiky hair and/or big bazooms? — Wait, don’t answer that. And if you’re a 23 year old male who breaks that mould, consider yourself excluded. Unless you’re a game designer, in which case you’re just lying.)
Nonetheless, when readers vote, I obey. (Well, I did what I wanted to in the first place, but don’t let me shatter your illusions of the Power Of Polls.) Yesterday I made character #9, Elegia the Knight of the Shining Client-side Graphics Bug. At least I hope it’s client side, because if that’s what we’re all going to see on battlefields, I’m going to write a letter of complaint to Sigmar. No wonder everyone’s Destruction — even the Chosen’s stinky black cloud auras are cooler looking than this.
I can’t comment on how they play yet, since in the end I only had a short time to play and didn’t make it past level 2. I have my certainly-not-DPS smackya in da chops action and my Voodoo stealyerstrength aura, along with that throw Chosen are forever using on my DPS chars, the one that has a chance to do tons of damage when you’re already almost dead and limping away like a frightened rabbit. One thing I noticed about the aura is that it’s counted as aggro, so every damned orange-name critter I ran past — cats, snails, rabbits, roaches, pigs, cows, sheep… you get the picture — decided I was being bolshy and ran after me to teach me a lesson about keeping my stinky auras to myself. All I did was drain their strength! Barnyard animals are so freaking touchy these days. Still, if it were up to me I’d moderate that somehow, because I certainly don’t intend to be on-again and off-againing my auras as I run through, for example, Altdorf. Twisting is for combat, not tourism.
There may also be a touch of alt-fatigue setting in. Odd to hear that from me, perhaps, but with the other gamelets I’ve been trying and a testing phase I am not officially in for a game I cannot officially mention, I’ve been making a LOT of chars in the last 2 months or so, and eventually they do start becoming a bit of a blur. My altoholism doesn’t like to go on binges like this. *burp* Coupled with tanks being the class that grabs me the least viscerally (though I’m not one of those people to underestimate the contribution of a well-played tank), I’m a little meh about the whole process right now.
That’s an expectations thing though. I’m tired, rather cranky, and still a little poorly, which means that nothing I do really grabs my attention right now — it’s hard to concentrate on any sort of character or game when your surgical site is bitching and whining about how it really shouldn’t be hurting this much three weeks after the surgery. Once that is out of the way, I suspect I’ll have more fun in games again too.
That said I did get Ysh to 25 yesterday. FINALLY! Rationality plays very little part in our perception of levelling speed — if we don’t play a character for 2 months and then get all of the next level in a day, we’re likely to feel as though it’s taken 2 months to get that level rather than the hours it really took. Assault mastery + career changes do make a difference to playing a Shadow Warrior in PvE, which is no longer a high-downtime slog. I can chain-kill critters with ease and I don’t instantly want to run away when I get adds, which used to be the case. Better yet, I don’t need to stance dance as much — I find that tiring after a while, and though it’s pretty important in RvR, I prefer not to have to do it too much in PvE… especially since I’m not sure all my bars are up to date. Anyway, 25 is also one of those new-gear, odd-numbered levels, and she’s finally starting to look a little less like something the Sigmar Salvation Army dressed.
Good stuff, really.
Of chestnuts and codpieces and chicken necks
It’s very, very cold outside… well, for Texas, anyway, and we huddle inside our flimsy, slightly-thicker-than-paper walls while the north wind howls outside and drops these strange white things on the ground. Fortunately, they don’t last long. (It’s below freezing, which is rare enough here, and we had some sleet/snow/whitestuffwannabe overnight, though it’s not exactly accumulating.)
In other words, it’s perfect gaming weather. I do have work to do — every damn time I say “I’m going to take a few days OFF to really start recovering from the surgery” more work rolls in — but it’s not all that much and leaves some gaming time.
So: carry on with Ysharros, who has been slightly frustrating to play ever since I realised almost any other class has a better time of it… or make one of those peacock knights?
