If you watch Werit’s video of the King fight from the test server, you will see a cameo by our very own Grilar! We sometimes call him the traffic cone because he often dyes his armor orange. But in Werit’s video, Grilar became one of the champions (look for the huge orange engineer). I shall call him the traffic cone…. of doom!

Watch the video in high quality also.

The fight looks a lot more fun than previous city sieges. Even if you’re getting your butts kicked at least you get to be huge for a while. Read more on Werit’s blog.

Just a heads up, the big Warhammer city patch might be tomorrow. From Andy Belford, hot off the Twitter presses:

Here is a link to the patch notes for 1.3.5 from the test server. The devs also saw fit to nerf the Bright Wizard spell Scorched Earth and the Sorc equivalent. IMO this only makes it harder for scrub BWs. The really good ones (such as the ones formerly in FOTF) never depended solely on Scorched Earth, although if a Destro jumps in the middle of three BWs while I’m taking a screenshot, I can’t take responsibility for what happens.

This doesn’t change my need for a break. This weekend was incredibly relaxing. I am playing a bit of Guild Wars, but it’s really low key.

I’m about 100 pages into a book I’m reading about human psychology and recovery from traumatic episodes (i.e. post traumatic stress disorder in combat veterans). No connection to the game of course, it’s just an interesting topic because I have a lot of family members who have seen combat.

I’ve canceled my WAR account, which expires today. I need to take a break. I’ve got some super busy weeks coming up at work. I am not leaving for another game although I will be playing Guild Wars occasionally (which I might also post about). If I come back it will be sometime in June, July or maybe August. It’s hard to say at this point. I might come back to try out the city changes too. It depends on my schedule which is far from certain at this point.

I will keep blogging about Warhammer (just not as often, maybe once a week) and I will stay on Twitter.

For this site, I will be revamping a few things, like changing the category and tagging system.

Reasons I’ve canceled:

• I am super busy at work. It’s budget season and I’ve been handed a special project to manage by myself and I’m really stressed out.
• Some of my long-time gaming friends are also taking a break from the game (including my RL husband) so it seems this is a good time for me to take a break as well.
• I cannot remember the last time I read a book cover-to-cover. I have a good list of books I want to read and it’s not getting done by itself.
• I want to go camping this summer. Summers in the Pacific Northwest are beautiful and I really want to take advantage of them. I’m probably also going to visit Europe at some point.

If you want to see what I think needs to happen for this game to become more successful, please visit my previous post about the Top five problems WAR needs to solve.

So, what happens to members of FOTF? A number of players have jumped to Knights of the Sepulchre. Dilek is a great guild leader. They are a fun group to play with. I respect them a lot and I think if you go there, you will have a lot of fun.

Overall Warhammer was a fun experience, but it was only fun because of Fight on the Flag and its members. The players in that guild have been incredibly fun to play with. If I do come back I might not want to lead the guild again depending on my time. But I will want to reconnect with all of you.

Again, if you have not become a member of the FOTF Facebook page (sorry, current or former guildies only) please e-mail me at fightontheflag@gmail.com with your in-game name and I’ll send you an invite. I check that e-mail about once a week.

• Testpig, who had the epic videos about how to improve WAR game design
• Healeroftru, who happens to play on Gorfang. He posted a funny earlier this week about the woes of PVP without the renown bonus

Very interesting posts all around!

Are you a former FOTF member from either Warhammer, Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot (we were Legacy of Storms on Albion/Bedevere)? Please drop me a line at fightontheflag@gmail.com and I’ll invite you to our Facebook page. Include your in-game name and in which game you played with us.

Testpig posted an amazing way to add relics to Warhammer and utilize the dead fortresses.

I love his idea so much. Please watch the Youtube video. Trust me, it’s worth the nine minutes:

I like everything about this video.

• Add influence as a main currency instead of the current system is a great idea because it doesn’t encourage one type of influence gain over another (ie. scenarios vs ORVR).
• The underdog system in the video would be a great addition to the current underdog system (reduce guards/keep door health)
• My one reservation: In Fortress attacks Testpig suggests that we add defender and attacker respawn points within the Fortress zone. I am not sure what to think of this idea, because when Order was underdogs at the beginning of the game we would often cut off their warcamp and kill stragglers. Testpig’s idea would work well if the realms were equal.

If Warhammer were to change to this or a similar solution I would have lots of hope for its future.

One question though, would Games Workshop flip out of this were to happen? I have no idea if this is against the game lore or not.

If you wanted to get into some of the minutae, Bootae has a few good ideas, also taken from DAOC.

EDIT: Werit thinks adding relics is a bad idea because it only makes the powerful realm more powerful. WARAyleen said relic raids were mostly alarm-clock runs anyway. Is nostalgia getting the best of me?

Are you a former FOTF member from either Warhammer, Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot (we were Legacy of Storms on Albion/Bedevere)? Please drop me a line at fightontheflag@gmail.com and I’ll invite you to our Facebook page. Include your in-game name and in which game you played with us.

