"We Want Negativity!": Five Things I Didn't Like About Warhammer

1) I don’t think there are MMOs without grinds.
2) That’s what the elves get, fo seriously.
3) Surprise surprise
4) ” ”
5) VNBoards (see: DAOC)

aaaaand
6) I love your sexy manness.

If there’s any game that shouldn’t be afraid of their users reaching max level, it’s Warhammer.

I very much disagree. WAR leveling through scenarios is too fast. The average player on the two servers I play on is already in tier 3, just 3 weeks after release. By end of the year everyone will be at the level cap. And then what? The same city siege over, and over, and over, because there is no other endgame content in WAR.

Why not save several million dollars, let people start directly at level 40, and scratch tiers 1, 2, and 3, if they are only used for a few weeks out of a multi-year lifecycle anyway?

I’d help you out with the grindgrindgrindgrind, but there’s the Punkbuster thing and the general hate thing and… well, it’s just not happening.

I just wish my archmage wasn’t a watered-down shaman.

About the grind:

It takes about as much time to level 1 to 40 in Warhammer your first time through as it does to level 1 to 70 in WoW right now your first time through (without abusing their recruit-a-friend-on-crack-program.) Probably less. And the whole time you’re leveling, you’re learning the game and you’re also already earning points towards your endgame progression system. It’s really not a grind at all.

I don’t know if I’d qualify it as a negative (yet), but it’s interesting how big a part knockback plays in RvR. In a big battle, I’ll occasionally see fully half of each team flying through the air, like I’m playing Cirque du Soleil: Age of Reckoning.

After 90 days, I might buy the game if the majority of commentators and players don’t hate the game by then.

We canceled already: two CE subscriptions with no conversion.

We played in beta and the experience nerf really, really hurt us. My wife ran out of content and did *not* want to be told she needed to move to another race’s storyline so she could keep leveling. The bugs from beta that didn’t get fixed (or got worse, or only got fixed a couple weeks after release) did nothing to help our impression of the game. Rubberbanding and lag (thanks, Comcast!), erratic pets, and the general suck that is the Squig Herder didn’t help. PQs are now a source of frustration, something that rarely bothered us in beta.

I hate to admit that I’m really negative about WAR. I really, really wanted to like the game, to throw my casual MMO time and money at Mythic instead of Blizzard, to play the interesting races and engage in occasionally meaningful RvR and try distinct classes. But the WotLK beta has been more polished than live WAR and even four year-old content in Kalimdor is more compelling than fighting at the front-lines between Order and Chaos.

Interestingly, when talking to WAR players, a statistically significant portion claim to have never played WoW.

I very much disagree. WAR leveling through scenarios is too fast. The average player on the two servers I play on is already in tier 3, just 3 weeks after release. By end of the year everyone will be at the level cap. And then what? The same city siege over, and over, and over, because there is no other endgame content in WAR.

Even if they had kept the other 4 cities, everyone would hang around in one field anyway, just like DAoC players kept 95% of rvr in hibernia.

Agreed completely on the forum issue. Official forums vs. non-official forums is a very hot topic of debate in the Community Relations sphere. For the most part, the arguments against it all boil down to “it’s cheaper to not have them.” All of the other arguments, imo, are hollow excuses to avoid simply saying, “we don’t want to pay for them.”

I’ve run games with official forums and without them. In my experience, the discourse is better on official forums (assuming they are well run of course) and companies that are truly interested in customer feedback should have them.

Depending on what you mean by grind, I suppose I’m a touch confused. I’m around level 25 right now. I only play a few days a week, for a few hours when I do – excluding this last weekend anyhow, which was almost purely open field RvR anyway. Considering that there are 40 levels in the game, and I’m over half the levels in, and only a handful out from reaching the highest tier of the game, well under a month… I just don’t see how the grind is that bad?

Now, that’s if you’re talking by time. It is true that around T3 you start running out of content unless you run a significant amount of scenarios. This means that you need to find ways to gain levels without doing quests, or moving to another race’s zone. There is a rather significant difference in how long it takes to level up from T1 to T2 and even more in T3.

The real grind that I notice, however, is influence rewards. I’m usually the only person doing PQs when I’m trying to gain influence, which amounts to doing little more than farming the first stages of them rather mindlessly.

1. Cancelled my subscription because for some reason I keep either crashing to the desktop, or worse, my system locks up and has to be rebooted.

