Killed in a smiling accident.

I’m sure completing every stage of WAR’s Heavy Metal event was supposed to be tough. I can’t find the exact quote, so I’ll just apply standard journalistic integrity and roughly paraphrase what I think I probably remember reading somewhere (ooh, biting satire): it was along the lines of “only the most dedicated players will be able to unlock the new careers early”. After the Witching Night had turned out to be a bit of a grindfest to fill the influence bar up, that set the old alarm bells off and caused a shift in GRINDCON status to Bikini Speckled Rumba (moderate to heavy grind expected, keep doors and windows closed and fill a bathtub with machine tools). Turns out it was a false alarm, most likely I misremembered or misinterpreted the quote, either way it was a waste of machine tools and it’s going to take forever to get those oil stains off the bath, but more importantly the Heavy Metal event was a positive breeze. After the first seven days tasks were assigned on specific days, the final seven tasks were available to complete at any point over the last week; I cheekily zapped through a Tier 1 public quest again and did five PvE quests in pretty short order, then with another task being to rack up 15 kills in Open RvR I wandered off to Black Crag, where there were reports of the occasional minor skirmish. By which I mean there were a good three or four warbands per side charging around the place. I got a spot of good keep defence in, but after Destruction withdrew and we charged after them, to be met by an extra warband or two coming up to reinforce, the Lagfiends of Gorax VII reared their ugly heads and made fighting a bit tricky, granting warbands mystical invisibility and teleportation abilities. Still, I’d racked up the requisite kills by that time, and most of the other tasks involved the Reikland Factory scenario, which happily was popping up very frequently. Within three or four runs we’d eaten a sandwich, thrown gravy bombs and killed some chickens, which I understand is a reasonable approximation of what our American readers call “Thanksgiving”, and that was enough to secure the final influence reward in one evening, the chance to roll a Knight of the Blazing Sun early with the new 1.06 patch; I hadn’t even needed to complete all 14 tasks, only 12 being required to fill the bar, giving some leeway if you’d missed a previous day. All in all, very sane and reasonable requirements leaving plenty of time to pursue other Heavy Metal-related activities, like drumming through the Ozzfest stage of Guitar Hero: World Tour. All aboard!

There are rumblings in the MMOG-o-blog-o-sphere over the “contribution” system in Warhammer’s Public Quests and keep capture. I really don’t know what actually happens in the depths of the code; having run through pretty much all the public quests in a zone with a guild group before I can’t say I noticed everyone having the same contribution time after time, though I wasn’t really paying that much attention. Keep sieges, on the other hand, there does seem to be a weight of anecdotal evidence of people arriving just as keep lords are killed, or guarding postern gates or similar, and getting top five contribution scores, suggesting it’s either horribly broken or random. Is random a problem, though?

I think it’s a brilliant idea. As discussed previously, in an incentive scheme based on measuring performance “what you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want”; as widely observed, how can you put a numerical figure on the relative contributions of someone tanking the keep lord, someone guarding the doors to stop the enemy crashing the party, someone who’s had to go AFK, someone who’s really trying their best but is getting a 0.1fps lagfest and the keep lord doesn’t even turn up on their screen ’til it’s at 25% health? So instead have an illusory “incentive” scheme, everyone will play as best they can in an attempt to influence their score upwards, and the final result is all random anyway. Perfect!

Well, no, obviously it’s horribly flawed; apart from anything else, wherever numbers exist in an MMO, players will pick away until they expose the mechanics. The best case scenario is the numbers are laid bare, more likely there’ll be a period of half-developed theories and suggestions, violent argument, and those weird urban game myths that pop up (”if you re-map your abilities so you only push prime numbered hot-keys during a keep siege you’ll *definitely* get top contribution!!1!”) It’s also quite hard to disguise an entirely random system when the top-contributing loot winner pipes up with “LOL I was AFK the whole time!!1!”, and puts a bit of a crimp on the next siege when a massed force turns up, stands poised ready to launch the assault, then go AFK en masse as that’s the way to top the chart. If you’re totally open and stick the precise formula up on the web, though, whether it’s random or whether it’s an incredibly intricate formula involving the phase of the moon and average rainfall of the past three days in Swindon (if you arrived here via a Google search for “average rainfall of the past three days in Swindon”, I’m awfully sorry but you’re probably going to be very disappointed), you’re back to the problem of a system open to exploitation (if random, just standing near a quest/keep and naffing off for coffee) or manipulation, and players being angry that you’re screwing over tanks/healers/melee/DPS/everyone. Damned either way, as per usual. My solution: I think they should’ve shipped a set of USB scales in the box with a built-in feather of Ma’at, and when rewards are to be determined all eligible players place their souls on the device and upload the results. Simple! Never let it be said I don’t offer practical suggestions…

Here in Europe we’re just starting on Day 3 of the Heavy Metal event in WAR, and it’s going pretty well after getting over the initial disappointment of logging in to find it wasn’t really a massive Black Sabbath concert with an RvR lake of a mosh pit (turns out Ozzy’s really more of a WoW man. Though after watching the advert, I’m not entirely sure he’s fully aware of what WoW is. Or where he is. Or what year it is. No change there, then.) Still, there’s Guitar Hero World Tour for that which continues to be excellent, though after really looking forward to Love Me Two Times I promptly failed when it came up, those guitar trills are tricky! But anyway…

