Fight on the Flag

FOTF was running some scens this weekend and I felt like taking a pic of our BW faceroll zerg.

But in the middle of our photo shoot, a Destro jumped in the middle of scorched earth spam and promptly died. I didn’t catch the name.

Click to embiggen.

“I know what you’re thinking. “Did they have three Bright Wizards or only two?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a facerolling class, the most powerful in the game, and would burn you to a crisp, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

Games have long used the carrot and the stick to motivate players to do what designers intend. Players have also tried to use bugs and game mechanics to their advantage to game the system.

In Warhammer, WAR is everywhere, right? Yet every day I log in, I see barely a single crossed sword on the map. ORVR seems incredibly rare. Genuine pushes on zones by Destruction tends to only happen in the very early morning or in midday when most people are at work.

When Warhammer first came out, the only reason to flip a zone was to get to the fortress. There was no flip renown, not for keeps, BOs or for zones. The only way to get renown was to fight people — run scenarios, go into ORVR and slaughter until the ground ran slick with blood. The only reason to take a keep was to get annihilator gear. When a zone flipped it was because we wanted it to happen.

Then the game designers decided to add renown for taking objectives and keeps, and then for taking zones. This meant that people who might work hard for a zone flip could be anywhere in the zone and get renown for just standing around:

Mailbox is safe!

In theory you don’t ever have to step into the RVR lake to make it to RR 80. You can just hop from warcamp to warcamp and enjoy the flip renown while reading a book, writing a blog post or doing chores around the house. Just keep an eye on State of the Realm and it can tell you when zones are ready to flip.

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Warhammer is a decent game or I wouldn’t be playing it. But if a viable alternative were out there I’d probably jump ship. It actually pains me to write that. It was a hard decision to leave Warhammer for Aion last year (Aion’s mindless grind made it so easy to return). And if you want to avoid elitist jerks in Warcraft this is the game for you.

I wanted to include a top five list of things to improve because I do want Warhammer to continue to be an enjoyable game.

1. Population balance

To see corresponding Order zerg pics, click here.

The bane of every PVP MMO seems to be population balance and Warhammer is no different. It seems every other month is feast or famine in this game. We switched factions a couple of times to Destruction to allow our server to recover from the effects of too many Order.

Population problems have been around for a long time. DAOC had problems but DAOC also had three factions. If one faction was doing badly the other two usually showed them some mercy (after taking their relics of course). If another faction was doing really well, the two underdogs ganged up on them.

I think the easiest solution to this one is to add a third faction. I bet devs are really tired of hearing this. But I really think it could a) revitalize the game and create more excitement b) help the underdogs gang up on the overdog (for lack of a better word) and c) (most importantly) bring in new players.

The problem with this is how do you redo the rest of the zones? That’s a hard one. It would probably have to be some sort of underground race so they wouldn’t have to redo the surface zones. It would be a lot of new content to create if they wanted to make it as rich as the other campaigns. I also don’t think it would realistically happen.

2. Game performance

Warhammer is not the most stable game out there. Every night at least one guildie crashes — and it’s not because their computer or their ISP sucks. I can run Guild Wars all day long and never crash. Warhammer, on the other hand, is a different story. I recently built a new machine that has more than respectable components. It should run Warhammer with ease. Yet I have the same problems that most of my friends are having. I get about 10-15 frames per second at any one time. I can have settings at “fastest framerate” or “oooh shiny” and it doesn’t make a difference and I have no idea why.

Game performance is a huge issue, especially with the upcoming city sieges. If you crash to desktop in the new city siege, you automatically get lockouts for the city encounter.

3. Rewards for RVR should be a choice and not a problem

If you are unfamiliar with the principle of game design regarding choices and problems, please watch this fun video. But if you don’t have seven minutes, here’s the gist using the example of the recent scenario changes where you earn an insignia upon completion of the scenario.

You can get insignias from winning a city PQ or by taking a keep, but by far the easiest way to get insignias is by doing scenarios. It is not a choice for players to do scenarios. If you want your weapon before 2012, you need to do scenarios. I think this is a perfect example of problem vs choice.

Is the goal of the game designers to remove players from the ORVR lakes? It sure seems like it.

4-5. If we MUST PVE to get better gear, make it less frustrating

This will count as two items because it deals with PVE.

- Buggy PVE encounters

I can’t think of anything more frustrating in a PVP game other than being forced to PVE. Oh wait, I can. Being forced to PVE in a game that has buggy PVE encounters (see earlier post: A TOVL Rant: Why don’t they fix this?).

