Warhammer Gold - warhammer gold blog

I had a bit of a rough and tumble start with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. That doesn’t mean you need someone to pass the salt so you can shake it all over this review, it just means that the game has things like typical launch-type obstacles, such as crash bugs, that affect a certain percentage of the population, and I fell into the wrong slice of the pie chart. Working past these issues, some of which seem to even have been resolved in the past couple of days, I’m finding a lot to like about Mythic’s new MMO.

Love Your Job

Warhammer is about a war. No kidding! The Order faction consists of the Empire (humans), High Elves, and Dwarves, and on the flipside lies Destruction, composed of Greenskins (Goblins and Orcs), Dark Elves, and Chaos. The careers are all tied to race, so it’s more important to decide what your job will be than what you want to look like.

Maybe you want to be a Witch Hunter. I mean, you get a gun and the ability to pile up accusations until an execution move becomes available, and who doesn’t want to follow the mastery Path of “Confession?” Actually, I spent most of my time with a Marauder, whose arm shapeshifts as needed, although the Brutality sword-like appendage seemed to rock the hardest, with its Convulsive Slashing move that just tears up your target.

From level 11 you start gaining mastery points with which you specialize your career. For instance, I started up the Path of Brutality which not only improves all the moves specifically using the Brutality-shaped arm, but eventually unlocks new moves and passive career tactics you can slot to increase your effectiveness. High Elf Archmages who not only heal, but shoot lasers out of their eyes, Goblin Squig Herders who attack at range while commanding one ugly-looking pet monster—I wasn’t able to try every career, but the fact that I wish I could have says a lot.
RvR Puts Hair On Your Chest

Of course there are plenty normal MMO quests (Kill wolves, find this dude, collect mushrooms…) but you can play any game for those. If you’re coming to Warhammer, you’re coming for the Realm vs. Realm and the Public Quests. The Realm vs. Realm (or you could say, “epic PvP” with plural Ps) comes in many varieties from open RvR servers to zones within a “core” server, to specific instanced missions called Scenarios. Scenarios are great because they last just fifteen minutes, you get set up with a group as you arrive, and you can zap straight to one from anywhere.

In the upper right hand corner of the screen, near your mini-map (with handy red blotches that designate quest objectives), there is a button to queue for a Scenario. Once you sign up, you can just forget about it and quest, craft, or whatever. When the Scenario resets and slots open up, a window pops up to let you know and you can warp from the spot you stand to battle it out against the opposing faction. Obviously noobs will be overwhelmed in these situations, but it’s only fifteen minutes and you respawn easily in the zone to just keep hacking away. There are also quest objectives for killing members of the opposing faction, and you get experience just for finishing the encounter. Then, of course, there’s the added bonus that even if you managed to kill just one guy, it still helps your realm in the overall battle.

Unfortunately, that vague knowledge is as close as we got to the huge scale that the war ends up taking. The highly anticipated sieges of “living cities” (that are more or less prosperous depending on how your faction is doing) are for those a bit closer to the 40 level cap.

PQ For Me And You

More interesting than RvR (for me, at least) are the Public Quests. Here’s an example: I’m sent to kill some Annoying Squigs on a quest (with Squiggle, my Squig Herder). When I arrive at the killing field, the game tells me that the area also happens to be a Public Quest called Ugrog’s Rage (Oh, that giant troll thing!) where the first objective is killing quite of few of the buggers. I notice another player in the area, and invite them to a party.

Parties are automatically labeled as open, and in the upper left there is an icon you can click at any time to see what parties are available, how far they are from you, and what they are doing. Everyone in the area knows we’re here doing this PQ, and we can keep inviting people, too. Even players not in our party (or eventual warband, if enough show up—that’s a group of up to four parties) are helping the cause.

Next we have to collect Ugrog some beer kegs, but there are still enemies to deal with as well. Finally, once he’s good and boozed up he’ll bust down the door to this dwarven fortress and the bosses first send minions charging, before finally running out themselves.

Most PQs seem to have three stages, and when it’s over you get a loot drop (or not, if there were a lot of people involved) depending on how well you participated. The drop is a grab bag where you get to choose one item, and there is always something you can use, whether it’s armor or a crafting material. If you help out a lot, you also get tons of influence (points—a bar that fills for each chapter of the story) and are able to pick up influence rewards from the rally master in town.

I love PQs. It’s a great excuse to get a party together and once you have one you can just roam the zone from PQ to PQ. Or you can run one a few times in a row if it’s crowded, since the more consecutive attempts you put in, the higher your roll modifier bonus will be.

I Made This For You

Gathering and Crafting skills are acquired in the chapter 2 zones for each race. Of the four gathering skills, Cultivating is definitely the most compelling, since instead of just picking over corpses or breaking down unwanted gear into magical essences, you’re growing seeds. The process starts by opening the Cultivating window and choosing a plot. You place a seed and then add soil, water, and nutrients as a timer runs down. I didn’t get far enough to see what sort of effect upgrading your soil types and watering cans would have, but you definitely run into higher quality ingredients as you go (or if you buy them from a Scavenger.)

So far there are two crafting systems in the game, one for making potions and one for making talismans. Talismans seem more difficult due to the rarer ingredients required, whereas many potion ingredients are readily available through butchery or cultivating. For that reason, I spent a lot more time with my Apothecary characters.

To make a potion you need a container, a main ingredient, and supporting ingredients for stabilization and added effects. For instance, you can turn regular green healing potion into pink healing-over-time by adding an ingredient that increases the duration of a potion’s effects.

Overall, I found myself actually enjoying crafting, for once. Even though I made way more potions than I really needed, the more active systems made the whole process more satisfying.

Bottom Line Time

I haven’t said much about the Tome of Knowledge yet, but that’s because I personally didn’t find it very interesting. It’s basically a cross between a fantasy novel and an encyclopedia of your progress, which is great if you’re super into Warhammer, but you can tell the designers don’t even expect people to read all the quest text–the dialogue is in a rusty red color as opposed to the sharp black of the actual directions—so to include all this extra reading material is either a huge waste of time or a way to show the true fans how much they are loved. I guess we’ll go with the latter, but it would be interesting to see what percentage of players reads every entry.

As far as audio/video goes, you’ll want to run WAR with more than minimum specs, obviously, for the ultimate RvR experience. It’s a pretty game, and less cartoony than World of Warcraft while still maintaining a clearly fantasy style. The main theme is hummable while you’re waiting for the game to load–especially if your server is full; the game is definitely popular.

My biggest complaint, aside from the crashes that made me want to just quit completely, is the lack of official forums. I don’t want to be part of a community, I want to be part of the community. Yes, you can report bugs in-game, but it still just puzzles me that Mythic doesn’t run their own forums rather than check-up on fan sites.