After a bit of a grindfest in the last event, I was slightly worried about what sort of tasks we might be faced with, but day 1: “take part in the new Reikland Factory scenario” was easy enough, the only obstacle being the length of time in a queue for it. I suspect something might not have quite been working as intended, as I’m sure both sides would have been signing up for it in numbers, but unfortunately a couple of guildmates never saw it pop at all over the course of an evening. Day 2, complete three stages of a public quest (any public quest) was also straightforward. Seems like a good idea to encourage people back into PQs, though I slightly went against the spirit of things as I didn’t have too much time by zapping back to Tier 1 and soloing a PQ there. From the list of forthcoming tasks over at Waaagh!, it doesn’t seem to get much more time consuming, either. Not that it really matters, as I’m not too fussed about starting a Knight a week early, so just two thirds of the tasks should be enough for the shiny cloak reward, but it doesn’t look like too much farming will be needed after all. I couldn’t miss the opportunity of getting a Bad News song in the title, though, all together now: “I’m a heavy metal farmer, I’ve got lots of heavy metal animals…” (Note to Activision/Harmonix: Bad News downloadable content, sure fire winner!)

Aren’t scenarios in Warhammer brilliant? Yes, I went there. I believe the correct response now is for you to say “oh you didn’t”, and then I say “don’t go getting all up in my face”, and then there’s a vague attempt at a fight involving some slapping and hair pulling, and then security get involved, so let’s just take that as given and presume we’ve moved on to the point of glowering at each other while being restrained by burly individuals.

Anyway. Yes. Scenarios. What with fake plastic rocking, rugby watching, comedy gigs and other more tiresome not-playing-WAR bits of Real Life going on, I haven’t had much time to be Bright Wizardly. In the odd half-hour here and there, though, I have been logging in, been *wanting* to log in, and why? If you said “scenarios”, well done, take a cookie. If you said “because of banjo-playing pigs in trees”, no cookie for you, honestly, the clue was in the first sentence. And post title.

They’re not perfect, of course. Individual scenarios can be awful depending on the respective team levels and compositions, and some of the maps and game types aren’t great (evenly matched teams frequently end up in a points-from-kills-only stalemate of a mass scrum). If scenarios were the only thing on offer in WAR it wouldn’t be much cop, just playing a few scenarios here and there is more akin to playing a few rounds of an online FPS (especially now so many FPSs have some persistent unlock type features), so if that’s all I was going to do, I might as well be playing an FPS. Nothing but scenarios, bad. However, UND THIS IST A BIG HOWEVER, I really don’t think heavily devaluing or removing scenarios, as suggested in many other places, would be good for WAR long term. The usual argument, grossly oversimplified, is that scenarios take people away from open world RvR, open world RvR is good, ergo scenarios are bad. My counter-argument is that open world RvR *can* certainly be very good, but can also be very bad, or very dull. As p0tsh0t points out (in an interesting post worthy of pondering more deeply sometime), there’s an imperial stackload of variables to deal with, and while we seem to be pretty lucky on our server in having a good number of players in Tier 4, roughly balanced between Order and Destruction, and fairly frequent RvR battles, there’s no guarantee that something will be happening at any given time, much less something I’ll be able to get to and actually participate in within half an hour (what is going on with zones like Dragonwake and Black Crag? Big zones, with irritating cliffs and plummeting drops such that if you’ve never been there before it’s a right faff just getting from a warcamp to a keep, so you fall off somewhere and die from the drop, and then come back at a camp, start running again from there, find a frikkin’ horde of level 39 mobs wandering around in the middle of the road that you can’t really avoid, and you can’t really kill ‘cos you’re level 32 which is fine for the RvR stuff once you’re bolstered but this is outside the lake, so you try and avoid them and the gitting things chase and kill you dumping you back at the camp and… anyway).

In half an hour, I can log in, hit the “queue all” button for scenarios, then have a crack at a quest or two, or sort out mail and the inventory, maybe do a spot of crafting, check out what’s on auction; a scenario pops up (usually Serpent’s bleedin’ Passage, but I gather they’re working that), play that, then repeat the process if I have more time, otherwise log out. This is a Good Thing. I’d love to be spending more time in game, doing a variety of activities, hooking up with the guild more (unfortunately I’m not getting the time for much past “Hello!” and “Goodbye!” in guild chat), tackling dungeons, taking keeps, but failing that at least scenarios give a quick hit of PvP, some XP and renown, even a bit of cash and loot, everything a growing Bright Wizard needs, and once I get some free time again I can get more involved in the rest of the game. Without scenarios I’d be far less inclined to fire up the client for those odd half hours, lose momentum, maybe be less inclined to log in at all.

WAR’s Witching Night event comes in two basic parts, PvP and PvE. Just to switch things around a bit, the PvP side is a Public Quest: tromp around a somewhat ill-defined bit of a nominated RvR zone in each tier, and kill 100 of Them before They kill 100 of You. The basic problem with this, as those with a keen grasp of maths may notice, is you can’t let Them kill You as much as You kill Them, and that leads to everyone being a bit cagey. It’s an excellent demonstration of why death penalties aren’t an unqualified good idea, the lack of them can make PvP meaningless, but the presence of them can make PvP utterly tedious. The side that’s outnumbered hang around at their warcamp, with siege weapons and heroes to back them up. The side that’s outnumbering them hang around just outside of siege weapon range exploring the communication possibilities of emotes, presumably hoping the other side really hate mimes:
Zoso walks against the wind
Zoso is trapped inside an invisible box
Then you wait and see who gets bored first.