2. Not a lot of documentation out there on how even basic things work.

3. Crafting is extremely limited, and, if you are doing talismans, expensive and slow.

4. Love the PvP, but I never got a feeling of how it was affecting the larger world. All these messages about zones being contested or controlled, but no sense of what any of it means in any overall war.

Other than the fact that it still has a grind(a good game might involve finding gear but it would do away with leveling)) I think the major problem is that its mind numbingly easy/simple.

I never got beyond 20ish in the open beta, because it wasn’t allowed. Is that why T3 and T4 suck, or did they prevent people from going beyond T2 because they knew T3 and T4 sucked?

In any case, the killer for me is the total population imbalance between realms, which every one knew was going to be the case at launch, and which Mythic simply did nothing to proactively address.

The ENTIRE appeal of WAR vs WOW vs Whatever is the Realm vs Realm PvP structure. Everything else, as cool as it may be or not be, is window dressing around this core game play.

Class imbalances, grindiness, etc are not good things, but they are not unique to WAR, so a fair number of players can overlook them the same way we all overlook paying a subscription in the first place.

What simply can’t be overlooked is when the entire “War” is about as competitive as the Harlem Globetrotters vs the Washington Senators. Why bother playing the game when the outcome is pre decided by population imbalance, and nothing is done to change it?

I’ll have to disagree with you on the PvE part. Not done lots of Chaos or Dark Elves (I hate elves with a passion) but the Greenskin area is absolutely brilliant. Almost every single quests makes me at least giggle, often times even roar with laughter.

Also. IB’s and BO’s are indeed overpowered

It’s not worse than WoW, but it’s still longer than it has any need to be in the latter half.

The fact that this happens in most games is no reason to be happy that it keeps happening.

1) Grinding: MMO’s just follow the business model of serial encyclopedias offering the first volume at a very, very, very low price. Once you’re hooked, the longer it takes to get to the end, the more money they can make off you.

2) Never cared about elves. And if I want some “Hibernian Protest”, I’ll move to Belfast.

3) I only played a ranged character in WAR, so I’ll refrain from commenting.

4) PvE was indeed restrictive and notoriously unimaginative in this game, but then, most MMO’s thrive on repetition.

5) This is the major point. It isn’t just the absence of official forums, it’s the barrenness of chat in-game. You know, I’m getting sick and tired of developers building games for “established” guilds instead of ordinary players. By the looks of it, Darkfall is going straight for that trap. As for the Warhammer Alliance forums, I’ve never spent time there, but one poster on another site described it as the only forum he had seen where fanbois even trolled the tech support section. (They had one thread there describing how to put together a computer strictly for playing WAR, for chrissakes).

But yeah, Mythic should have had forums for the game, instead of relying on third-party boards to do the job (and where it’s impossible to control the message).

Based on those six days I spent playing WAR, I also agree with your positives.

1. Tons of content – done one pairing exclusively and hit 40 while questing in chapter 22.
2. There is a lot of endgame content, other than RvR. There are quite a few dungeons in the game, and they are hard as nails. In fact, they need some tuning down.
3. I have fun with WAR from the point of character creation. Meaningful PvP from the get-go is awesome. How can you people forget about that?
4. The more people you play with, the better WAR gets. Most criticism seems to come from people, who are not open to join groups and especially guilds and are thus missing out on most of the awesome. That’s why you have the problems you have.

Games should be fun. WAR is great fun to me, from the get-go. If WAR isn’t any fun to you, why do you play it? Because if you grind to get to the fun, you have not understood this game. There is no grind, there is just an awesome game. If you don’t like questing, matched RvR, open RvR, group-oriented PvE and all the MMORPG things-to-do, why do you still play MMOs? You should be on XBOX live or something like that, and play with a lesser hook, higher skill requirements and more instant fun, instead of investing your time into something, that’s a grind to you. Just making me sick to my stomach.

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Games should be fun. WAR is great fun to me, from the get-go. If WAR isn’t any fun to you, why do you play it? Because if you grind to get to the fun, you have not understood this game. There is no grind, there is just an awesome game.
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it is a grind. join a low pop server and try and get a pq or a scenario in tier 1 or tier 2. it’s like pulling your teeth. you’re basically being told to level up to enjoy the game. that is what makes it a grind. the journey sucks, esp with two of their most touted features (rvr & pqs) having no one around to do it with

Does anyone remember the day when it took months to get to the end game? I think attention spans are so low now, if someone can’t get to max level in 1-2 weeks then the game is a grind. Quite different than the old dial-up muds or early mmorgs

Scott,

I’m not sure where you get your numbers, but you seem to be really off base about the Warhammer Online community. Especially the forums.

