Warhammer Online Thread!

[Hatchet4015]

And if anyone can counter my points, PLEASE do because I sincerely still want to get into WAR.

Maybe my opinions are simply biased/skewed because I've been playing WoW for so long (3 months after it was released) and haven't even tried WoW's beta/release day

Ok, here we go...

Graphics
They are SO ugly. But before I say a few things, I hear and I'm sure that they are releasing the full set of graphics with the retail client, reason they didn't do so for beta was because it would greatly increase the download size, and people aren't selected to test graphics, they were selected to test gameplay.

You are correct. The download was already 10 GB so if higher resolution textures were included, it would be much larger.

UI is REALLY bad, and unlike many people here say, is not customizable at all. The only things you can "customize" about it, is that you can move modules, and you can resize them, and you can hide them, and that's IT. You can't select certain features within a module or add anything that isn't already in the default UI. There is also no latency/ping meter, so apparently they want you to think it's your fault when you lag around instead of a server issue.

That's pretty customize able if you ask me, more so than any other MMO that I've played and I've played quite a few. Not to mention, there will be add-ons to modify the UI further, much like WoW.

Next is the targeting system. While there are party/warband frames for you, you:
1. Can't tell the players class to prioritize heals.
2. Can't tell if they are out of range or not.
So what happened was that when I saw someone getting low on health, I selected him and spammed my heal button, only to realize he's not even in range of me. The only way to tell if someone is in range is if you first select them, then look at your action bar (again, see SS above) and look at the little number above your heal button and if it's red, he's out of range, if he's in range it's white. FYI I only have two heals spells at that level, and they're both red in that SS.

Not being able to tell the class by looking at their target bar may be an issue, yes, but knowing if they're in range or not is the healers responsibility. I don't see a big deal with it. Future add-ons may change the entire spell icon to red, instead of the number, but we'll have to wait until they're created.

So pretty much as it stands, you have to manually select players in the field with your mouse and constantly check their health to see if they need a heal or not, and even then, good luck actually clicking them with everyone running and moving around so much.

There are actually options that you can enable to display health bars above the heads of other players.

I even found some spelling errors in their Help UI thing (like a dumbed down tutorial)

Did you report the problem so Mythic can fix it?

Every NPC wants you to go there and kill that, maybe "look around in [area] for [number] [object]" when object spawns at random locations.

Now I'm beginning to think you're just ranting just for the hell of it. That's the point, it's a quest. You're essentially doing work for an NPC to get rewarded.

PQ (player quests) are supposed to be non-group, zone specific PvE effort. Think of it as an accidentally meeting a raid in world PvE and a quest pops up for everyone. Great on paper, but the quests are retarded and not tough at all. It's just a zerg of players rushing to kill X amount of respawning enemies, and based on how much you contribute in terms of healing, DPS, etc, you get a reward at the end if you're in the top 3. But the thing is, there are so many players trying to get to kill those NPCs before you that you don't even get a hit in before the NPC dies. Then at the end there's usually some kind of a boss, but the boss is very easy and dies in 10 seconds, and then it's over. Some players choose to keep camping the zone in hopes they can get the reward this time, others move along.

I think certain aspects of PQs need work, but right now they're just overflowing with new players. I predict the PQs will be a lot less crowded and challenging once things die down and the player population is more spread out across the world.

First of all as I touched above, the ally targeting mechanic is certainly broken, so it's hard to be a healer in RvR.

What's the problem? I've played a shaman almost exclusively through CB and PW without too many issues.

Next are scenarios, which are WoW's battlegrounds pretty much, and anyone who claims they're different is full of it. You zerg as a team to cap an objective and kill the opposite faction as they also try to get that same objective. That's it.

What else would you recommend? You can say that for practically any territory control team based game.

That is where the real problem is. When it comes down to which side wins the battle is "which side has more numbers", because once a player gets focused by as little as 2 players (out of something like 20 total in these scenarios), he dies in a split second, and since MOST healing here is based on healing over time, while most damage is direct damage, it's pretty dang hard to keep that player up, couple with the fact you have to manually click up in the fray of players to try to heal them, and you got a dead player in 5 seconds.

I have yet to see this "dies in a split second" thing. You have to cast heal over time spells on players as they're running in to the battle. It's pretty easy since most of them are instant cast. The big direct heals with long cast times seem to help out a lot when someone is getting attacked by multiple people. Like I said before, I haven't had too many issues healing in PvE or RvR.

Also, manual clicking? What? Do you want the game to be automatic and play itself? That's just part of being a healer. You have two options, click the health bars for the players in a group, or "manually" click them in the fray.

Now what if you're DPS? Tough luck, because there's already DPS on other people and they're downing them in 5 seconds just as well, so good luck trying to touch someone in the first place, and if you do, expect a fight to last... 5 seconds.

Obviously, if multiple people are attacking a single target it is goes to die fast. 5 seconds, maybe, but that's if they aren't getting healed. If there are too many people on an enemy, find another?