Three times I’ve headed into the RvR/PQ zones. Once was great. The keep and battlefield objectives started out in Destruction hands, when I arrived Destruction players were outnumbered and sticking around their warcamp. A couple of Order warbands eschewed the hanging around and miming option and instead headed off for an objective and the keep. Destruction came out to play, objectives were attacked, defended, captured and recaptured, though almost no kills in the process actually counted for the PQ as they weren’t in the arbitrary PQ area. The final phase only really kicked off when a Destruction force had re-taken the brewery and were pursuing the former defenders when a second Order warband turned up from taking the keep, completing a rather beautiful pincer movement in the PQ area, Order finally ending up with their 100 kills to about 90-odd for Destruction. The only downside was that I wasn’t keeping a close eye on the scores, so when the count ticked up to 100 and Phase II began I didn’t instantly turn and run towards the Witching Lord. I’m not sure what killed me, Destruction players, or the boots and hooves of what had been the Order front line as they trampled me in the process of legging it to the Lord, either way I’d just about respawned back at the camp and was about to mount up when “Rolling for PQ loot…” appeared. Guess the Witching Lord lasted about as long as me, needless to say I wasn’t close enough to get any kill credit.

That was the good. The bad was another time, when Destruction were outside the Order warcamp in force, and everyone had a much higher boredom threshold; in the course of an hour the kill counts had risen to about 10 apiece as both sides glowered at each other, edged forwards a couple of steps, edged back a couple of steps, and waited for the other lot to attack. If there was any way to dig trenches, we’d've been set for a re-enactment of Ypres. In real time. Over four years. I emoted sitting down playing a mournful harmonica for a while, wrote a bit of poetry, then gave up and joined scenario queues.

As for the ugly, that was the third time, when Order had the edge in numbers again and Destruction had fallen back to their camp. This time around a few Order players weren’t going to wait them out or head off to another objective and kept trying to attack on their own, falling to siege weapons/hero NPCs/the massed pipes, drums and spells of the Destruction forces. Players in zone/warband chat tried to suggest that everyone backed away from the warcamp, some people did, some didn’t, the kill count kept ticking up, people in zone chat got more annoyed and capitalised, insults started flying, and as exciting as it was to stick around to see how many variations of “NO U STFU” exist, I buggered off with Destruction about 70-50 up. That’s the problem with open RvR in a nutshell: when it’s good, it’s very very good, when it’s bad, it’s ZOMGZ WTF R U DOING??/?

So: one of the goals of the Witching Night event is to kill 10 Witching Lords, and I believe they only spawn as Phase II of the RvR PQ. Time spent in RvR PQ zones: about five hours. Number of Lords killed: zero. Now, according to my mental calculations, that would require me to spend… um, let’s see… carry the 4… precisely “divide by zero error” hours to get the ten needed for the quest. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really got divide by zero error spare hours. Still, not to worry, there’s always the influence rewards, right? Like other public quests, there’s an influence bar to fill, and rewards along the way. Killing other players during the PQ nets you influence; I’m not sure exactly how much, by the time you divide it between a warband or three, if you manage to be involved in 50-odd kills over many hours of tedious stand-offs, you’ve netted yourself a good few hundred influence points. Rewards here we come, woo! Oh, apart from the minor issue that a few hundred influence points is but a tiny fraction of the influence bar.

Off to the PvE areas then. As well as the Witching Lords, there are a couple of other scary mob types, Crones and Spirits, sprinkled around PvE zones. Crones stand around a cauldron; after killing the Crones, interacting with the cauldron spawns a bunch of Spirits, then the whole lot respawns after a while. Spirits also turn up by themselves in a couple of other areas, and both Crones and Spirits are worth 100 influence points each. They’re also not very challenging, at least the ones I bumped into; I could slap a basic Bright Wizard DoT on to them then stand and auto attack, they’d die in a few seconds having barely scratched me. Trouble with this part of the event is that there really aren’t very many cauldrons around, every time I found one there were other people there. If they were Order, I’d try and group up; if they were Destruction, it was a race to tag mobs as they spawned. Either way, not great influence rewards, and lots of standing around waiting for cauldrons to respawned, so after racking up the requisite 25 Crones, I moved on to Plan C. A helpful forum post pointed out a bit of Talabecland where Spirits spawn, I wandered over and started mowing through them. These Spirits spawn in a haze of purple tendrils, and only hang around for a few seconds before vanishing again, so, as they can’t really hurt you, the only challenge is in spotting them, hurtling towards them (ideally avoiding non-Spirit mobs) frantically mashing an instant cast spell until they’re in range, then spinning around and looking for another one; if you can tag them with damage, they stick around until dead. I think three spawn at once, at least that’s as many as I ever managed to simultaneously tag, sometimes they’re conveniently close to each other, sometimes they’re spread too far apart to get more than one. It’s mildly entertaining for a while, and as nobody else was in the area doing the same thing the influence bar filled up at a fair old rate, I got enough for the first reward and headed back to Altdorf to cash in.

I thought that would be it for Witching Night, but then the event was extended, so the next day I popped back to the RvR zone, resulting in the standing around bore-fest detailed previously; then I thought “hmm, those cloak rewards look pretty nifty, I could always grind some more Spirits to fill the second part of the influence bar and get one”. I’ve got a bit of a problem, see, show me a progress bar with a reward, even a fairly inconsequential reward, I have a compulsion to make it go up, push that lever, get the food pellet… If something’s only available for a limited time, the compulsion is correspondingly greater, I’ve spent hours in City of Heroes grinding Christmas presents and Halloween costumes just for badges that have no effect on anything. So I stuck a podcast on, went back to Talabecland, spent another 45-odd minutes grinding out the Spirits while listening to the ever-splendid Mark Kermode, got enough influence for the cloak, and headed back to Altdorf again.