WAR is probably going to be a really awesome game. The deciding factor for each player is not going to be whether you are into Warhammer, but rather whether you like PvP/RvR. That said, Public Quests are some of the most fun I’ve had in PvE, and, as I mentioned, crafting feels a lot more like an alternate activity than just something else to grind. An important test will be what happens to the population when Wrath of the Lich King launches in November, but as of right now (assuming they really have licked the random crashing bugs) WAR is the MMO place to be, so roll yourself a char and bring on da WAAAGH

Related Topics:

• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (PC)
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (PC)
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (PC)
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (PC)
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (PC)

Some time ago, the developers at Mythic Entertainment began working on a crazy dream. They would take the best portion of Dark Age of Camelot — the realm vs. realm combat — and marry it to the fantasy setting of a beloved tabletop game, Warhammer. They were gambling that a game that focused on one particular gameplay dynamic and built all of its systems around that dynamic would be a fun and exciting experience for millions of MMO gamers. Fast forward a few years through some rocky development woes (including numerous product delays and cut content) and the dream is finally a reality. And while there are certainly issues that need to be dealt with, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has hit the ground running with one of the best MMO experiences we’ve had in a long time.

War is Everywhere

There are individual elements of Warhammer Online that merit praise, but the game’s greatest achievement is actually the integration of its PvP, RvR and PvE experiences into a consistent whole. The “meta-game” of Warhammer Online is the constant state of war between Order (Dwarfs, High Elves, Empire humans) and Destruction (Greenskins, Dark Elves, Chaos humans) to dominate enough of the game’s landscape to open the enemy’s capital city to looting and pillaging. Everything in the game from basic quests against NPC mobs to instanced PvP battles called “scenarios” to open-world RvR struggles over fortresses in the middle of the landscape all contribute in various ways to that struggle. Even better, players are involved in it from the first moment their level one character appears in the world until their level 40 character goes on their first city raid. Mythic has essentially dropped the early-game “leveling process” in favor of an MMO that’s pretty much all “endgame.”

In Warhammer Online this sense that “war is everywhere” comes through in myriad ways. The graphics do a great job bringing the world of Warhammer to life in ways both gross and subtle. The game’s opening zones, for example, are filled with atmospheric details that throw you into the Warhammer mindset immediately. The Empire opening area takes place during a full-fledged Chaos assault on a small town filled with explosions and cannon fire. As the player works his or her way through the world, there’s always something beyond just NPC mobs to indicate the war, whether it be as big as a burning windmill or the old bone fragments that litter the ground.

The frenzied and chaotic atmosphere is enhanced by some exceptional landscape design. The game’s zones are a riot of broken terrain, unscalable ridges and dangerous drops. While the actual land area is fairly small as MMOs go, every inch of it is stuffed with mobs, towns, public quests, RvR zones, points of interest and visual obstructions that block line-of-sight. This makes travelling anyplace without getting attacked by mobs or other players very difficult and pulls players in a dozen different directions at once because there’s always something interesting to do or somewhere interesting to explore. It also ensures that when players do fight, it’s always on a landscape that adds to the excitement of the battle.

The World at WAR

Gameplay in Warhammer Online proceeds along two basic tracks — the PvE and the PvP/RvR areas. Of the two, it’s the PvE zone that initially comes off as the less impressive. When considered by itself, it doesn’t beat the often-elaborate scenarios offered in a game like The Lord of the Rings Online, which is essentially built around a core of questing and storytelling. That, however, isn’t the purpose of Warhammer Online’s PvE content. The game’s PvE is instead designed to weave in and out of the PvP content and offer compelling group-based experiences without the pressure of PvP combat. This it does exceptionally well.

The primary vehicle for this kind of experience are the public quests. PQs are geographically bounded multi-stage world events that everyone within its region can contribute to. Once the event is over, loot drops are rolled for with bonuses going to those who contributed the most. They’re also a brilliant innovation, one that we wouldn’t be surprised to see other MMOs copy in the near future. They offer all the challenge of a group-oriented dungeon and (in later stages) raid-level challenges in short 10- or 15-minute intervals without all the tedious looking for group or the huge time commitment such content usually entails. On Open RvR servers they become even more enjoyable. At least one competitive PQ in the Dwarf/Greenskin zone (where players compete to kill 100 NPCs from the other side) has become an insanely fun kill-zone that’s now a must-stop as players level through the content.
As players progress through the game, a fascinating melding of PvE and PvP content begins to occur. Certain PvE quests will send players into PvP “lakes” to complete objectives that have nothing to do with fighting other players. Others will offer players in PvE zones opposing PQ objectives conveniently located right next to PvP areas where players can slip over and try to kill one another when taunting and interference aren’t enough. In higher-level PvP zones, capturing objectives entails dealing with very powerful NPCs that require raid-level coordination to take down. City sieges — the very goal of the game — are the ultimate fusion of the two. Once a city siege begins, players will have to compete in PvP events to unlock a whole instanced capital loaded with PvE content ranging from low-level quests to loot and kill regular citizens to high-level dungeons and huge raid-level bosses that will take the resources of a guild to destroy.

The Enemy of My Enemy is my Enemy

It doesn’t take much play time before the PvP heart of Warhammer Online becomes clear. Scenario-based PvP is available from the instant a player logs into the game. All a player has to do is click the “Join Scenario” button on the UI anywhere in the world and they queue up. When in a scenario, characters will be leveled to the tier mean. They won’t be given any extra skills, which means that very low-level characters will still be at a slight disadvantage, but the field will be more or less even and everyone feels useful. Scenarios run the gamut from simple timed slaughterfests for points to take-and-hold actions to king-of-the-hill games to capture the flag. As players level, they’ll be asked to take part in more elaborate scenarios that will require more coordination and planning but even the simplest (Tier One) scenarios in the game offer a huge variety of play styles and a host of ingenious play mechanics.

The other part of Warhammer Online’s PvP system is the Realm vs. Realm combat. This consists of PvP “lakes” within larger PvE zones (one for each side) that surround it. In these areas are a series of objectives such as castles or points of interest that are guarded by NPCs that can be captured by players to control the zone. This is easily the game’s biggest individual attraction. First, it offers a ton of balanced PvP combat confined to limited areas under specific rule sets and avoids the annoying “ganking” phenomenon (for those who want it, Mythic has created a number of “Open RvR” servers). Second, these RvR lakes are amazingly fun. In a couple of days’ worth of battles we accumulated more stories of brilliant assaults, sneak attacks, dirty tricks, desperate last stands and amazingly funny moments than in a year of another MMOs PvP. If the greatest piece of content in an MMO is other people, Warhammer Online offers an endless variety of PvP “content” to explore.

Unfortunately, all of this PvP combat comes at a price — fairly steep system requirements. While lag, stutter and chug are usually not a problem at the game’s lower levels, in larger battles with dozens of players it’s very possible players without a high-end system will see their game slow down. We never had a problem so bad it made the game unplayable, but even on our highest-end machines we had to tone down the graphics in some of the larger fights. That may turn off some gamers who were looking forward to the game but may not wish to upgrade their systems — especially that segment that’s been playing nothing but World of Warcraft for the past four years without an upgrade.

Hell is Other People

The biggest irony of Warhammer Online is that its greatest strength is also its biggest weakness — the reliance on other people. The vast majority of the game’s content, especially its meta-game, requires an active and enthusiastic player-base committed to getting to the city sieges. In the game’s opening days as everybody levels up and the game still exudes that “new game smell,” that isn’t a problem. Even in these first days, however, we’ve found that there are inconveniently located PQs that are virtually abandoned. We’re concerned that as the player base ages, these areas may be abandoned, making the trip to level 40 the grind that Mythic worked so hard to avoid.