It seems the best way Mythic has addressed this problem in the past is by removing the content altogether. We all remember fortress encounters, which were so buggy that it was nigh impossible to win (or or allowed you to win, see post of Destro’s first Altdorf siege here, which was assisted by a bugged Reikwald fort lord that warped to the bottom where they easily killed him).

Do they read bug reports? I submit one every time. Do they have time to fix them? I would guess not.

- Remove luck from the equation

I cannot remember where I read this but I think I heard that the devs are going to include a system where if you have the ward for a piece of equipment then you can actually buy the piece (someone in the know please correct me if I am wrong). That would be awesome, especially if they did it for every encounter.

Anyone who has been to the Tomb of the Vulture Lord knows that the loot drops are amazing and the drop rate is abysmal. We have gone through entire clears without seeing a single piece of Tyrant gear drop. Other guilds who have been doing this much longer than Fight on the Flag can tell you they’ve never seen a breastplate drop, or have seen multiple back pieces drop for classes not in attendance. This is sooo frustrating for players! Spending five hours in a dungeon to get nothing for anyone in the group is not fun. Yet the gear is so good we can’t not try.

So there’s my list. Please let me know what you think and if you would add or remove anything.

That pain in my neck is not the new Pilates routine, it’s Destro stomping all over my about-to-be-dead corpse:

They got into our city at least two times Saturday, but it was probably more because they were pushing pretty hard to get there again when I logged to make dinner.

FOTF had a really fun time in scenarios though. It almost feels like we’re getting some of our groove back. After not playing Order side since July 4 or thereabouts, it’s a rough awakening going from best on the server (several of our guildies were #1 on the leaderboards) to complete nobodies.

Oddly enough the people who seem to remember us most are the new transfers from Phoenix Throne. They were some of the elite Order guilds that we fought against when we played Destro over there. I am glad to know we were more than just a speed bump to them!

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.)

I canceled my Warhammer account last night and was asked to provide feedback at the end of a short survey. Here is what I wrote. I have removed my personal contact information from the letter. My comments about the letter will be in brackets and italics.

Dear Mythic,

My guild, Fight on the Flag, enjoyed your game for a long time. Unfortunately, we left because felt we could no longer have fun in your game because of a number of factors:

1. Unbalanced server populations make lopsided battles no fun for either side.

My guild initially rolled Order/Gorfang because we sought a challenge. We preferred to be the underdogs and thought Order would lead us to good times — and it did, at first. But then Destro, for whatever reason (insert crying about BW bombers), felt they could not compete and stopped showing up to fight. Scenario queues were terrible for the overpopulated side, and sometimes several queues would pop and nobody would show up to anything. Sever merges only exacerbated the problem because, while you added more players to the server, the gap between the two factions remained as large, and possibly grew.

2. You tried to cater to too many player bases (PVE vs. PVP) and therefore failed to entrance either of them. [I should have listed this as number one, because frankly LOTD was a horrible failure.]

When FOTF started playing Warhammer and realized the potential of this game, we thought back to our DAOC days (as Legacy of Storms on Alb/Bedevere) and became afraid. We seriously considered starting a letter-writing campaign to Mark Jacobs begging him not to introduce a Trials of Atlantis type expansion. “But no,” we thought, “they wouldn’t do that again. TOA was a disaster.” How wrong we were. The second I heard of Land of the Dead, I thought “Oh crap, not again.” Everyone I knew from DAOC who had participated in TOA hated the idea, yet they remained cautiously optimistic because you marketed it as a “Darkness Falls” type dungeon.

Warhammer was marketed as a RVR game, like DAOC. Yet in DAOC the gear requirement to PVP (pre TOA) was never an issue. You get max crafting skills, spellcraft your MP armor and you were ready to PVP. You didn’t have to deal with bugged instances, terrible itemization and unlucky drop rates. But in Warhammer, someone decided that you had to cater to the PVE player base and add instances to get your gear. This was a HUGE mistake for anyone who loved Warhammer for the PVP. For my guild, PVE was something we dreaded but tolerated because we wanted to make sure that we remained competitive with the other side. Warhammer PVE was a time vampire that sucked away what little time I had to play with my guild on the weekend.

3. You were slow on server merges, leaving hopeful yet despondent players to languish on dead servers or consider rerolling.

I had written to you before to merge Gorfang with another server because the Destruction side sorely needed help. Unfortunately, my guild rerolled on Phoenix Throne before you merged servers. By the time the Gorfang server merge happened, if we were not already 50 we were well on our way on PT. In any case, players had asked for weeks if not a month or more for the server to get merged. We all knew what was wrong (I even crafted a video, just search for Doorhammer on Youtube).