Yesterday… well. The final influence reward is just a mask. Purely cosmetic. It would look silly on a Bright Wizard, and replaces headgear that actually has useful stats so you wouldn’t want to wear it in combat anyway. But… there’s a bar to fill… it’s only available today… I couldn’t help it, back to Talabecland, killing spirits while half-watching television. About halfway through the final bar I was pretty fed up, but by that point as well as the usual “must get reward” compulsion, there’s an additional “if you give up now, you just wasted all that effort”, so I kept on going.

Now I’m in no position to have a go at Mythic for putting in a lengthy, entirely optional, influence grind, having stood around killing hundreds of Spirits for hours on end. It’d be like criticising an electric fence manufacturer after grabbing the wire and going “OW THAT HURTS!” Then grabbing it again. And again. And then getting a free toaster after grabbing it a couple of hundred times, when I didn’t even need a toaster (unless my existing toaster had been taken by an otter to an ice cream factory, which is hardly likely). The mere fact that I (and presumably others) did it vindicates their implementation in some ways. A few tweaks could’ve improved things, though; spawning an awful lot more Spirits and Crones around the place, for example, so you could butcher a load during normal PvE questing rather than having to hunt them down in a few small areas. Making them a bit tougher, or having Champion versions with increased influence rewards, could go some way to alleviate the fact that, being trivial encounters, I could burn through Spirits as fast as they turned up, and any sort of teaming up could serve only to reduce influence gain over time (course it’d have to be a fine balance, or I’d be complaining bitterly about the difficulty of taking them down…) On the RvR side, plenty of other people have made suggestions for tweaking the Public Quest goals, mostly involving bringing objectives or keeps into play to avoid everyone hanging around their warcamp (though you have the problem of needing some way of giving an outnumbered side a chance at winning the public quest, or they’re just not going to bother trying). Definitely room for improvement, hopefully the new scenario for the forthcoming Heavy Metal event will be fun and perhaps liven up the influence grind a bit for that.

Something I haven’t really talked about in WAR is gear. Not the benefits and stats (I haven’t seen enough of how the game pans out at the level cap to decide how the recently announced progressive gear sets will affect things), the important stuff: how it looks.

Both a strong selling point, and something of a limitation, for WAR is the Games Workshop IP. Other settings like Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan don’t really have fixed visual templates for characters; illustrations vary, films might inspire some styles, but need a bit of expansion unless you just have the one class of “barbarian”, all players as Schwarzenegger clones, and only two pieces of armour in the game: “leather posing pouch” and “a couple of leather straps”. In WAR, most of the classes are taken from the tabletop game, with a bit of tinkering to fit an MMO, and that gives you the appearance: a Warrior Priest looks like a Warrior Priest, a Witch Elf looks like a Witch Elf. With the inextricable link of race, class and appearance, your choices can be somewhat limited; if on the Order side you want to be a ranged healer with a bit of DPS, you have to be an Elf; if you want to be an Orc, you have to be a Black Orc, thus a tank, and each class has its own distinctive look (see also “how to recognise Destruction tanks”). Most MMOs have types of armour: light, medium, heavy, cloth, leather, plate, that sort of thing, usually with several classes sharing an armour type. There might be some class specific pieces, or gear with stat bonuses only useful for a particular class, but WAR is a little unusual in that almost everything (cloaks and jewellery apart) is only usable by a single class, reinforcing the distinctive looks from the tabletop game. In other games, a warrior could don some robes for a bit of a laugh, even if only a madman would do so for protection, in WAR there’s no way for a Chosen to dress like a Zealot.

One downside to this is no Hat News Now Today, I’m afraid. As a Bright Wizard, I can’t pop a Witch Hunter’s buckled hat on for a giggle, and the armour in my own head slot isn’t even a hat, it’s a high collar (probably a good thing, wizard’s hats can be a bit daft, and might mess up my mohawk). I suppose I could snap pictures of other people’s hats, but it wouldn’t be the same. Perhaps more widely than just odd people with a hat fetish, it limits roleplaying options a little, there don’t seem to be any casual options for kicking back in your capital city, but then WAR isn’t really a casual kicking-back sort of game.

The distinctiveness across classes does come at the cost of similarities within classes, you don’t have many ways to fundamentally differentiate yourself from others of the same class. As you level up, the gear gets slightly fancier, but the basics don’t really change, you keep that class look as you go; so far, at least, pictures of the high level gear sets look quite reasonable, nothing is ludicrously oversized. This could be a pretty serious issue, character customisation, making yourself stand out is definitely a factor for some MMO players (like me), but WAR treads a fine line; perhaps it’s a bit like the Uncanny Valley, the more similar two characters are, the more you notice the slight differences between them, but you’re not all clones. Again, the inspiration is from the tabletop game, where a unit is comprised of similar, but not identical, figures, which can be painted as desired, painting being reflected in WAR’s dye options. Dyeing seems like such an obvious system, oft-called for in games that don’t have it, but I suspect it’s a bit of a headache for artists and modellers to actually implement well, so it’s definitely nice to have. The painting theme carries into the names of the dyes, taken from Citadel’s paint range. Standard vendors offer a limited selection of dyes, with the more desirable colours (black, the more vivid reds and blues) found as drops from mobs, or possibly crafted by alchemists. These uncommon dyes are fetching high prices at auction on my server at least, emphasising the importance people place on appearance; ideally, I’d really like a wider selection of dyes available cheaply from vendors, but you can see why desirable colours are kept as drops, and the standard selection is enough to at least give yourself a coherent look.

