Fight on the Flag

This is not a ragequit post.

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.

Woot! After many hours of trying we finally downed the Vulture Lord himself!

Sorry for the crappy quality of this screenshot. My desktop died a couple of weeks ago and we are in the process of replacing it.

This fight, I thought, was actually really fun. We seemed to have spent far less time learning this fight than boss 7, which was really, really frustrating until we figured out a couple of tricks. Essentially for the VL, we had a heal-spec WP and everyone else went DPS (aside from the MT of course). We had to really think about the fight and ways to maximize our damage. All in all, I thought it was a very fun encounter.

Grats to me on my AM cloak, and to Riamin for the six funerary masks (which we all passed to him so he could get two pieces toward his Tyrant set).

FOTF has a lot of news to share! First off, we’ve beaten the seventh boss of the Vulture Lord dungeon. Big thanks to Istaflysiii from Blitz for some very useful advice. That encounter literally took hours and hours and hours to figure out. A big thanks to all our players who have helped us get this far. Those of us who completed boss seven are: Perle, Khaevil, Grilar, Riamin, Andora and Brewz, but I also have to mention Anatheos and Truncheon because they also helped with that fight at one time or another.

Now we are on the Vulture Lord himself. I think we have him down but we are encountering some bad luck. We can consistently get him to phase three, but then our buff shears might not work as quickly as we hoped. I have to say even though we wiped many times at the VL, it was a really interesting and fun fight, as opposed to the boss seven encounter, which is soo frustrating.

Here’s a pic of the Vulture Lord encounter (click to embiggen):

I am looking forward to completing this. We are almost there!

Anatheos also hit a new FOTF record for healing, previously held by Truncheon:

I think this was also my heal record but I am not 100% positive because I don’t really keep track of that sort of thing.

Finally, Fight on the Flag has its first rank 80s! Over the weekend Truncheon hit the mark first, followed by yours truly.

This /special screenshot is a homage to when we first formed FOTF on Gorfang. I couldn’t have been more than level five in this screenshot. Just to think, a year ago this month FOTF had just completed its first N’Kari kill (with the ironic post title of “FOTF completes PVE content”) and and we also did our first Inevitable City raid. This was back when we were required to take two fortresses just to get there, uphill in the snow, BOTH WAYS!

How far we’ve come!

I took a brief break from the blog after a business trip. Here’s a quick update.

Obliteration and FOTF have been running King together for the past month or so. We’ve definitely got it down. Loot is rolling in and people are progressing. We have almost a full warband of Warlord geared people and we are bringing in people who are nearly high enough to wear Warlord as we can.

FOTF is also trying to run through VL but the darn thing is so buggy half the time we get frustrated and leave.

We have killed through boss six and only briefly saw boss seven last weekend. Not too bad for only trying for a couple of weeks I say.

Finally Sunday morning we were out and decided to stop the Destro zone flips. The Destro apparently gave up after we stopped them, a shame considering we were vastly outnumbered. I guess they just want their freenown (free renown) as fast as they can get it and it doesn’t occur to them to try to, oh I don’t know, fight people for it?

In any case we are still having fun and still trying to kill Destro at every turn. On another note we are not recruiting anymore. We got some fabulous new guildies and learned quite a bit about those who did not make it through the initiate phase.

I had work Saturday but imagine my surprise when I get home and Order was already pushing zones to get into the city.

Five members of FOTF got into a warband with V’los Vel’drin and a few other guilds. Bangrund did a fantastic job tanking. We worked with Run Like Hell to lock down an instance. Destro bodies were everywhere.

Fighting on the flag in a city assault is truly the best thing ever!

Teamwork among Order was great! For the instances that were losing the PUGs left and they were replaced by organized Order.

I think at least two king instances of Order got nice shiny Warlord/Sovereign pieces. Both Pylith and Truncheon are decked out in full Warlord. It was my first king instance and I also got a few pieces after breaking royals down. Next time I will be in full Warlord and will then be working on Sovereign.

Grats Order on our fantastic teamwork!

We had a very fun and productive weekend. First off, a few FOTF members got Warlord gear from the king captures over the weekend (myself excluded). This is great news for those of us who had tried 40 or 50 times to get Darkpromise breastplates.

We also had some really fun fights in BOs this weekend!

Here, the manor in Eataine (click to embiggen).

We were flipping zones like pros and almost made it to stage 2 on Sunday’s IC push for those of us unable to make the first king run. Unfortunately my WB was in the losing city instance. I think either a lot of Order left or a lot of Destro joined (or both) and we lost the last stage 2 event. D’oh! Maybe next time.

Destro was definitely out in force.

I was proud of how our realm did in almost defeating them during prime time. Destro must have been taking a break after beating our king Sunday morning or more would’ve shown up for that effort.

(more…)

Yesterday afternoon FOTF members were sitting around trying to figure out how to boost our guild rank quickly. We have tried this before, but it never worked as quickly as we hoped.

This time was different.

When a guildie went from 39 to 40 using the free level scroll, he noticed the corresponding jump in guild experience.

