Dartmouth as a magic circle

So apparently a few people in our group have gotten the idea that Dartmouth in and of itself is a magic circle, which is why we couldn't get involved with the game.  I think that's all bs - there are plenty of people on campus that are actively involved with MMORPG's.  I was one of those people for a while at the end of last year.  The problem (no one in our group has become addicted to WAR) is not with our environment, its with the game.  There are so many problems with this game its amazing that its still running with any servers open!

PROBLEM #1

Imbalance.  Just head to the Warhammer forums and you can see which characters are overpowered.  Bright Wizards and sorcerers generate enormous amounts of damage, Witch Elves can stealth and kill enemies in mere seconds, and heals over time are more powerful than the other players damaging them.  Currently there are 3 times as many Bright Wizards as White Lions (www.waralytics.com/warclasses/index) because of the White Lions poor design and multiple bugs.  Now, there is a patch coming to (hopefully) fix these glitches, but this patch will not affect our play, this term.

PROBLEM #2

Lack of an end game.  I mentioned this in my previous post. There is no end game!  Warhammer is just an endless grind, until you get too bored with the game to play anymore.  In successful MMO's there are clear, defined objectives at the end of the game that are difficult to attain and can provide goals for players.  In Warhammer, all you have to look forward to at rank 40 is more pvp and more keep assaults (renamed fortress assaults, and requires more people).  This is exactly the same thing you did for 200 hours getting to 40!

PROBLEM #3

Servers!  Even when you do get to 40, and you do the proposed end game (gather hundreds of your friends and attempt to take a keep or a city), the servers crash!  Obviously this will be fixed eventually, but future fixes do not help us, people who were trying to play right now and enjoy ourselves.

PROBLEM #4

Poor storyline.  Now, clearly  Warhammer has a well written plot, since it was successful as a fantasy based table top game.  Many books have been written based on Warhammer lore.  I've read most of the original story that was involved with the table top game and it seems very compelling and deep.  For some inexplicable reason Mythic decided to cut out 95% of the story, and instead just give bare outlines of what is happening.  I cannot even begin to describe how much this takes away from the game for me.  When I play Warhammer I feel no emotional connection to anything related to the game.  I don't feel like I'm playing out an epic story worthy of legend and fame, I feel like I'm playing an arcade game - RvR, put in a quarter, repeat.

I'm sure there are some other problems that I haven't gotten around to in terms of game play, maybe Brendan would be able to outline them.

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!

#$&%!

well, i am in thayer right now and i can't figure out how to log on... i get an error message saying that interactive logons are not allowed from my account.

this is the first time in a week and a half that i've actually had time to play, and i can't log on.  i am incredibly annoyed.

i think i might go over to sudikoff, or just play tomorrow night. 

However I have made one interesting discovery.  I feel like I want to play SO MUCH MORE because I'm not able to.  Earlier this week I haven't really had the time to play, but I also haven't really wanted to play either.  Today I didn't have anything else to do, so I meandered over to Thayer.  Now I'm here, not able to play, and really really pissed off.  I guess this would be an early level of addiction?  I'm certainly not fully addicted, because I haven't felt very many urges to play at all.  

Something to think about.

Its 4:15 in the morning.

and I'm in Sudikoff. I think I started playing at 10? I made it to level 8, and I'm only a quarter of a bar away from leveling again. I'm having a really hard time thinking about things; I can't tell if it's because of the time or if it's because I've been staring at a screen for the last 6 hours.

Well, I'm not going to write anything groundbreaking in this state, so I think I'm going to bed. I really should just get to level 9 though...