Pros: new char appeals to altoholic; no codpiece on females (have you SEEN those codpieces? Wait, how could you not! — right. So, no codpiece is win. Incidentally, googling “codpiece” for images, even in moderately safe search, gives some pretty scary results. Go on, try it – you know you want to.) Would be T1, at least for a while, which suits my comfort zone; Ysh is T3 and I haven’t dared set foot in a scenario yet.
Cons: chicken neck effect (so I’m told) on KotBS who carry shields; tank probably the least immediately-appealing playstyle for me.
As reagrds the Shadow Warrior, I don’t really care how everyone else is levelling, but I do care when I find it easier to level an Archmage than the DPS class. I may well not be playing Ysh correctly, and I have to admit the recent changes have helped quite a bit (including my own change of scout path to ambush path — sod RvR usefulness). Also, I haven’t actually played her since those changes, other than to note that they did make life quite a bit easier.
What’s holding me back is the memory of how awkward and time-consuming each fight could be rather than how they are now, so I really should give it another go, especially since DPS is my overall fave playstyle. Downside: I daren’t play any scenarios. I haven’t ever done any T3 scenarios (though ironically I got to do a few T4 ones in beta), and I’m worried. People get less and less tolerant as the tiers go by, and making a mistake tends to get you chewed out or worse. Besides, I don’t like to not know what I’m doing. I am not spontaneous, I am not a thrill-seeker, and I don’t much like the unknown; so all in all, T3 isn’t doing much for me right now.
In any case, the biggest lure of the KotBS — nuts and codpieces aside — is the lure of the new alt. I have no antibodies for that kind of effect, and I purposely left some alt slots open so that I could make a new char when these classes came back. Alt lure > almost anything, to the extent that I’m wondering if I really should find a 212-step (typo, but I’ll leave it) program. Then again, if I’m having fun, who cares?
I am going to try and stick a poll in this. I will probably screw it up, so I’ll publish this first.
Hope springs eternal
Because I started my MMO career with Asheron’s Call, which had monthly content and fix patches, I’ve always been a sucker for a good patch. The recent 1.0.6 patch broke a few things it was supposed to fix, but since that’s always the case with patches I wasn’t too worried. The day I see a patch implemented with absolutely NO follow-up hotfixing and “server maintenance,” I’m heading down to my bunker to wait out Armageddon. It already makes me nervous enough that Mythic almost always comes in under their Server-Up ETA. (Tangent — it makes me wonder why nobody else, ever, seems to have figured out that giving a 4 hour ETA when you think your stuff will take 2 hours is only sensible. SOE could learn a thing or 12 from that.)
Hot on the heels of 1.0.6, Mythic have released details of the much-awaited 1.1 patch. They’re long, and I think I’m only allowed one RSS-reader exploding post per week, so I won’t quote them here, especially since they’re not actually live yet and things may change between now and the rollout to live.
Aside from silly little things like working better, trio-PQs, gold bag reviews, contribution reviews, and a general cornucopia of tasty improvements, here’s what jumped out at me:
Guild heraldry settings and choosing to hide your helm or cloak will now save upon zoning or re-logging.
And choirs of angels sang. Now, one thing I never say (I think) is “Why the fart haven’t they fixed this already, it should be eeeeasy!” because what seems easy to fix usually turns out to be a major bitch, and what seems really convoluted can be a matter of moments to sort out. Besides, I’m no code-monkey, I have no idea how easy something may or may not be, and I’m not dealing with millions of lines of code. Tell me something is easy if you could do it yourself and kave 100% accurate knowledge of what’s involved. Otherwise, stfu with the “it’s easy” crap. Uh, yeah, tangent off.
Anyway, the cloak/helm thing was apparently in the “it’s a bitch” category so, if this fix works, I will be very, very grateful. Like I said, it’s the little things, and that was one of the major little things — to the extent that I’d actually considered taking both helm and cloak off, but even I am not quite that distanced from my characters’ material, stat-enhancing possessions.