Fortunately, Mythic is aware of this and put systems in place to try to stem it. Since every zone in the game contributes to the push-pull city-raiding meta-game, there is certainly an incentive for players to level alts and leave them at specific levels in order to be able to switch to different content tiers when the situation requires it. The game also offers a “Tome of Knowledge” that in itself is a huge piece of content. The Tome is combination achievement/kill-counter system that tracks virtually every aspect of gameplay. There’s a kill counter for every type of creature (and player) in the game, exploration unlocks for finding specific locations, well-written story snippets as a reward for following the PvE questlines, titles, new skills and much much more. In fact, there’s even a whole host of silly and secret achievements in the Tome such as clicking on your own character 100 times, fighting while naked or just adding five players to your friends list.
Xbox Live’s achievement system proved some time ago that people will go to incredible lengths for a score beside their name and a few virtual medals. The developers at Mythic took that lesson and ran with it. There will certainly be a large contingent of players who make it a goal to unlock everything in the Tome. For everyone else, the Tome is a sort of goad to experience everything in the game. It’s worth playing that PvP scenario one more time to finish an obscure Tome unlock. It’s worth going through low-level PvE quest lines in the other races’ areas and doing public quests that one has outleveled just to get the unlocks. More than that, the Tome is just one of a host of meters to fill and counters to click and trophies to go for. The game’s guild system treats guilds almost like players with their own system of levels and bonuses and prizes that players can work to unlock. There’s an entire separate system of PvP leveling that unlocks access to high-level loot. One of the key benefits of all this is it keeps players circulating throughout the world and participating in all of its content.

Greenskins in the Woodpile

Despite all the well-deserved praise, Warhammer Online is not without its problems. While the game seems to have avoided the big technical nightmare of unstable servers, there’s a definite danger of population imbalance. As players come on board, there seems to be a pronounced predilection for the Destruction side. While the developers at Mythic have taken steps to ameliorate this, the resulting low population caps on servers have contributed to long wait times for scenarios and 10- to 20-minute waits to log in at peak hours. Since balanced populations fighting each other are the key to this game — much more so than in World of Warcraft, which continues to wrestle with this issue four years after launch — this is something that needs to be carefully monitored and controlled as the game moves forward.

There’s also a host of smaller problems, though none of them rise to more than a small level of annoyance. Players in scenarios can “AFK” their way through, stealing experience and renown points they don’t deserve. There’s a weird graphic bug that will lock an avatar into one animation cycle (though you can still play the game). The crafting is confusing and feels like an afterthought. The UI, while quite good, could use a few now-common elements like the ability to hot-link items and abilities in chat. Considering how important player coordination is in higher-level PvP, the game could really use some type of built-in voice chat system. Some of the terrain in the scenarios and the PvP lakes could use some tweaking, as their proximity to spawn points sometimes gives an advantage to one side while the other faction faces an incredibly long post-death trek.

In the end, though, all of the problems, even the most serious one of lag in heavy player combat, are ultimately fixable. Warhammer Online has had the smoothest, most complete MMO launch we’ve ever seen. Game balance and other elements of the game need tweaking but they’re all there, they all work and most importantly, they’re all fun. This is a game that has 20 separate classes and while some may be overpowered or underpowered, none of them are boring to play. The game comes loaded with PvP and PvE content that — balance issues notwithstanding — is as good as or much better than that of any other MMO on the market. Warhammer Online is the next great game of Player vs. Player and Realm vs. Realm content and we have the feeling that somewhere on the other side of reality, the Chaos god Tzeentch is smiling.

Related Topics:

• Warhammer Online : Age Of Reckoning
• Warhammer Online : Age Of Reckoning
• Warhammer Online : Age Of Reckoning
• Warhammer Online : Age Of Reckoning
• Warhammer Online : Age Of Reckoning

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has finally been released and at a great time for many MMORPG players. If they finally tired of the fast click action of Age of Conan or their hundredth raid in World of Warcraft they now have a new rich and exciting game to play, but there are two main points I have to stress before I go down with the actual review. First off, the game starts out slower then any MMO I can remember, even EVE Online and from my own experience and dealing with other players in game that was a bit of a turn off, but rest assured that slow experience is a good thing while you learn the ropes and when you are a couple of hours in to the game the actual game picks up dramatically in its overall pace and fun. The other point is the game maxes out at level 40 and while during the beta many people seemed to complain about that pointing out other MMORPG’s have level caps at 60, 80 or even 100 levels, you can not compare Warhammer’s level system to theirs because I found that by the time I hit level 15 in Warhammer I actually had a longer and deeper playing experience then I ever had in World of Warcraft. When I topped out in World of Warcraft (all too quickly) and then I maxed out in Age of Conan (again so very fast) it was fun at first to do so but not rewarding or worthwhile, so what I am saying is do not let the level cap lead you to believe the game is short and sweet, when in fact it is long with plenty of replay value.

The overall premise of Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning or WAR is a great war has broken out everywhere across the land and it is time for you to declare your allegiance and join hundreds of thousands (maybe millions eventually) of other players on the many Realm versus Realm (RvR) and Player versus Player (PvP) battlefields in Age of Reckoning and turn the tide of war for your side. Warhammer is a universe of two distinct sides with the Armies of Order (Dwarfs, High Elves and the Empire) and the Armies of Destruction (Greenskins, Dark Elves and Chaos). These two sides will invade each others land, lay siege to impressive fortresses and sack each others cities. Wielding destructive magic and powerful weapons you can fight solo or with your fiends as you explore the world, discover the secrets to the Tome of Knowledge and help lead your side to victory.

So far during beta and the first few weeks of release, it appears the side of Destruction is getting the preferential treatment in terms of numbers on many servers. Both sides are excellent and fun to play but I guess being bad is the fan favorite. Finding which server to join is important and depending on your play style, this will determine how successful you are in Realm versus Realm. But just do not pick Destruction because they look cool, the Armies of Order have their own charm.

Gameplay

Your career in Warhammer Online is just as important as any other MMORPG, especially when you look at your play style, what your potential guild may need and who is most needed in everyday groups. There are many careers to choose from and they are based on Race and sometimes the sex of the character, for instance a Witch Elf can only be female. The careers in the game so far include…

Chaos Career
Chosen – Chaotic Master Tank
Marauder – Melee Damage Masters
Zealot – Healer Caster
Magus – Ranged Damage Dealer

Empire
Warrior Priest – Melee Healer
Witch Hunter – Melee Damage Dealer
Bright Wizard – Ranged Damage Dealer

Dark Elves Careers
Witch Elves – Melee Damage Dealers
Disciple of Khaine – Healer Caster
Sorceress – Ranged Damage Dealer

High Elves Careers
Shadow Warrior – Ranged Damage Dealer
Swordmaster – Graceful Tank
Archmage – Healer and Loremaster
White Lion – Melee and Pet class

Greenskin Career
Black Orc – Heavy Tank
Shaman – Healer and Caster
Squiq Herder – Ranged attack and Pet class

Dwarf Careers
Iron Breaker – Defensive based Tank
Engineer – Shooter/Hybrid
Rune Priest – Healer and Buffer

Every class on each side between Destruction and Order has their direct opposite in some way. This is because the main part of the game is Player versus Player in a Realm versus Realm environment. Now if you are new to the RvR concept, do not worry since it is fairly straight forward and a concept which was pioneered by Mythic in their earlier MMORPG, Dark Age of Camelot. The easiest way to describe the game is us versus them or in very simple terms good versus evil, but if you do not like to bash other players heads open you can solo or even just do the Player versus Environment (PvE) side of things with other groups, the game does not force you in one direction or the other. But you will miss out on some rather fun gaming by not competing in the RvR side of things and I am not a big fan of PvP in many MMORPG’s period so that is saying something.

