Killed in a smiling accident.

The default dwarf mount is the gyrocopter, a bizarre half helicopter, half microlight steampunk affair which is nevertheless only able to move along at ground level, with the ensconced dwarf’s feet dangling a few inches above the world as they burble and clank along.

In terms of the game world, gyrocopters are actually capable of full flight, as evidenced by the travel system between zones, where characters are strapped into one of these unconventional contraptions and the player is then subjected to a short cut scene of said character launching off into the distance, an undignified affair for any robe wearers (which is a good three quarters of all Order classes) it must be said, as they gyrate overhead, legs akimbo, underpants on show for all the world below to see.

However, it would be slightly biased towards the diminutive race of hearty eccentro-engineers if their mounts could launch them across maps in all three dimensions of space, so they are restricted in the game to only being allowed to hover a few inches off the ground, and one has to wonder why the designers didn’t just remove the main rotor and stick some wheels on the thing instead. Still, that’s the least of anyone’s concerns, because as you ‘fly’ around Altdorf you very quickly come to realise that, as such a short race, hovering a few inches off the ground for a dwarf means that the main rotor of the gyrocopter is perfectly placed at throat height for the somewhat taller races of elf and man…

I can only imagine the bloody carnage that I leave in my wake as I barrel around the city streets at break-neck speeds; peasants, nobles and merchants alike all have to leap out of the way of my thrumming and grinding decapitating mechanical monstrosity as it hurtles past in a cloud of smoke and churned-up leaf litter. All those poor children forced to live on the streets because their parents were mown down by a dwarf trying to get to the ale house before it closed, while they themselves were spared due to their short stature. Not to mention the number of cats that have been sucked-up into the rotor and flung out into the harbour or diced into skaven feed, or had their tails caught up in the gearing mechanism and then been flung out of the exhaust pipe like some sort of feline cannon shot. Many a dog has been seen scampering down the street, tongue lolling out, barking after a gyrocopter, only to be found later missing an eye and a leg and howling from the roof of a town house where it has been stuck for several hours.

There’s a whole section in the slums of Altdorf that is a crumbled ruin which burns day and night, it used to be one of the more affluent areas of the city. Until the gyrocopters came.

Ever wondered why you never see children with skipping ropes in the streets of Altdorf? After the Great Gyrocopter Garrotting of 2508, skipping ropes were banned in all major public areas.

It’s fun to be a dwarf.

A picture is worth a thousand words; that well known saying made famous at the battle of Bordygaim where the Puritan Scrabbliers faced off against the Royalist Pictionariheads is as true today as it was back then, when men fought tooth and nail to spell flanking on a triple word score whilst their enemy desperately tried to draw a convincing image of a pincer movement

“What the hell is that supposed to be?!”

“Damnit, man, it’s a crab! See?! And that’s its pincer!”

“Look, just underlining the drawing ten times doesn’t make it any bloody clearer you… grahghhhh, ‘bayonet’… in a single play… on a double word score. Tell Mary… that I love her… urk”

“You love her what? ”

“No, no, tell her that ‘I love her’. Full stop. Then ‘urk’, as in the sound of my death throe”.

“Oh. No wonder we always lose these battles”.

Don’t know what that was all about, sorry. So yes, picture, thousand words, the worthiness thereof; as such a picture of some words must be worth a lot in word currency! So here is one:

.

So what does it mean? Because in all its thousand word descriptiveness, it may still not be clear. Allow me to elucidate.

A small band of valiant guild members had banded together in order (Meh! Order! Because we play on the side of Ord… never mind) to participate in a few scenarios for the evening. In this instance (Meh! Instance! Because it’s an ins… never mind), we were playing Phoenix Gate, a capture the flag affair, with the forces of Order and Destruction locked together in a combat spiral of death and carnage as they desperately try to grab the opposition’s flag and run it back to their own flag. And then touch them together. I can only assume that it’s some sort of bizarre pseudo-sexual ritual, a deflowering of the enemy’s flag-based chastity. Yes folks, as we all know, ‘touching flags’ is an even more devastating war crime than slaughtering village stores, pillaging innocent villagers and molesting their livestock; at least that’s the way it’s done here at kiasa.org, because we like to mix things up a bit: it keeps the enemy on their toes, and gives them something to talk about on those long dark nights as they try to console their cattle.