So, one player can not turn the tide around in these RvR's, you don't feel like you've contributed anything. You may have saved/downed a couple of players, but in the grand scheme you've done nothing.

As a healer, I feel I've contributed a lot. Remember, it's Realm vs Realm, not player vs player. One player shouldn't be able to turn the tide on these battles, it's a team effort.

Not only that, but let's say you join as a level 1 into a scenario (aka battlegrounds), you have like 2 spells while other people have around 10 already. Yeah, it's real fun.

Oh, come on. What did you expect joining a scenario at level 1?

"this is BETA. GET OVER IT"
May be so, but fact is, this game is getting released in 3 weeks. If they couldn't fix this in all this time they were making this game, I have my doubts they can fix it any time soon.

Wait until the retail version of the game, or even a few months after release, before you judge an MMO. These games are massive and usually take a long time to get right.

 

[Zorachus]

Bottom line question

People that still like and play WoW, will WAR be fun enough to attrack them away, or at least make them willing to play 2 MMORPG's at the same time ??

 

[Archer75]

Bottom line question

People that still like and play WoW, will WAR be fun enough to attrack them away, or at least make them willing to play 2 MMORPG's at the same time ??

Really depends on the person but I would say yes. Those who play WoW will find WAR easy to get in to. But it's important to note that WAR is not WoW so don't expect it to be the same. It's a new game with new goals.

 

[Frostex]

Fun fact from the Closed Beta and Preview Weekend:

Know how in many MMOs you have those quests where you need to collect 10 bear paws for some NPC? You go out into the woods and start slaughtering bears, only to find that maybe 1 in 5 actually have usable paws on loot? That doesn't make any sense does it? Well, WAR didn't think so either.

Every single time you have to collect something from a NPC that should have it (ie. I need unicorn hearts. Every single unicorn needs a heart doesn't it?), it has it. No more elves missing ears, bears missing paws, or wolves missing teeth.

It really cuts down on the grind factor and says a lot about the game that they don't need to artificially lengthen quests to eek out more content.

Yeah they mention this in one of the developer podcast things a while back, that and the server tracks your total kills for each creature whether you're doing a relevant quest or not, so if an NPC wants you to kill 10 bears and you've already killed a load the will already count.

 

[krameriffic]

Really depends on the person but I would say yes. Those who play WoW will find WAR easy to get in to. But it's important to note that WAR is not WoW so don't expect it to be the same. It's a new game with new goals.

I figure it will serve as a nice stopgap for WoW players bored with the current lack of new content in the pre-WotLK game. I may play WAR when it comes out, but I will almost certainly start playing WoW again when WotLK comes out.

 

[nullzero]

Here is a nice post from Mark (Lead DEV on the WAR team)

-----------------------------------------------------
State of the Preview Weekend
Folks,

I'll be expanding this as the weekend goes by but here's where we stand right now in terms of some of the issues that have been discussed, tossed around, thrown like a spear at our heads since the Preview Weekend started:

1) We peaked last night at around 30K concurrent players across our servers, that is obviously a great number. During that time the servers performed extremely well in terms of CPU usage and we never once came close to max usage so we know that we will meet our server cap populations for launch.

2) Regarding overall server stability we've pretty much exceeded our expectations. We've only had two full server crashes across all servers since we began. Neither crash was due to player load, CPU overload, code going brain dead,etc. but due to a minor issue on our part. The same is true for region crashes of which we only had two. Unfortunately, we had more scenarios crash (20) than we like but the number is still quite low considering we've been running 15 servers for more than a day.

3) Client crashes (crashes to desktop) are down from the last stage of closed beta and thanks to all the people playing, we've already fixed two issues that have caused some of the CTDs. We're not there yet but we are in better shape than we were last month and we will be even better at launch. Even now the CTDs are lower than some games were at release but having said that, it's not good enough for us and CTDs are issue #1A for us right now.

4) Pet AI and pathing is severely broken. The Preview Weekend patch (3.3) unfortunately borked the system. This is issue #1B for us. Even though this is a beta and new bugs/issues are to be expected, we messed up on this issue. We expect a quick turnaround on this next week. So please accept my apologies for this one, it should not have happened.

5) On the subject of graphical quality, SLI, etc., the problems that some players have reported are being focused on as well. From what we've been able to gather so far (other than on SLI which is a known issue), there is something weird happening with a small percentage of graphic cards as well as a possible issue which crept into this patch. We'll know more about it this week.

6) On some targeting issues, we're looking into that as well.

7) Regarding the GCD, we are not going to remove the GCD but we are continuing to look into some of the issues that have been reported with its use. As our closed beta testers have reported, our Combat Responsiveness Code made a huge difference to the game's feel and we're going to continue to look at the GCD and see if it needs tweaking along with any bug fixes that need to be done. I'll be posting more about this as well in the coming days/weeks. While the bugs with the GCD isn't our #1 priority, making combat feel even more responsive and fun is a major issue so it will continue to get looked at and tweaked over this last month and beyond.