Another way of customising your appearance is through trophies, little medals, emblems and the like that you can hang from your shoulder armour or belt. These are a nice touch; they aren’t terribly obvious, you have to look quite closely to see them, but any customisation options are welcome. I haven’t found too many so far, a fair few look to be linked to tome unlocks, so something to work towards.

Overall, then, WAR does pretty well for character appearances, especially for something soon after release, as new items and gear are nearly always added to games as they go. Certainly compared to Age of Conan, which was terribly bland and generic initially, I believe there are new armour sets being introduced there even as we speak. I’m certainly happy with my Bright Wizard.

Tier 3 scenarios have been rather a mixed bag. For a while, when queuing for everything it seemed Tor Anroc popped 9 times out of 10, a Destruction Dude would always pick up The Thing, and you’d have to slog it all the way over to their base and fight your way up the hill under a withering barrage of fire in an oft-doomed bid to Kill The Dude With The Thing. Then different scenarios starting coming up more frequently, and Order were winning Tor Anroc more often than not, but losing most others. This was from a fair mix of the Temple of Isha, Doomfist Crater and High Pass Cemetery, an occasional Talabec Damn, and almost no Black Fire Basins. Conclusion: the best scenarios are those that involve Killing Dudes With Things, or Killing Dudes Standing Next To Things. Picking Up The Thing And Running To Another Place Without Being Killed, not so hot.

Last night, after a few days of general exploring, questing, dungeons and the like, I thought I’d go scenario crazy again, queued up five or six times in a row, and Order won everything, convincingly in most cases. It might’ve just been the luck of the queue, but glancing at the summaries at the end, Destruction’s levels seemed a bit lower on average than they had been. There are a couple of pretty dedicated Order guilds on our server, with several players who’ve been level 40 for a while now, probably more than Destruction (from anecdotal evidence), so I have a suspicion that Order players have tended to start on Tier 4 scenarios as soon as they can, whereas Destruction had been staying with Tier 3 as long as possible; I’d often see four or five level 30/31 Destruction players in a scenario, and very rarely see an Order player over level 28. Now it looks like a wave of Destruction players who were on that cusp have either outlevelled Tier 3 entirely or chosen to head for Tier 4, and coming up in their place are some lower level players, tilting the Tier 3 level advantage in Orders favour. Or I could be reading way too much into random scenario queue matches. Either way, it made for a nice haul of XP and renown, huzzah!

Fret not, gentle reader, if m’colleague Melmoth’s casual, barely considered dismissal of WAR has struck you like a slap in the face from a game developer (I could never develop games, my arm would get far too tired from all the slapping that’s apparently mandatory). I haven’t changed my mind since last week, I’m still enjoying WAR, clocking up scenarios, popping into public quests, storming the odd Keep or two; still annoyed by the limitations of the quest log (an impromptu Gunbad group formed up last night, so I dropped all the general world quests, flew to Gunbad, picked up all the Gunbad quests, did a wing, completed a few, dropped the rest of the Gunbad quests, flew back to High Pass, picked up all the world quests again…)

If, however, you seek WAR, the whole WAR and nothing but the WAR, KiaSA possibly isn’t the blog for you; while Warhammer is currently my main source of blogging inspiration, muses are lithesome and ephemeral things (the mythological muses, this is, not the band. Though Matt Bellamy could possibly do with eating a few more pies.) Even if I keep playing WAR for a while, there will be times when I just can’t think of much to write about it, or even MMOGs in general; I previously blogged at “MMOG Musings”, and one of the driving factors for moving here instead was going through a particularly non-MMOG-y time. Rather than rust into posting-immobility, I thought it was better to at least keep momentum going by writing about other things, hence at KiaSA we cover the whole gamut of human experience. MMORPGs, MMOFPSs, other MMOGs, online (but not massively multiplayer) games, offline games, generally offline games with an online component, generally online games but with an offline mode, you name it, every facet of life on the planet. Books (game novelisations, or books about gaming), television programmes (that ideally feature games), films (so long as someone plays a game at some point), music (why, the very post after this one is going to be all about music… possibly in games, admittedly), comedy (why did the chicken cross the road? Because it was a tier 3 player in a tier 1 zone and wanted to get to the other side, *badum tish*), I could go on. Though don’t ask me to.

Having said all that… scenarios, eh? Is it me, or are Order a bit slow to get off the mark sometimes? The scenario starts and there’s only six people there, and the rest sort of dawdle in over the next couple of minutes apologising for the delay, only the bus was late and they overslept and stuff, and they have a bit of a look around then amble off towards the objectives taking in the view. Destruction on the other hand are all spiky bundles of growling hatred and really jolly cross about all sorts of things, so what we need to counterbalance that is a rousing fight anthem. With apologies to Tom Lehrer I’d like to propose:

Fight fiercely, Order, fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.

How we will celebrate our victory,
We shall invite the whole team up for tea. (How jolly!)
Hurl that Chosen into the sea (of lava),
And fight, fight, fight!

Fight fiercely, Order, fight, fight, fight!
Impress them with our prowess, do!
Oh, fellas, do not let Sigmar down,
Be of stout heart and true.

Come on, chaps, fight for Order’s glorious name!
Won’t it be peachy if we win the game? (Oh, goody!)
Let’s try not to injure them,
But fight, fight, fight!
Let’s not be rough, though!
Fight, fight, fight!
And do fight fiercely!
Fight, fight, fight!