It was a close battle, the forces of Order had made a quick dash and grab of the enemy’s flag, and they had done likewise, and as is often the way in these battles it seemed as though never the twain would meet, as a few defenders hung around with the flag carrier and the rest of the forces slugged it out in one war camp or the other or somewhere in-between. However, your intrepid reporter, clad in the traditional combat correspondent’s outfit of full plate armour and a large two-handed axe, made his way into the enemy camp and, without bothering to fight, spent time being pummelled by the enemy as he scouted around the place in order to ascertain where the dastardly Khun (a portmanteau of Khainites and Hun, although it does come but a nice cup of Earl Grey away from being an even better description) had hidden their flag carrier. As you can see from the screenshot, I found the fellow, and snuck around the back of the hill he was hiding upon, crept up to him and attacked! Alas, he had company hidden in the nearby trees who I hadn’t spotted, and I was rapidly sent back to the makeshift hospital tent in our own war camp.

I was not finished, however. For I am dwarf. Hear me roar! A quick patch-up by the doctors and I was back at the enemy camp, but this time I had a plan. A plan that involved more than charging in and flailing around with my axe. A plan so cunning that you could put a robe on it and call it a wizard. Ironbreakers have an infamous ability called “Away With Ye!”, it’s a massive knock-back on a fairly long cool-down which costs thirty Grudge. For those who don’t know, Ironbreakers principally build Grudge by being hit, or their Oath Friend (someone who they’ve chosen to protect) being hit. There are other methods for generating Grudge, but that’s the basic one, it’s very similar to a Warrior’s Rage in World of Warcraft. So being fresh back to the enemy’s war camp, I was also fresh out of Grudge, and not wanting to alert the enemy to my presence, I needed a way to build Grudge stealthily. Here’s where the joy of the Oath Friend comes in, because I can select an Order player who is some distance away, say, a tough tank in the middle of combat with the enemy, and as they are hit while fighting, I get to build Grudge.

So suitable Oath Friend selected, I again snuck around the back of the enemy hill and made my way to the top, checked my Grudge was now high enough to power “Away With Ye!” and charged the enemy’s flag carrier. The first mistake he’d made was in standing on the edge of the hill and watching the battle that raged below between the bulk of the Destruction and Order forces. The second mistake he’d made was in thinking that the dwarf charging towards him was going to fall for the old “friends hiding in the trees” trick again.

The third mistake he made was in not realising that the dwarf had rotated his weapon in his hands such that it was the big, flat face of the axe that was facing towards him, and not the edge of the blade.

As he turned to face me with that mocking look on his face, and his friends again dashed out from their hiding places amongst the trees, I swung my axe for all I was worth and hollered “Away With Ye!” The flat face of the axe smote him full-bore in the chest and with my momentum behind the swing I flung him in the most mathematically beautiful parabola ever seen by man, elf or dwarf. He arced through the air with all the grace of stone from a trebuchet and landed smack-bang in the middle of the forces of Order.

Suffice it to say, he wasn’t looking smug for very long after that, or at least it was hard to tell, what with the various parts of his anatomy being spread out over such a large area.

Order promptly capped the flag and were ultimately victorious. And if I never win another scenario again I’ll die a happy dwarf, because I’ll always, always have that moment, the split second after launch, when the enemy realised that I wasn’t trying to defeat him myself, I was, like any good Ironbreaker, merely there to enable my team to do so, by any means necessary.

I am dwarf. Hear me roar!

Progress in Warhammer Online continues apace, the game is certainly fairly stable as far as MMOs go, and free enough from coarseness that one can play quite happily without feeling the need to write a stern forum post explaining just how much of an insult the game is to your family, and that the developers might as well come around to your house, poo in the middle of your lounge and attempt to sexually molest your cat, because it would be less offensive to you than trying to play their game. Believe me, such posts have been written in the past and will be written again in the future; I did not write them, but I have witnessed them in all their glory, and like a drunken hobo performing a striptease on the buffet table at a Michelin-starred restaurant, you can feel the awkward silence and embarrassed tension building to a crescendo, even in such a wasteland of emotional expression as a text-based forum.

Of all the minor inevitable niggles that are prominent in my day-to-day gaming, there is one that particularly grates with me. Its importance in the grand scheme of things is so minute that it wouldn’t bother me at all, except for the fact that it exists, and in existing it should not be, because how on earth do you implement such a minor vanity thing and then not have it work? The mind boggles.