They’re putting in fixes for a number of other niggles I had, like time-stamping turning itself off every time I zoned or logged, bringing back guild notes (yeeha! let’s hope they don’t break the game this time around!), flashing chat tabs, and shorter game-exit times to desktop.
I’m so full of anticipatory patchy goodness I don’t think I’ll need to eat for a week.
Now, if I could figure out how to have a poll and text in one of these posts, I’d start a Patch Day Pool. My guess is December 18th, long enough to test it a little but short enough to bring out the new classes AND catch the Christmas playtime. What’s your guess? There may be a prize… or there may not.
The little things
The Spousal Unit is playing WAR a few feet away while I do my usual morning round of news, blogs, forums and other internetty goodness. I’m not watching the action over on his monitor, but I can hear all the sounds. He’s in the High Elf starter area and every few minutes I hear a constipatory “Hrrrnnnnggh!” as someone hits Flee so they can run that tiny bit faster for a few seconds.
Aside from the amusing nature of the sound effect itself (which isn’t quite so amusing after the 85th rendition), it points to something that’s been bothering me about MMOs for quite some time now. When did tiny, paper-cut like irritations become a substitute for immersion? Running slowly doesn’t make the world bigger, it just. Really. Pisses. Me. Off.
Unreasonably so, maybe, and I’ll cop to that. It’s not that I want to be able to teleport everywhere — what I want is, simply, to run at a decent speed when I’m getting about in the world. I don’t mean a realistic speed, because my WAR chars jog a damn sight faster and for much, much longer than I ever will; I do mean a speed that won’t make me want to snore when I’m trudging, for the 18th time, from Oobygooby’s Camp in northern Ostland to Yabbadabba’s Camp in southern Ostland. It’s slow. It adds nothing to my gaming experience. Did I mention, it’s slow?
I spent a lot of time in Asheron’s Call watching my character run from A to B, especially before housing came in along with the housing portal sets that suddenly shrank the world to a fraction of its previous size. Sometimes I’d run from A to B after those portals came in, just because it was fun to slam across the (seamless, zone-free) landscape like a speeding sling-bullet. I spent points on my Run skill well beyond what was necessary, just for the fun of running like the wind; it added a certain spice to the frequent dial-up connection losses, too — I never knew quite where I’d have run to by the time the game realised the connection had dropped and logged my character out.
Now, I’m not asking for Asheron’s Call run speeds (though hey, if you want to give them to me along with a large, seamless(ish) world, I won’t check the horse’s teeth), but I’d like something a little faster than WAR’s speeds. EQ2 wasn’t stellar, but I didn’t feel constantly stuck in treacle, and there were plenty of run buffs that made life a little easier — though to be honest my memory may be flawed, since the character I played most there was a Dirge and they’s fast. I’m not asking for insta-ports from any location to any other location, because that really *would* change the fundamental nature of the MMOs I play (though it might be interesting if it were integrated from the start — what would we do with all the time we save from not having to hoof it around the map?!).
I’ll come to the point. When a game makes a particular activity a staple of its gamers’ experience, that activity should not be tedious in the extreme. We are way, waaaay past the point at which “meaningful travel” means rolling for random encounters every 6 game-hours of travel. If the WAR designers genuinely thought people would enjoy lumbering around as slowly as they do, they need to be smacked with a clue-by-four; what I suspect, however, is that they took the mounted speed (which isn’t much to write home about either, by the way) and derived the run speed from that. “If we make them crawl across the map until 20, think how grateful they’ll be when they get to move a little faster! And besides, won’t the world just feel so huge and lush and marvellous because they have to spend hours getting around in it?”
I’m not grateful. It’s not a seamless world, and having loads of time in which to get irritated at how slowly I’m moving only makes the world’s flaws more evident instead of less. (Zones puzzled together like a hopscotch game and not a world, for one.) Sure, it’s a minor irritation, but it’s repeated every single time I play, and for a fair proportion of that time I spend “playing”. Like a paper-cut that’s constantly redelivered, just to make sure I don’t forget about it.
