No, You Can't Have My Stuff: Warhammer Online Part 1
Posted on
Friday, November 14, 2008
by Gary A. Ballard
Every forum with even a marginal interest in MMOG's has experienced the "I Quit" thread. These are usually started by a self-important jackass who feels the irresistible urge to not only inform everyone on the Internet that he has quit his latest MMOG to end all MMOG's, but also to wax eloquent on all the myriad reasons why said MMOG is a failure on how it could be improved by just following his suggestion. Of course, most of these first posts, no matter how well-reasoned or how utterly incomprehensible they are, will be followed by a reply that says, "Can I have your stuff?" This is the first in an irregular series of posts by this self-important jackass who just quit Warhammer Online and wants to tell you why. No, you can't have my stuff, but you can have my opinions.
My first impressions of Warhammer Online contain the seeds of my dissatisfaction. Perhaps I should have gone with my first instinct and resisted the urge to play the game after release, but I was weak. One of the most obvious flaws in the game design was the levelling curve. I predicted that players starting six months from release would have a devil of a time leveling, because much of the content players use to level is in public quests and scenarios, both of which require other players to succeed. One cannot finish a public quest without at least a 3-man group in the early stages, and for a scenario to launch requires 2-3 full groups on both sides. What I did not foresee was that not one month after release, many of the public quests for the midlevel ranges were completely deserted, and thus the quick experience and gear received from public quests was just not available. It was not uncommon for my witch hunter to be completely alone in the tier 3 zone Talabecland, unable to complete most solo quests in the zone because he was too low level to compete against the mobs he was forced to fight. Adding insult to this injury was the realization that most of the quest rewards would not be usable for another two levels.
The gear and level disparity problems could be solved easily, but the public quest problem cannot. One simply cannot progress a public quest beyond the first stage without help. In most cases, one cannot progress past stage 2 without the "holy trinity" of groups, including a tank, healer and damage-dealer of some kind. Stage 3 invariably requires a full group which must have the holy trinity as its core. Had the population not been so spread out among so many faction areas, this might still have been a problem based on faction imbalances. For instance, until Mythic adds the Knights of the Burning Sun class back into the game, the Empire faction does not have a tank class. It must rely on a dwarven Ironbreaker or a High Elven Shadow Warrior to make the trek to the Empire area just to be able to absorb the damage that stage 2 champions can inflict. The Empire healing class, Warrior Priest, must be involved in combat to build power for healing; without a tank to absorb the blows from stage 2, he will fall too quickly to succeed. Stage 3 is an even worse proposition.
So why are the zones deserted? Without even floating the idea that people have left the game, I can offer one hypothesis. The zones are deserted because even if one had the perfect party to complete these quests, the rewards for completion are a joke. While the elite gear is certainly nice, the amount of influence required to get to elite gear is high. It requires completion of all the public quests per chapter, as well as returning to some of the quests to continue to gain influence. Each PQ creature killed gives 100 influence - unless of course, it is killed by a group, in which case the influence is split proportionally. Remember that you need a group to survive stage 2 of a public quest? Yep, that's right, in order to finish a public quest, you need a group but to get the rewards of the public quest system, grouping actually means you elongate the time it takes to reap the chapter rewards. But yes, finishing all stages of a public quest do give the participants a random roll on a random piece of loot. The more group members you have, the less chance you have of winning the best rewards, which makes soloing the quest more rewarding if you could actually finish the quest solo - which you can't. Once that flaw in the system is exposed, there really isn't anymore reason to do the public quests unless you have another quest that leads you into the area and you have a steady group you can call on to help.
What makes this even more infuriating is the rate of experience in public quests. Again, during the tier 3 levels, the experience needed per level continues to increase. At level 25, I was staring into the abyss of over 300,000 experience points needed to advance. Some of the more challenging PVE mobs in public quests gave no more than about 1000 xp. Killing those mobs in a group would slice that number proportionally. Compare this to PVP scenarios such as Tor Anroc, where a typical loss yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 xp for less than 10 minutes of PVP, which I can access from anywhere without needing a ready-made group. Even the less rewarding scenarios would still give me as much if not more experience than killing public quest mobs until my eyes bleed. Is it any wonder people in tier 3 choose Tor Anroc, the most rewarding scenario (and unfortunately, the least fun) over and over again? Tor Anroc gets really old after 10-15 tries, but nothing and I mean nothing compares to the experience gained.