“Oh but my dear, dear, dear, dear, dear Lord Melmoth”, I hear you cry, “with it being such a minor vanity item the developers obviously had more important things to fix before release”. A fair point, to which I would feel compelled to respond “But my right honourable, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely darlings, why put the thing in at all when it simply doesn’t work, why not just leave it out?”. And I imagine you would then say “Oh Melmoth, run away with me and let us find a small quiet village in the highlands where we can settle down, start a family together, grow alfalfa and raise rabbits”. Maybe.

A slight derailing of the thought train there. Um… niggles! Right. So this niggle is quite simple, doesn’t affect anything important in the game unless you’re me, in which case it’s more important than working out whether using blocks of cheese as dipping items for a cheese fondue is considered bad form. Simply put: turning the display of your helmet on and off doesn’t work.

No wait, come back, this is important! We’ll do the cheese fondue thing next, I promise!

Look, it may just be me (no ‘may’ about it — Ed.), but why put something like this in to the game when it’s fundamentally broken? Yes, you can turn the display of your helmet off - this is important for me because I find the bald spot on my dwarf to be an excellent reflective surface off of which I can bounce sunlight into the eyes of my foes - but it is reset, well, in every situation imaginable. Going into a scenario? Helmet resets and is displaying again once you’ve entered. Coming out of a scenario? Helmet resets. Going into an instanced building? Reset. Coming out the building. Reset. Standing around scratching your bum? Reset. Setting your helmet to not be displayed? Reset.

Ok, probably not the last one, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s not the fact that it’s broken, so much, as the fact that someone went to all the trouble of writing the code to get this to do something close to what it was meant to do, and then, what? I mean, they must have seen that the state reverts between world instances, was that really such a terribly time-constrained problem to solve considering they’d had the time to invest in implementing the basic feature in the first place?

“Well Stan, I’ve stuck in the code to turn off the display of helmets, but it doesn’t work in any but the most specific and useless cases, unfortunately they keep re-appearing.”

“Great! Call it a feature! We’ll call them Magic Appearing Helmets. Of Greatness. Plus One. In fact, get marketing to stick it in as a unique item for the Collector’s Edition.”

“Uh, but it’ll happen for everyone.”

“No problem, we’ll just say that we’ve decided to be generous and give magic hats to all. The peasants will love us!”

“The CEO said we weren’t to call them peasants any more, Stan.”

“Oh ok, the plebs.”

“No.”

“Peons?”

“NO.”

“Skinner box rats with a line of credit?”

“Jesus, Stan, I’m out of here.”

“What about the magic helmets?”

“Forget it. I think I’ll go and half-implement the mail box system or something”.

As per my previous post on the lost classes of Warhammer, my spy at Mythic has given me an exclusive low-down on some of the factional pairings that were considered for the game but removed after early trials:

My Little Pony vs Carebears: In an unexpected twist the fighting was exceptionally vicious between the two factions; after both sides were accused of numerous war crimes including torture of civilians and mass extermination of prisoners of war an amendment was made to the Geneva Conventions to prevent the two groups from ever bearing arms again.

Coffee Drinkers vs Drunks: The coffee drinkers complained that the targeting system was rubbish because it was always shaking all over the place, and the drunks complained that the coffee drinker always outnumbered them by six to one, even in a one-on-one fight.

Bloggers vs Press: The battle never really got off the ground because the bloggers refused to accept the blatantly obvious fact that they were a separate faction.

Glamour Models vs Teenage Schoolboys: The glamour models complained that since their tank class - the Kleenexer - had been removed due to time constraints, they had no defence against the ranged bombardment of the schoolboys. The developers agreed that the whole thing was a real mess. The schoolboys were apparently too tired to comment.

Goth vs Grunge: A pairing which accurately reflected the social impact of war, but was so depressing that the servers kept trying to throw themselves out of the rack.

Fallout 2 Fanboys vs Planscape Torment Fanboys: In the consideration of the all time greatest ever game of all time ever, of all time, there can be only war. Unfortunately keeping the war inside the game proved utterly unenforceable. Several real life fatalities caused the developers to reconsider, although normal people everywhere urged them to continue their excellent work in the name of Darwin.

Transvestites vs Ladyboys: Far too much willy waving and not enough fighting.

Snails vs Sloths: Nobody knows whether this one would work, because as far as anyone can tell the two sides are still trying to mobilise their respective armies.

Marmite lovers vs Marmite haters: Never really got started, because who doesn’t love Marmite? Nobody of consequence, that’s who, because it’s bloody delicious. Want to fight about it? Wait, maybe this one could work.

Erasers vs Pencils: Totally unbalanced, with the erasers regularly wiping out the pencils.

