Guild News & Rants

I'm confused. So very confused.

First people bitch about how long it takes to get 40 (which is an absolute joke in itself). Then we have people complaining about Serpent's Passage repetition. I'll concede that is a rather warranted complaint. Although it's only one step from non-zerg Open RvR.

Now the complaint of the month is the lack of action in RvR? There hasn't been a single night I can remember where I wasn't able to PvP in a scenario almost instantly after joining the queue. And I'd say four out of five weeknights are loaded with Open RvR; and I don't mean keep-tag. I mean actual RvR. Whether it be annihilating Lords of War as they try to take our keep, or roaming Praag between keeps, there's been plenty of action.

The one glaring complaint I share with most players is the renown award system. It is completely counter-intuitive to progression. It fosters everyone being the same rank. I understand and accept the concept of higher ranked players yielding more renown. But punishing someone for being several ranks above the player they killed is ridiculous.

And on top of that, the way to achieve PvP sets is ridiculous. So Rizaz, Nordicmonkey and Yuriel are the only way Destruction can get Conqueror boots for the foreseeable future? Am I the only one that sees a problem?

But I digress. What to do at 40? RvR - that's the point.

Having to grind PvE is not a valid excuse. Even the special olympics group I ran yesterday in Bilerot cleared through it in just over two hours. And I stress the fact that it was truly retarded in there. A more class-balanced group could clear that in under two hours without blinking. Bloodwraught is even quicker. And the Order equivalents I'm sure are similar.

What you do at 40 is RvR. I guarantee if you want to Open RvR you simply roam a zone and take a few BOs, and Sacrifice will be there 2 minutes after we notice. Or if we don't, take a keep, claim it, and roam the zone. We'll be knocking on your front door (and your backdoor when we find you if you get what I mean, baby), as soon as we can.

Scenario rotations are getting better, Reikland is a change of pace, and there are plenty of people to kill. The more people we have that don't fall into the attitude of giving up out of apathy and just wait until "prime time" for the action to boil up, the better chance we have of spreading the warfront across more zones.

This latest "agreement" I've been informed of, for the entire server to converge to a single zone, is going to be the biggest cluster fuck in the history of the universe. Think for one second what it will be like to have 100 people on the same keep. Now imagine 500 with this agreement. Now picture your genitals burning.

What we need is the T3 lovers to eat some garlic, have their balls drop, and level up to Tier 4. The game is still growing, and too many people are just stalling in the lower tiers with some false sense of accomplishment. Nobody gives a shit about the minor leagues - really.

And all of the level 40s that are "bored" because there's no RvR are just contributing to the problem by not logging in. The more people queued in scenarios the more variance of scenarios we get. The more people in Open RvR, the more spread out the front gets and we have some pretty amazing fights in separate areas. If you don't want to take keeps, take BOs and roam. If you're patient, you'll find some action, guaranteed.

Sacrifice has yet to have any issue whatsoever finding any RvR. Our biggest complaint has been getting stuck in queues against level 28s and 30s. It's no fun for either side; I promise.

If you want to RvR, then get a group and get out there, don't just sit back and wait - that accentuates the problem.

If even that fails, log into Sacrifice's vent and pick a fight. We will always take the bait.

It is rather interesting how quickly a group of 10 guildmates turns into a "zerg" of 43 people. I have to say I was shocked when I saw that at Drakebreakers; especially when the original ten of us got mowed over at Covenant of Flame not much earlier.

Does anyone know if the Oil at certain keeps is deliberately out of range for casters, or is that a bug/oversight? That makes taking those keeps almost impossible if there are defenders. Even with siege weapons it's nearly impossible to "kill" the oil if there's anyone repairing it.

In the same vein, are we supposed to be able to AoE through doors? I noticed I could yesterday, and there were at least two engineers that were napalming us like it was 'nam 2008.

Zone control could still use some tweaks. We had 21 in our warband doing PQs repeatedly and queing only for Serpent's Passage after we'd taken all the keeps and BOs, and couldn't break 80% control. Partly because Order retreated to Thunder Mountain. Are we supposed to be doing different PQs? Is Open RvR that much of a contributing factor, that everything else we did still fell short?

Paul Barnett probably giggles himself silly every day thinking about that steep ramp up to the keep in Thunder Mountain. On the way down it's inevitable for at least one person to die from running too fast.