Meanwhile, the selling point of the game, the whole thing that is supposed to separate Warhammer Online from its competitors, is the world PVP, called open RVR or oRVR. The rewards for oRVR are pitiful. While yes, you can get passable experience killing other players in oRVR, you are not likely to find them because you can get better, more reliable experience in Tor Anroc. Going into one of the 6 RVR lakes for your tier doesn't guarantee you any action, and without action, you get no experience. Solo play in the RVR lakes is a dicey proposition at best. In order to be successful, you must be really good, as well as lucky enough not to meet one of the classes for which your class has no hope of defeating in one-on-one combat. If one is lucky enough to be able to get a warband of 2 full groups, you can then participate in the taking of a battlefield objective (which yields no chance at gear drops) or a keep assault. Keep assaults are great in theory, but if no players come to the keep's defense, it is essentially a drawn out public quest - pure PVE where experience is often minimal because there are so many people splitting the pitiful experience gains. And once the keep is taken, a public quest random roll for a few pieces of random gear is given as the reward, and there are many anecdotal stories of this system being buggy at best, incredibly broken at worst.
The largest flaw in the whole oRVR process is the fact that defenders get no rewards for defense. Other than points for player kills, defenders are shit out of luck. Why defend? The keeps have nothing of value to a player. Sure, there are some skill trainer NPC's, but these same skills are available in the capital cities. Guilds who claim a keep get no benefits from the keep, only the significant money drain of maintenance costs. So why defend? Or for that matter why participate in oRVR at all, seeing as how scenarios like Tor Anroc offer so much more bang for the buck? Why burden yourself with the hassle of getting a group to finish a public quest when you'll have to do that quests over and over again to get any sure rewards from it? Just go to a warcamp, grab the quest that rewards you for participating in the Tor Anroc scenario and queue up.
MMOG developers can channel player behavior in very simple ways. Reward the things you want the players to do. Make sure the greatest rewards are given for playing the game "as intended." When the game rewards scenarios more than any other activity, then scenarios will be what most of the player base will do. Since scenarios are also more convenient than any other activity, even if the rewards were exactly even between all three phases of the game, people would still choose scenarios because convenience is a reward too. If Mythic wanted to make a game that was nothing more than a lobby for instanced, even-sided PVP fights, they should have skipped the whole "massive world" business and just focused on making a Guild Wars clone. As it is, they have an entire world of content that people either ignore because it's not rewarding enough, or that people suffer through to get to the good stuff. That is the definition of grind.
oRVR has got to have great improved rewards unless scenario rewards are horribly nerfed. Public quests either need to be made soloable, or grouping needs to give experience and influence bonuses, not splits. But the real culprit isn't so much the out of whack reward structure. The real problem is that an exponential leveling curve is horribly horribly bad. It is my self-important jackass theory that most developers believe that the longer the leveling curve, the longer a typical subscription will last. This is no longer true. Games like World of Warcraft have proven that you don't need a 6-month to cap leveling curve to succeed, even when the choice of activities after the cap is fairly weak. In a PVP environment, the endgame content is other people - a dynamic source of content that costs the developer nothing to develop. And yet we still see the idea that without a long PVE-focused leveling curve, people won't stick around. The opposite is true in PVP. The longer the distance to the cap, the fewer the number of people who will stick it out. In PVP, the Haemish Rule of 11 is a universal constant: If the dial goes to 11, 10 will never ever do.
This is not the only flaw with Warhammer Online, but it's one of the main ones driving my cancellation. Come back next week to see the self-important jackassery continue. No, you can't have my stuff, and neither can Warhammer Online.
My first impressions of Warhammer Online contain the seeds of my dissatisfaction. Perhaps I should have gone with my first instinct and resisted the urge to play the game after release, but I was weak. One of the most obvious flaws in the game design was the levelling curve. I predicted that players starting six months from release would have a devil of a time leveling, because much of the content players use to level is in public quests and scenarios, both of which require other players to succeed. One cannot finish a public quest without at least a 3-man group in the early stages, and for a scenario to launch requires 2-3 full groups on both sides. What I did not foresee was that not one month after release, many of the public quests for the midlevel ranges were completely deserted, and thus the quick experience and gear received from public quests was just not available. It was not uncommon for my witch hunter to be completely alone in the tier 3 zone Talabecland, unable to complete most solo quests in the zone because he was too low level to compete against the mobs he was forced to fight. Adding insult to this injury was the realization that most of the quest rewards would not be usable for another two levels.