Catching up on a bit of a feed backlog, I came across an interesting piece from Spinks on Book of Grudges: “Sexism and Swordmasters”. Making a mental note to wander over and post a stiumulating and intellectual comment (or possibly just to shout “bloke in a dress!” a la Eddie Izzard), I carried on down the feeds to Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Sunday Papers roundup, which linked off to another piece touching on robe-wearing tanks, “MetaBalance or ‘The Cool Factor’”, and there’s a comment there from Harvey Smith linking back to a talk of his on game avatars. Slightly linktastic I know, but all Quite Interesting, honestly. Go and read them. GO ON! You may drink your weak lemon drink as you read, or save it for later. I shall drink mine now.

Stimulating and intellectual commentary is rendered somewhat void by that lot, I’m still digesting the multi-layered construct of in-game identity even without getting into gender security, so I’ll just ramble a bit about WAR instead.

Destruction certainly don’t lack for Chosen and Black Orcs, but Order don’t seem critically short of tanks, on my server at least. Nordenwatch could be a nightmare for the Empire at low levels due to a combination of less movement between racial areas in Tier 1 and limited power availability; standard procedure was for your group of 8 Bright Wizards, 3 Witch Hunters and a Warrior Priest to seize the first objective, run towards the fortress, see a wave of Chosen and Marauders pouring up the hill backed up by a couple of Zealots and a Magus, cast your one DoT and start on a fireball, die horribly, repeat. By Tier 2, though, with a slightly wider range of abilities including shackles and a decent mix of races showing up in scenarios I’ve been winning more than losing, on one occasion feeling slightly sorry for the lone Zealot trying to keep 8 tanks and a couple of DPS classes alive… “Too many tanks will cause you scenario problems, just as sure as none at all”, as I think Oscar Wilde said on his posthumously released album.

I also got to wondering if the Big Scaryness of the Destruction tanks might actually work against them on occasion. With my extensive PvP training I’ve evolved a highly strategic and incredibly complex targeting mechanism, a closely guarded trade secret that depends on the health percentages of all participants in the combat, their relative positions, timing on global cooldowns, phase of the moon and whether the day has a “y” in its name, but which can very generally be summed up as: “Not the tank, NOT THE TANK!” It needs repeating at higher volume, for just as in Team Fortress 2 your first instinct is to shoot the huge bloke with the really big gun when you should actually be taking out the medic standing behind him, so when a socking great Orc or spiky Chaos chap is pelting towards you it needs a bit of discipline to ignore him and go for the healers. Once you’ve got over the initial panic of “AAAAAHHHH, get ‘im, hit him with a broom, ruffle his hair up, hit him with a bucket, AAAAHHHHH”, though, the contrast between the Destruction tanks and their other classes does make picking targets quite easy. A quick Order Guide To Attacking Stuff That Isn’t A Tank:
1) Greenskins. The big one is the tank, kill the little ones first. Really kill anything with a staff who shoots green beams.
2) Dark Elves. No tanks here. Kill them all, Khaine will know his own. If they’re not wearing clothes and standing next to you (or you can’t see them), they’re melee DPS. If they’re not wearing clothes and standing far away, they’re ranged DPS. If they’re wearing something that covers more skin than two flannels and some dental floss, they’re a healer. (For any Strictly Come Dancing fans, the healers are dressed for ballroom, DPS for latin. Apparently. I wouldn’t know myself.) Watch out for sneaky healers who’ve taken their clothes off to masquerade as DPS.
3) Chaos. Big blokes with big swords or shields are tanks. Ignore them. About the only class on the Destruction side you might get confused for tanks in a mass ruck are Chaos melee DPS, but look out for the weird arms. Ranged DPS, the standing-on-a-floating-disc business is a dead giveaway, which by process of elimination leaves healers as the weird looking ones who aren’t on a floating disc and not running towards you going “GRRR I’M QUITE CROSS AND CHAOTIC”.

So there we go, all very easy. For Destruction, I guess it isn’t quite so straightforward; it’s not rocket surgery or anything, but the three Dwarf classes are at least the same height rather than Ironbreakers drawing extra attention to themselves by strapping on a pair of stilts, and non-Shadow Warrior Elves do look a bit similar in their robes (unless they’ve taken their clothes off to try and blend in with the Dark Elves). The Empire have The One With The Sword And Gun And Hat With A Buckle On It, The Fiery One On Fire and The Other One With The Hammer, but as none of them are tanks anyway it doesn’t matter so much.

