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Mythic GM Talks Warhammer Launch, Banning Gold Sellers
Gamasutra has an interview with Mark Jacobs, GM and co-founder of Mythic, about the recent launch of Warhammer Online. He talks about handling the heavy demands on the servers, and how the launch is going better than the opening of Dark Age of Camelot (during which "somebody parked a truck on our internet"). Jacobs also blogged about the glee with which he and his team have been banning gold spammers: "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 have a strike team whose sole job it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message. Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when a gold seller/spammer is banned. I've given them a wide leash to come up with creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep it within the Warhammer universe."
I picked it up, along with a bunch of friends, and we're all LOVING it. :)
They really hit this one out of the park IMHO, I've no doubt that they will do really well with this game.
I can't see myself ever going back to WoW.
Things I liked:
The biggest reason for me quitting WoW was the time commitment in the end game raids. Warhammer doesn't seem to require the same solid block of time that WoW did, which for me, as someone with a family, is huge.
I like it, I played wow for a few years but got tired of the arena-or-raid focus (I like BGs, but it is pointless after a while because of people afking to get honor to buy gear to do arena) and decided to give war a try and I am glad I did.
It does seem very casual friendly for now at least, you can queue up for bgs from anywhere (yay) and it will port you back wherever you were afterwards (not at the battlemaster, yay). PQs are nice, and in general it seems to be the type of game that does not have intentional timesinks thrown in for no good reason (like wow, all the reputations etc.). Gear seems also much much much less the focus than wow, which works well. I also like how quests give you 'hints' on the map about where to go, and the whole tome of knowledge is nice.
If they can manage to keep a critical mass of subscribers for a few months they definitely have a good chance, the real test will be when wotlk or 3.0.2 come out, will people stick with WAR or not? I am sure blizz is going to release 3.0.2 ASAP just to get people back to play with all the new talents.
In terms of annoyances I can list not being able to activate AA (some jaggies, even at 1920), having to sit through the cinematic logos every time, having to accept the TOC every time, having to give UAC permission every time, but that's about it.
I am also pleasantly surprised by how 'well sorted' the UI feels, considering how I had 100+ add-ons in WOW and haven't felt the need of most of them in WAR (save for Grid and for being able to customize the chat window a bit more)
-- the cake is a lie
I played EQ, WoW, and beta tested SWG.
I have to say, I am most pleased with this game.
I fucking HATE gear grinds for end game content. I am notorious for soloing and not joining guilds because games shouldn't be scheduled work. I quit EQ early on because of it, I never saw endgame in WoW because of it, and well SWG just sucked. That having been said, I really enjoy the public quests, Scenario, and open RvR elements of WAR.
I always shied away from PvP because it was always seemed a gear and lvl based system trying to placate people who wanted large scale combat. I have to say that so far in WAR even a casual player can enjoy RvR.
The scenarios level balance when you enter them. Now, you don't get new abilities that you don't have - but you can at least compete. The higher levels of a tier do seem to have an easier time of it, but crappy tactics can't be made up for with l33t g34r.
The public quests sometimes suck when there aren't enough people to overcome the second and third stages, but they reset after a short time (read minutes) and you can play the low events over and over again for the point rewards.
The open RvR areas are really boss. Just running out to an area and fighting others is an awesome visceral experience. There is no corpse runs, so getting back into the game is simple. There is a brief "death debuff", but that is easily dealt with by paying a healer to remove when you respawn. BTW, you respawn right next to a healer.
Just so you kno, a lot of those "WoW conventions" were pretty much invented by other games. World of Warcraft is simply the latest (and most successful to date) in a line of MMO titles that have evolved from common ancestry. Everquest used to be the game of choice. In Asian markets, Lineage had WoW-like numbers far before Blizzard had an MMO offering. And the first large-scale commercial MMO of significance here in the US was Ultima Online. And of course, all these games borrowed liberally from online text-only MUDs.
In a somewhat humorous twist, Blizzard is somewhat notorious for.. shall we say.. liberally borrowing concepts from the Warhammer universe. Not slamming Blizzard, they make awesome stuff, but please be aware the genre did not start with WoW.
Penny Arcade summed it up best, of course: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10/
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I don't understand your logic. Using the in game transfer system to transfer gold you bought online is cheating. However, buying a strategy guide or a subscription to a website with tons of data is perfectly alright? The data you pay for in the strategy guide or map site is all composed by someone in the real world. Gold is composed by someone in the real world. Sharing it with someone for a fee or not is the same in both situations.
I don't like gold farmers as much as the next guy (it makes it hard to get honest things on the auction houses unless you farm yourself or pay for gold since it drives prices through the roof) but the only ways I know of to get rid of them is to not have auction houses and trading -or- make the game easier so people don't feel like they need to buy money to catch up. While I personally wouldn't care about losing auctions/trading, I know a lot of people that would bitch and moan about that loss of mechanic. I preferred the old barter days of the commons tunnel in EQ personally. Auction houses are a horrible way to promote farmers since they have a one point source of trading supported by the game.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I was playing last night and got one of those messages. I wish I'd written it down now, but it was something along the lines of "Emperor Frobozz has banished Ruetard for activies against the empire". I was playing my empire ("good" human) priest at the time.
I figured it *probably* meant they had just booted a gold-farmer, but it was kinda hard to be sure from the message.
Its kind of cool to see that, but they did it rather annoyingly. They didn't put the message in the chat window, and didn't have it come up as big text on your play window either. They put it in a pop-up window that you had to dismiss by clicking on the "OK" button. If I'd been in the middle of a furball at the time that could have been deadly. I still *had* to stop what I was doing to read the darn thing and click it away.