So, that's it for now, more to come as the PW progresses as things arise. Overall we are thrilled with the response to the game on the Web, to our in-game surveys and from our feedback/bug tools. I'm glad we still have almost a month before launch but I am also quite happy where we are other than the problem with pathing/AI for which again I offer my apologies.
-----------------------------------------------------

It is nice to see that the biggest issues are being tackled. Like others had said the combat responsiveness system needs some help. Mark aknownledged this as a big problem and is working hard to fix this.

 

[Deleted member 143938]

What does he mean by GCD bugs? And GCD means global cooldown, right?

I can't think of.. a bug with it when all it is is a 2 second timer?

 

[veterator]

What does he mean by GCD bugs? And GCD means global cooldown, right?

I can't think of.. a bug with it when all it is is a 2 second timer?

I think what he's referring to on the GCD is sometimes where you'll try to use abilities that SHOULD be ready and show they are ready. They will say "Ability not ready." then start another timer on it, usually for me it's the full duration of the cooldown on any ability I used and got the message on.

At least that's what I hope he's talking about, because it acts like the client and the server aren't syncing up right. Which I wouldn't be shocked if they told me my client was de-syncing cuz the game lags like crazy after 30+ minutes of game play....get random hitching/pausing...and as I continue to play my character will get into animations poses and get frozen. I ran around for probably 20 minutes with my character bent over with it's arms up like it was trying to stab someone by holding it's arms out and charging at them.

The memory leak, or whatever problem I have with the game is absolutely killing it for me. I am guessing Im in the video card problem club he was talking about in his preview weekend update. Hopefully it's fixed for open beta week, because it's a show stopper for me on enjoying myself while I play.


Other thoughts on the game:

- I didn't think the capital city was as spectacular/big/massive as was expecting. I didn't find anything going on there of particular interest to me at a low level, so maybe that changes at higher levels....but so far I don't see why the other cities were removed.

- Each class on each side has it's counter part on the other side, just the mechanics are named different names..but the abilities and what not that I saw minus maybe the career path talents were the same. I didn't really notice it reading through the lists with no in-game knowledge but there are definite mirror classes on both sides when it comes to tanks/healers for sure.

- I felt the greenskin starter zone was the best of all the Destruction ones, it seemed like they spent more time on it to me. Just was a better layout, and less aggravating quests. Where as say..the Dark Elves had these quests of kill Some Guy A...and he'd be on a slow spawn timer and no one would want to group...so you'd compete for the kill. Or other variations of specific name person needs to have something done and when you do it, they die..and take forever to respawn. Drove me nuts, and I never got anywhere near as pissed off in the greenskin zone. Only quest I can think of similar in green skin area is killing cannoneers on the dam...

- PQs, some of them have insanely long wait times for waves of NPCs. They need to scale these waves a little so they spit out more guys if there's more people. Prime example of this is the greenskin PQ involving the giant. Like 5 non-champ dwarves for 25+ people to kill and they continue on like that for like 3-4 waves of boredom for anyone who doesn't want to spam tab trying to get a target and hit it before it's dead.

- RvR scenario queue has no estimated wait time, they need this even if it's just a best guess. At some point while playing I was in 1-2 hour queues for a scenario, and missed it cuz I got up to get something to drink.

- Open world RvR, I didn't have too many problems here, but one stuck out for me. The dwarf/greenskin tier 1, one of the points is near the dwarf camp and the roaming guards come up to within 200-250 feet of the flag cap. So people would come up and shoot a pet to aggro the guards, or run someone over a hill and have the roaming guards coming up the hill at the same time. I see the point of the guards to stop camping, but that's just a little silly having them so close to a cap point, especially where they roam up that close.



Overall I'd say I am interested enough in the game to justify 30 days of play time.......if it ran smooth for me. But no game is worth the frustration of random crashes or hitching while playing. So here's hoping OB runs better for me.

 

[MrFace]

fast attack feel, whatever, it doesn't equal good gameplay

Yes it does. Right now the game feels like you are moving a chess piece that doesn't do anything until you tell it to do a certain attack and then at that point the character goes in to the SAME animation for every attack. Nothing is fluid. I was so hyped for this game because I thought it was going to be a fast paced FLUIDLY ANIMATED combat game.

When your characters move like sloths it really ruins the gameplay because it doesn't feel natural whatsoever. Sure, it's beta, but the game is ready for retail. I'm hoping there is a major overhaul of the combat animation system sooner than later.

 

[phobic]

Yes it does. Right now the game feels like you are moving a chess piece that doesn't do anything until you tell it to do a certain attack and then at that point the character goes in to the SAME animation for every attack. Nothing is fluid. I was so hyped for this game because I thought it was going to be a fast paced FLUIDLY ANIMATED combat game.

When your characters move like sloths it really ruins the gameplay because it doesn't feel natural whatsoever. Sure, it's beta, but the game is ready for retail. I'm hoping there is a major overhaul of the combat animation system sooner than later.