For clan Melmoth this past weekend was spent away visiting with relatives, so very little WAR happened, unless you take into consideration Melmoth facing off against his two younger brothers as to who gets the last sugared doughnut to go with their coffee at breakfast, in which case World War 3 happened. All in a loving siblingy way, you understand; although I’m still picking bits of doughnut out of my ear even as I write this.

It brought to mind (the ‘not being able to play WAR this weekend’, that is, not the ‘doughnut in the ear’), however, an element of the forthcoming Issue 13 of City of Spandex. I’m now using “City of Spandex”, because I’m tired of writing “City of Heroes and, possibly or, Villains. Maybe one, or the other, or both”. Here’s what they have to say in the pre-release notes:

Levelling Pact
A new innovation to MMOs, this system allows you and a friend to create new characters and have your XP permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your friend plays ten times more often than you do! It’s sort of like ‘Extreme Sidekicking.’

It’s a great idea on first examination because it would have been perfect for the situation that occurred this weekend, with myself away and therefore not playing at all, Zoso could have continued levelling away in Warhammer Online like a mad thing and at the same time my character would have kept up, such that when I came back late on Sunday evening I would have found myself a level or two higher, but importantly still within range of Zoso’s character in order to carry on questing together.

However, on closer inspection it might not be all that it’s cracked up to be; don’t get me wrong, I think it will work fantastically well for City of Spandex, but that’s because the game is well established and lends itself to this sort of system. With respect to having this system in another game such as WAR or WoW, there are a couple of issues that I can see from a first glance:

• Missed content: This can be a big or small issue depending on a few of the player’s circumstances. If it’s the player’s first character, and if the game is very much about the journey rather than the destination, then having a friend increase your character’s level multiple times while you are away from the game would force you to miss out on the joy of questing and exploring the content. In WoW, for example, you could potentially miss out on a whole zone if your friend was a bit of a levelling machine. You could leave your character one evening somewhere in Westfall and come back a few days later to find yourself ready to start questing in Lakeshire, and hence missing out on all the fantastic quests in and around Duskwood (one of my favourite locations in WoW). Having said that, if we wished to look on the bright side, you could log out one evening in Booty Bay, and come back a few weeks later to find that your friend has levelled you past all the content in Stranglethorn Vale, although if you did that on purpose you’d probably find yourself less one friend at the end of it too.
• Services: Probably the biggest downside to the whole thing, this would effectively enable a ‘no holds barred’ service industry around the power-levelling of characters if ported to a game such as World of Warcraft. Such services already exist of course, but the Levelling Pact would essentially streamline the system, removing a lot of the risk of giving some strange fellow half way across the world the username and password to your game account. Unlike City of Spandex, there is a very strong end-game culture to World of Warcraft, and a lot of the levelling is now seen as an obstacle to getting there. In City of Spandex, the game seems to be much more about creating characters and levelling them with friends, and therefore abuse of a buddy system such as the one that is to be introduced in issue thirteen will, in all likelihood, be fairly limited. And delight of delights, as with the selling of gold, to get your service into the collective consciousness of the player base you have to advertise, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is through the medium of spam, more power-levelling services mean more spam. Spam, spam and spam. Spam, eggs, spam, spam, spam, spam and spam.

It’s a shame because as a concept it’s brilliant, it would have solved the problem that I had this weekend perfectly, but it opens itself perhaps a little too much to abuse, unless the chaps at NCSoft have come up with some particularly genius way to prevent such abuse, rather than simply relying on the fact that the player base in City of Spandex is now suitably mature (as in ‘length of time played’, not as in ‘has forums free from trolls and frothing, ranting elitist gits’) and therefore dedicated enough that any abuse is not going to affect NCSoft’s bottom line. This is, incidentally, probably the best bottom line of all MMOs due to it being covered in figure-hugging spandex.

All of the above is, alas, hypothetical, because I am actually still in the insidious grip of altitus with respect to Warhammer Online, and nowhere near Zoso’s character in level at the moment. I think actually, for me, MMOs are about rolling alts rather than actually playing the game. Every player has something that they get out of an MMO, for the Power-levellers it’s all about getting to the level cap faster than anyone else; for the Completionistas it’s about fleshing out their character to the fullest by getting every unlock and award that they possibly can; the Socialisers just want to spend time adventuring with other people, making new friends and experiencing new communities; the Explorers want to find everything the virtual world has to offer, no matter how far out of the way they have to travel. And then there’re those people who roll new characters after getting half way to the level cap because beard option A actually looks so much better than beard option B. We shall call them the Idiots, because although I say ‘them’ it is, in all probability, the singleton subset of MMO players whose sole element is me.