You state that, “the primary forums SEEM to be Warhammer Alliance, but there isn’t a lot of traffic there, at least what you’d expect from 3/4 of a million subscribers.”

I wonder just how many of those 750,000 people do you expect to be posting? Historically, developers have said anywhere from 10-20% of actual subscribers are active forum posters. So given that fact, (I can provide you with quotes if need be) you would expect about roughly 115,000 posters.

Well, the Warhammer Alliance forums, may SEEM like a calm lake on the outside, I can bring the numbers, that show a explosion of growth and posting activity within the forums.

How about the fact that Warhammer Alliance does more forum posts per day than every other official fansite combined. How about more forum posts per day than the entire IGN Vault Network Forums (I said the entire Vault Network Forums, for every game, every board.) How about tens of thousands of posts per day, more than a million unique people every month, millions upon millions, of pageviews and site traffic.

There has been an explosion of growth and posting activity within the forum community.

Now I know I’m waste deep in the trenches, yes I have a level 40 character already and am working on my alt. But I think you’re off base about the forum community.

I could continue to rant about the success of this particular fansite, and the fantastic team of volunteers that run it. But then I’d need a blog. I’ll just end with this. I think you’re wrong about the community, I don’t think that it’s perfect, I think Mythic could have, and still can do a much (read: a whole hellva lot) better job of working with it’s fansites. I also belive that the fansites themselves could be doing 100% better in terms of the content they offer. But in the end, Warhammer Alliance in many regards is leaps and bounds beyond anything an official forum can do or offer.

1. I don’t mind playing mmo’s that take awhile to level up, but the trick is to hide the grinding feel to it which WAR doesn’t do well. I must have done over 100 tor anrocs and doing the same PQ’s over for the inf rewards really is getting to me. There just isn’t much incentive to do other things, you just have to do what everyone else is doing.

2. Maybe I don’t have a good eye for detail on this issue but I really haven’t noticed a drop off in this area for the elves.

3. RDPS is definitely king in WAR. The second I even come close to a caster I get snared to snail speed, spammed with pbae roots, bounced around with KB’s like a ping pong ball, knock downed, disarmed, and then spiked to death all within the first 10 seconds. The ideal style of play seems to be for all melee classes to stay back and protect your casters while they unload on the enemy. Not all my experiences have been like this but there definitely needs to be some balance in this area.

4. I enjoy PVP as much as the next guy, but lets face it there’s only so much you can do with it. You can have as many silly CTF games you want to determine who’s the best at PVP, it dosen’t compete with taking on a challenging PVE encounter with some interesting AI. You can do a lot more on the PVE side of things, but it’s severely lacking in WAR.

5. I agree with this point as well

Not sure how T4 will be but being able to jump right in to scenarios at early levels has me making a TON of alts… to the point where old guildmates are ticked off I’m all over the place. BUT ITS FUN! and thats all I care about. I almost prefer the T1 scenarios now… some of the others are just painful as a PUG. Like Phoenix gate without healers, ugh.

I was a little annoyed at having to basically use all the content on every races’ area to level my ironbreaker but most of it was decent at least. The elf area is definately bleak and somewhat flavorless for quests tho.

Oh and Bright Wizards must die horribly by any means necessary, damn their OP eyes.

I pretty much agree, and am at least happy many of the points can be fixed via patching. Balance issues can be fixed (or just tuned a little each month like WoW to keep you guessing ).

Grind grind grind is there, for some silly reason after playing open beta I thought “wow almost no grind!” boy that was naive of me. I don’t know what to think … or if I’ll ever find a multiplayer game without it.

However despite the Kill 10 x quests, I find the pve really much better in this game than most. It’s like the great chain quests in WoW with backstories, of which there are far too few of in WoW, but WAR has a higher percentage of them. Of course that could be because WAR just has fewer quests.

Elves work fine as NPCs, but really let’s just get rid of them. Sure dark elves are hot, but so are female dwarves. mmmmmmm

An amusing data point to take from all this is how the post detailing all the things wrong with WAR has twice as many comments as the post detailing what it did right.

And we wonder why the media is such a mess these days!