Age of Conan, I guess, has faster combat but that game is basically an exercise in worthlessness for me. Very stale and all around boring. Bottom line is that while the combat appears to be fast paced, the gameplay still sucks to me.

That being said, I don't have that big of a problem with WAR's combat mechanics but it's clunky to a point and Mythic knows this. Should be interesting to see what they do about it.

 

[Heyday]

I had a blast with the preview weekend. Made me cancel my AoC sub, that game is dead to me. The combat system wasn't as bad as everyone made it sound. Even with the global cooldown, it doesn't seem that slow. We were even limited to low levels, games always get better when you get closer to max level.

The RvR system is great. You can level with PvP all the way to max level. If you don't want to do quests, you don't have to. The quests were just something to do while I waited for the scenario que. The sieg of keeps was a blast. We had some great massive battles. I was even on order, the greatly outnumbered side, and still had a blast.

I also thought the Public quests were quite fun. Sometimes they were just a competition to see who could get rank 1-3 for the loot, but that was still fun. Other times there were only a few people around to do the quests, and it was a challenge.

Overall, I had a lot of fun, and will be playing this game at launch, and for a long time after, if this is an indication of the entire game.

 

[MrFace]

Age of Conan, I guess, has faster combat but that game is basically an exercise in worthlessness for me. Very stale and all around boring. Bottom line is that while the combat appears to be fast paced, the gameplay still sucks to me.

That being said, I don't have that big of a problem with WAR's combat mechanics but it's clunky to a point and Mythic knows this. Should be interesting to see what they do about it.

It is true that Mythic is aware of it and I'm hoping for the best. It's obvious the game had to be rushed so I have no doubt that the combat issues will be handled via patches.

 

[fornarmr]

It's a roleplaying game, not an action game. It's not supposed to be blazing fast. Once they fix the animations and clunkyness it should be fine. If it's the same speed as daoc then I'll be happy.

 

[Heyday]

It already feels faster than DAOC to me.

 

[Archer75]

Yes it does. Right now the game feels like you are moving a chess piece that doesn't do anything until you tell it to do a certain attack and then at that point the character goes in to the SAME animation for every attack. Nothing is fluid. I was so hyped for this game because I thought it was going to be a fast paced FLUIDLY ANIMATED combat game.

When your characters move like sloths it really ruins the gameplay because it doesn't feel natural whatsoever. Sure, it's beta, but the game is ready for retail. I'm hoping there is a major overhaul of the combat animation system sooner than later.

I still don't see this slow combat. I don't see characters moving like sloths at all. So i'm not quite sure what their is to complain about. I stand by my original post. The animations in no way equal good game play. Combat is like any other MMO, push some buttons and watch it happen. If this were twitch based it would be different.
But a simple combat animation, While maybe not looking nice, doesn't affect the gameplay and content. I would much rather see content than fancy animations.

 

[Heyday]

I still don't see this slow combat. I don't see characters moving like sloths at all. So i'm not quite sure what their is to complain about. I stand by my original post. The animations in no way equal good game play. Combat is like any other MMO, push some buttons and watch it happen. If this were twitch based it would be different.
But a simple combat animation, While maybe not looking nice, doesn't affect the gameplay and content. I would much rather see content than fancy animations.

/agreed

The people at Mythic are actually focusing on the important stuff, gameplay, instead of being pretty. Other games should take a note of that. Too many games lately have had beautiful graphics with lackluster gameplay, and I am tired of that. I am very glad to see someone looking at it differently.

 

[ob1]

I am a current EQ2 player and have played that game since its launch in 2004. I have been trying to get into other games like AoC and now War to make a break from EQ2. I think War has the most potential for me, but there are some small issues.

First, the game ran great for me and my son. We had no problems on either of our computers at all, and the frames, lag, and everything else was great, which surprised me for being still in beta.

The graphics of this game, alot like WoW, are a little dated. I do understand however, that the reasoning for this was for the larger 200v200 RvR battles and such. EQ2 graphics are still way above this game, except for maybe some of the particle effects.

I have never really done PvP before, but in this game I enjoyed it, except for the fact that I played mostly order classes and would be severely outnumbered. I think thats just gonna have to be that way I would imagine, but the game did give me a feel that our side was always losing. I joined in to help win some control points back, but we were outnumbered probably 10 to 1 in those open contested zones. Once we got organized and took out a war party of three groups, we were able to kill a few groups of destruction people, but then they got rallied and came back with at least six or seven groups, and wiped us out. I don't see a fix for that really.

The game mechanics seem pretty sound, although I don't know how high they will scale when the game is a year or two old. I only got four toons to around level 10 - 12, so I didn't see much of the game. I tried to play what people thought were overpowered DoK and AM, and then what people perceive as weaker WH and Sorc and had fun with all of them. Although I did try almost all classes and noticed some mirroring from order to destruction, with renamed spells/abilities.

