So here we are kids. The 1 year anniversary of the release of the most promising, potential-filled MMORPG since WOW….and we’re here to cut through all the bullshit and whining to give you a real look at the game, from both sides of the faction-fence and it’s journey from the very exclusive Closed Beta that we were part of (and none of you were until they started letting scrubs and losers in) to this very day. And wot a journey. Whoever said the best part is the journey and not the destination must have known W.A.R. woz coming. Let’s address Mr. Hickman’s recent interview where he states W.A.R.’s biggest 3 problems and answer him before going on our rant about this colossal failure called Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning, shall we?
Jeff says “Too easy PvE” : Only for Order (which every single part of the game woz balanced around), but on the Destruction side of the fence, we had to organize and hammer at things due to the lack of career synergy our side woz designed with. No Jeff, the PvE being too easy is not the problem with W.A.R.
Jeff says “Lack of social networking. People can solo the whole game” : Again, only for Order, but on Destruction, all throughout your game-time there are people looking to group up to do X quest. No Jeff, the lack of Facebookness in W.A.R. is not the problem.
Jeff says “The economy” : Now in this quote he blends both in-game economy being a problem - lack of real value of gold, so no one cares to farm it, and the world economy. This really shows that Mythic is despirate to blame anyone but themselves because WOW released the WotLK expansion a month after W.A.R. and sold 2.8 million copies on day 1 and their subs had a very strong and solid increase since, and the in-game economy is probably the best in any MMIRPG to date. No Jeff, the game nor real world economy is not the problem with W.A.R.
Get your fucking head out of your ass, you horrific example of a Game Developer…
W.A.R. woz the most promising MMORPG to come and it broke records in Beta applications and release pre-sales. It had the best reviews, it had the best launch, it had the most promise and woz a game that woz meeting all of our expectations as the savior PvP-Centric MMORPG. So wot exactly happened? While there are alot of things people can point to that can be the largest causes of the game’s ultimate downfall into infamy as the biggest MMORPG Failure - ever - there’s one thing is the REAL problem and it’s just too huge to ignore (but that doesn’t stop Mythic from doing exactly that)….
Balance : Plain and simple, this game jumped the shark at pure career balance between the two factions. Order is simply far stronger, has far more utility, and has far better synergy than Destruction - and the actual factual PROVEN quoted reason for this is “Destruction looks cooler, so Order plays better..that’s how the sides were balanced pre-release“, or the ever-popular quote from Paul Barnett (who has oddly vanished) about career balance on May 23rd, 2009 : “It really is incredibly difficult and I’m glad I don’t do it. Always play Order, that would be my bet.”
Are you fucking KIDDING me?!
Population Imbalances aside, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal and probably wouldn’t even be an issue today if Mythic actually made the two sides play evenly. The “mirror but not” thing just doesn’t fly in real life. There are plenty of ways to make both sides “unique” while keeping them equal in power, utility and downright synergy. The most obvious is, give both sides of the same “career type” the exact same abilities, morales and tactics and just make them LOOK different and unique for each side. If they had just done that, the game would be doing just fine right now and they wouldn’t be scrambling to blame everything else possible and making up ridiculous excuses in an effort to save face. No one would be able to cry that one career on one side is overpowered because quite simply, both sides would have that career. For Fuck’s Sake, look at WOW. Now they may have their share of balance issues with the classes, but since both sides share the classes, when they touch ONE they fuck with it for both sides. And while population imbalance does have an impact there, it’s nowhere NEAR as bad of an impact or much of an issue as it is in W.A.R. When WOW had the Paladin as Alliance only and Shaman as Horde only, the balance issues were amazingly clear and caused a huge problem and rift in the game itself. So wot did Blizzard do? They gave both sides both classes plus two more races and a new landmass. Now look at any given server in WOW, and you’ll see that the balance is as close as you’re going to get. There’s a reason there are over 12 million people and growing playing WOW and W.A.R. only has 6 NA servers left after launching with 100 worldwide. And no Jeff, it’s not the fucking economy, fucking PvE nor social fucking networking, you clueless fucking moron.
Now, when the game hit, while there were some slight imbalances with the careers and Order did have a slight edge to it all, it wasn’t nowhere NEAR as bad as it is now. The battles on both sides were pretty mean, the sides weren’t exactly even, but Destruction could hold their own against the Order zerg. Sheer numbers didn’t mean jack shit compared to players that knew wot the fuck they were doing. Then something happened. The Heavy Metal Event came along introducing The Knight of the Blazing Sun and The Black Guard. Order players logged into the Test Server, ran to the trainers, read the abilities of the Black Guard, and posted in a frenzy trying to gut the career before it hit live. And guess wot? It worked. The Black Guard, to this day since their official live release on December 8th, 2008, is still struggling to be PLAYABLE, nevermind viable while the Knight is still leaps and bounds, head and shoulders above The Chosen - it’s “mirror”. Then Patches continued to come in that slowly began to castrate various Destruction careers. It woz slow and unnoticable, and every patch introduced some pretty major Order-Only bugs that gave that side some huge exploitable advantages that lasted FOR MONTHS, while Destruction began to struggle time and again to maintain, even when the battlefield woz balanced. Suddenly people began rerolling Order after the few first months because that was where the power is, plainly. Between the power disparity and glaring bugs that were only on Order careers for some rather convenient reason that allowed them to basically stomp the shit out of any size Destruction force, people were either rerolling or letting their subs run out and going back to WOW with it’s fresh, new, polished, balanced, game-revamping expansion. Mythic paniced and they actually took a step to fix this before it got worse. This would be the first and only time since the game’s launch that Destruction would have the chance to stand and fight.