A couple of cogitations, ruminations and general tips that have forced their way into my brain from playing Warhammer Online and are now stuck there, unwanted, but are nevertheless a potentially useful lesson for the unwary. Like a door-to-door salesman who you’ve nailed to the front of your porch.

Thought for the day:
Every class comes equipped to perform their role in PvE and PvP straight out of the box except the tanks. At least, this is my experience with the dwarf Ironbreaker, because they don’t get their taunt until level seven. Admittedly they get Grudging Blow at level one, which is supposed to make monsters hate the Ironbreaker more, but in my experience it is not effective enough to hold aggro from, say, the healing aggro of a Runepriest. It’s not a huge issue because those first seven levels fly past like a greased pig out of a howitzer, but I find it a curious design decision, especially when the first public quest can be undertaken well before level seven, and has a final boss who really needs to be tanked unless you happen to have some A-grade kiters around at the time. I understand that Oath Friend is a core mechanic of the class, but it is not terribly useful in the early levels; it helps to build extra grudge but that’s not hard to do anyway in most early level fights, and its second benefit, where some of your skills help your Oath Friend as well, is not terribly useful because you have so few skills that would actually help them. Personally, therefore, I think it would have been more useful to have Taunt from first level, and then drop Oath Friend in at level seven or eight when you start to build a really useful set of skills that compliment it. It’s not a game breaker in any way, shape or form, but I just find it funny to be running around the Chapter One public quest, watching the healers heal and DPSers doing whatever it is that they do, whilst I am unable to tank.

Tips of the Day:
You can shift-right-click on bodies to loot them and it will automatically Loot All, so you don’t have to keep clicking on that annoying button.

Runepriests will often give you a buff when you’re in their group; it’s not just a buff though: the icon for it can be clicked to trigger an effect! Mouse-over the icon to see what effect will be triggered, often they deal out a small amount of damage, but some will give you a modest heal or some other effect. Triggering the effect does not remove the buff, it just puts a sixty second cooldown timer on using the buff’s triggered effect again. This is one of my favourite mechanics in WAR, and I hope other MMOs pick up on it and incorporate it, because buffs just got a whole lot more, uh, buff. Seriously though, rather than just granting you a passive ability boost, these runes, in addition, give you extra abilities. And what do extra abilities mean? Flexibility and options! And maybe prizes.

Spinning your character around when you’re on the character selection screen makes them perform a stunned/dizzy/unnerving-panting-weirdness animation. It’s one of those dangerous Easter eggs in a game, which is kind of fun, but is more likely going to have your player base asking why, if you had time to code that in, didn’t you have time to fix the broken /special animation on their character, or the strange clipping between certain headpieces and hair, or the fact that Destruction are totally overpowered against Order in the early Empire/Chaos scenarios because Chaos has tanks/DPS/healers and Empire has DPS and hybrid healers only. You know, those other minor niggles.

If you have trouble with truncated, missing or delayed text in your chat windows, turn off timestamps if you happen to have turned them on. I like timestamps, they tell me how long it was since I missed someone asking me to join a group, or to heal them, or what have you; however, last time I checked, timestamps hideously broke the chat window. It might be fixed by now, but I haven’t gone back to check. Still, at least my character does a funny animation when I spin him around on the character select screen!

I guess I’m just an old DPSer at heart. After being a Blaster (ranged DPS) in City of Heroes and a Rogue (melee DPS) in World of Warcraft, I tried branching out with classes like a Captain (melee Buff/Healer/Tank/DPS/Pet/Coffee Maker/Floor Wax) in Lord of the Rings Online and a Conqueror (melee Tank(ish)/DPS/Buff/Egg Slicer) in Age of Conan, but they didn’t really click. Maybe they were too radical a departure; much as you should make the transition from accountancy to lion taming via easy steps, starting with, say, insurance, I did rather enjoy the Tempest of Set in Age of Conan, nominally a “Priest” class but really a lightning-packing ball of electrical death with a couple of heals you might like to use, if you remember them. I’ve also been enjoying playing a couple of Corruptors in City of Villains, Kinetics and Radiation, packing the same main attacks as a Blaster but with a variety of buffs, debuffs and heals as a secondary powerset instead of “yet more attacks just in case all those other attacks weren’t attack-y enough”.

