Picture: Realm Balance Explained

1.3.6 Test 1: What We Learned

Keep in mind that the current build of 1.3.6 on the PTS is 1.3.6.525. The Live version of the game is 1.3.5.539. “It’s still 1.3.6 and that’s bigger than 1.3.5” you say. No it isn’t. It’s missing hotfixes from many weeks ago, maybe months. This means that some of the features in 1.3.6.525 are early iterations… earlier than even the core testers knew about them. This means that most of the changes probably don’t have any of our feedback so far taken into account. Do not take this build as the final product. It’s an alpha at best.

Yesterday we had a Q&A. Anyone who pays attention on the forums would know most of the answers to the questions asked in the Q&A, so let’s skip that.

4 hours(ish, I slept through these) after the Q&A, we had a “stability test” on Warpstone. What most of you didn’t realize was that it wasn’t a stability test at all, but there was a change implemented that they wanted to test without telling you first. Usually when they tell everyone, it doesn’t get tested, it gets complained about and picked apart at completely unreasonable levels.

Friendly collision was turned off.

I knew nothing about this until we were fighting outside the keep and I realized that I could just walk right through people. I said in region “my friendly collision appears to be broken”, then I went “O M F G I REMEMBER” in my head. Good thing nobody even noticed that I had said it, because everyone else appeared to still be clueless about it.

Performance was greatly increased for me, and plenty others. I still remembered the 15% performance increase statistic from, well, where I had heard it beforehand. It felt like 30%, easily to me. It was fun hearing 50+ people on vent go “ohhhhh” when Andy had announced that friendly collision was missing that night.

Then, of course, came the theory-crafting. People started talking over each other in Vent about how it would affect tank walls, and how it measured up compared to the performance gain, and a few people talked about tank walls being completely gone. Andy re-iterated that it was FRIENDLY collision that was gone, not all collision. Still, tank walls are a reasonable debate to get into. Let’s do it.

Here’s a good tank wall with friendly collision on.

And here’s a good tank wall without friendly collision:

As you can see, with friendly collision enabled, it’s not viable to make the tanks’ hitboxes overlap. Assuming it takes 4 seconds to move through player collision, you’d easily be able to create 12-20 seconds of collision where a target is barely moving. This would allow your MDPS and RDPS to take out the target very easily.

Realize, though, that neither of these situations really happen that often. You’re the ones that wanted to theory-craft about it, though, so here you have it.

At this point in the game’s life we need to start thinking about what would greatly benefit the game, not what would greatly benefit the game WITHOUT changing any of the current mechanics of things. The age of drastic changes is upon us.

A Reply.

So, I got this comment moments ago, and I found it worthy of making a blog post about.

Here it is, followed by my reply:

 

 

how about the statistic that the game went from 50 servers to 4. Yea, 8% of your original servers 2 years later is awesomely successful.

Or how about the patch once every two months, that breaks more(by a large margin) than it fixes.

How about losing your ceo, and your entire team no longer even attempts to connect to the community out of embarrassment. (anyone heard from hickman or paul lately?)

How about going from 1 million(and more, but that was the reported number back in the day) box copies sold, to 4 servers, that aren’t even max capacity.

Yea, this game is wildly successful, oh wait…no it’s not. If you think this is successful, DAoC, UO, EQ, EQ2 are all gods compared to this game. At least none of them are the laughing stock of an entire online community.

 

 

And here’s my reply.

 

As I said in the post that you obviously skimmed through, yeah we’ve lost a lot of players. Most of them were not valuable. Most of them left the game spewing false information and skewed statistics, much like yourself.

There is no statistic on how many bugs are generated with each patch as compared to how many bug fixes go in. As I said, the game is amazingly well polished these days. All patches in every single large MMORPG ever created cause bugs. All of them.