To play the RvR side of things is fairly straight forward, so you just enter your self into the queue and very quickly you will enter the fray, transported from where ever you are. Placed into a group if you are solo or entering the actual battle with your group you engage the other side for control of specific areas. Fighting until the actual goal is reached when you win or lose the encounter. You will gain renown points which add to the overall gaming experience and can be used to unlock titles and more.

Warhammer Online is more of a traditional MMORPG then the recently released action based MMO Age of Conan, but with that “traditional” label Warhammer is also one of the most polished MMORPG’s gameplay wise at launch, just like the Lord of the Rings Online was for polish and stability. The basic gameplay is there with the auto-attack feature we know from many games and then clicking off abilities or spells as we need to cast them. Down time has been almost eliminated with your character regaining their health and action points (action points are used in combat for abilities and spells) very quickly so you can always be on the offensive if you need to be and not sitting back waiting for your health to regenerate or your action points aka mana to be restored.

WAR uses a book called the Tome of Knowledge which is basically the book which knows everything about you from your kills, what you have unlocked, how long you have played and much more. This book is handy and very easy to find your way through via the tab system on the left side of the Tome. What I enjoyed most was seeing how many kills I had for specific monsters (I like to know that for some reason) and what of the History and Lore I had unlocked and seen. As a heavy duty Role Player this was a very welcome addition.

Quests are plentiful and easy to do for many reasons, the first being they are easy to find as in most current MMORPG’s with a green book above the head of the person and where you are to do the actual quest is shown on your map, handy and while this is basically hand holding, it allows the player to level and find their way around easily and jump on to more important things such as RvR battles and crafting.

Public quests are by far the most fun I have had in the actual game, since you will join forces with other adventurers to reach certain goals for each actual public quest. Usually killing X number of baddies and doing something else very specific. One of the best quests I have seen so far was when a giant spawn and ran towards the public quest, knocking down trees and making a general nuisance of himself. Of course after he is killed, or the quest is finished, everyone who competed in the fight rolls for a chance to win some loot. Not everyone will win and bonuses on the roll are given by your overall contribution in the battle, but you can redo the fights more then once which is handy because the loot is nice.

As you compete in the public quests you win points which are put towards items key NPC’s will offer you, from potions, equipment, gear and more. This is one of the better ways to get your self some excellent gear for your level. It is too bad though you can only get one item out of each of the three prize tiers.

Crafting is extremely important to any MMO player worth their salt, but if the crafting system is bad, what is the use of it. Well I have great news for those of us who love to craft and can sink dozens of hours at a time hunting for regents and experimenting, we have a solid crafting system which is easy to use, actually looks good and crafting per se is not some mindless endeavor where you sit back and watch a progress bar before clicking ’remake’. Of course I never had a chance to try them all, but I plan on at least giving each one a decent go.

Warhammer Online is a strong, deep MMORPG with a ton of features that would take too long to get into, but is well worth experiencing the gameplay on many levels.

Graphics

Graphically Warhammer Online is very good and it does not push your graphics card or your average computer to its limits by any means. This is a good thing for those gamers with older systems, those with high end video cards who may be expecting something closer to Age of Conan’s or some other higher end graphic game, will find the graphics less then pleasing. At first I will honestly admit I was disappointed in the overall graphics, but after seeing my third or fourth major public quest with three or four full groups running around and fighting the various enemies who were around, I began to prefer seeing the very high frame rate, with the graphics quality maxed out and fifty plus player characters engaged in battles with at least that many mobs. Not once in this game has the game had any sort of video lag, or lag of any kind and that is impressive on many levels.

One issue with the overall graphics that I have is until you reach the mid-range levels you will see copies of yourself over and over again, in my very first group during the beta, there were two other characters who had the exact same look as I did and even after several quests, we still looked the same after adding a few items to our armor. Do not let this worry you though as you do get higher, your personal touches to the character begin to show and the game is more about Realm versus Realm combat then dressing up your character, the fashion show can happen later on with updates and hopefully many expansions.

Level design wise the world is very well done and for once it appears a MMORPG developer did not hit the “Create Random World” button, do some slight tweaking and run with it. Each area has this personal touch to it, almost to the point it would seem a separate team was in charge of each area and they did not sit back and borrow from each other. There are some creatively designed areas with impressive forests, temples and dungeons and with each starting area this is a sign of what is to come later on from the Elven forests to the dying lands of Chaos.

Monsters, demons, fairies, dragons and other creatures you will fight and hopefully slay with others are very well designed, animated and textured. Every area in the game, especially the earlier levels has plenty of variety of monsters for you to see and fight. I was most surprised by seeing a dragon early on while playing my Witch Elf who are amazing fast damage dealers and entering a Warband and destroying the beast in one of the early public quests, but that is just a piece of what is to come.

The special effects are beyond excellent, especially if you are a caster such as a Bright Wizard and light the world around you on fire. Every class has some interesting and ’cool’ effects to their special attacks and abilities and it never gets old building up your characters special ability and releasing it in some epic attack and devastating the enemy ranks.

Finally we have a game out of the box (at least one that I can remember) that has almost a complete, easy to use user interface editor, with this you can easily move everything around, change sizes and more from inside the main game with out any hassles, shutting down or issues of any type.

Audio

Dramatic music and deep environmental audio is the core of Warhammer Online’s audio library. Every location, dungeon, battlefield and town has a strong feel to it, which is driven by what you see and hear and if the audio was not as strong as it is, the overall game would not be the game of grand adventures which Warhammer is known for. Even listening to the music at the server select or character selection screen has this range of hope and balance to dark and chaotic battle chords. Audio wise Mythic has done a fantastic job on Warhammer.

Non-Playable characters are a chatty bunch in the game, but unfortunately they do not have a voice track for many of them, but what voice work we do hear in the game from the battle cries, to giants getting angry are excellent and what is most surprising these voices have the correct level of emotion needed for what they are saying and based on their characters race. A Greenskin Shaman sounds like you would expect as does the high and mighty elves. This should not shock me but so many MMORPG’s often fail to go that extra step with voice over work and have everyone sound the same from Orc to Troll to bar wench.