“In times of trouble, go with what you know”, though, as tanks would randomly say in Scorched Earth (a really nifty old artillery-type game), so for Warhammer Online I decided to head back to the comfy old sofa of DF^HPS. Ranged or melee, though? With the RvR-centric nature of Warhammer, I thought about how similar situations worked in WoW. Back in day, after they introduced “honour” and rewards for PvP kills, but before battlegrounds, if you weren’t on a PvP server and wanted to boost your rank you’d head for Tarren Mill. There the Massed Pipes & Drums of Her Majesty’s Royal Alliance would line up in the vague area of a horde of the, er, Horde, and both sides would glare menacingly at each other, lofting an occasional arrow or spell at anyone foolish enough to step a bit too close, until a melee class snapped and went charging over the top, to be inevitably mown down by the machine gun of the Harrow fullback (or the combined spells, arrows and bullets of the other side). Stay far enough away, though, and you were safe as houses (or the titular elephant). As a stealthily sneaky type, the opportunity would occasionally present itself to creep around and pick off an incautious loner, but after one or two of those everybody would bunch up, making surprise attacks an exercise in insta-death (for the attacker, not their intended victim). If you got bored of the standoff, and could persuade one of your own mages or priests to wander around on their own like Penelope Pitstop shouting “hey-ulp, hey-ulp, poor l’il ol’ me is lost”, then when a Horde Rogue, unable to resist such a temptingly cloth-armoured morsel, attacked from stealth for an easy kill, you could turn the tables by leaping out and stunning them in a cunning reverse-gank. Course you had to be careful in case there was a second stealthed enemy Rogue waiting to pull off the double-reverse-gank, unless you in turn were accompanied by a Druid friend for the double-reverse-gank with cat-druid twist, though they in turn might have had an extra Druid… Anyway, generally it wasn’t a whole heap o’ fun for melee. Battlegrounds and small group action were much better; if the 40-a-side Alterac Valley battleground bogged down into a massed PvP ruck somewhere in the middle it would all go a bit Tarren Mill, but that seldom happened as the two sides rushed past each other for the NPC bosses. Having looked around at some of the Warhammer details massed general PvP looked a distinct possibility, which was a strong contributory factor in choosing a ranged DPS class, and setting fire to stuff is always good so Bright Wizard was a natural choice.

It’s still early days, but the choice has been vindicated so far. I’ve been doing fairly well in scenarios, not getting obliterated quite as quickly as I feared (though, in common with most Bright Wizards I suspect, occasional self-detonations don’t help on that score), and last night I got involved in my first major world RvR rumble. After a splendid bit of Corrupting with the League of Evil in CoV, I just popped in to WAR for ten minutes to fill the last smidgen of a chapter’s influence bar to claim a wizard’s staff (with a knob on the end), and after reporting back to the Rally Master I had a quick look at the map and noticed a couple of quest objectives in the vicinity, so while I was there… One was the usual “go scout this World RvR objective”, which in previous zones I’d fulfilled by legging it to the general vicinity of the objective hoping to avoid other players, regardless of who was controlling it, and running away again (particularly quickly if it was a bit red). Getting closer to this one, though, a terrifying wall of red players suddenly hove into view, and facing off against them, a similar sized group of Order. Looked like we’d gotten bored of Destruction usually holding the Ostland keeps, and saddled us up a posse. Signing up with an open warband, I took my place in the battle lines, and found Tarren Mill-esque fights work much better with a range of flaming doom to fling. With somewhere from 50-100 players involved lag started playing a part too, never cripplingly bad, but it would certainly have added to the frustrations of a melee class. Me, I just went with “if in doubt, mash ‘target closest’ then ‘fireball’ a lot”. Weight of numbers drove Destruction back, we claimed the objective, I got a good chunk of a renown rank and the quest done, not a bad night’s work!

One thing that Warhammer Online has managed to do, perhaps more successfully than others, is to make other people the content. This came to light recently when discussing the number of new arrivals in the guild and how the first ten levels or so are fairly fast in coming, but then things start to slow somewhat after that, such that it was highly likely that these newcomers would, in all likelihood, be able to catch-up with the current wave of existing members and in short order join with them on the battlefield. It’s a bit like a motorway traffic jam, where the faster traffic at the back catches up quite quickly with the slowed traffic at the front and everything concertinas up, only with less swearing, horn tooting and smashing of GPS units against the dashboard.