We did not LOSE our CEO. Mark Jacobs left on his own account due to decisions made by Electronic Arts. Community coordination from Mythic is at an all time high right now. They talk to us in IRC, they play the game alongside us, they hold live Ventrilo Q&A conversations with us, and discuss planned future changes with us on the forums. Your MMO of choice is NOT better than this in terms of developer-player communication. Hickman and Barnett are not and were not ever designated community coordinators.

At no point in my original post did I call the game "wildly successful". At this point, it’s living up to its original promises of great RvR, while bringing regular improvements and updates, and still profiting.

Success.

Skuz.

A Welcome Post

Dear Iron Rockians,

 

We have a player joining us by the name of Kerbear, you may have had your post locked by her on the forums.

Don’t hesitate to send gifts of gold, talismans and well wishes her way!

 

Kerbear is a unique character. She has an extra finger, that means her healing is astounding. 11 fingers on her group heal button means serious group healing. She also has a serious disability, due to an unfortunate mining accident in Belize in 1829. She asked that the disability be kept a secret.

The Gobbo Council of Girlfings has decided overnight that she should be given squig milk and pink dye as welcoming gifts, along with the fastest mount in the game, the Red Ridin’ Wulf.

 

Welcome to Iron Rock, Kerbear!

WAR: Successful.

 

It’s been a while since I posted last, because I decided that my blog would not be yet another news blog, where I write a bit about every single thing that happens, ever.

This is a spot for me to say what I want, and if you have my blog bookmarked, a place for you to read it.

 

If you like.

 

As of June 2010, I declare Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning a successful MMORPG.

 

Let me make it clear what I just said. I did not declare it a successful PvP MMORPG. It is the single best PvP MMORPG to come out since DAOC, that’s my opinion, but it’s just too much game to lump it all into one  I’m also not saying that it’s a successful PvE MMORPG, because if you only PvE, I can’t imagine it’s very good.

I believe WAR is successful because it isn’t the best total game on the market for your general MMORPG player. Mythic wanted WAR to be a little less niche than DAOC ended up being, and let’s face it, they failed at that goal. That’s the only goal at which they really failed. Before anyone cites “and I heal, and I heal”, you have the potential to do serious damage at any given time. Your argument is not valid. My argument is not invalid, yours is. No you. Paul Barnett will fight you.

WAR has hundreds and hundreds of hours worth of content. Is most of it kinda grindy? Yeah, why not? You seem to have no problem remembering older games and talking about how big the grind was BUT it was a great game… well, stop your whining. 40 ranks are content. 80 renown ranks are content. Scenario weapons are content. Wards are content. Content does not mean little places you go into with your warband and spend 3 hours in a night killing heavily scripted bosses after reading about exactly how to complete it. RvR doesn’t work that way.

RvR is player driven. You. Are. Content.

Running into an RvR lake and taking the BOs and Keeps and waiting for the flips is the skeleton of the ORvR experience. It’s not THE ORvR experience. There are other players out there. You don’t know exactly what they’re going to do next, you don’t know exactly how many there are. What you do know is that it’s your job to make sure that they don’t ruin your day. If you’re complaining about the time you spend banging on a Keep door, you quite obviously just don’t understand this.

 

When WAR launched in later 2008, it was clearly overhyped. That didn’t mean that over a million people needed to buy the game and be disappointed, largely because they aren’t even real fans of RvR. Most of those million players aren’t playing the game today. Over 90% of them never should have tried the game in the first place, although I’m sure the initial money flow was nice. Those are the same players who flock to every game on release day, rip it to shreds, and laugh when it dies a year later. They were the reason that the game looked so grim a year ago today.

Let’s not forget that there were problems with the game. Patch after patch of huge lists of fixes were Mythic’s answer to this. Some things went unfixed, let’s be real about it. They were. It was frustrating, but what people need to take away from the launch of WAR is that every MMORPG that you play from launch is going to be as bad or worse than WAR. I’d be happy with saying that most games are worse at launch.