Value

I would expect most players will stick with one side or the other in terms of overall faction loyalty in the game because that is what they prefer, basically Order (good guys) and Destruction (bad guys) and in many cases this would limit them to just a couple of classes, but in WAR they have many classes (careers) with 10 on each side and we can assume more will come with future updates and expansions. So basically the amount of value is there, especially with how long it takes the average player to see the end game and just because you have seen the end game, it does not mean you have done everything you need to do.

Bottom Line

If you are a Warhammer fan in any form (and who isn’t?), this is your first chance to play in the epic and fantastic world we have only seen in table top and the odd RTS before, so it is a must buy. For MMORPG fans and RPG fans this is also a must buy, for the simple reason it has many of the strengths of games like World of Warcraft and Everquest 2, but has also taken from its spiritual predecessor Dark Age of Camelot (best PvP Fantasy MMO of all time) to create a wonderful gaming experience for the PvP/RvR and the PvE player.

— Tested on –
Windows Vista Ultimate 6.0 Service Pack 1
AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core Processor (4 CPUS) 2.2 Ghz
4 Gig Ram
1 Gig NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2
1680 x 1050 (32 bit) 60Hz
Merc Stealth Keyboard
Microsoft Trackball
Related Topics:

• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review

Contribution to the public quest isn’t just calculated by damage done either, but by healing and group support through spells and abilities. All these elements make public quests both fun and easy to take part in. However, the term public quest does tend to infer that players will need each other to complete them, so problems could occur when the lower-tiered public quests have no players around to do them. Ultimately, as time passes, this design flaw will impact the guild-less player, causing them to miss out on potentially better items and, on a more lofty level, game content. Currently, there isn’t a problem because there is no shortage of lower-ranked players, but tweaks will most definitely need to be made later on.

Warhammer Online’s PvP elements are a definite ray of Elven sunshine. Mythic has divided its PvP priorities into two forms: Scenarios and Open-world RvR. Scenarios are played like instanced team vs. team matches between Order and Destruction. Players can join scenarios as easily as clicking a button on the HUD. Groups of players that have banded together also have the option of joining and playing scenarios together.

Once inside the scenarios, players can expect standard modes of gameplay. Capture the flag and capturing and defending control points are just a few of the game modes. There are some additional ones that add a twist here and there, but it isn’t anything veteran gamers haven’t seen or played before. When players select to join a scenario, they are placed in a queue, so while the game is preparing a scenario, players can continue to go about their business. Once the scenario is ready, players can join and are instantly loaded into it. Once the scenario is finished, the game places the players back where they were within the game world, allowing them to pick up where they left off. For once, these out-of-world zones aren’t tedious or pointless to play, and those who would normally find them to be a waste will catch themselves actually having fun.

Open-world RvR plays out in predetermined areas of each map and there are no multiple instances of the same thing. Battlefield objectives are scattered throughout these contested areas. Each tier has two maps in it, each with its own set of objectives. When one realm captures and holds all those objectives, bonuses are given to the players of that realm and the game acknowledges their dominance. Eventually, Mythic’s idea leads to one realm being able to capture and hold all the objectives of each tier until the end, which results in the siege of the other realm’s capital city.

Players will earn points for two different ranks, one is their overall rank and the other is their Renown Rank. Earning renown is a matter of participating in PvP, whether it’s scenarios or open-world RvR. As players earn renown points and ranks, they get access to renown abilities, which can be used to help their characters become more powerful. Of course, the issue of low-level player populations cannot be ignored. How will the balance be impacted when there aren’t any players left in the early tiers of the game?

Warhammer Online makes it so everything matters and contributes to character or guild progression. Players unlock abilities and special awards for killing certain numbers of specific types of enemies, for exploring uncharted corners of the maps, and for doing things that are normally mundane. The brilliance of this system is that MMOs tend to be reward-heavy games anyway, so why not make everything the players do a form of progression. For instance, killing 100 wolves could result in an unlock that gives a special cape or armor piece.

There are a lot of features that make up Warhammer Online. Most of those features aren’t anything veterans of the genre don’t already know and understand. And, there are a complement of bugs and glitches that accompany this giant, but the core gameplay is solid. Warhammer Online isn’t trying to reach a specific audience either, regardless of Mythic’s original intention. Instead, it seems to be creating a whole new audience, turning and redefining players’ expectations and behaviors. If MMOs are what you enjoy, Warhammer Online is one of the best on the market. It may not have a new combat system built from the ground up, or flashy next-generation graphics, but its success without those two elements is a feat in its own right.

By Derek Hidey
CCC Freelance Writer

Related Topics:

• Play Logs: Week six of Warhammer Online (PC)
• Play Logs: Week six of Warhammer Online (PC)
• Play Logs: Week six of Warhammer Online (PC)
• Play Logs: Week six of Warhammer Online (PC)
• Play Logs: Week six of Warhammer Online (PC)

Welcome to week six of our play logs for Warhammer Online. We’re getting close to the end of this play log review of Mythic’s title, which means that digging into the simple features should be over. Next week will be the big overview of RVR, the game’s principal (and most complex) mechanic. When I initially planned this coverage, though, I expected crafting to be just as significant. Coming from games like Star Wars Galaxies, Final Fantasy XI, EverQuest 2, and World of WarCraft, I expected Warhammer to follow suit with some kind of worthwhile crafting offering. Sadly, such has proven to not be the case, and thus this week’s entry is pretty straightforward.

One of the few areas where there is a huge amount of room for improvement in Warhammer Online is the game’s crafting system. With only two main craft skills and four supplementary gathering abilities, the crafting is somewhat shallow and limited. Artisans who enjoy crafting more than any other aspect of the game—those who spent days managing their own tailoring shop in SWG or perfecting recipes and trying different day and weather combinations in FFXI—will be extremely disappointed.

Apothecary, one of the two craft skills, involves combining various natural ingredients from quests and enemies or procured using scavenging, butchering, and cultivation. Apothecaries scavenge for water and seeds and then cultivate the seeds or butcher animals to obtain raw ingredients. These ingredients are then combined in various ways to create potions which offer many different effects from hour-long buffs to instant-heal medicine or even clothing dyes.

Apothecary and Talisman crafting are the only two pursuits.
The other skill, Talisman-making, is essentially the equivalent of enchanting in WoW. A talisman crafter uses the salvaging gathering skill to break down rare items into essences and fragments. These fragments can then be used to create stat-imbued talismans which are slotted into equipment and weapons. Some talismans have certain durations (say, eight hours), while others are permanent.

And really, that’s about it. The crafting system devolves into a simple game of “drag the appropriate item to the right slot and click ‘go.’” While the apothecary may have a little more work to do in this regard, as cultivation unto itself does take some time and a separate bout of dragging and dropping, both are fundamentally the same, and incredibly basic and boring. Experimentation is kept to a minimum, and generic blueprints emerge for what will produce what with randomized “+1″-type versions resulting every now and then.

Worse yet is the fact that, at least through the majority of the game through to level 30, rare materials aren’t that rare. Forget the days of camping a given pop to have a chance to receive that one rare crafting item you need to make a fortune. Apothecary-related rare materials drop like candy, and talisman crafters can easily camp public quests to scavenge for gear. While the hunt for rare items does come into play in the end-game, the problem is that the kinds of crafted good produced by these two trade skills are really not all that special: the former produces only good consumables, while the latter provides enhancements that don’t make as much of a different in the greater scheme of things because stats only give one player a (very) small edge over another.