To sum up my feeling, I am going to try this game when it launches, maybe get a 60 day game card to limit it, and see where it goes. I don't anticipate this replacing EQ2 at this point, unless things get really good at the higher end of the game.

 

[Climber]

Warriors in WoW have a 1.5 second global cooldown that triggers off every attack and I feel WoW's combat is pretty face paced. I can't see another .5 seconds being life altering, think other classes in WoW also trigger a GCD of 1-2 seconds as well.

It has been over a year since I last played WoW so forgive me if this is wrong, but I do remember a GCD on my warrior.

As far as being outnumbered, this was a common problem in DAoC as well. Generally Albion was the most played so you would routinely face 2-3 groups vs your 1 Midgard group, having a third realm, Hibernia, helped even out any population imbalances usually though. it took a while but most players who stuck it out generally became very good at dealing with multiple opponents which really made the RvR and PvP stand out.

 

[Sky15]

order all the way!

 

[MrFace]

I still don't see this slow combat. I don't see characters moving like sloths at all. So i'm not quite sure what their is to complain about. I stand by my original post. The animations in no way equal good game play. Combat is like any other MMO, push some buttons and watch it happen. If this were twitch based it would be different.
But a simple combat animation, While maybe not looking nice, doesn't affect the gameplay and content. I would much rather see content than fancy animations.

Oh ok. I remember people touting this game as "skill > gear". If standing there pressing buttons is skill then...I'll have to pass

 

[-Tetsuo-]

OK I have to get this rant/QQ/complaint post out of my chest! It's long and fanboys won't like it. But I will

I am vastly disappointed with this. If you follow my posts here in [H] for the past month I've been pretty much exclusively posting in this thread, hyping myself, others, and trying to help boost this game and justify a few things. But I haven't been in closed beta. This weekend I got to try the preview weekend and I take back pretty much everything I have said.

Graphics
They are SO ugly. But before I say a few things, I hear and I'm sure that they are releasing the full set of graphics with the retail client, reason they didn't do so for beta was because it would greatly increase the download size, and people aren't selected to test graphics, they were selected to test gameplay.

That said, in this preview weekend client, they are absolutely disgusting.

The draw distance is like 50 steps ahead of you tops, you always see random buildings scenery half popped in when you move in the background. Screenshot as an example below (click to enlarge):


Animations are just one step ahead of Half-Life 1. When people jump, the body moves as a stiff hunk of metal, I have also encountered many item clipping issues.

Terrain is also very not detailed, but I'm positive there will be high-res textures with the retail release, though I can't imagine how graphics would fix the very awkward jumping/falling physics that are inplace right now.

UI
Refer to SS above for the following examples.

UI is REALLY bad, and unlike many people here say, is not customizable at all. The only things you can "customize" about it, is that you can move modules, and you can resize them, and you can hide them, and that's IT. You can't select certain features within a module or add anything that isn't already in the default UI. There is also no latency/ping meter, so apparently they want you to think it's your fault when you lag around instead of a server issue.

Next is the targeting system. While there are party/warband frames for you, you:
1. Can't tell the players class to prioritize heals.
2. Can't tell if they are out of range or not.
So what happened was that when I saw someone getting low on health, I selected him and spammed my heal button, only to realize he's not even in range of me. The only way to tell if someone is in range is if you first select them, then look at your action bar (again, see SS above) and look at the little number above your heal button and if it's red, he's out of range, if he's in range it's white. FYI I only have two heals spells at that level, and they're both red in that SS.

So pretty much as it stands, you have to manually select players in the field with your mouse and constantly check their health to see if they need a heal or not, and even then, good luck actually clicking them with everyone running and moving around so much.

Also notice how the buff icons beneath my healthbar pop out of their frames, and how the chat windows don't completely disappear, they have this little gray shade to them on the bottom at all times, and also you can't mouse over a buff that is on a second row, a tooltip doesn't pop.

I even found some spelling errors in their Help UI thing (like a dumbed down tutorial)
PvE
Not many complaints here, except that Mythic prides themselves in having some kind of a revolutionary quest system when it's no different than WoW.

Every NPC wants you to go there and kill that, maybe "look around in [area] for [number] [object]" when object spawns at random locations.

PQ (player quests) are supposed to be non-group, zone specific PvE effort. Think of it as an accidentally meeting a raid in world PvE and a quest pops up for everyone. Great on paper, but the quests are retarded and not tough at all. It's just a zerg of players rushing to kill X amount of respawning enemies, and based on how much you contribute in terms of healing, DPS, etc, you get a reward at the end if you're in the top 3. But the thing is, there are so many players trying to get to kill those NPCs before you that you don't even get a hit in before the NPC dies. Then at the end there's usually some kind of a boss, but the boss is very easy and dies in 10 seconds, and then it's over. Some players choose to keep camping the zone in hopes they can get the reward this time, others move along.

RvR
Oh boy, where do I start with this failure.

First of all as I touched above, the ally targeting mechanic is certainly broken, so it's hard to be a healer in RvR.