Server after server was shut down around a year ago. Our population obviously dropped by quite a bit. This does not mean that WAR, in the end, was not going to end up a success. It means that the kids that came over from WoW and whatnot weren’t meant to be here. We don’t really want them either.

That’s the thing. WAR is 100% a community driven game. Driven on our money, yes, but that’s not what I mean. It relies on us to have the fire inside of us that causes fights to break out in ORvR. It relies on us to spread word about how far the game has come since launch, for more people to come. We’re not going to get commercials with Ozzy in them unless Ozzy wants to buy a commercial to promote the game.

 

WAR today is a great experience.

You cannot get in-game and point a finger at the screen, running around going “there’s a bug”… “there’s another bug”… “there’s three more”. You cannot do it. I promise you this.

We have 4 servers. Every one of them is really balanced and packed full of players. The servers are incredibly stable, I haven’t been in a zone crash in at least 6 months. We have great communities, which usually are in the form of Alliances. Realm balance is incredible… not finished being balanced, but incredible.

We have PvE dungeons that are very long and take many runs to get the items you need. They’re really well scripted for the most part, and they’re some of the more difficult PvE I’ve ever come across in a MMORPG.

Finally, players are returning who quit in the early months and are very happy with the progress that the game has made. They’re staying… with a game that they swore sucked.

I could go on and on, but I won’t for the sake of my post being too long already.

 

 

 

All of that being said, let’s not forget the men and women from the Mythic team whose jobs fell in the line of battle while the game was improving, and becoming the success that it is today. A lot of them lost their jobs because of greed, like when EA bought Playfish right after letting go of a large portion of Mythic’s force. Many of them lost their jobs because of the initial sales vs. the amount of players that stuck.

No matter how much more successful the game becomes in the future, we cannot forget and stop honoring those people.

PSA: Passwords & Profanity

Passwords

Peoples’ accounts are currently being stolen by brute-force programs. This means that someone, somewhere is getting your account name and trying millions of different passwords until they figure out yours. Make sure your password is 8 letters long or more, with at least one number and a capital letter. Punctuation characters and non-dictionary words are also recommended, but since they make your password harder to put in, you don’t need to.

Here’s an example I made up today using calculations based on some of the best brute-force software available. The example shows the password “carrot” and how it could be safer.

password : time-to-crack

carrot : <1 second

Carrot : 6 seconds

carrot85 : 16 minutes, 33 seconds

carrot1985 : 14 days, 21 hours

Carrot1985 : 9 years, 6 months

&&{[Carrot]}@@ : 9861554213 years, 8 months

 

 

Profanity

When helping out new players on the forums, please don’t use profanity. Profanity is masked by the forums as “waffle”. This can confuse new players, and you won’t be helping out at all when you say “Magus is waffle”.

Skuzbat is Pink for Tink and so can you!

A good portion of <Old Folks> is currently Pink for Tink, so I figured I’d share how pink I am.

Wut Skuz iz finkin: afta’ returnin’

 

What I love about Old Folks is that I log in and instantly get invited for something I didn’t even know was happening. I’m RR48… that means I’m simply not incredibly powerful. Honestly, I’m not great at gearing up in this game. I need some serious LV runs, but have little confidence in PvE in WAR. Old Folks still seems to respect my abilities and presence.

I’m not sure what it is about WAR. In every other MMO, I am simply the best healer you’ll get. I’m not bragging to sound good, I’m just uncontested in the other MMOs I used to enjoy. I’m nearing 5 years of nearly solid PvP healing experience. Yet I’m not incredible at WAR. Perhaps I haven’t found the perfect strategy on my Shaman, I wouldn’t be afraid to admit it. I do fumble around sometimes, wondering if I should be hotting people up, or group healing. I can often output healing very close to higher-RR players, but my confidence is still low.

Gearing is incredibly annoying. The next few sets of gear for me have intelligence on them. I question though, should I take them? Or keep my gear from b/b?  This gear is doing me well, but I really feel as though I should be getting something new by now. In any event, I don’t have anywhere near enough tokens to really get anything meaningful.

