Warhammer Online Information by the Truckload

Last week Massively.com got the chance to head over to EA Mythic's Virginia lab to clock some hands-on time with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning . As a result they were pumping out loads of review content, everything from hardcore PvP info to dungeon crawling to crafting. The culmination of all this hard work was a summary post with clickable navigation to all of their review resources. Definitely worth a look if you are at all curious about this upcoming behemoth.

Zonk at Massively?

[eldavojohn]

I haven't seen a post from Zonk since April 17th [slashdot.org] and now I see that this blog at Massively is by none other than Michael "Zonk" Zenke.

Is there a reason why this wasn't hosted at games.slashdot.org? Is it a sign of Zonk moving on like other editors/authors or is he merely helping other sites out?

Either way, an unparalleled score of information on Warhammer Online by EA Mythic! Well done, Zonk!

I wish there was word on how stable and balanced the game is currently at. I remember playing some MMOs back in the day that were more than a bit glitchy.

DAOC 2 ??

[setrops]

When they put the game on hold some months back and stopped the beta program I was a bit intrigued on what they may doing. It looks like they took feedback from the beta players (mostly DAOC players?) and implemented siege warfare, keeps, realm abilities and other features directly ripped out from DAOC. This could be bad, really bad.

Well let's hope Mythic learned their lessons from the mistakes that they did with DAOC and not repeat them. Who know it may be a great game.

There's only one important thing in the game...

[HerculesMO]

How much PLAYER SKILL does it take to compete?

World of Warcraft is very cookie cutter -- X class will beat Y class, armor and weapons make a HUGE difference, etc.

I have been waiting for Darkfall Online for 6 years (and am still optimistic), but it seems like that will be the only game that fulfills the idea that an individual player can beat somebody else because of innate ability rather than what class you played.

That said, the only other good PvP game has been Ultima Online. I've tried EVERYTHING since then -- AC/EQ/AO/EQ2/WOW/AoC, and more that I forget.

Not Impressed ... Yet

[kenp2002]

In full disclousure I am a former DAOC player:

Warhamma' has one major, GLARING, OUTSTANDING, AND IDIOTIC failing that Mythic has time and time again told us the players is not an issue, yet we complained over and over (and still do to this day).

In Warhammer, there are only two factions (sides.) And I played BETA for 3 months I NEVER SAW A SINGLE, NON-CHAOS player. EVER. With only two sides the oldest problem MMO's face crops up, un-balanced populations.

Every 10 year old kid is going to "roll" Chaos. All the hard-core PvP'ers will roll Chaos. So for every 10 Chaos we'll get 1 person playing a dwarf for about a week; subsequently the dwarf cancels because they're outnumbered 30 to 1. DAOC had 3 factions so even if Midgard outnumbered Hibbies (Hibernian) the combined populations of bucket heads (Albion) and Hibbies outnumbered the fatties (midgard). A three-way battle provided an excellent mechanism for preventing population imbalances. (And isn't a three-way better then a two-way anyway?)

Faction stacking is going to be a serious issue with Warhamma, enough to kill the game at launch if not addressed and as usual, egotist know-it-alls claim they are smarter then the players, and in this case, smarter then basic statistic and math. They denyed population imbalances for years prior to and post Atlantais in DAOC. Time and time again we would show them the population problems (on one server there was an 4 to 1 ratio of Mid's to any of the other two. The other two combined only equaled 1/2 the number of mids.) Their arrogance keeps their head in the sand and with Warhamma, unless they fire some of those twits are gonna bury their own product at launch (reminds me of Star Wars....)

We see it already in WoW with battlegroups (clusters of servers) starting to stack as people transfer to "the horde or alliance dominated" battlegroups.

At least WoW instanced the majority of PvP\RvR to control population imbalances but as far as Warhamma is sizing up, failure is written all over it before it even launches... Hell the gearing imbalances still linger from the AV debacle. On Stormstike I have both alliance and horde (Archimonde and Scilla) and When I queue up for WSG I am standing next to 70's with an average resilience (a key PvP gear statistic) of 70. When I log into my horde on Scilla and head into WSG the average is 200. Most in full s3 gear and very few without at least 4 pieces of s2. Full BG rewards because they had such an advantage during the AV transition (now fixed but the damage is done.)

Basic math doesn't lie and without major re-work I see no future for Warhamma.

When you paint a situation with only two clear cut sides, even the foot steps of a moth will break any hope of balance.

Re:Zonk at Massively?

[StalinsNotDead]

So why does your user name still have the Slashdot indicator next to the friend/foe dots?

Good luck on you r current gig(s).

Re:Not Impressed ... Yet

[Achoi77]

That's never going to change.

In almost all mainstream MMOs, the most dominant race played are the 'most normal' ones. And then after that you have the most 'hardcore' races played by the 'serious' gamers.

In WoW, while NE were popular, humans were clearly the most commonly played race on the Alliance. Dwarves and Gnomes the least played. On the Horde, it was the undead, them being the most 'human' looking, but in a hardcore eeevil fashion. The trolls being the least played race.

EQ had the same pattern - humans being the most commonly played race, trolls and gnomes/dwarves the least.

Also keep in mind that a lot of people were afraid that everybody was going to roll undead during launch - and at first it was true, but as more and more people signed up to play the population evened out after a while, with humans at the top.

But when this game launches, I wouldn't be too suprised to see when a bunch of wow expats playing the opposite faction that they have played in WoW. I myself am looking forward to rolling a dwarf.

Re:I won't pay to play an MMO until

[Spudds]

Dark Age Of Camelot (also created by Mythic) was somewhat like that. WAR is basically DAOC v2.

In DAOC, you captured keeps. The more RvR keeps you had, the more advantages you had in PvE.
For example, with x keeps, you had more gold dropped from mobs. With x + 1 keeps you had more gold drop and bonus XP when you killed mobs. With x + 2 keeps you had more gold, more XP and did more mele dmg.

Those aren't exact, they're examples from my diminishing memory, but you get the idea.
There was also a special dungeon shared across all realms that you were only allowed to go in if your realm had enough keeps in RvR. I believe that's where "the good drops" were...

It sounds like WAR is following in those footsteps but is expanded and refined. So it sounds like WAR is basically what you're looking for.

Re:DAOC 2 ??

[DerWulf]

judging from the disappointing (not bad, but not on par with expectations) Age of Conan I'd advise developers to look at what WoW does right first if they want to have a fighting chance. RvR could be a clusterfuck if the realms are not balanced. Then everyone will suddenly cry for instanced PvP because open is just so damn unfair (the reverse of what people crying about on the WoW forums). WAR and meaningful PvP? I'm not convinced until I see it ... and if it is truly the case the devs should be prepared because any balance issues will be magnified a thousand times by that.