Next are scenarios, which are WoW's battlegrounds pretty much, and anyone who claims they're different is full of it. You zerg as a team to cap an objective and kill the opposite faction as they also try to get that same objective. That's it.

That is where the real problem is. When it comes down to which side wins the battle is "which side has more numbers", because once a player gets focused by as little as 2 players (out of something like 20 total in these scenarios), he dies in a split second, and since MOST healing here is based on healing over time, while most damage is direct damage, it's pretty dang hard to keep that player up, couple with the fact you have to manually click up in the fray of players to try to heal them, and you got a dead player in 5 seconds.

Now what if you're DPS? Tough luck, because there's already DPS on other people and they're downing them in 5 seconds just as well, so good luck trying to touch someone in the first place, and if you do, expect a fight to last... 5 seconds.
So, one player can not turn the tide around in these RvR's, you don't feel like you've contributed anything. You may have saved/downed a couple of players, but in the grand scheme you've done nothing.

Next is the world RvR. In these places you're supposed to cap a castle or some other cool-sounding-thing-on-paper, but in reality they're static buildings that all you have to do is open a door, you enter one itty bitty room with a flag in the middle, and cap it. Here is a post I made on WHA forum about it when someone asked what it's like:


Now, there are people that say that you can level through RvR alone. Yes, you can. But guess what, it takes about 10 times as long to gain a level as if you were doing PvE, and all you get for it is spending 50 percent of that time watching "you will be resurrected in 9s", 40 percent running, 5 percent fighting, 5 percent capping.

Not only that, but let's say you join as a level 1 into a scenario (aka battlegrounds), you have like 2 spells while other people have around 10 already. Yeah, it's real fun.

"this is BETA. GET OVER IT"
May be so, but fact is, this game is getting released in 3 weeks. If they couldn't fix this in all this time they were making this game, I have my doubts they can fix it any time soon.

Is this a joke post? 90% of those complaints are mainstays of 90% of the MMO's out now.

 

[Archer75]

Oh ok. I remember people touting this game as "skill > gear". If standing there pressing buttons is skill then...I'll have to pass

It's no different than wow in terms of combat. Maybe some subtle differences but the combat is what you'll find in any MMO. All MMO's really come down to pushing buttons but can still involve more skill than a shooter. It's about understanding your class, your build and your opponents class and build and being able to execute the most efficient attacks all while responding to whatever comes your way.

But just because it isn't twitch based doesn't mean it doesn't involve skill. In warhammer skill is still > gear.

And combat animations have nothing to do with any of that. It's merely a visual.

 

[azuros]

I have to say that i beta'ed aoc and did not enjoy it at all, as an avid mmo player since the days of eq1 most of the things you are saying are true to 90% of the mmo's out there if not more. Personally i would rather them spend time developing the facets like pvp than making the character look pretty (anyone remember shadowbane). This game is wholly created for pvp and although i dont disagree with you i would like to see more fluid character this is still beta a month out from release. As it stands now they canceled the release of 2 races and stopped 2/3 cities from being siegable to get the core of the game 100% which i do think is a good idea and this gives them easy content for and expansion. This game is not a wow clone, if it where it would be completely focused on pve which it is the opposite they want you to pvp and introduce it early in outer world style. Overall i was impressed with it and plan on playing when released.

 

[ost]

All you people are lucky to get into beta. Thanks for your thoughts on the game.

 

[combustion]

played it on saturday and I gotta say i was very disapointed.. I just cant get past that fruit loops cartoon style.. it kills it for me just as wow killed it for me.

gameplay is boring and the skill setup is just as good as any free mmo.

 

[Oomps]

Is this a joke post? 90% of those complaints are mainstays of 90% of the MMO's out now.

So it's no different then 90% of the mmo's out...interesting

 

[Climber]

So it's no different then 90% of the mmo's out...interesting

No MMO is completely different from another. The core element of an MMO is same regardless of being a pvp/rvr/pve centric MMO.

Each iteration of an MMO builds upon the genre by adding to or taking away from the previous generations. The questing system in WAR is quite nice and takes away some of the more asinine parts of questing in MMO's and it also borrows a lot of the better PvE aspects from WoW. The RvR expounds upon what Mythic did in DAoC as well as the battlegrounds from WoW.

played it on saturday and I gotta say i was very disapointed.. I just cant get past that fruit loops cartoon style.. it kills it for me just as wow killed it for me.

gameplay is boring and the skill setup is just as good as any free mmo.

The "fruit loops cartoon style" is preference as well as the fact that everything is scaled down in beta so on release the hi-res textures and particles will be available, and I think anyone would agree that in large scale RvR you want a playable scenario rather then a "pretty" one. Look at AoC currently, it is without a doubt one of the more breathtaking and pretty looking MMO's out there but you can't do a 48v48 siege without a plethora of problems and killing off pretty much all massive scale PvP.

I would try and expound on why the gameplay is boring to you. Was it the PQ, the scenario's, the basic grind, etc...etc...