 

I did my first 1.3.5 City. My first time in was a PUG on both sides, and it was an easy Altdorf raid for Destruction. I got a gold bag which I had to wait 24 hours to get, it ended up being Invader boots. I got a purple bag in the final stage. It was purple boots, and while they had fantastic stats, I simply cannot lose my 5% crit bonus from my b/b set over them. Now I wish I would have taken them incase I get the b/b set hat, but we all make mistakes.

My 2nd time through was in a Raven Host Alliance premade, although it wasn’t a full premade. I could tell because we were having some coordination issues. We managed to lose this time, but we were able to get into another almost empty instance before the city siege ended. That was fun.

My overall impression of the city is very good, I wish I were around to test it on the PTS, I can tell a lot of testing and hard work went into making the city the way it is now.

 

I did some Scenarios last night/this morning with Old Folks, it was very good fun, I had not done a scenario since the changes. There isn’t a whole lot to report about it, it was nice seeing Gaarawar in a couple of scenarios, I had a lot of fun running away.

 

 

The only other news to report is that Skuzbat is now Pink for Tink.

Warhammer Online: Greener Edition

Today marks Skuz’s return to the game.

 

Don’t forget to send prizes.

Bulletins, Blogs & Bigotry

My attorney is like all others a Goblin Shaman. We were on my Enslaved Manticore somewhere in the wastelands west of Praag, returning to the Inevitable City with an unreasonably sized bag of mushrooms. Red, black, spotted and striped. We were kicking up a cloud of black-grey dust behind us that was sticking to the vomit on the Manticore’s heavy tail. That was not mine, I was keeping my composure, only occasionally dodging the blue beetles in tuxedos that were attempting to enter my skull.

We were approaching the forums now, the skyline cluttered with Player Support and General Discussion varieties. Later it would become apparent that there had been about 7 Skaven on our trail earlier, but the sound of the wind and the fires in the distant Praag had drowned out the sound. All that was left was the contents of some future soup. It seems Skaven eventually fall apart in their blind rage to eat all of your mushrooms and leave you for dead. Endurance is not their strength, but neither is calculus, or showing up to the Character Creation screen.

I peered into the forums, and I’m not surprised at what I saw;

Black Orcs, complaining about equality but at the same time repressing everyone else. They don’t even make a good case for themselves.

Archmages, having considerably better burst healing than anyone else but still looking exactly like a bunch of idiots in table cloths.

Cheaters, complaining about losing their accounts to “hackers”, when nothing more than a keylogger had been passed on. In this world, cheating is the only way you’re going to get one of those.

What really caught my attention was the Dev Discussions section. Lack of information had caused a barrel of monkeys, seemingly on mescaline, to spill out and start spewing mislead information all over the place. “No bans yet,” I said to my attorney “these bastards don’t even understand what they’re rambling about yet.” These people almost universally had their rights taken away from them a few years back under the threat of brown people from the east… but would sooner riot over things that aren’t even finalized. Not even officially announced.

If only the outside world worked like this. If only the only people you really ever heard from were violent and cranky.

“We came here to explain that the Archmage is clearly better.” my attorney reminded me.  He was right as usual. My burst was not existent. My group healing was mediocre. My AP pool was horrid. My TTD was similar to that of the Kennedy family. The only thing special I could really do was to increase Toughness on players that should already have 700+ toughness. It doesn’t slow down the massive burst of… everyone. It isn’t burst – in fact, it wastes yet another GCD.

My thinking was interrupted by a phone call from Morkquarters. Gorkquarters. Morkquarters.

 

 

I had to report on patch 1.3.5 within 2 days, and I had to do it fax it in. It would be a True Fax. It would be the greatest thing I had reported on yet. If only they knew what was down the road from that, they might stop complaining about the little things.