Aion was the nail in the coffin because so many players left Warhammer for it (and honestly some of us hate that game so far because the grind is so oppressive, but we can’t come back to Warhammer because there is nothing to come back to). [It's a bit like that hot chick that dates complete jerks, but she would rather be dating a jerk than nobody at all. Neither solution (Warhammer or Aion) is best, but Warhammer burned us most recently so we're kinda leery about that option.]

I don’t want this to be too long. I would be surprised if anyone reads this anyway. But you had a good game going, it’s too bad you didn’t listen to your veteran DAOC players.

Sincerely,

Perle, GM of Fight on the Flag
www.fightontheflag.com

PS. We will never forget the fun times we had in Warhammer. It will always hold a special place in our hearts, as DAOC still does. The time we killed two full warbands with our six-man BW bomb group was priceless. I only wish I had been running Fraps at the time. (And yeah, tone down AE next time you make a game, or players like us will use it to our full advantage.)

I am not saying Warhammer is dead. I hear there is still action, but not the fights we had before on Phoenix Throne. If you have evidence to the contrary, however, please post a comment. A recent patch has revitalized the Destruction side from what I hear (marauders got serious buffs).

By the way, anyone who would say BW are/were OP and that Destro couldn’t do what Order did, you don’t know what you’re talking about. We rerolled on Phoenix Throne and regularly ran successful bomb squads (though our gear was a bit worse, we still won many fights against top-rank guilds).

I’ve been playing around with Fraps quite a lot lately. Here is another fight from May 17, where FOTF, TS and some other folks ran to look for the Destro zerg. And boy, did we find them!

What followed was a fight from the big bridge in Dragonwake all the way to the Destruction warcamp. The fight actually lasted about seven minutes, but I compressed the entire thing down to three. Enjoy!

(Watch this video in HQ mode.)

Such an intense, crazy fight!

On another note, FOTS (as we now call the combination of Fight on the Flag and Temporal Space) has been avoiding keep assaults. We timed how long it took for us to get through the first and second doors of a rank four keep: nearly half an hour. That was with two warbands banging on the door.

By the way, no new videos until I get a special project completed. Hopefully I will have more word of said project in the coming week.

From Saaz/Khaevil on the forums:

Starting at guild rank five we’ve been getting a guild tactic every level. The choice in these appears to be unchangeable so it needs to be made carefully. We will eventually have three standards and six standard bearers, allowing two groups to run around with nine bonuses at once.

But our tactics are not respecable, so we have to be careful about what we get. Currently we have the tactic that gives us 30 percent action point regen, and 5 percent renown gain. He lists the tactics in the forums or you can view them on the Warhammer Wiki

Let’s have a discussion about what we want. We will be specing our tactics for end-game RVR, so please keep that in mind.

Also, Mythic introduced patch 1.03. Here are some of the notes that apply to RVR:

• Reduced the interaction time required to deploy a guild standard

• Reduced the interaction time required for players to pick up standards that they own. Please Note: This does not include the capturing of enemy standards.

• Capturing an enemy standard will now reward the capturing player and his nearby allies with renown.
• While going over the data collected for renown gained by healing, we discovered a few incorrect values that led to players earning far more renown than designed.  To ensure equal renown gains for players regardless of their chosen career and whether they group or not inside scenarios, we have made several adjustments to the way renown is granted from healing other players:

• Earning renown from healing players was erroneously granting renown while outside of RvR.  This has been adjusted so getting renown for healing players outside of RvR or from a player that is not RvR flagged will occur less frequently.

• Healing players will grant renown correctly if the healed player has earned renown from killing other players recently.

Sorry this is a bit late, but here’s my review of the game based on preview weekend a couple of weeks ago.

Organdonar and I joined up for some fun in some of the scenarios. Scenarios are like AV or WSG in WoW, except you can queue from anywhere in the world. When you are done with the scenario, the game puts you back where you were when you left the PVE world. We initially tried to play on Destruction, but the queues were literally 45 minutes. It reminded me of the queues we had to put up with when WoW implemented the dreaded 2.4 patch. So we switched over to Order and gave it a shot.

There we reigned supreme, or at least, according to the screenshots. Actually my photography kind of sucked. I’ve completely lost my touch with all these months away from gaming. I didn’t even get some battle shots. Oh well, heres what the scoreboard looks like:

Burnination was my Bright Wizard, the class I plan to play on launch. Bright Wizards are hella fun because if you’re not careful you blow up and die. As Organdonar can attest, I did this several times without complaint.

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