I’ve decided not to continue my subscription to Warhammer Online. Or, to put it more accurately, I’ve decided not to subscribe at all, since GOA were not resourceful enough to demand my credit card details from the outset, and thus I never actually had any semblance of a subscription plan in the first place.

Now, all those fanlings out there who take joy at frothing and foaming at any slight to their game, no matter how small and no matter how irrelevant the instigator, can feel free to fire-up their email clients and compose stern letters in poorly spelled words of no more than two syllables telling me just how wrong I am. Rest assured I will print out every email and give each one the intimate attention it deserves; even if it means I have to wipe my bottom raw, I will make sure I cover each and every point you make.

So why am I not subscribing? I’m not having fun; this much is as irrefutable as the gravity on this beloved planet of ours. Why am I not having fun? If I could only tell you the reason, I would, but then I would also be able to tell Mr Jacobs, preferably on a contract salary with many, many zeros at the end of it, and to be brutally honest I’d much rather do that because, regardless of the monetary recompense, I wouldn’t have to wipe my bum sore on all the ranty opinionated drivel that was sent my way.

I simply don’t know why.

To put things in to context a little, then: I’ve tried numerous classes, on Order and Destruction, and have found nothing really wanting with them, they are all excellent takes on the classical classes, with unique twists and attempts to involve the player more; some work better than others, but they all work. I’ve played alongside some fabulous people in a guild that is both populous and active, and therefore have not simply tired of soloing a game that was never meant to be played solo other than by the hardcore grinder. I’ve probably had as many victories as I have had defeats in PvP, such that I have not been put off by the game’s heavy PvP bias; in fact, I’ve found that upon cracking open my sugar-coated carebear shell there was a soft, delicious chocolaty PVP centre within me. Warhamer Online has, if nothing else, opened my eyes to how good PvP can be. Guild Wars showed us that an MMO with a PvP focus could endure and remain fresh in the public consciousness, much like Everquest showed us that MMORPGs could work in an online world of FPSs and RTSs; and much as World of Warcraft brought MMORPGs to the masses, I believe Warhammer Online brings large scale PvP to the same. Make no mistake, World of Warcraft had the mass-market PvP first, but Warhammer made it compelling beyond a mere treadmill-like league of grinding phat loots, instead making it integral to the whole game experience, tying it inexorably to your character’s fundamental reason for being.

Still the question stands: why am I not having fun? There must be something tangible to grab on to, some tiny annoying loose thread that mars an otherwise immaculate dinner jacket of a game. Perhaps it’s not that I cannot find the thread, but that I fear to pull on it lest my entire view of MMOs unravels before my eyes, and I’m left wearing the rather tatty and dishevelled waistcoat of MMO disillusionment. Can we just accept that for some reason the game does not work for me on a basic primal level, and leave it at that? Look, I like Shakespeare’s works; I love to visit the Globe and be a groundling for an evening, or in times passed watch the RSC at the Barbican before they decided to turn into some sort of travelling troupe. Yet I know many, many people who don’t get it. They don’t enjoy it in any way shape or form, even if it’s cast in a Baz Luhrmann too-hip-to-be-cool mould. I never ask them as to why, though, for what sort of answer could one expect? It’s boring. It’s inaccessible. It’s outdated, maybe? To me these seem like crazy reasons, but that’s not because these people aren’t right, it’s just that they can’t really put their finger on why they don’t like it. They. Just. Don’t. I can’t argue with them for not liking it, you can’t say to someone “Well, if you just read all around the topic and studied it for a few years. Perhaps take to quoting sonnets until your brain can only form sentences structured in iambic pentameter. Then you’d probably enjoy it”, that’s not an argument for the joy to be found in Shakespeare, it’s an argument that says “You’re at fault and you should work hard to correct that”. No, no and thrice no. Enjoyment of pastimes is not a chore, it is a pleasure from the start or it is nothing at all. Yes you often have to work at an interest to experience all the enjoyment that it has to offer, but there has to be that base interest in the first place, that foundation of pleasure and enthusiasm to build upon, else you’re building something that will not stand even the lightest of pushes against it.

If pressed, if truly harangued by the torch-bearing, pitch-fork wielding horde of fanatical fans of the game, smashing at the doors of the KiaSA windmill while I stand above them on a balcony, cursing them for their lack of understanding and their heathen ways, I would perhaps offer a few vagaries in the hope that they would pause for a moment in contemplation and then leave me in peace. These would be thus:

The so good:

• The character and world design is fantastic. Grittier than World of Warcraft and eschewing shoulder pads that rival the wingspan of 747 airliners and weapons that could be used to span the English channel and support multi-lane highway access to the continent, Warhammer’s characters are closer to the tabletop miniatures, they still have their comedy moments, but it is the refined surreal comedy of the Mighty Boosh as opposed to the gaudy over-the-top comedy of South Park.
• The war. War is indeed good. We’re still not sure what it’s good for (huh), but we can agree that Mythic has certainly delivered on its promise to develop realm pride and to allow that pride to be represented (yo) on the field of battle.
• The game is at least trying to do some things differently. Many of these things work and work well, others are great in concept but have lacked a little in their realisation.