Andy Belford posted on the Mythic site linking to various bloggers. He mentioned Fight on the Flag! Yay!

Fight on the Flag – Dey is talking about fightin, dat’s gud!

No insight today. Time to get back to my 50 hour-a-week job with one-hour commute each way.

By 1.3.6 players will have the capability to play as both Order and Destruction on the same server.  We did this in Camelot, because we wanted to give players more choices about where they wanted to play and who they wanted to play with. We’re aware of the possible downsides (such as cross-realming) and we’re aware that people have a lot of realm pride, which we believe is very important, so we’re going to be introducing a significant lockout timer to switch between realms.

I have mixed feelings on this. I will not lie: there have been many a time when I’ve been tempted to roll Destro on Gorfang simply because Order has been outnumbered and all I want is a good fight where I am vastly outnumbered (most people want to be on the other side). Carrie admits that there’s a potential for cross realming, which is very real. I also think that some players will exploit whatever they can to gain a better advantage. A good example of this is the recent free-to-play trial. I know of a guild on Gorfang that rolled all new T1 toons and then proceeded to summon them (with summon stones before the ability to do so was removed) to several different zones to get tactics, gear, etc.

For me the main question is “What is the definition of significant (referring to the lockout timer)? This question may have already been answered somewhere, but I do have a life and work and a husband to spend time with. If someone knows the answer please post.

Shadow-WAR has a timer I could get behind: Six days.

The biggest trick of this entire deal is going to be the lockout timer.

If it’s too short, it won’t matter, people can hop from side to side at a whim, with no impact on their play. If Destro suddenly decides to come out and play today, they can hop over and zerg-surf to 80 and full sovereign in empty city instances, and do the same tomorrow if Order does it. If it’s too long, people won’t make use of it. So, the crux of the entire problem lies in timing.

The answer to the problem: 144 hours. That’s six days.

The reason? The final lockout for sovereign gear is 68 hours, just shy of 3 days. This lockout timer is short enough, that you can do it multiple times per billing cycle (5 times), and long enough, that you’ll think about it seriously before using it. It also ensures that you’ll most likely see at least two city siege attempts where you can gain loot.

Over at Backseatdev, Tyanon writes that people who want to cross realm are already doing it, and “paying for two accounts to do it.”

His other good points:

• Obviously one of the biggest problems with the city siege being participation-based is you need to rely on realm pride to be greater then the desire to just roll over and let the enemy take your lands if you are locked out on offensive city timer and can get loot for defensive city timer.
• It is going to hurt some guilds that have members jump to the other side with their main account, then be locked out of their current guild. (My comment: This leads to a degradation of community which is a bad thing for player retention. Players stay in a game longer than they normally would because of their guild.)

Healeroftru on Gorfang thinks this is going to be a huge detriment to the server and the game in general:

Mythic wants the player opinion?

Me: Good idea, maybe.
Gaentin: Stupid
Dominateme: Looks like 1.3.6 is the end for me.
Uthrax: Junk
Yel: Life will go on
Laudine: Proof the game is failing
Ravashack: …one more step towards the slippery slope of death.

Does the player base have a say in whether this happens or not? Hard to say. Most things that Mythic announces tends to come to fruition simply because they want to be trusted and don’t announce things that are iffy anyway. My opinion? I am not sure, but leaning toward no. I have no desire to play two realms. (My Destro character has only been logged in on Badlands to create a guild and maintain leadership.) I only want a good, fair fight. I am not sure that will happen if we have people switching factions all the time.

Destro healers seemed few and far between. I felt bad for them, especially when a marauder healed for more than three of their healers:

Click to healinate.

Big props to Apollonas for trying! If I recall correctly his DPS was tops out of Destro as well. When you heal more than Norronis and Nij, even as a healer, it’s usually a good sign of a talented player. This shows, to me, that a few people weren’t trying their best and were probably just there to farm/AFK insignias. (Yet another example of bad player behavior in pursuit of the carrot.)

But on to the /wave report!

Hi Fletch!

And for good measure, an innocent comment from someone who doesn’t know us yet. Don’t hold it against him fellas!

I should note our activity is dwindling somewhat. Some people are bored with the game and are playing Guild Wars instead (which admittedly is a breath of fresh air for now). Anyone have a Guild Wars group? Feel free to post and maybe we can team up.

Click to zergify.

Order was so happy to see so many Destro that we ran at them again and again and died over and over. Good fights all around. I was glad to see them out and about. I didn’t recognize any names but that doesn’t matter.

Yes, players are advocating the renown-gain strategy of letting the Destruction take BOs so Order can cap it all back later.

None of this surprised me until this discussion just now in Caledor:

Really? Really?
/sigh

I suppose nobody should be surprised. Groups of Order have always done RVE to get renown. I’m saddened that they want to work together with Destruction to maximize renown gain.