When the Bitter Rivals Event came in patch 1.2.0 on March 3rd, 2009 and gave us the Choppas and Slayers, things almost looked bright for the game as a whole. All careers were in, both sides were battling it out and while Order had a big population advantage AND the power disparity, coupled with huge bugs that favored only their specific careers for some reason, all that was truly needed was a few small but important bug fixes - and they were actually coming! The patch that evened the playing field (ie. fixed some of the more powerful bugs and abilities that made Order so ridiculously out of whack from Patch 1.1.0 on December 12th, 2008 to March 3rd, 2009) was Game Update 1.2.1 on 4/16/2009. This fixed the AOE Radius, fixed the Knights door repair abuse bug, fixed most of the GCD bugs that Bright Wizards were abusing for half a year and contained no real detriment to either side of the coin. And as a direct result of the fixes in this patch, Order across the entire game…all servers…immediately started getting their asses handed to them on a silver fucking platter. Why? Because the bugs and abilities that Order had were so powerful and skewed the balance so horribly in Orders favor, that when it evened out, Destruction players across the entire game that were used to playing with such severe handicaps were just wiping the floor with them. Cooincidence? I think not. So this is the point in this where you’d think Order simply needed to adjust to the shift from overpowered to as even as you can get just like they all kept stating Destruction needed to do when these mysterious imbalancing bugs started appearing - they were features, lrn2play. Unfortunately that’s not how the world works and the general populace of Order flooded all forums they could find crying foul, screaming they were quitting. And they expect us to believe that the majority of the Order players aren’t spoiled children? Anyway……considering that since the total gamewide population was nearly 3:1 Order:Destruction, Mythic thought they had a problem. So they began to hand out the pacifiers in patch after patch.
Patch 1.3.0 on June 16th, 2009 was the beginning of the end for both Destruction and the game. It introduced the Land of the Dead, and the groundwork was laid for the real raping of Destruction Careers. July 16th, 2009 1.3.0b came and really solidified and vocally announced their intentions - to the disbelief of the entire game population. Even Order players were wondering what the fuck was happening. I guess someone at Mythic (proven fact : they play Order on Phoenix Throne) got their asses kicked by some skilled Destruction players despite the Order Zerg. Nothing secret about it here, they were out for blood. And then it happened. On August 18th, 2009 - just one month ago - Patch 1.3.1 came along and put wot may just be the final nail in the coffin of W.A.R. It basically buffed the holy fuck out of anything Order and nerfed the unholy fuck out of everything Destruction for no reason given other than “because”. In 1 patch, they finished off one entire Faction, and with Destruction players leaving now in droves or rerolling, Order has no one to fight, and that spells doom for W.A.R.
Now before any whiney cuntymint tries to cry foul, let’s look at this for a second. Between June and August, the largest bulk of server CLOSURES happened, while Mark Jacobs and Adam Gershowitz - the two most directly responsible for the game’s direction and career balance respectively - were outright FIRED. If they didn’t fuck the entire game up with their bullshit one-sidedness and blatant bias, they wouldn’t be shit-canned. They. Fucked. Up. Period. Thus resulting in the mass exodus from the game, the need for dozen of server closures and the game suffering massive losses WORLDWIDE all in that period. The timeline doesn’t lie here.
So where are we now with W.A.R.? Well, there are now only 6 NA servers left. 4 Core, 1 Open-RvR and 1 Roleplay, only 4 english EU servers left, 5 German, 4 French, 1 Spanish, 1 Italian, 2 Russian…and I don’t give a fuck about the Korean and Japanese servers but it can’t be good. And what’s Mythic’s big plan? To finally, supposedly, look at crowd control, combat and career balance issues and population issues. But no, they can’t do all the changes this game has been screaming for since they destroyed those exact systems in one patch! Not even 2 or 3! No! Nevermind that it only took one patch in 1.3.1 to actually destroy it all, it’s going to take 3+ patches to fix the game. Dragging your feet when you have gone from 1.7 million NA players at launch to less than 200k players 1 year out is a bad, bad, bad, bad idea. I don’t think anyone expects this game to be around come 2010 at this rate. And sadly, neither do any of us in the Toof.
So wot does it need exactly? I mean it’s easy to point out flaws without advice, right? Simply put, Order and Destruction careers need to be balanced. How? Well, there are many ways. None of them include taking their sweet ass time. The best way for Mythic to fix this game with the least actual impact on the game, would be to put out an actual PAID expansion that either adds two new races to both sides, or one neutral race, thus adding a third realm ala DAOC so the population can balance out on the fly, completely revamp the entire game, and in that, include full career mirroring. Wotever one side’s career has, the mirror on the other side will have it, period. The looks can all be unique so everyone can feel like a special little snowflake, and yes you’ll probably piss off the whiney, no skill cunts on Order because they’ll need to learn how to play for real, but you don’t have a choice. At this rate, if Mythic doesn’t get some balls to make the hard call that simply needs to be made, this game will not see it’s first paid expansion, it will not make 2 years, and I honestly doubt it’ll make it very far into 2010.
Truth be told, this game is the biggest disappointment in the history of MMORPGs. How so much potential could be wasted and destroyed so quickly is mind-boggling and will be the only thing this game and Mythic Entertainment will be famous for.
~Blagtoof