The not so good:

• The XP curve. Fixes have already begun to filter through for this, and if there’s anything most MMO players can cope with it’s a tedious repetitive grind, so I don’t imagine that this will be a problem for long.
• There is still too often a tangible disconnect between what I do with the interface and what my character appears to do on the display. The effects work - the healing is delivered, the enemy is smote with damage - but my character appears to be doing something entirely different a lot of the time, playing the banjo or crafting origami badgers, it doesn’t matter, the fact is that I cannot easily tell if what I did had the desired effect without parsing the combat log or upgrading the floating combat numbers with an AddOn and then spending my entire time staring at text on the screen. Which I could do playing MUD1.
• Huge parts of the game already feel like WoW’s 1-60 content: empty, abandoned and unused. I have visited so many public quests and out of the way areas and found nobody else around. On odd occasions I’ve found another lone soul and we’ve teamed-up in order to try to accomplish something, but mainly we just end-up standing and quietly holding one another, a forlorn attempt to affirm our connection to a world where one steps into a void as soon as one leaves the grind-filled ruts of the common levelling path.
• Scenarios break public quests. Simply put, public quests should have been available on a queue system like scenarios are, or scenarios should not have been on a queue system but accessed from specific locations around the world map, with those locations preferably being close to public quests (which would have been rubbish, because instant fix PvP is one of the excellent design decisions Mythic made). Mythic came up with two excellent game systems that unfortunately aren’t terribly compatible in their current state. With scenarios having the greatest XP-per-effort/time ratio, they won out, as has been discussed by m’colleague and numerous others already.

There’s nothing game-breaking or truly awful in the above, they are just a few areas that help contribute to my lack of desire to play the game. They are not the reason for my lack of desire, however, this I wish to make abundantly clear; the game doesn’t work for me at a fundamental level, but it works for a vast number of others and I’m deeply happy for, and somewhat envious of, them. And if none of that helps to pacify the lynch mob, or at least confuse them long enough that I can make my escape by the back door, then I shall just have to play the Boris Karloff part to Zoso’s Frankenstein, lift him up before the crowds and present him as the sensible one, the brains of the operation, the one who is still playing WAR and enjoying it, and to entreat them not to destroy us with their flames just because they perceive me as a monster.

Is WAR the Next Big Thing, or just a passing phase (one of my bad days)? I’m still rather enjoying it, and I think I’ll stick with it a while longer yet. It doesn’t do anything wildly revolutionary, claiming it’s created a new genre or something is frankly bonkers; WAR and WoW and LotRO and EQ2 and Age of Conan and their Diku-inspired chums are all ice cream, just some have chocolate swirls, some have raspberry ripple, some have sprinkles on top, some are made by otters in carpet factories. Maybe you don’t really like the sprinkles but you’ll put up with them ‘cos the other varieties don’t have those lovely chocolate chips, or maybe the sprinkles are a showstopper (for every sprinkle I find, I SHALL KILL YOU!) So far, for me, Warhammer’s butter almond ice cream of PvP scenarios with the roasted hazelnuts of public quests and almonds of keep taking in the white fudge shell of World RvR are enough to compensate for the fairly average praline pecans of PvE. I’d better step away from the ice cream a moment before I get too hungry…

It’s the mix of options that really make WAR. If there’s nothing else particularly on, I gravitate towards scenarios. Hop on, hit the “Join Scenario” button, roam around doing anything else you fancy while waiting, then it’s off to a fearsome life or death struggle with XP and renown rewards at the end of it. Oddly enough this is very similar to how I played WoW for a while, queue up for a battleground, fly off and quest for a bit, and into the battleground when it pops. The main difference is that on my old WoW server 10 minutes was usually the minimum queue time, more often 15 minutes for Warsong or Arathi and 30 minutes or more for Alterac, whereas now they’ve added the ability to queue for all scenarios in a tier with a single click, something usually pops within a couple of minutes in WAR. Unless joining with a guild group, though, the increased frequency of PUG scenarios isn’t necessarily a good thing, and can merely speed the screen-punching results of repeated losses in wildly unbalanced teams (10 ranged DPS, 1 melee DPS and a tank, let’s go!) full of bozos, but that’s PUGs for you. Tier 2 was going fairly well, I think I had a winning record overall, but Tier 3 is a bit painful so far, possibly due to being comparatively under-level for now, and not helped by Tor Anroc being the most frequently popping scenario, in which Destruction manage to be The Dude With The Thing every single time.

Outside scenarios, world RvR has been quite fun too. It’s a bit hit and miss, obviously depending on who happens to be around, but our guild have stormed around en masse a few times taking a bunch of keeps in the process, and a few spontaneous rucks have developed around battlefield objectives. More often, though, it seems that large warbands eschew direct confrontation; a substantial number of human defenders make taking a keep a very difficult proposition, far easier, if you can manage to point everyone in generally the same direction, is to fly off to another zone and quickly storm an undefended keep; the attackers just need to shout “everyone to (zone name)!” in warband chat, and unless the other side has a pretty organised intelligence and communication network, they’ll have taken the keep before any serious opposition can be massed.

Public quests do seem to be suffering slightly from the popularity of scenarios, but I don’t think it’s because scenarios give better rewards necessarily (though the combination of renown points, experience points, and even money and loot from other players is a nice package), just that they’re much easier to get into. If the situation was reversed (ignoring the fact that it wouldn’t really work), if public quests were off in their own instances that you could queue for with the click of a button, and there were a couple of locations on the map you physically had to travel to for specific scenarios, I think more people would be in public quests much of the time. Scenarios only need to be slightly more popular for a positive feedback loop to kick in, you go to a public quest location, nobody else is there, so you join a scenario queue while plinking away at a few of the Stage 1 mobs; you get into a scenario, somebody else turns up for the public quest, nobody is there, they join a scenario queue… On the plus side, once you do get a group together, they still work very well; a guild group ran through all nine Elf public quests in chapters 10 - 12 last night, and had a rather splendid time.