Salvaging, one of the four gathering skills, lets you disenchant items for materials.
To put it simply, crafting in Warhammer Online is disappointing. While other games have made the artisan lifestyle a completely separate and self-sustaining experience from the main game, crafting in this game is barely a worthwhile side endeavor. Though both professions net modest rewards, the staple craft skills that involve crafting custom gear or special PVP items simply aren’t in the game. Whether that will change with a future patch or expansion has yet to be revealed, but at this stage, the crafting disappoints—especially for those looking for a worthwhile time-sink aside from RVR.

Another smooth week passed this week as server stability remained high and public outcry about imbalances or other complaints of that sort remained relatively quiet. Player progression seems to be moving along nicely, and as I move into the third tier zones, it seems that world PVP is starting to take a precedent over instance-based scenario RVR. Because of the palpable rewards of world PVP—having control of a zone’s keep is the only way to access high-level RVR gear dealers and renown skill trainers—there seems to be a constant battle. Plus, the addition of siege weapons (actually usable in the game at launch *cough* Age of Conan) makes world PVP a blast. But I’ll save that for next week.

One thing I would like to comment on, as my random observation for the week, is that Warhammer Online handles mounts way better than World of WarCraft. I got my mount early last week after hitting level 20, and I had just enough gold to buy it when I dinged. I’d been saving money up without sacrificing anything—just avoiding dying my gear or buying anything unnecessary—and thus getting a mount didn’t prove to be an unnecessary time sink. This is by far the converse of what it was like getting a mount at 40 way back right after WoW launched (before the gold elevation and level changes were brought forth in various patches and before stacks of Earthroot sold for 2 gold each), which required days of money grinding and AH playing. Now I’m free to continue progressing and sinking my time into something more important and more fun: RVR.

Related Topics:

• Exclusive WAR Post Launch Interview with Mark Jacobs
• Exclusive WAR Post Launch Interview with Mark Jacobs
• Exclusive WAR Post Launch Interview with Mark Jacobs
• Exclusive WAR Post Launch Interview with Mark Jacobs
• Exclusive WAR Post Launch Interview with Mark Jacobs

Questions by Cody “Micajah” Bye (Managing Editor) and Garrett Fuller (Industry Relations)

Answers by Mark Jacobs, CEO/VP of Mythic Entertainment

Few names in the massively multiplayer online gaming industry hold as much clout as the often quoted Mark Jacobs. Having been a part of the online gaming industry since the early 1980s, Mark has been a fundamental factor in the gradual evolution of massively multiplayer online gaming. With the release of Mythic Entertainment’s latest MMORPG, Warhammer Online, it looks like Mark has again played a fundamental role in the evolution of MMO gaming. But with any MMOG, the work isn’t done when the game is released, and the Ten Ton Hammer staff sat down with Mark to discuss the future of Warhammer and his thoughts on their initial launch. We hope you enjoy the discussion!

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s your general sense of how the launch went? We’re past the first weekend and into the first real week; how do you think things went?

Mark Jacobs: I think it was the smoothest launch in MMO history. For six days there were no crashes. No real emergency patches. No downtime. Not only did the entire game not crash, but no servers even crashed. So for the first six days, things were fabulous. Of course that evening we had two crashes and then two more after that, but that’s the only real blemish on the record.
But when you have 55 servers up, that’s some pretty good up-time.

Ten Ton Hammer: How are you dealing with game balance? Obviously you had plenty of testing in beta, but now you’re seeing it in full speed. How are you dealing with the class balances, faction balances, etc.?

Mark Jacobs: I think it was the smoothest launch in MMO history. For six days there were no crashes. No real emergency patches. No downtime. Not only did the entire game not crash, but no servers even crashed. So for the first six days, things were fabulous. Of course that evening we had two crashes and then two more after that, but that’s the only real blemish on the record.
But when you have 55 servers up, that’s some pretty good up-time.

Ten Ton Hammer: How are you dealing with game balance? Obviously you had plenty of testing in beta, but now you’re seeing it in full speed. How are you dealing with the class balances, faction balances, etc.?

Mark: It’s about what we expected. We got a lot of it right. The beta testers told us a lot, but they didn’t tell us everything. They never do. So, we have our strike teams looking at everything - the reports, the metrics - and we’re going to balance things. No MMO ever comes out fully balanced.

I think we’re certainly in better shape than where we were with Camelot. Are we perfect? No. I’d be hard pressed to think of any MMO, especially one that’s PvP geared that is, within sixty days, didn’t have some major balancing adjustments to the game. Hopefully we won’t be making major adjustments, but we’re certainly going to be balancing things.

When you have 55 servers and they’re busy almost all day every day, you get a lot more data than when you do during beta.

Mark: One step at a time. Certainly you know and anyone who has been around me for any period of time knows that I can’t stand these guys. I have no use for them. I think they’re helping to undermine MMO gaming, and as somebody who has been making online games since the dawn of time, I have no use for somebody who wants to help destroy what has taken over two decades to build up. And that’s what these guys are doing.

You can pretty much expect that this is just the first shot. This is the easiest. We’re hoping to discourage them. Discouragement is good; it takes less time, less effort, and less cost. But we ain’t stopping here.

Ten Ton Hammer: How did you end up creating a game that has combined really meaningful PvP with some really quality PvE experiences? A number of games have tried to blend the two in the past, but few have reached such an outstanding level of PvP gaming that your studio has attained. What kind of tricks and secrets did you use to come up with this formula?

Mark: A lot of hard work. A lot of willingness to take feedback from other people. One of the things I talk about in many of my interviews is that I don’t think that I’m the world’s greatest game designer. I don’t think that I’m a genius. I think that I’m a pretty good game designer. One trait that I try to spread among as many people as I can in the company is that you have to be willing to listen. Nobody is right all of the time. Nobody is perfect. Just as I can take criticism when one of my ideas is bad or something we do as a company is dumb. I think that a great designer has to be willing to listen to other voices and go ‘yeah you are right I wasn’t thinking.’ Whether it is how we are trying to mix PvE and RvR, or things like the tome or the quests.

This has all evolved from both internal and external feedback, and that’s the secret sauce. I mean, I’ve spoken out before against the idea of the Vision, as opposed to a vision. You know a small ‘v’ versus a capital ‘V’. When you have a small ‘v’ that’s a good thing. That’s the initial vision for a game. That’s what I did with Warhammer. But I don’t have the vision with a capital ‘V’, that’s when bad things happen.

Ten Ton Hammer: (laughs)

Mark: It’s true! Thats when bad things happen in almost every field - and it doesn’t matter if you are making games, making movies, television, or writing books - when you are so caught up in that Vision that you have. When you are the only one who can be right. Sometimes absolute greatness ensues but its easier the less complicated things are. I’ve yet to see an MMO that has that kind of Vision, where you can tell that it is some one man’s, one woman’s Vision, truly succeed. WoW is not that kind of vision. Its the vision of a lot of very talented people at Blizzard who did their job and did it very well. And so if you are looking for the secret sauce that’s where it is. Hard work and a willingness to listen.
Ten Ton Hammer: How are you planning to equalize server populations? I know that’s been the thing that’s…..