Oh ok. I remember people touting this game as "skill > gear". If standing there pressing buttons is skill then...I'll have to pass

Not sure what to say here. The most simplistic view is that this is what all MMO's do, pressing buttons and I'm sure you're capable of looking farther beyond that aspect. I can't think of any MMO that doesn't focus on "just pressing buttons". However, gameplay, especially in RvR boils down to a lot more then "just pressing buttons". If this is all you do then ya, you're pretty much stuck in the most basic of gameplay and won't excel at all in the game...just look at how many crappy people abound in WoW arenas. You can have the exact same makeup as a 2200 rank team but if all you do is just run in there and press 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 over and over again your going to suck and lose pretty much every match you come across.

 

[phobic]

Alright I don't want to be a WAR fanboy or Mythic peen sucker but I have to say, I'm pleased at the way they let us know what's going on with the game. They aren't afraid to talk about what's wrong right out in the open. Whether it get's fixed the way they say it will is a different story but they are trying a lot more than recent companies. Mark Jacobs (WAR game producer) had a few more things to say.

TLDR version at bottom.

http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/108341444/p1
Okay, it was a wild and crazy weekend in WAR and while some of you might be tempted to go all Samurai on us for a couple of the bugs, overall things went very, very well. As long-time readers of my notes now, I won’t do a Nick Winters and we are anything but pathological liars so we’ll always own up when we make a mistake and we made a couple here. So, let’s talk amongst ourselves and have a little chat about the top nine list of the biggest issues and where we stand in regards to them.

(1) Client Crashes – I’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why we didn’t release the NDA until recently. Here’s the current status.
- Just a little too many currently. While we are better off than we were in beta, we must do better still before release.
- A number of players will lower spec machines had more CTDs than higher spec machines.
- Number of fixes already in pipeline. They are working their way through our testing servers and will be pushed to the players once they have been vetted internally.
- Engineering time for CTD issue has remained heavily committed; our top engineers are working on the various issues.

(2) Monster Pathing and AI – Well, what can I say other than not even all of King Tut’s wealth could have made us feel better for messing up on this one. Well, maybe all his wealth.
- “Yes, that monster seems to be behaving a little oddly”. Monster responsiveness was very sketchy, odd pauses and tethering issues.
- “Oh, was I supposed to go in that direction?” Pathing sometimes wonky - mobs get stuck or go in wrong direction.
- Utter confusion at times as both monsters and pets will engage and disengage seemingly at random
- Internal server optimizations last week broke the pathing/AI. And I mean really, really broke it. This truly was a “Opps, we broke this code” moment for us and we don’t have many of them.
- Going to ensure that this problem is fixed this week. As I said in my first Preview Weekend, this is a major concern for us. Fortunately we have no underwater combat in this game or some of the NPCs may have been appropriately dubbed land sharks.

(3) Pet Responsiveness – With similar issues to Monster Pathing and AI, this was not our finest hour.
- Need to transfer "combat responsiveness" fixes to pets - have pet move immediately on button press.
- “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Pets suffer from same pathing and lack of response as general monsters. Pets hopping around like they were headed to Del Staters.


(4) Global Cooldown Timers –This seems to be a hot topic for players to talk about. However, things aren’t always as they seem.
- Reality and perception are two different things, Warhammer has a GCD of 1.4s, WoW has 1.5s
- “Ability not ready” messaging needs to be improve, a sound effect if Global Cooldown in effect, maybe more cowbell?
- Need to improve on the feeling of sluggishness of the GCD and UI. Bug with display where our timer shows 2s when it is really 1.4
- The next best thing to a queue is? We will add in better "slop timer" to allow players 0.3s extra to pre-queue a second ability followup.

(5) Better animations
- So much more coming in the next two versions of the client. We are currently incorporating serious amounts of new animations into the game. Hopefully nobody will sneak a coneheads model into the game.
- Look at what my XXXX does now? Over the next month we will address many class-attack specific issues across all 20 careers.
- “U think you can dance?” Nope, but we have added new racial animations for movement, fidgets and redid some emotes.

(6) Texture Blurring
- Textures are currently cached in a manner that results in blurriness on entering a region.
- We will look at adding a client scalar.

(7) Client Performance – This is one of those issues
- Need better scalers on effects, sounds, graphics, etc to help lower end machines (already lots of additions to coders)
- This thing loves memory like Dan Aykroyd loves bass. We have already improved the memory consumption of the client and taken 100M out of current test best.

(8)Cool Targeting, Camera, etc
- Currently our targeting system differs from many MMOs in terms of our features and how we go about things. We will identify and make a more standard initial setup but allow flexibility.
- Will add additional keybinding selections to allow flexibility

(9) Renown rank gear
- Unfortunately, a new bug (well an old bug we fixed and then managed to break again) which allowed Rank 10 RR 6 players can go to Tier 2 to get better gear and then come back to Tier 1 and own scenarios. We are currently working on a fix.

