Fight on the Flag

FOTF has been running plenty of scenarios lately, and for good reason! The new scenario patch comes out today.

Here’s a screen of a scen where we were horribly behind but we pulled it together against one of the better Destro teams. They have a few random people in there, but we had a full group of random people.

Finally the qotd, we haven’t had one of these in quite a while. FOTF was trying monolith PQ with some Oblit and other people. Order finally beat it at a later date. If you have ever done this PQ then you know why most people do not try it.

We did not win during this run, but many of us were finally getting the hang of it as the timer ran down.

For the longest time FOTF has avoided doing TOVL. There are many reasons, one of which is that PVE content tends to be buggy and we are too lazy to figure out the strats. We decided to start doing TOVL last weekend because the gear is too good to pass up. Our theory is that,  in the time it takes us to do Lost Vale, we can get really nice other loot, including talismans, cartouches and warlord-equivalent stats gear.

Last weekend we downed the first two bosses fairly easily (not bad for the first time in several months). On the third boss we wiped and five of us released. We asked for the sixth to release and when he did, the gates remained closed as if the boss were still in combat. We sent in a stuck appeal and we got no response. Destro owned the zone so we couldn’t just reset. Frustrated, most of us logged for the day.

This morning, we planned to wake up early and do TOVL. We wiped on the first boss and five of us released. The sixth released and yet again the gate was closed (maybe this is a trend?).

(Perle is on the flag, there are six people. Notice the door is closed?)

Again I sent in a stuck appeal and again we got bored after waiting for 30 minutes and getting no response. Finally about 30 minutes after we left the dungeon we got an automated message that they were “looking at the problem.” Pshaw!

Both days the bug prevented us from progressing further. Both days our time was wasted and we become more disenchanted with the game.

Maybe the solution is to release at the same time so we don’t get the bug? I really don’t know. Once everyone is dead the doors should open and that should be that. If someone knows the answer to this please let me know.

I guess this goes to show we will never be done fighting doors.

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.

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.)

I agree with much of Massively’s write up about Aion’s first month.

Yes, the PVE is boring. It’s so boring that one of our most patient guildies in the world (i.e. Mr. “You need to suck it up and grind, quests are a waste of time.”) has all but quit the game.

The only reason I personally haven’t given it up yet is I see the potential (and I have a bunch of wicked cool guildies to suffer through this PVE grind with).

Does anyone know when that experience boost patch will be in? Some guildies say since we are months behind Asia in patch cycles, we will be waiting quite a while. I hope they fix the experience grind issue sooner rather than later.

Read the parts of Massively’s write up that I agree with:

It was still a shock to many Westerners to only get half their level from quest XP and the rest from setting up camp and killing the same beasties over and over again for the remainder. Again though, NCsoft has been listening to player concerns and the latest patch notes indicate a massive quest XP boost coming soon.

…

It’s not that I’m adverse to putting in effort to get something, but Aion’s grind just seems like unnecessary punishment. I realize it’s a PvPvE game, but I’m just astonished that they gate the PvP with 25 levels of bland PvE.

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.

I am pretty sure when we started playing Warhammer that we never thought we would turn into pigs. Yet, here we are, one year after we bought the game and started playing together.

It’s made PVP… interesting. I can’t count the number of times my guildies have commented that this is probably the lamest live event Mythic has created to date. How did that office conversation go?

Dev 1: Hey guys, let’s come up with a live event to celebrate our one-year anniversary!

Dev 2: Great idea, how about we make a bunch of PVE content that PVPers have to complete in order to remain competitive! That’s how we celebrate the anniversary of our awesome, RVR game.

Dev 1: Yeah, and I just got done watching Deliverance, can we turn people into pigs too?

Dev 2: Awesome. Let’s do it.

Dev 1: As a bonus, let’s create a rare-drop pocket item that drops only in PVP and has no known practical use. The irony will drive our player base mad!

I’m pretty sure that’s how that conversation went.

In other news, FOTF continues to plow through PVE content to try to make sure we have the best gear available to us so we can PVP.

We had out first unassisted N’Kari kill on Destruction side, and it was a great fight. We one shotted her very quickly. Hardly anything went wrong though I am sure I can speak for the healers in that it was a difficult fight.

Saturday morning we sieged Altdorf after pushing zones for several hours. After getting into Altdorf, however, we were unsuccessful in pushing to stage two. It appears the best defense from a city siege is no defense at all.

Of course there was the usual complaining on the forums about the broken city mechanic. Who can blame them? It seems in every patch, whether it be with inventory issues, Lost Vale or not seeing objectives on the map, something is broken.

What is more frustrating to me, however, is the impact gear has on the game. Gear matters far more than most people realize.

(more…)

Fighting over the weekend, especially Saturday, was awesome. Destro really wanted to get into Land of the Dead, but Flags in Space wouldn’t let them! Rumbles at the Battlefield Objectives were pretty good for our tiny server:

Several times we attacked the Destruction in Praag. Most of the time we were repelled by their sheer numbers. This is how fighting should be all of the time. I did take a video of a small fight. I would post more videos but the view from my Archmage is pretty boring.

Sunday we explored Land of the Dead. The officers talked and we discussed how much we want to be chasing gear vs fighting Destruction. Initially we chased gear because we were getting flat-out owned. But now, we seem to do just fine against Destro. We decided that we only want to chase gear when there is no fighting going on (usually early on Saturday/Sunday).

Personally the little I’ve seen of the Tyrant set, I really want it for my Archmage. But the bosses don’t drop the pieces every time /sigh. I really wish Mythic would realize that most people who play this game for PVP do not want to do endless equipment grinds. A few of our members have been running Lost Vale since our very first attempt, and they only need one piece to finish their set.

PVP this weekend was very off and on. We didn’t have any action Saturday until well after noon. Sunday in the morning, we thwarted what I think was a Destruction attempt to push zones in preparation for a later city push. They had a couple (or more) warbands out.

It was a lot of fun in Praag fighting in the middle and at the graveyard. The only problem is the fights would be awesome for maybe an hour, then Destro would leave and go hide for a few hours. This was great for our guild rank because we started powerleveling necessary alts. But it was terrible for morale.

Our high points were really high. One fight on Sunday, we had seven people near the east keep in Caledor. Destruction was headed toward the East BO maybe? I forget why they were there, but we wiped them with our seven people. Nobody else was around.

After that, they came back again and again. We used the terrain to our advantage, and I hugged trees and rocks to stay away from those pesky Squig Herders.

We then made the tactical mistake of getting impatient and chasing one group. We got sandwiched by another warband that had been hiding in the keep.