The gear and level disparity problems could be solved easily, but the public quest problem cannot. One simply cannot progress a public quest beyond the first stage without help. In most cases, one cannot progress past stage 2 without the "holy trinity" of groups, including a tank, healer and damage-dealer of some kind. Stage 3 invariably requires a full group which must have the holy trinity as its core. Had the population not been so spread out among so many faction areas, this might still have been a problem based on faction imbalances. For instance, until Mythic adds the Knights of the Burning Sun class back into the game, the Empire faction does not have a tank class. It must rely on a dwarven Ironbreaker or a High Elven Shadow Warrior to make the trek to the Empire area just to be able to absorb the damage that stage 2 champions can inflict. The Empire healing class, Warrior Priest, must be involved in combat to build power for healing; without a tank to absorb the blows from stage 2, he will fall too quickly to succeed. Stage 3 is an even worse proposition.
So why are the zones deserted? Without even floating the idea that people have left the game, I can offer one hypothesis. The zones are deserted because even if one had the perfect party to complete these quests, the rewards for completion are a joke. While the elite gear is certainly nice, the amount of influence required to get to elite gear is high. It requires completion of all the public quests per chapter, as well as returning to some of the quests to continue to gain influence. Each PQ creature killed gives 100 influence - unless of course, it is killed by a group, in which case the influence is split proportionally. Remember that you need a group to survive stage 2 of a public quest? Yep, that's right, in order to finish a public quest, you need a group but to get the rewards of the public quest system, grouping actually means you elongate the time it takes to reap the chapter rewards. But yes, finishing all stages of a public quest do give the participants a random roll on a random piece of loot. The more group members you have, the less chance you have of winning the best rewards, which makes soloing the quest more rewarding if you could actually finish the quest solo - which you can't. Once that flaw in the system is exposed, there really isn't anymore reason to do the public quests unless you have another quest that leads you into the area and you have a steady group you can call on to help.
What makes this even more infuriating is the rate of experience in public quests. Again, during the tier 3 levels, the experience needed per level continues to increase. At level 25, I was staring into the abyss of over 300,000 experience points needed to advance. Some of the more challenging PVE mobs in public quests gave no more than about 1000 xp. Killing those mobs in a group would slice that number proportionally. Compare this to PVP scenarios such as Tor Anroc, where a typical loss yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 xp for less than 10 minutes of PVP, which I can access from anywhere without needing a ready-made group. Even the less rewarding scenarios would still give me as much if not more experience than killing public quest mobs until my eyes bleed. Is it any wonder people in tier 3 choose Tor Anroc, the most rewarding scenario (and unfortunately, the least fun) over and over again? Tor Anroc gets really old after 10-15 tries, but nothing and I mean nothing compares to the experience gained.
Meanwhile, the selling point of the game, the whole thing that is supposed to separate Warhammer Online from its competitors, is the world PVP, called open RVR or oRVR. The rewards for oRVR are pitiful. While yes, you can get passable experience killing other players in oRVR, you are not likely to find them because you can get better, more reliable experience in Tor Anroc. Going into one of the 6 RVR lakes for your tier doesn't guarantee you any action, and without action, you get no experience. Solo play in the RVR lakes is a dicey proposition at best. In order to be successful, you must be really good, as well as lucky enough not to meet one of the classes for which your class has no hope of defeating in one-on-one combat. If one is lucky enough to be able to get a warband of 2 full groups, you can then participate in the taking of a battlefield objective (which yields no chance at gear drops) or a keep assault. Keep assaults are great in theory, but if no players come to the keep's defense, it is essentially a drawn out public quest - pure PVE where experience is often minimal because there are so many people splitting the pitiful experience gains. And once the keep is taken, a public quest random roll for a few pieces of random gear is given as the reward, and there are many anecdotal stories of this system being buggy at best, incredibly broken at worst.