We decided to see if we could boost our guild rank using level 40 characters who had not yet done the quest. We first booted everyone from the guild except for the people who were doing the quest, while keeping six or fewer in the guild at all times.

The results were jaw dropping:

In just the span of an hour, we jumped two guild ranks (35-37, not all screenshots shown).

Later that night, we got rank 40.

I suggest anyone who is interested in doing this for your guild to take advantage of it this weekend. If Mythic is inclined to fix this it could be implemented into a future hot fix.

For each turn in at level 40, each player contributes 6,877,776 experience to guild rank. We tested this on the FOTF guild in Destro and on Order side.

Warhammer is a breath of fresh air to me after playing Aion. Several of our members have returned along with us, including Andora and Cald, who did not make the transition to Aion very well. It’s really good to see them and hear their voices in vent.

Now we need to get back to our previous state of pwn on this server. We’re basically handing out free crests at this point as we relearn our characters.

We definitely have a fight ahead of us though. Destro outnumbers us by a large margin. This is not the same server we left. The Destro are also more organized and higher RR than Order.

This screenshot cannot do justice. I wish I could do wide angle shots. The front of the north keep in KV was packed full of about four warbands at one point this weekend.

Destro is also in the city about three times a day. Sunday they did an alarm clock raid and pushed the city to stage 2. For those who have not been in the city during stage 2, it’s pretty boring, though there still are some Destro who remain to fight. Everyone else is in the Warlord PQs.

As a result of frequent city pushes, many of the high powered Destro are in full sets of Warlord gear.

FOTF is not the only group returning from Aion. Dooger made a post welcoming back those of us who are returning.

Do you want to return to Warhammer? I can hand out some 10-day free trials (as long as you’ve been gone for 60 days or more). Just reply in the comment using your real e-mail address. I can only send out one per day, though.

Face it, no game will ever be perfect, although Warhammer came awfully close. Aion could also be that game if it didn’t take so much PVE to get to the point. Our guild has always been full of staunch PVPers. For most of us it is very painful to try to grind through the levels. It is very boring.

Several of us are on our last legs in Aion. Khaevil even vowed to never play MMOs again after this experience.

An obvious question: What now? This has caused me to look back at Warhammer. From my previous post you would think we would never, ever go back. But time has changed the game from when we last played it.

The BIGGEST thing that killed Warhammer for me was a lack of people to fight. That rationale is no longer an excuse:

This screenshot from Gorfang was taken on a Sunday morning, back when we used to think all of the Destruction were in church. My account was still open so I thought I’d check things out. Order on Gorfang is now seriously outnumbered, out-organized and outclassed.

My second point in the aforementioned post is that Land of the Dead forced people to PVE to keep up with everyone else. While this is still true, there is some sad news on the PVE content front:

Mythic has had some pretty massive layoffs in the creative department:

Mythic laid off 80 people today (Nov. 9), which is about 40% of the company and responsible for 90% of the content. According to a friend of mine who left before this happened, they’re putting Warhammer into “maintenance mode.”

I say sad news because I hate to see anyone lose their job. I am not happy they have lost their jobs at all. While some say “maintenance mode” means that the game is dead, Organdonar has a more optimistic outlook:

If they aren’t adding new content then they aren’t fucking up the game.

Yes, this still leaves LOTD in the game, but frankly if we had not played Aion and stayed in Warhammer we might have most of that gear by now and we wouldn’t have wasted our time with so much PVE. With the creative team mostly gone, this means they won’t add more PVE content to the game anytime soon. Then all we have to do is wake up and PVP. Awesome!

Lastly, my third complaint (Mythic was slow on server merges) could be resolved soon. From Massively’s interview with Jeff Skalski:

Q: Would it be better to merge servers again?

A: Yes and no. Merging a server affects a lot of people, and some players rejoice while others get upset about the change. It’s a tough call really. Right now we’re closely watching Dark Crag and Phoenix Throne. Both have passionate players on them, but we wish the populations were higher. With the recent release of 1.3.2 ,we’ll be holding off on any merges until we get a few more weeks of data. Then we can make final, informed decision if needed.

Interesting. Very interesting.

Where does that leave us? I am sending out my recruit-a-friend invites to members as I can (I only get one per day, how lame is that?). With the recruit-a-friend invite we get 10 free days of game time to check it out. (If you are interested in an invite, send me a PM on the forums and I will add you to the list.)

Aion — the game where you fight mobs and fight to stay awake at the same time!

A group of us hit 25 this weekend. My god, is the grind long and boring. We wouldn’t even bother if we didn’t see the potential in the game though. The flight is pretty cool but I think a few of us are on the fence about how much effort this is worth.

That’s why I haven’t posted much — who wants to stare at a few pictures of the level grind?

There, happy? Now stare at that picture for about 10 hours and you get an inkling of what we’re going through.

One more quick note, we’ve changed our guild name. <Fight on the Fla> wasn’t doing it for us. We are now <Mile High Club>. I’m not going to visit the URL to determine whether it’s taken or not. I’ve got safesearch off.