It’s also one of the reasons I log in, think about all the running I’ll have to do, and log out again. There are other minor niggles I have with WAR, but since I don’t experience them every single time I play and/or for very long, I forget about them in between and they don’t have a chance to fester like some of the others do. Client quirks (what I see isn’t what other people see) and run speed are festering with me. Others probably have other triggers, but that doesn’t matter, since the end result tends to be the same.
Designers need to start paying attention to minor irritations when they pile up, and most especially when they become an intentional part of the design. That’s defensive, time-sink style design, and it doesn’t work in the long run — certainly not on me. Not anymore.
As a post-script — if you’re going to comment about how I want easy mode, don’t bother. That’s not what this is about.
HM out, career updates in
For those who can’t access the Herald and original source of the patch notes. These are long-ass notes, so get comfortable! I’ve been looking forward to this.
(Edited with additional info in blue in the RvR section.) Continue reading
Belated Metal
But better late than never. I have come to the Heavy Metal event almost at its end — I’m guessing it’ll be over in the next few days — but what I’ve seen of it has been fun, and has made it fun to be back in WAR.
Note to self: don’t do ORvR while on painkillers. I’m not the sharpest tack in the PvP box at the best of times, but yesterday I let a poor Witch Hunter die like a dog in the road 20′ behind me while I ran on, obliviously ignoring chat. Crow pie followed. Thank you Sir may I have another! (I did — they killed me next, of course, since I was standing there like a KillMe flavour lemon in the middle of the road.)
The Witch Hunter was surprisingly gracious about it, considering.
And Reikland Factory scenario is fun, I think. It’s hard to tell — it takes me a half dozen or so runs through a scenario before I have a clue what’s going on, and RF is kinda laggy for me, so it’s difficult to rubberneck AND figure out what partridge I’m supposed to pluck out of what pie tree in what location AND kill the bad guys AND, you know, if there’s time, take the flags and win the scenario. Not to mention that it hasn’t popped that often for me — I’m playing a T2 character, which helps, but my playtime has been unintentionally off-peak lately, which doesn’t. I have a few tasks left to go, but I did get my spiffy Heavy Metal cloak. I’m wondering, in fact, whether I won’t simply run a few other characters through the non-scenario tasks just to see if I can get their cloaks. Nice looking, especially when normal cloaks are still broken.
And now the neat segue to what still really, REALLY irks me about WAR. I think I can probably encapsulate it thus, in the age-old, many-games-company-uttered line: “Client issues? What client issues? The client has no issues.” Inevitably followed a few months later by “Oh, those client issues. Yeah, we’ll look into them, someday. Maybe.”
One, the memory leak. Oh yeah, there is one. Running WAR + Firefox is funny, for a very short while.
Two, the fact that when I turn off my cloak and helm on MY client, those changes are not reflected on anyone else’s client. I know that since the spousal unit’s desk is right next to mine, so it’s not hard to check. So even though I go to all the trouble to turn off the fugly elf helm and the fugly white (which shouldn’t be white, but it’s broken) cloak, it only works ON MY OWN CLIENT. What, exactly, is the point of that? Oh, and of course it only works if I don’t zone anywhere, either. Pfft. Two (b), I also really don’t like that it takes forever to log in and out, and forever squared to quit the client. What’s up with that, anyway?
Three, performance, especially in RvR, but apparently that’s going to be looked into.
Four — there was a four, but I don’t remember what it was now, so we’ll Holy Hand Grenade it and pretend we never got this high.
For all its issues though, Warhammer is a fun game. The issues I have with it are irritating over time, and I may need sanity breaks so I don’t start to hate the game when what bothers me is really client stuff for the most part; but I’m also relatively confident those issues will be addressed.
Now, if only they’d move up the career tweaks. It was nice doing a little more damage with my SW on the test server, and coming back to the creaky PVE with Ysharros… naaah. I’m playing my Warrior Priest instead, since there isn’t anything much in PvE they can’t handle.