I hope you enjoyed the Preview Weekend and we thank you for your interest and we hope, patronage of our game.

Guess what folks, that’s the news and I am outta here!

Mark

TLDR:
Client optimizations to fix crashes
Better AI/pathing for monsters & pets
Better animations
Better camera and targeting controls
Fixes for texture blurring
They are looking into the global cooldown issue and maybe adding a pre-queue
Fix for Tier 2 renown gear in Tier 1

Sounds good on paper and hopefully they'll make it into the game.

 

[Troub]

I' am currently at work right now but does anyone know if the servers are still up for the preview weekend? Thanks in advance

 

[phobic]

I' am currently at work right now but does anyone know if the servers are still up for the preview weekend? Thanks in advance

Well since it was a preview weekend.... Servers came down at 10:45AM to prepare for open beta.

 

[kadozer]

Those animations...lol they should be the first thing they fix aside from technical issues.

 

[krameriffic]

For those of you who are interested, Fileplanet is offering open beta keys for those who are subscribers. So if you have a subscription for some reason (possibly the free one from Comcast) and you are on the fence about preordering the game just to try it in the beta, you can get down on this opportunity.

 

[canislupy]

Fine print: "Subscribing does not guarantee participation, however pre-ordering does!"

 

[veterator]

Yeah, but if you act pretty quick on fileplanet, usually they have 20-50k keys for any open beta if not more. So if you wait yeah you probably won't get one, but if you get in right away..I never got denied a beta I request a key for on the first day unless it was a staged release. 5k keys, then 5k keys hours later randomly to cut down on the server load, but I eventually got those too. And if they don't run out of keys they usually open to anyone with an account on fileplanet (free account)...or sometimes they have a set amount of those. But that probably won't be offered until 3-5 days prior to open beta, which Im guessing is usually at the publishers request so they can get an idea on how many people they can expect on the first day of beta to simulate the head start and official start influxes.

 

[Deleted member 143938]

Oh wow very nice list of changes, very nice!

Can't wait to try open beta, hopefully they will be implemented by then

 

[Justintoxicated]

Ok I didn't cancel my order yet, Frys.com says it is backordered now. Hmmmmm Will I get the beta before the games comes out I hope? I probably wont even have tie to play the actual game I dunno why I purchased it. I figure I can get a good hour or 2 in every week tops.

 

[jonneymendoza]

im debating on weather i should get this game or not. im currently playing wow for the firsty time atm and my sub will end soon

 

[Frostex]

Still not clear on the UK and the early access stuff, the Warhammer Online website only lists official US traders who can do pre-orders with keys etc, no where is any UK stores listed.

D2D is kind of tempting but with such a huge download, that's a bit of a pain, I'd rather have the disks in this case tbh.

 

[jonneymendoza]

yet again UK get shafted

 

[XBarbarian]

Nice - that message from Mark Jacobs is as honest and forthright as any message I have ever seen from a Dev team ( and I support Dev teams in the non game Software world, you can forget about that level of bluntness there ) and that really has to be encouraging to anyone that is excited about the potential of this game ( well, that and someone that's mature enough to get beyond "OMG..it's 30 million years past WoW's release and the pictures are not any prettier !!1! n00bs!!1! lrn2code!!1! ) Once again, gameplay > pictures, although it should be reasonably current in it's graphics.

I pre ordered from EAStore, last night 8/25, hoping for less kluginess in the sending of open beta keys, etc going directly to the Authors, however; received a confirmation message of the sale, but no message with open beta keys etc, which means I can't register on the mythic accounts site, etc. I had gone to Target, but they were out. I hope to get whatever message I need to be allowed to move forward with the DL, etc, and be able to participate in the Open Beta and Head Start stuff!

Regardless, I am excited about this game, I need a game to get involved in again. WoW is just unable to keep my attention anymore. I played AoC for a month, paid for 3, but canceled as that game seems fairly dead, and mmo's suck if the pops are too low.

Enjoyed reading this thread, and really spent the weekend reading lots of threads on various sites. Here's to hoping the game is good, and is supported, fast enough, to get better in a reasonable time frame, enough to start with the big subs, and grow from there. As has been said, not sure anything can ever be a WoW killer per se; the synchronicity Blizzard captured with WoW and their pretty responsive support and continued Dev work with that may have been a once in a lifetime kinda thing; but as long as WAR is fun, is supported well, and continues to be responsive to players' desire's and needs, there's hope it can sustain and even grow subs, which is critical to long time playability in any MMO.

As a old time EQ1 player, the SWG, then WoW, I realize nothing can ever really re capture the "magic" that I once felt in the early days of my EQ1 Addiction, or at least nothing has yet, but I do prefer mmo's for the simple fact there's a whole lot less cheating going on. FPS's can be a blast, but the lack of depth eventually always looses my attention, and the fact I'm hard pressed to find one that doesn't eventually mean playing against code ( hacks ), instead of skill, makes it even more frustrating.