Tiberios must have been rezzed ten times in the lord room at one keep last night. Every time someone would say "he's dead FINALLY" - someone else would say "uh no he's not he just stunned me!"

To this day, Valerik in Dragonwake still makes me double take, every single time.

Few things are as awesome and fun as Open RvR in the giant field in front of Covenant of Flame.

Few things suck as much as being punted off the bridge near Covenant of Flame.

The renown system is still fucked. 1 Renown for a kill is ridiculous unless that person has been killed within the past minute. Anything more just makes zergs make more sense because the smaller fights that drag on forever because of rez end up being worthless.

What is the song they sampled for the Heavy Metal tab in the Tome?

I am well aware of the viral poisonous nature of public forums and the mob mentality that goes along with a community agenda. We saw it destroy DAoC and result in New Frontiers, and we saw it in WoW becoming so more bland than the ramen I lived off through college. (Although soaking that shit in butter and salt sometimes helped - FYI!)

However, lately the public forums (namely VN and Warhammer Alliance) are overwhelmingly depressing. Nothing but complaints and blind threats of canceled accounts and entire guilds leaving the game. The same old "give me what I want or I'm going to cancel."

Part of it has merit, granted. If there is a glaring bug in the game like CTDs, that warrants massive attention to get resolved quickly. I think Mythic has done a great job, but needs to do better. Similarly with the bugs on Kaarn, and miscellaneous issues with Bastion Stair locking Order from killing Skull Lord.

But rather than feed the doomsday frenzy and become part of a poisonous community that is sprouting up and growing rapidly every day, take a step back and think for a second.

Warhammer Online has been playable "live" for less than two months. Mythic is in a unique situation in that they decided to legitimize the basis of their MMO rather than all but steal their concept like Blizzard did. As a result, Mythic is handcuffed by a lot of red tape and bureaucracy that stops a lot of their progress from being immediate. This is both good and bad.

It is good because it stops the knee jerk reactions that DAoC suffered from, and stops a lot of the nerfing that causes a roller coaster of class popularity.

It is bad because the public forums turn into a cesspool of complaints and false threats. I wish I could see Mythic's database and see just how many of these retards are full of shit with their claims of killing their accounts. I am not naive enough to believe some people have not quit. But even with all their faults, and the horrible economy, you have to be silly not to recognize growth in the game. Just the other day while being dragged around Target for my opinion on the scent of all of the 928 candles, I noticed a shelf of video games that had nothing but two rows. The first row covered in WoW, The Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King. The second row was Warhammer Online, and some prepaid game cards. The Warhammer row was virtually empty while there were plenty of copies of Wrath of the Lich King left; even to my surprise.

There are so many things WAR has going for it that make it such a fantastic game. The first being there is no true "end game." When you've killed the final boss in a PvE game, there really is nothing left for you to do. Period. The End. Wait for the next expansion.

In WAR, the game is constantly evolving based on the leadership of rival and enemy guilds. Just the other day Sacrifice had two groups que'ing for scenarios separately. We were lucky to time it well enough we were able to get grouped together frequently. Maybe one out of five scenarios ends up being against the majority of the same players. It's a constant evolution of strategy and competition. And while granted sometimes it's hardly fun as we are pitted against 12 players of which Yuriel is the only level 40, this is temporary until those players reach 40.

And when we noticed Order was taking keeps in Dragonwake we rallied together in a Warband and defended the keep against Pkrstar, Silverhands, and their guild/warband of approximately 15 on three separate occasions. It was absolutely amazing fun.

So when someone asks what's the point of WAR if you can't push zone control, I have a few things to say on the subject.

Every time you have sex, are you trying to get your girlfriend/wife pregnant? I would assume not. [edit - Unless you are Bigdaddy. He pops every time.] So why does every RvR encounter have to be a waste of time if you're not pushing towards the enemy city? If it were easier to push towards the city, wouldn't that then become meaningless? If it were so easy to push zone control that a single guild could do it, everyone would then be complaining it's too easy to do the "end game."

I don't entirely agree with the emphasis on Tier 3 on the control of Tier 4, but from a design perspective it does make sense, and when guilds like Lords of War, and The Fallen, stop dicking around and all get into Tier 4, it won't be that much trouble anyway because we'll have more people in Tier 4 working towards zone control.