The largest flaw in the whole oRVR process is the fact that defenders get no rewards for defense. Other than points for player kills, defenders are shit out of luck. Why defend? The keeps have nothing of value to a player. Sure, there are some skill trainer NPC's, but these same skills are available in the capital cities. Guilds who claim a keep get no benefits from the keep, only the significant money drain of maintenance costs. So why defend? Or for that matter why participate in oRVR at all, seeing as how scenarios like Tor Anroc offer so much more bang for the buck? Why burden yourself with the hassle of getting a group to finish a public quest when you'll have to do that quests over and over again to get any sure rewards from it? Just go to a warcamp, grab the quest that rewards you for participating in the Tor Anroc scenario and queue up.
MMOG developers can channel player behavior in very simple ways. Reward the things you want the players to do. Make sure the greatest rewards are given for playing the game "as intended." When the game rewards scenarios more than any other activity, then scenarios will be what most of the player base will do. Since scenarios are also more convenient than any other activity, even if the rewards were exactly even between all three phases of the game, people would still choose scenarios because convenience is a reward too. If Mythic wanted to make a game that was nothing more than a lobby for instanced, even-sided PVP fights, they should have skipped the whole "massive world" business and just focused on making a Guild Wars clone. As it is, they have an entire world of content that people either ignore because it's not rewarding enough, or that people suffer through to get to the good stuff. That is the definition of grind.
oRVR has got to have great improved rewards unless scenario rewards are horribly nerfed. Public quests either need to be made soloable, or grouping needs to give experience and influence bonuses, not splits. But the real culprit isn't so much the out of whack reward structure. The real problem is that an exponential leveling curve is horribly horribly bad. It is my self-important jackass theory that most developers believe that the longer the leveling curve, the longer a typical subscription will last. This is no longer true. Games like World of Warcraft have proven that you don't need a 6-month to cap leveling curve to succeed, even when the choice of activities after the cap is fairly weak. In a PVP environment, the endgame content is other people - a dynamic source of content that costs the developer nothing to develop. And yet we still see the idea that without a long PVE-focused leveling curve, people won't stick around. The opposite is true in PVP. The longer the distance to the cap, the fewer the number of people who will stick it out. In PVP, the Haemish Rule of 11 is a universal constant: If the dial goes to 11, 10 will never ever do.
This is not the only flaw with Warhammer Online, but it's one of the main ones driving my cancellation. Come back next week to see the self-important jackassery continue. No, you can't have my stuff, and neither can Warhammer Online.
Labels: Game Design, Game Reviews, MMOG, Video Games, Warhammer, Warhammer Online
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posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 10:34 AM
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Evolution in Action: Warhammer Online Open Beta (MMOG PC) Review
Posted on
Monday, September 15, 2008
by Gary A. Ballard
I have not been eagerly anticipating the impending release of the PC MMORPG Warhammer Online. As a matter of fact, I've been critical of Mythic Entertainment for the conduct of their beta. Not only did they not bother to invite me to the beta, giving me the free preview of the game I demand before I will spend money on an MMOG these days, but they held the non-disclosure agreement over the heads of the testers for entirely too long. Keeping an NDA in effect until just a few weeks before release always makes me seriously doubt the quality of the final product, reminding me of the bad old days prior to the release of Anarchy Online, World War II Online and other such notable flops. But once I finally gained access to the Fileplanet Open Beta this past weekend, my fears were allayed. Warhammer Online is not a colossal failure, a bug-ridden cluster fuck or an empty clone of other games. Unfortunately, while it certainly iterates successfully on the formula of previous successes in the genre, the new features of the game don't raise it beyond the level of other competitors.
Before I begin my obvious comparison, let me be clear. I am well-versed in the Warhammer universe, having played the tabletop miniature version Warhammer Fantasy Battles for many years. I am quite well aware that the Warcraft universe was an almost direct homage to the Warhammer universe, and that all things Warcraft owe more to the Warhammer universe than Warhammer Online owes to World of Warcraft. And yes, I'm also aware that the Warhammer universe is a darker re-imagining of the Tolkien universe through the drug-addled lens of British metalheads. So do believe that I have ample background to claim that Warhammer Online is at its heart a fun mashup of World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot, taking parts of both games and successfully creating a PVP-focused, casual-friendly MMORPG.
