Warhammer Online Information by the Truckload
Last week Massively.com got the chance to head over to EA Mythic's Virginia lab to clock some hands-on time with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning . As a result they were pumping out loads of review content, everything from hardcore PvP info to dungeon crawling to crafting. The culmination of all this hard work was a summary post with clickable navigation to all of their review resources. Definitely worth a look if you are at all curious about this upcoming behemoth.
Sounds like you're asking about Eve Online.
Or at least, the Faction Warfare expansion being released on Tuesday. See: http://www.eveonline.com/empyreanage/
The jewel of Warhammer Online will be it's Realm Vs. Realm (RvR) combat. One of the main tenets of RvR combat, as Mythic implements it, is that all PvP actions contribute towards the war effort. Entire zones will change control as the result of events in RvR. Believe me, Mythic is very much trying to avoid the solo-MMO paradigm that was made popular by (parts of) WoW.
The only real mistakes that mythic made with daoc were the atlantis expansion and crafting.
I have high hopes for WAR.
Except of course for the whole "Developers cheating to help themselves and their friends" issue that plagues Eve.
Programming: Its not just a job - its an indenture.
You missed the other game by Mythic that was focused on PvP - Dark Age of Camelot. If Warhammer is as good at PvP as DAoC was, it will be great.
Aprils 17th was actually my last day with the site.
:)
I'm just another Slashdot user now.
My primary gig is over at Massively, but I'm also writing at places like Wired, Gamasutra, and 1up.
As for stability, unfortunately I can't really speak to that. They're still very much in a Beta phase. It was a lot less glitchy than I've seen some games at that stage, but it was (of course) a setup specifically designed to give me the best impression of the game possible.
Except that WoW has never handled PvP well. That's one of the major things that the fine folks behind WAR have looked at and made sure to get right.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I believe they are trying to address this problem by adding NPC 'helpers' to the weaker side in PVP/RVR battles where the population is unbalanced.
That won't help the "ghost town" phenomenon that can result from population distribution problems, but it should hopefully make RvR "fair".