Also in PvE-world are dungeons. I’ve only seen Gunbad, heading there a couple of times, and… it’s a dungeon. It’s not awful by any stretch, but it didn’t exactly leap out and perform an “I’m an amazing dungeon” tap dance while handing out free tickets to the wedding of its son. Perfectly functional, mosey on through taking on groups-of-three-Champion-mobs, a bit like yer bog standard WoW-type instance (one of the less interesting ones). Having public quests as you go is quite a nice touch, and it’s something to do as a group, nice for a bit of a change but not something I’d be queuing up for on a daily basis.

Finally, there’s general questing. Quests are the glue that binds everything together, and unfortunately for WAR, it’s more Pritt Stick than superglue. It starts off so very promisingly in your first zone, you have plenty of lovely quests. Quests to use siege weaponry so you get the hang of that, quests that reward you for taking part in a scenario, quests that overlap with public quests to nudge you gently in that direction, quests to kill mobs, quests to kill players, quests to scout the objectives in World RvR zones that encourage people in there for a bit of a rumble, quests that introduce you to and reward you for just about every aspect of the game. By Tier 2, though, and especially Tier 3, things start to come a little unstuck. M’colleague points out the problems in no uncertain terms, most fundamentally that the quest log (the otherwise concentratedly awesome Tome of Knowledge) is limited to 20 quests. The quests keep coming, and indeed multiply; you get quests that send you to the other racial zones, wherein there are more quests. There are quests to go to the Gunbad dungeon, and quests within the Gunbad dungeon, quests to capture Keeps…

Let’s say I’m merrily wandering around Empire lands, quest log stuffed to the gunwales with lovely quests in that zone, and I join a group for Gunbad. Flying over to the Marshes of Madness, I wonder if there might be some quests in the offing, and sure enough bright green “quest available” icons abound, the local Dwarfs more than keen to offload their petty chores onto you, what with being nailed to the floor and unable to move and everything. I start to grab them, but wait, quest log full, so I drop anything back in Empire lands (hoping I wasn’t halfway through anything particularly difficult to complete). A couple of the quests involve going to Gunbad, huzzah, and off we ride to the caves, where, in the pre-dungeon bar and grill (”would sir care for apéritif before plunging into the hellishly troll-infested bowels of the cave?”) a couple of the quests are completed, and another bunch are available, necessitating further quest dropping to fit them all in.

After a light and refreshing jaunt around pestilent nurglings and gaseous squigs, we finish a few quests, never get around to some others, pick up a couple of follow-up quests and call it a night. Next day is Guild Keep Storming Day, so we form up, and go and look for a Destruction keep or two to reclaim for the Emperor. Now a couple of weeks back I’d remembered to pick up the three quests to reclaim keeps, only Destruction weren’t playing that day, and everything was already in Order hands, so I’d since dropped those quests to fit others in, only tonight of course *everything* is in Destruction hands, but by the time I remember there’s a potential quest available it’s a bit late, I think it might be bad form to shout “wait, wait, I forgot the quest! Everybody stand on the ground floor, don’t worry Mr Keep Lord Sir, we’ll be up in a moment, I just need to nip back to Altdorf first…” (tanks stand around whistling, Witch Hunters adjust their hats for maximum jauntiness, the Bright Wizards stand on their own in a corner having a chat about the best way to treat burns and occasionally exploding).

Day three and a bunch of us decide to blast through some public quests, most of the others are over in the Elf zone so I fly and join them, and of course there’s another stackload of available quests, some of which probably overlap with the public quests and would provide nice bonus XP, cash and/or items, but it’s just too much of a pain to try and juggle everything.

Now this isn’t a terrible problem, it’s not something that makes me furious to the point of unsubscribing, but as Melmoth suggests, why do you need to talk to someone to start a quest? Just stick everything in the Tome of Knowledge automatically, tweak the interface a smidge so quests are divided up by zone, default view being the zone you’re in, track ‘em all on the map with the nice red splodges, make the on-screen tracker a little more intelligent to only show relevant immediately local quests, and Bob is your proverbial uncle. Does it make sense? How would you know that Neville T. Arbitrary really needed a box of vital supplies that had been on a wagon that lost a wheel in a rogue hamster attack somewhere in the north east? You’ve already got “Wanted” posters in games that give kill-quests, is it such a stretch that villages extend the system with lost and found, domestic help wanted and assorted other small ads? One click on the notice board, you jot everything relevant down in the Tome of Knowledge (three good leads for quests, one opportunity to make easy £££ at home and a possible bargain if the L-reg Ford Fiesta really is in running condition), and from there it’s hardly a huge leap to just *assume* the click, and automagically populate the Tome as you wander around the world, it’s no more immersion-breaking than joining scenario queues and randomly teleporting off to fight them. Granted if you did that for *everything* it would rather take the mystery out of it, you wouldn’t want to totally eliminate fun for Explorers by labelling everything with a big red arrow, so leave a good sprinkling of conventional quests and items to find around the world (as WAR does, with various tome unlocks for mobs and items all around the place), but the basic nuts n’ bolts “do this scenario, scout this objective, go to this place” stuff, there’s just no need for it. The supreme irony in all this, of course, is that somebody has effectively pointed this out before. Some “Paul Barnett” bloke, something like that? He really ought to implement those ideas in a game, it’d be great[1]…

[1] This is irony, by the way. Kill Collectors are in the game, and they do work, but there’s one of them standing next to seventeen other people with glowing green “git yer lovely quests here” icons, which if anything makes it all the more annoying when one of *those* is to kill ten of something you’ve just been mowing through.