Mark: Always! That’s always going to come up. That’s always going to be a pain in the butt. I mean one of the things that we did already that no one else has done was the server clone idea. I can’t believe that it took so long for anyone to think of it. Now, I’m glad I was the one who thought of it!

But we are going to take other steps as well. I’ve already announced that we’re going to have free character transfers if the servers don’t even out over the next week or so. What’s funny is that if you look back at WoW’s launch, people had horrendous queues. While people weren’t very understanding, they were more understanding.

After two days - just two days - people are going “Oh my god! What are you going to do about the server queues!? It’s an epic fail!” I’m like - it’s been two days! Two days since we launched! Then the population started evening out some more, and they’re going to continue to even out. We’re going to wait before we do anything drastic, like people putting in transfers. It doesn’t really make the problem better, necessarily.

It’s pretty humorous, really. If you go back four years and compare the two games, we have far less problems than Blizzard had in terms of their queuing. And yet, we get blown out of proportion. We’re going to do whatever we need to do.

In terms of ongoing balance, it’s important for people to understand that just because you’re outnumbered on a server, doesn’t mean that the other guys are going to win. That’s the beauty of this; you can have Destruction have 20% more people than you, but in scenarios you can still kick their butt. Even in open RvR; if you go back to the Camelot days, how many times did the underpowered realm - in terms of numbers - win? It was all the time! For a lot of the people that are always complaining about their being more Destruction people, it just means that you get into a scenario faster. And for those Destruction people complaining about their not being enough Order players, within 24 hours, people should have moved to a different server.

It’s not like people can go “Oh my god, it took us six months to get our characters to level gazillion and now I need to move because there’s nobody online to play with.” When we tell people that this is what we’re going to do and we have plenty of servers up, and they choose to go to the crowded server….

Y’know we put warning after awrning up telling people not to choose the crowded servers, and yet I get to watch a board that shows how many people are logging in and creating characters and new people keep going to the crowded servers. So what can we do, right? If we shut of character creation there, then the guilds will get pissed. So we can’t do that. If we give people a bonus for growing to the less crowded servers, then the guilds still bitch because we gave a (hypothetical) 10% leveling bonus if they would move to that server.

Since we’re not past week one of our initial launch, we’re not going to overreact. We learned our lesson from the years of DAOC.

Ten Ton Hammer: So no server mergers in the near future?

Mark: Oh god no! The funniest bit was that when this stuff first started, people told us that we needed to merge servers. It was Friday. And so I’m keeping track of how many servers are mid to high population levels. I even told people on the Vault about it.

The next day, four more servers had moved from low pop to mid pop. I just want to tell people that this will keep happening and to just be patient. We opened extra servers than we would normally, because we wanted people to have those option. We listened to our community.

When we did our first launch with the CE and the SE, people were asking us to open a few extra servers because of large guilds or alliances. So we did. And of course people started complaining.

But it really doesn’t matter. We opened with far fewer servers than what we will need to contain all the sales that we’re going to get over the next month. We know - or at least we hope - what our numbers will be, and since we have plenty of servers to handle that, I’ll think we’ll be just fine.

Ten Ton Hammer: So do you think you came out with the right amount of servers?

Mark: I think we did come out with a couple too few for the CE, and I think we did come out with the right amount for the first week with the SE. What other people have to realize is that if we put too few servers on and a problem happens at two in the morning, we’re not going to be able to do anything about that. The people that give you the high sign to put up more servers may not be there at two or three in the morning. Now the CSRs are there and we do have people watching, But these servers are delicate, it’s almost a feel thing.

It’s not like we’re just watching the numbers and trying to make a decision when to move people over. We really prefer to have a few extra servers now and wait and see what happens over the next week. It hasn’t even been a week yet since we went on sale.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are there any plans for reducing scenario wait time? Some players have been getting anxious with how long it’s taking one faction compared to the other to get into a RvR scenario.

Mark: This is another thing that involves server population and people that are willing to jump into those RvR scenarios. If you can’t seem to get into the RvR scenario, that’s why we have open world RvR.

But if one side wants to do open RvR and the other side doesn’t, that’s going to be a problem. That’s a problem with any game, not just WAR. It could be something that happens on the WoW PvP servers or the Camelot servers. If guys don’t want to RvR, then they have to sort it out among themselves. You can’t force people to RvR. You can’t force ‘em to PvE.

These things will sort themselves out once we have the transfers going, then people can make the choice if they want to stay on their server or not. They might look at the servers and discover that one is a bit more PvE oriented, so they’ll move to that server. But activating anything now, that’s just going to make the problem worse.
Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think there will ever be a time where you tell players what tendency a server has? Maybe put “RvR Scenarios” or “PvE” or “Open World RvR” in parenthesis beside the server name?

Mark: Oh absolutely! If we see that something is going on regularly, that this particular server is really into RvRing, then we would absolutely do something. whether it’s flagging or allowing free transfers off those servers. We would tell players that “Sorry guys, no one is RvRing on your server. Why don’t you move to another one?” I have no problem with that. We want people to be happy.

Ten Ton Hammer: The pace of the game is really fascinating; it is not boring. Every time I sit down and play, there’s always something to do. Was it your philosophy to give players so many options that they’ll never be bored?

Mark: That’s one of the keys to the design of this game. I wanted to cut out time sinks whenever possible. It should be really intense. What I’m hoping is that people will settle into a natural rhythm after awhile where they might start up a separate character and take things a little slower. Part of the thing with time sinks is that it gives people time to talk and start to build a community. Now I think people will begin to start that community due to all the action that’s going on, and you’ll see all the guilds in the scenarios and then in the open RvR.

I wanted a game where I wasn’t spending a ton of time waiting or healing or riding on this thing to go to this other place. That all makes the game feel more grindy. I would get annoyed when I couldn’t do some things or I’d have to wait for things. Our pacing is absolutely on purpose.

Ten Ton Hammer: What can you tell us about the future? What’s coming down the pipe?

Mark: I can tell you without any fear of contradiction that one of the things we are looking at is bug fixes. That is a priority item for us.

On a decidedly different track, over the next four months we’re looking at bringing back some of those classes that we cut or some of the other content that was cut. Or giving players some additional things that they want and have been asking for.

That said, we’re not making the game more PvE. We’re not talking about that. But I did sit down with Rob and I have a list of 21 items on my board. Out of those 21 items, I have nine things that I consider to be hot button items from the players perspective. This is taken from my experience and what I’ve seen on the forums. Out of that nine, we’ll probably be able to get to six or seven that will go in fairly quickly.

Then there are the changes that need to come in because I didn’t want to have any point in the game where the player can say that they’d rather stick a hot poker in their eye than do that again. There are a couple of things that are on that list for WAR. And I just go, “How the heck did this not get fixed before we launched?” The answer is frankly that we thought it was fixed but it somehow made it in. These are the things that can get really annoying to the player over time.

