I was all set to post that I didn’t have much to tell about my playing time in Warhammer Online this week. My two week reprieve from working really long hours had come to an end, so my adventures were curtailed. No pictorial journals to report since I’d spent most of my time when I was playing in Scenarios or farming up some seeds for crafting.
I like to spend Sunday afternoon soloing. The quiet before the Monday storm. I find a nice spot that will get me seeds and coin, and then just grind my time away. This Sunday I logged on to the game much earlier than usual. I had babysat my two year old nephew over night so I wasn’t able to sleep in until noon or so. By 9:36 we were up and had already finished breakfast. After putting on Disney’s Tarzan movie – I know the whole dang movie by heart because he insists on watching it every time he’s at my house and he’s here quite a bit.
Anywho, shortly after he settled into the movie I logged on to my Bright Wizard who was sitting in Altdorf. I piddled around at the bank for a few minutes pulling out my crafting supplies and making room for the ones I planned on farming, when I noticed the local chat. I wasn’t in Vent because the baby was here and I didn’t want it to disorient him hearing voices from the PC or ruin the movie.
Someone was saying that Altdorf was under attack. I was like wah??? They explained that the keeps were gone and to head out to help I was shocked not to see any sort of warning or notification that it was under attack. I told the very few guild members that were on what I’d read and asked them to come to defend. Before long a warband was formed and the VERY few of us that were aware and even remotely of a level to help, were exiting to mount a resistance.
When I looked at the map, all of the local keeps were Destruction controlled. People didn’t know what to do or where to go. I was lucky to see a group exiting and followed them. We made it to Morr but there wasn’t much we could do. We didn’t have any siege weapons. We were able to kill Destruction players that we still trying to get into the Keep but taking it back was hopeless. Small bands of Order tried forming defensive lines at different locations to prevent more Destruction from entering the area. A few were successful for a while but stuck on the outside of our keeps we got sandwiched in between the Keep and more Destruction arriving behind.
As more Order logged into the game they had no clue what was going on for at least an hour. You could see people asking over and over why they couldn’t fly to Altdorf and then the shock when they were told that it was under siege and all the keeps were lost. I don’t think people expected even Destruction to be mounting city attacks this quickly after launch. And I hazard a guess that Mythic didn’t either because the mechanics don’t work so well. I’m not a sore loser but they’re going to have to put more polish behind this mechanic or risk unhappy customers.
Here are the things I saw that need to be addressed:
- No highly visible indication that Altdorf was even under attack. I was in Altdorf and when I logged on. The Keeps had to have already fallen, yet there was nothing that told me, “Yo, someone’s sackin’ yer shit go out and defend!” I’ve had to click "ok" to close announcements about gold farmers being banned but nothing as blatant as that announced that Altdorf was going down??
- Some mentioned seeing a notice pop on the screen once but not at any regular frequency. If you were zoning or not looking at the screen at that very moment, you wouldn’t have seen it all. Seems like something on the interface should burst into flames or some shit so that it’s very obvious. Besides which, large guilds using Vent don’t really read a lot of the chat text so I hope that’s not what they’re depending on to communicate.
- COW is one of the largest Order guilds on Averheim. When I checked there were only a half dozen of us even on the game. All of us headed out. But what kind of defense can be mounted when one of the largest guilds only has six players to offer up for support?
- You can see from the picture not many people were at the gate but the lag was insanely bad. You were fighting people that you couldn’t even see!! Someone was attacking me, I could here the melee hits and see that I was taking damage but they never displayed on my screen.
- When opposing players did happen to display, much of the time you couldn’t attack them. You got error messages saying “Immune”, “Out of range” and “Invalid target”. The whole end game is about these sieges. If the game can’t handle two dozen players attempting a siege what the heck will happen with a large, equally balanced battle zone???
- I guess we’re supposed to sleep with one eye open? I get that MMOs are live 24/7 but when campaigns are planned during the wee hours, how can you reasonably take it back with the enemy already entrenched? I guess you wait for prime-time to roll around? Once an enemy is entrenched momentum is on their side so not sure how this is supposed to work out.
I never played Dark Age of Camelot so I don’t know how the RVR worked there. And while there is certainly congratulations due Destruction for the planning and achieving this capture so early in the game, I have to wonder at the glory when part of the plan was to take the city when they knew very few defenders would be online. I guess I expected more. I expected the in your face RAWR, we’re so bad we’ll kick your ass prime-time battles. Not the "wake up to your keeps are already gone" version of RVR. I’m not sure what to think. I was envisioning massive Eve Online battles of epic proportion, man to man grudge matches.
I thought this was the fantasy game with serious PVP. So I’m a bit lost on people purposefully planning them in the wee hours. Doesn’t that really just make it a PVE encounter at that point??? Isn’t that just a step or two above World of Warcraft’s Alterac Valley, with enemy forces racing by each other to the end bosses? When COW zerged across the T3 zones last week we didn’t do it in the dead of night We didn’t do while most people were sleeping. We did it prime-time in your face come and get some son! Even then the momentum that swelled around the attempt was virtually unstoppable, but at least Destruction was online to fight back if they choose to do so and they did. They stopped us from getting the final keep.
Again, I don’t know what to think about how Mythic has this designed. Hell the original Alterac Valley in WOW could and did, take 4 to 6 hours on large servers like Illidan. How does an end-game achievement happen in that amount of time and in the mists of the sun rising.
I fear for this game’s numbers if this is the precursor to how this needs to be played. I’m sure that 750K boxes sold contain WOW players looking for a change and casuals. I’m enjoying this game plenty but I can tell you without a doubt, I won’t be getting up a 3AM to raid the Inevitable City. What happens if that becomes the norm? Will players not interested in that kind of schedule, be okay with their cities being rolled while their asleep? Will people say it’s WOW’s Alliance (good guys) all over again and switch sides or worse, go play Wrath of the Lich King instead? Dunno but it’s certainly going to be interesting reading in the next few weeks.
Mark Jacobs is responding in a VN Board thread here
Still not sure what to think about it all. Not even sure what can be done. However, I’ll say again, when one of the largest guilds on the server has less than a dozen folks online what the hell are you supposed to do??? Personally, I wouldn’t have been on the game for another five hours under normal circumstances. If not for a babysitting a toddler, I would have been dead sleep at 9-something AM on a Sunday morning.