Even despite all that, if we had more people roaming BOs and Keeps and the zones in general, RvR'ing in the open, we'd have even more opportunity to push zones than we do with farming scenarios repeatedly. The RvR action in a zone itself contributes substantially, but hardly any guilds are interested in that. It seems all anyone wants to do is flip flop keeps for their Annihilator sets, and then complain about how bad the sets are?

I can't speak for all of Destruction, but Sacrifice would gladly roam and RvR against 12-24 players all night long than do Scenarios. But we do what we can to RvR because that's what we play for. If you have more than 24, bring it separately to two war fronts, and I'm sure Black Watch and other guilds would be happy to fight along side us, or on their own in another zone.

But at the end of the day, the point of the game is to RvR, with or without the intent to capture Altdorf/Inevitable City. And I'm thrilled it's not easier, because the game is only two months old, and I'd be very disappointed if I was able to get into Altdorf and start killing the King already. I enjoy a challenge, and when everyone steps back and realizes that not only is the game new, but our server is uniquely low level with an isolated Level 40 population that most servers do not have because we are cloned, we'll be in great shape. In another month or two when Lords of War and The Fallen, and the other massive T3 playerbase becomes active, RvR will be everywhere, and then the only thing you'll be able to complain about is Sacrifice

There seems to be a lot of Mythic changes lately as the result of player feedback. I commend this greatly, but I'd like to offer some of my own:

Increase the minimum renown for a competitive kill from 1 Renown, to 25. If the player is 8 or more levels below you, 1 renown point is perfectly acceptable.

Decrease the renown-earned timer. Currently it is 10 minutes. Unless I am mistaken: a player killed again within the next 10 minutes in Open RvR rewards 1 renown point regardless of anything. Reduce this to one minute scaling, with a 50% reduction each time.

For example. Player1 is is worth 100 Renown on a fresh kill. If killed again within 60 seconds, he will be worth 50 renown. If killed again within two minutes of the original kill, he is worth 25 renown. Three minutes, 12 renown, etc.

Scale renown earned based upon the number of players in a specific radius, only when that number breaches 24.

If one "side" has more than 24 players, reduce their renown by 50% for each kill when their enemy has less than half as many players.

If that ratio breaks 10:1, all kills should be worth 1 renown. At this point your only excuse for having that many players is to raid the city or a fortress, and renown should not be a concern anyway - right?

If you are simply roaming and RvR'ing with a single warband, you will have no "penalty" for up to 6 "tag-alongs" - Meaning, if Dragonriders has a guild warband, but people invariably tag-along outside of the warband and try to leech off your keep raid, or your roaming RvR. It happens, don't penalize them for it. If it gets to be more than six people however, you are only feeding a potential zerg.

Do not respawn a keep lord for fifteen minutes, and leave all doors "down." And increase renown by 25% for all kills within a radius of the keep, for 15 minutes after the keep lord has died.

For example, Sacrifice takes Covenant of Flame. This activates a public quest "Defend Your Keep!" For the next fifteen minutes while the keep lord is "spawning" any RvR kill is worth 25% more renown. With the keep doors down, and no lord/guards in the keep, the keep has essentially become its own 15 minute scenario. After that fifteen minutes are up, the lord spawns and all guards spawn, and the doors close, and (assuming there was RvR and it's not 3AM with nobody to fight), the side that remains in the lord room "wins" and receives a 1k renown bonus.

I wouldn't even mind if Order killed us all and camped the lord room for the lord to spawn for a quick retake, because they earned it by raping us for 15 minutes and basically reclaiming it that way. It encourages more actual PvP and less of the keep humping that has run rampant lately. Additionally, it gives incentive to defend the keep because of that 1k renown bonus, so retards aren't spouting stupid shit like "Just let them take it and we'll retake it in an hour when they are in thunder mountain."

Remove enemy player names, and replace it with "Race - Renown Title."

The ranks are basically meaningless otherwise. And it adds a slight element of surprise as well. So if Corky and Okom are near each other, my only way of telling who is who, is by their renown rank, or if I click on them. And it adds a little coolness factor as well to see "High Elf Lightbringer" instead of "Corky."

Lastly, and most importantly, fix my fucking cloak so mutations do not remove my guild heraldry. The only time my cloak displays guild heraldry is if I'm not mutated - which is pretty damn stupid.