11/2

I would say that last Sunday (11/2) was the most productive day for the MMORPG group this entire term. The Order team met from noon to 3:30 at our Thayer lab and completed several of our stated goals.

We started the day by meeting at the capital city where we advertised for our group’s services. We advertised both our bounty hunting services and our addiction counseling group, although we only received responses for addiction counseling. This actually surprised me, because I thought the addiction counseling was kind of stupid while bounty hunting seemed awesome. I remember when I played WoW that there were always people on the opposite faction that I wanted to find and kill, and there were usually people on my faction that really annoyed me and who I wouldn’t mind seeing killed.

I was involved with one addicted gamer who talked to us for about 10 minutes. We asked him what he’d be doing if he wasn’t playing WAR, and he told us he’d probably be “playing a diffrent (sic) game.” He went on to explain his philosophy of addiction, saying that, for him, “it’s either be addicted to this… or something more dangerious… like herion or a girlfriend (sic).”

After we had annoyed everyone in the capital city, we proceeded to go back to our appropriate leveling area and utterly demolish the destruction side in a skirmish. It felt very, very good beating them, because we were not over-leveled at all. Clearly they have not caught up with us, as our previous experience was the only difference with equal character compositions and levels.

After our skirmish tried to hold a peace protest on the beach. We actually managed to get a few people out who weren’t a part of our team, but some of the reactions we received over the regional chat were quite interesting. One particularly ornery player told us that we should go play “hello kitty” and was quite derogatory towards us. Another fellow Order player had actually heard of us before; apparently his guild lost a scenario because the WarJammers staged a peace protest inside of Nordenwatch. I think it’s really exciting to think that our name is getting out there (even if it’s just because we are so annoying).

So we had about 20 players of opposing factions on the beach, and the tension was growing. Several Destruction players would try to stir up trouble by attacking just once. Not enough to kill anyone, but certainly an unanswered challenge. We decided that we had had enough peace, and it was once again time to let blood flow onto the beach. However, we still wanted to rebel against set game mechanics, and one of the things that I have found missing from this game is the ability to duel someone, one on one. We rectified the problem by setting up a “fight club”, in which everyone stood in a circle and one person at a time challenged someone on the other faction. Although inter-faction communication is normally impossible, we had set up a Ventrilo server and were talking to our experiment mates who were in another lab. At first it was only fights between members of our experiment, but soon we had organized complete strangers to enter into our fight club, creating a game within Warhammer.

Finally we went into a scenario, however our Destruction counterparts didn’t make it into the same one as we did. Our peace protest wasn’t effective since we didn’t get it across to the Destruction team. Basically we ended up just losing very, very badly since none of us were even playing.

After most of the group left the lab(we had been playing for 3 and a half hours) Brendan and I stayed to keep leveling up. We joined a warband with a ton of random people, and I had the most fun in the game to date. It was an exhilarating feeling, running though the woods with 23 other people and trying to take down keeps. Keeps are big fortresses that can be controlled by either faction, and are guarded by both enemy players and high level NPCs. This was the most fun I’ve had playing the game so far, but unfortunately I’ve heard that this is basically the end game. I would say that this is Warhammer’s greatest downfall; I really feel no need to level up if the game is going to be the same 3 days of play from now as it is right now.

Lesson for MMORPG’s: Make the end game have something cool and flashy that everyone can aspire to - something you can't do in normal gameplay!