If you've played any of the ever-growing number of fantasy DIKU-based MMORPG's that have infested the medium since the success of Everquest, you know the mechanics Warhammer Online. Create a character of various classes, move him with the WASD key configuration, attack monsters or other players and hit hotkeys 0-9 to launch special abilities until you gain enough experience to raise your level and purchase new gear and special abilities. Along the way, your character will perform quests for various NPC's that wait around in warcamps. Some of those quests will bring the player in conflict with other players from the opposing faction. The gameplay is really nothing new. In execution, it lies somewhere between World of Warcraft's frantic style and Dark Age of Camelot's slower version of the same thing. In short, if you aren't sick to death of this style of game, you'll enjoy WAR as well as you would other games.
WAR improves on its predecessors in a few areas, namely the public quests, tome of knowledge, open parties and integration of PVP objectives into each character's narrative. The public quests are entertaining and easy to find. As a matter of fact, the player will usually trip over a public quest without even knowing it exists. As long as that player is in the area, he can contribute to the quest by killing certain mobs or completing objectives, all of which are tracked on the player's HUD so long as he remains in the PQ area. One need not be in an existing party to contribute, and all who aid in the quest have a chance at getting one of six rewards which are comparable to the best gear for that player's level. Combining the best parts of raiding without the catassery normally required, public quests are a fun way to gear up and gain experience.
The tome of knowledge takes the place of the quest journal from other MMOG's, and improves upon it greatly. Not only is every monster cataloged in the bestiary, but maps, quests and just about any other useful information in the character's career is tracked and cataloged. The tome is rife with achievements that grant custom titles to the player, and is a OCD collector's wet dream. The tome is a feature that every MMORPG developer needs to copy and improve on, because it is a slick way to build a character's individual place in the world.
Open parties is another improvement on the normal MMOG grouping mechanic. A group can declare itself open, meaning that anyone can join the party just by being in the area. In a game where many objectives will require groups, removing the need for the traditional "looking for group" tools is genius. A party can turn off the feature if it desires to avoid the pitfalls of pick-up groups, but for the solo player, the ability to find a group that easily is a godsend. In addition, if the normal group is filled but finds it needs more slots for friends or to increase its strength, it can declare itself a "warband," opening up more group slots. Guild leaders should trumpet this feature from hill to dale, because it should significantly improve the problem guilds have had in the past with certain members feeling they are being ignored for groups.
Finally, the integration of PVP into the natural narrative of the character's career is almost seamless. While PVP isn't required ever, it feels so natural both for the setting and the mechanics that I can't imagine why anyone would avoid it. The PVP is very similar mechanically to both World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot. Both open world obejctives and instanced battleground scenarios are available, and all PVP progress is tracked zone wide, leading to bonuses for the side winning the most battles in the zone. Level disparities in PVP are diminished in comparison to other games, as all players are boosted to three levels below that area's maximum level. While this does help lower-leveled players compete in PVP, there are drawbacks. While levels are added, the player does not get that level's commiserate special abilities, making them underpowered against the highest level characters in the area. Lower level characters aren't quite speedbumps in the RVR areas, but they aren't exactly what I would call competitive. It does encourage players to achieve at least the minimum level before engaging in significant PVP.
All is not rosy with WAR, despite the positives I have mentioned. There are certainly bugs, as one would expect of an MMOG these days. Network lag was also a bit of a problem at various times during the weekend, which is again to be expected during an "open beta." As the game matures, new players will find their progress stunted because the majority of the population will outlevel the starting areas. I shudder to think of the grinding difficulties a player starting the game six months from now will find when trying to finish public quests all by their lonesome. Population imbalances among different factions may also become a significant problems, and I'm not sure anyone has found a solution this problem that plagues all PVP-enabled games.
The game is fun, of that there is no doubt. Still, during the entire time I played, I couldn't help wanting more out of the game. At its most basic level, the core gameplay isn't that different from World of Warcraft or other games of its type. And as someone who is entirely too experienced with that sort of gameplay, I am inevitably bored by it. While the world is well-realized, and is worth exploring, I don't think it has enough new features to be worth my money. For those who aren't hopelessly burnt out on DIKU, I can recommend it as an entertaining alternative to World of Warcraft. I can't say that it is better or worse, just different. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give the game a 7.5. It's not spectacular or innovative, but it's entertaining for those who like that sort of thing.
Labels: Entertainment, Game Design, Game Reviews, MMOG, Tolkien, Video Games
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posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 9:51 AM
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