Sorry doomsayers, the cat finally clawed it's way out of the bag.  Thank Mmmmm Gud and Bootae for finding that little gem. I blew it up to poster size and hung it on my ceiling above my bed so I can look at it at night and think about all the people screaming about the game being over. In fact, I can still hear them screaming now. I really don't think they're going to stop either, but it sure makes them look like idiots.
Thank god that's all over with. People sure get fussy about layoffs. Jeff Hickman probably threw together this letter when he found out about EA doing what it does best, crushing hopes and dreams. As if there weren't enough haters out there, EA opening it's big fat dumb mouth about layoffs just got em all into a brand new fresh blood frenzy. Well relax kiddos, you can go back to your caves and continue trolling without any real justification. It ain't gonna happen anytime soon.Delicious quotes! "...we will maintain the same high level of customer support you’ve come to expect and continue to improve our games with an exciting schedule of patches, live events and new content." "Ultima Online is the granddaddy of MMORPG’s and it’s still going strong after 12 years." "Dark Age of Camelot is over 8 years old and the Realm vs. Realm action keeps getting better.""Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has had a solid first year despite some issues that we’re working to address every day. We’ve seen a great response to 1.3.2, which introduced tremendous performance improvements. A flood of new players are discovering the game every day thanks to the recently released Endless Trial and New User Journey. Moving forward we remain committed to releasing more great patches, continued performance improvements, and changes based upon your valuable feedback!"Okay, so really that's the meat of the letter. Jeff says everyone continues to get patches, content, and support. Does anything else really need to be said?
 It's always something on comic days isn't it? I found out this bit of info and had to rant before whipping up a comic to further jab a thumb into the eye of all things current. Not to mention finding a video to scrape screenies from. I suppose it could have waited until Friday, but this has me REALLY excited. Even if nothing comes from it, and WAR goes on about it's normal life, at least there's a chance RIGHT NOW for big things to change. WAR is great as is, but there's a lot of things that were either overlooked or deemed unnecessary that would make it BETTER. Through the midst of all the blogs and news sites I had to troll to find enough information to make this comic work, there's still a metric ton of WAR haters out there. It still to this day surprises me how many WoW purists there are, and because of that no MMO is going to get the love it takes to survive. There's an alternative to this, and WAR is poised to make it happen. WoW is classically a PvE game, WAR is at heart and soul an RvR game. WoW makes feeble attempts to make PvP fun and awesome but ultimately fails. WAR makes feeble attempts to make PvE fun and awesome, but just doesn't have the might to even show up against the current king. What to do? Simply put, take the elements of WoW that everyone pines for, and instead of directly copying them via the PvE route, do what you're good at and convert them into RvR. Hasn't Mythic noticed the pure joy players get from Live Events? We all rush out into RvR and pound the HELL out of each other for something as simple as a title. PvE be damned! What happened to Conflict PQ's in T4? Bring back a couple of those, and have them bleed into RvR areas! WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DOES CRAFTING HAVE TO SUCK? See my previous post on that one. Base it off RvR for the awesome recipe's and ingredients, then scale back what you can possibly get in PvE. WAR has all the potential in the world to become an anti-WoW, heavily favoring killing players over trash mobs for fat loots. No one at the moment has a hope of taking the crown from WoW, but we can make a new one from the guts and bones to wear for ourselves. It's already on the right track by rewarding players with some of the best loot in the game through RvR kills, zone flips, fort attacks (and defense) and city invasions. Land of the Dead, if it works correctly will be a great example of how new "Instance"-style zones should be done, and old ones should be converted to (Gunbad-Bastion-LostVale). This way we're not trying to do the PvE game better, it's just not possible. But we CAN do the RvR game better, and just as good as a mirror to WoW's PvE game. Isn't this the goal?
 Some people dread the juggernaught of EA eating up more and more small(-ish) studios for fear of ruining all that is holy. For the sake of WAR, I see this only as a blessing. Bioware has some of my favorite games under their belt, and a new vision for the production of WAR is pretty obviously needed. Mark Jacobs brought life to WAR, and FINALLY got it released as a major triple A MMO that we all know and love today. He also had his own personal touches on a couple aspects of the game that have been really hard to swallow. Crafting being the thing I'm talking about. He gimped it so badly time after time, and horribly limited the wide scope of things that could be done to the point that when anyone does crafting we get either a potion or a talisman.
Look, I want more bodies on the battlefield. There's a ton of players, casual and hardcore, that took one look at our crafting system and never looked back. There's another ton that gave it some time, and ultimately couldn't deal with it. Mark tried to downplay the importance of crafting in an RvR focused game, but ultimately it closed off avenues of potential playerbase. Wanna get people involved in the fighting instead of grinding it out in Altdorf? Make the BEST crafting gear come from high RR players in OPEN RvR and make it BoP always need on use. Just like in WoW, except our focus is PvP instead of PvE. That's what people came to expect from WAR, a mirror version of WoW with LESS PvE importance, and a more persistant world with the danger of getting sacked every few hours.
Persistance is something that Bioware has gotten a lot better over the years. Let me paint a picture for what I think they could pull off. Now, I don't know if I've talked about this on the blog before, but it's always been a tickling fancy of mine. Perhaps this is something that Bioware could pull off. There's always been an irritation that I've had in that we can capture only capital cities, forts, and BO's temporarily. The prior being pretty sweet, but the two former being slightly meh. When a zone flips, it's always possible for the winning side to rush in with high morale and crush the defenders (with notably lower morale), and quickly take subsequent zones. When this happens I always feel like something is being left behind. Namely, the enemy warcamps and towns. Of course, R55 Champions tell us to bugger off with big 30,000 point smackings of pain and relatively light suffering. Is this WAR??
When a zone flips, and the battle "moves on to the next location" the R55 Champions should really get their asses in gear if they want to defend their territory. This way, the winners of the current zone can go ahead and lock down the opposing PvE side by destroying their camps, and looting the leftover bodies. Also giving the losing force MUCH MORE INCENTIVE to fighting back, and further opportunity and time to quickly snatch the zone they were just put into. Much like the Conflict PQ's in previous Dwarf/Greenskin pairings, make the Warcamp a 30m conflict one-chance PQ, where the defenders have a chance to push the attackers back into the lake and hold their ground. Or let the attackers fight off a balanced force of Champs/Players (one spawning/despawning on entry/leave), with a number of key Hero's to be killed to finish. Let's see : Quartermaster, Flight Master, Healer, Quest Givers, and a Warcamp Lord. Stage one would be killing 100 players/guards, stage two would be the 8-ish Hero unique mobs, and stage three would be the WC Lord. At the end of it all drop a fat-lewt bag with (gasp) Conqueror Gear! Conq gear is by far the hardest to attain, as a capital city run can yield upwards of 5-8 pieces of Invader gear, but only two forts with Conq fall per city run. More ways to get it (a crazy hard T4 conflict PQ), the better.
Do you all see the madness in this? With the attackers in control of PvE, they cannot level any further without pushing zones short of being in some real danger. Turn captured zones into full RvR for the opposing realm, and they'll think twice about venturing into them. Omg, real consequences for not defending our territory?! Madness! Omg, we can get Conq bags by BURNING THEIR WARCAMPS TO THE GROUND!? That sounds MUCH more like it, bring it on!
Ray Muzyka, you're more than welcome to enter the Waaagh, and make these things happen. I dare you.
|