A perfect example would be like when you get booted or want to switch toons and you get stuck in the server queue again. We thought it was fixed, but we’re going to go in and fix it again. To me, that’s something that’s really important to fix right away. That’s not a balance issue. Nobody is going to be pissed off about us fixing this dumb bug. That’s one of the things that I really want to do over the next thirty days; get a whole bunch of these annoyances or bugs out of the way and then get ready for a couple big content patches.

Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks for your time, and it’s always great talking with you Mark!
Mark: Thank you very much!

Related Topics:

• WAR booting gold sellers ‘like crazy’
• WAR booting gold sellers ‘like crazy’
• WAR booting gold sellers ‘like crazy’
• WAR booting gold sellers ‘like crazy’
• WAR booting gold sellers ‘like crazy’

Mythic Entertainment’s CEO Mark Jacobs dedicated his first new blog post since the release of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning to gold sellers. Great, if the blogs don’t go about piracy they sure aren’t far off with gold sellers.
The tone of the post is immediately set:
I hate gold sellers/spammers. No, that’s not strong enough, let me try again. I HATE GOLD SELLERS WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING. Ah, that’s better. Now, why do I hate them you may ask? I hate them for a number of reasons, most of which have been detailed in various interviews I’ve done over the years. And now that they have taken their obnoxiousness to new levels with gold service spamming, I HATE GOLD SPAMMERS EVEN MORE NOW THAN EVER BEFORE.
Further down he explains that they have a zero tolerance thing going on there which resulted in 400 bans within the first 48 hours of the game’s life. Instead of doing regular mass bans, they have a dedicated team that does nothing else than hunting down gold sellers and booting their illegal asses immediately, no exceptions, no mercy. Also, when a player gets banned it is done medieval style, a public message humiliating the given player and sending a strong message to the surrounding crowd.
Related Topics:

• Warhammer’s Mark Jacobs offered big bribes from gold farmers
• Warhammer’s Mark Jacobs offered big bribes from gold farmers
• Warhammer’s Mark Jacobs offered big bribes from gold farmers
• Warhammer’s Mark Jacobs offered big bribes from gold farmers
• Warhammer’s Mark Jacobs offered big bribes from gold farmers

While he wasn’t giving away any numbers, Mythic’s lead Warhammer Online designer, Mark Jacobs, said recently in a blog that gold farmers have offered him huge bribes to allow them to ply their ill-gotten ingots.

Here is the direct quote from his blog: “BTW, for those who might be tempted to think that we are doing this so we could offer our own service or because we do make money off their boxes (traditionally, gold sellers will quickly shift to buddy disks and free trials though to lower their costs) let me tell you this. I’ve been offered “a piece of the action” both personally and corporately in the past if I will either turn a blind eye or help them in their actions. This would have netted me and/or Mythic a very, very tidy sum, far more than we would see from box sales. My answer was and always will remain the same: Go to hell.”

In the rest of the blog, Mark Jacobs just says “no thanks” to all the gold farmers spammin’ it up.

Makes me wonder about some other MMORPGs that I’ve played, that seemed to be stuffed to the gills with gold farmers — were those studios taking bribes, perhaps? It seems like it would be easy enough to report and ban gold farmers spamming chat channels — but many MMORPGS seems to have trouble doing so.

The true size of the gold farming (and power leveling) industry is unknown. But one initial study that tried to gauge the size of this industry believed that 400,000 people where employed gold farming, racking in profits of over 500 million USD (which seems absolutely incredible.)

The vast majority of gold farming is done in China. A recent trend has also shown that Chinese gold farmers have been increasingly out-sourcing their work to even poorer countries, such as Vietnam and Cambodia.

Related Topics:

• Mythic CEO unleashes a torrent of wrath on gold sellers and spammers in MMO
• Mythic CEO unleashes a torrent of wrath on gold sellers and spammers in MMO
• Mythic CEO unleashes a torrent of wrath on gold sellers and spammers in MMO
• Mythic CEO unleashes a torrent of wrath on gold sellers and spammers in MMO
• Mythic CEO unleashes a torrent of wrath on gold sellers and spammers in MMO

Not even a week after the title’s release, developer Mythic Entertainment found Mark Jacobs revealed in his blog that over 400 “gold farmers” have already been banned in their MMORPG, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. He stated on the blog:

“Online Games Are A Niche Market. Since WAR launched we have been banning these [gold farmers] like crazy. As of Saturday Night, we had banned about 400 of them. My [Corporate Social Responisibilities] have a zero tolerance policy. We don’t wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away.”

We checked on one of the popular “gold shopping” websites to see how much real money does it cost to purchase fake money. Observing from one of the title’s most populated servers, Phoenix Throne, an amount of 2,000 gold sells for $1,749.99 USD–pardon our math, but that’s almost 75 cents per gold! Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, published by Electronic Arts, is out now for the PC

Related Topics:

• Warhammer Online has zero tolerance for gold sellers
• Warhammer Online has zero tolerance for gold sellers
• Warhammer Online has zero tolerance for gold sellers
• Warhammer Online has zero tolerance for gold sellers
• Warhammer Online has zero tolerance for gold sellers

Mythic CEO unleashes a torrent of wrath on gold sellers and spammers in MMO

There’s a lot of money to be made on MMOs, and not just for the games’ publishers. There’s also a good business to be made out of gold farming, with sites such as IGE offering to save you from the grind by exchanging in-game currency for real money. It’s seen by some players as a part of the MMO furniture, and by others as a total nuisance, but Mythic Entertainment’s CEO, and lead designer on WAR [Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning], Mark Jacobs, has revealed that he’s wielding a ban hammer worthy of Norse mythology on gold sellers in WAR.

‘I hate gold sellers/spammers,’ says Jacobs on his blog to get straight to the point. He then decides that this isn’t strong enough, and hits the Caps Lock key to say ‘I HATE GOLD SELLERS WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING.’ Describing IGE as ‘lowlifes,’ and likening gold sellers in general to ‘pond scum,’ Jacobs has revealed that he has no time for the arguments put forward by gold sellers to justify their business.

He particularly dislikes the argument that gold sellers don’t interrupt gameplay. ‘I hated seeing their messages when I played WoW [World of Warcraft] or any other MMO,’ says Jacobs. He then adds that ‘I’ve been waiting for the day that launched so I could have the absolute pleasure of instituting policies to make their lives more difficult so we could drive them out of WAR.’

His solution is to unleash the ban-hammer equivalent of a JCB with a ‘zero tolerance policy.’ He claims that 400 gold sellers had been banned over last weekend , and that his ‘strike team’ of banners don’t let gold sellers stay in the game and wait for a single mass ban, but instead ‘ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away.’ He also says that the team have been coming up with a range of messages to explain the banning of gold sellers in the in-game chat system, such as ‘Tchar’zanek has ordered the slaughter of [Spammer] and all others of his kind who weaken the Raven Host by providing wealth and power to the unworthy.’

Should gold sellers be allowed to continue to trade in-game currency for real money and message MMO players, or should they be banned outright as Mark Jacobs says? Let us know your thoughts.

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