The point was that despite the motorway-congestion-based levelling curve we do have several levelling machines within the guild, the sort who seem to have strapped their arms, via a complex set of hinged rods and springs, to some Victorian clockwork contraption that ticks and whirrs away in the background, thrusting the mouse hand around and chik-chakking the fingers on the keyboard hand like a strange cross between a hyperactive spider and an H.R. Giger biomechanical mass, presumably allowing them to continue playing even as they sleep. They are the steampunk Terminators of the MMO world: they will not stop levelling ever. Or so it used to be. Now, however, several of these guild members are talking about rolling alts and trying new classes whilst they wait for the rest of the server to catch them up, because they’re finding very little to do at their current level. That’s not to say that there isn’t any content, that’s not the case at all, it’s just that what they want to do is fight in RvR; the game makes RvR so pervasive and easy to partake in that it becomes the focus of a player’s levelling experience, these speed levellers therefore want other players on their side to join with, and they want players on the other side to fight against, because it’s slowly becoming clear that, if done well, PvP is a far more compelling game-play experience than an AI-controlled PvE one can ever be.

Which is something EVE Online and its proponents have been trying to tell us for years.

General PvE and the more focussed public quests are fine, but what WAR is showing us is that PvP can also be fun, even for Carebears such as myself. Take, for example, a scenario run last night where Order were facing off against the forces of Destruction in the tier two scenario Stone Troll Crossing. I say ‘facing off’ but of course what I mean by that is ‘getting obliterated in the typical fashion of an undermanned force fighting against an overpopulated realm of hardcore PvPers’. Such is the way of Order, such is the way of the Alliance, such is the way of Good in the universe it seems. But let’s not get all melancholy and dwell on it as though we were an Eliot in the waste land, because our valiant underdogs pushed-on, hounding the enemy as best they could and at one point, in a brief moment of nugatory success, had the enemy fleeing before them, like foxes before the hunt, doggedly pushing them all the way back to their starting area.

It was a pyrrhic victory of course because we lost the match by some abysmal margin, but in our hearts we had won the greater battle, that being the self-imposed struggle against moral degradation and debasement at the hands of a superior force. We were the Spartans at Thermopylae; the Sikhs at Saragarhi; the Jacobites at Culloden.

Who knows, maybe one day we will be the English at Agincourt.

The fact of the matter is that being the underdog can be fun, oh for certain we don’t get to sit around bragging all day about how we own an entire server and could some of you pitiable peons please come and play Order on our server so we can unleash our fearsome skills on you, but when we do get a victory it feels like we earned it, that we fought tooth and nail for it and that it wasn’t some sort of boring statistical tick in the box, another soulless token victory by our superior force. Seeing that the game positively encourages you to get involved in the war effort with both renown and experience being rewarded for PvP, why wouldn’t you take the WAR supermarket’s special two-for-one offer? You’d be crazy not to, and at the low low price of a bit of a drubbing by the forces of Destruction every now and again. Bargain!

Other blogs have stated that public quests don’t work as well as people had originally thought, but I think they’re off target slightly: public quests do work, very well, they would be an absolute revolution in World of Warcraft for example. The reason that they’re not so popular in WAR is that the PvP scenarios and open RvR work even better. Why spend time grinding PvE mobs, and maybe experiencing the odd (albeit excellent) scripted event for a few items of gear in a public quest, when you can jump into PvP, face-off against real opponents who can produce more bizarre and unexpected tactics in one fight than the bastard offspring of IBM’s Deep Blue and a slot machine ever could, and earn yourself experience and renown to boot. And what does renown mean? Phat lewts!

Public quests were, alas, a major revolution set against the backdrop of a global war, and they inevitably and unfortunately became background noise to the main event.

So what we have is a game where the PvE content is the side order of coleslaw to the half pound cheeseburger of PvP, it’s nice to have something to dip into every now and again when the burger gets a little too much, but it’s nothing but a brief diversion on the path to chronic indigestion. Other players are the meaty main course in this game, and in the end isn’t that what massively multiplayer games should all be about?

Mmmmmm, meeeeeeeat.

With the complaints about server queue times building-up around the blogosphere, I’m left wondering what the problem is when every server that I can see has a low to medium Order population. Ah yes, that’s right, it’s because the majority of people are playing Destruction. Now considering the numerous petty and snide remarks that I’ve read about all the lesser MMO players rolling ‘pretty’ characters on the side of Order and it therefore being analogous to World of Warcraft’s Alliance, I think it time that those people take a look at the server populations again and perhaps readjust the saddle on those awfully high horses they ride, lest they fall off and are then lost in amongst the veritable ocean of Destruction players.

Destruction is the new Alliance.

The Chosen is the new Paladin.