WAR (Warhammer Online)

Hello all, I am going to try and explain my feelings about WAR. I've been playing for a month, and I'm resubscribing for the next one, but the main reason is because I don't really have another game so I'll keep on playing this casually, if only for the ORvR action.

I play in Europe on a relatively good populated server and I'm in a good guild. I have no problems at all finding Orvr, which is the sole reason I'm resubscribing, because it can be fun when there are battles going on.

However, some flaws in the game design really disturb me and I'm sure alot of people get this feeling too. I'm gona refrain from using the usual annoying stuff (combat synchronisation, crafting, class balance etc..) cause IMO that's just what they are: annoyances. I think the main problems of the game lie elsewhere, and I'll try to portray my feelings towards the game thanks to these few points:

1-Everything is given to the player from rank1. Some people like this, but there's no sense of achievement because everything in game is already available to you. Every player is the same, you just grind renown and get gear for free, there's no attunements needed, nothing to work for and achieve to feel special etc. There's no urge to level, nothing pushes you to get to a certain point, it's stale imo.

2-Game is extremely repetitive, going from chapter to chapter, pq to pq, rvr zone to another for 40ranks and you don't feel your in a world at all. (and I barely do scenarios, funnily enough). I know most MMOs are the same, However:

3-The community in WAR is non existent so you actually "feel" and notice the repetitiveness, whereas in some other games not so much. There's no community. You don't need any player to do anything, you just group with them without uttering a single word as if playing a single player game with NPCs.

4-Capital city Altdorf is dead. I'm actually depressed everytime I need to get to it (which is very rare actually) which brings me to another point.

5-There needs to be some sort of center/hub whatever in Altdorf where people usually hang out. The way even auction houses are scattered across the city for example is maddening! why not have only 1/2 auctioneers no need for more and that way we can see more people, which again leads to:

6-Regardless of what people say, the zones are HUGE and there are many ways to level. Reading this sentence alone people might think this is a positive thing, but in practice it's not as it helps in having an empty world, a scattered population and no community feel.

I don't know if all these problems can be solved as some seem to be at the core of the game.

Thanks for reading, try to be as constructive as you can.
 

Well reading your post and your unbalanced poll I would say you are a player that enjoy's WAR but annoyed at the population.

Not once did you mention the fact people queing for senario's,or that player items were a problem.

You are right in the chat being quiet but that only comes from the game being tiresome.

The reason alot of players have quit is they dont want to just log on just to join the same scenario they did the week before and the week before that,Also on top of that why bother?I mean you can maybe get a set item if you manage to beat the other guys in the keep take,kinda hard if your a healer and no-one to heal as it ends up a small pve run.

The problem with WAR is they wanted to get the DAOC guys aswell as the WoW guys and I think they manged niether!

Originally posted by daylight01

Well reading your post and your unbalanced poll I would say you are a player that enjoy's WAR but annoyed at the population.

Not once did you mention the fact people queing for senario's,or that player items were a problem.

You are right in the chat being quiet but that only comes from the game being tiresome.

The reason alot of players have quit is they dont want to just log on just to join the same scenario they did the week before and the week before that,Also on top of that why bother?I mean you can maybe get a set item if you manage to beat the other guys in the keep take,kinda hard if your a healer and no-one to heal as it ends up a small pve run.

The problem with WAR is they wanted to get the DAOC guys aswell as the WoW guys and I think they manged niether!

Well yea I didn't mention scenarios for 3 reasons:

1- I personally didn't have a shortage of players to quest/rvr with.

2- This is PROBABLY going to be more or less solved with the upcoming major patch 1.1.

3- I think it's been said many times before already and people are fed up with it. :p

But I agree that scenarios have to be obliterated as well! :)

Aldorf is not dead, switch your server. ORvR is now thriving in my server selection. Every hour there is some ORvR and I can easily do it.

I agree on some points though and this is a good post (unlike trolls)

I do disagree that giving everything at lvl 1 is a good thing because I don't want to have an attunement like in WoW where it takes such a long time to get a single item.

Hmm I somewhat agree with most points. However IMO almost all of them are heavily exacerbated by low server populations from day 1. Med/med servers are way too low pop and even high/high could hold at least twice the population they do for the game to really shine.

One of the major design flaws is that Mythic probably got too concerned about too many players congesting in certain areas so they quite simply went too far with counter measures. Too many servers at release, scenarios, too many zones which are further subdivided into chapters...

Hmm and I don't think point 2 is really spot on.. If you do just "follow the yellow brick road" it will get repetitive. However there is quite a lot of content away from the road. For example, there are dungeons - Gunbad from 20+ is great for taking a break occasionally and you can gain a few levels there.

And I personally strongly disagree with point 1. In fact this is a major part of the game's appeal for me. I will NEVER again play a mmo that requires me to "work" to max level so I can start doing what I bought the game for. That's completely ridiculous - it's like you bought an online FPS but you can't get online until you complete an extremely lengthy single player campaign.

It is OK that you have to put some effort into getting REWARDS. But "working" to unlock major gameplay modes is utterly pointless.

What planet are you from ?

@Magter: I agree that Orvr is easily found and I said that its the main reason why I'm subscribing for another month. However about Altdorf being dead, it is on my server (Med/Med) and the points in this thread are made while I was playing the game, on my server (good population) and my char! 

@markoraos: thx for this detailed answer. Indeed I should have stated the population number limit on each server, and that's key to all the other problems IMO. But the performance would probably shoot down, though who am I to know!

Concerning the repetitiveness: Yes I know there are multiple PQs, multiple keeps, multiple scenarios and quests. However IMO the PQs are mostly the same, same with the keeps so you feel like doing the same thing in different skins. Until now though I'm ok with it as I'm having fun.

Yea I can understand your point of having what you paid for and not having to work for it etc., however it's a matter of opinion and I personally like a bit of effort (not grinding mind you) if only for the feeling of accomplishment. Though it's a matter of opinion and I respect yours.

@Cryptor: You don't deserve this response, but I'm going to give it to you anyway:

Whilst you may think that this response makes you funny/clever, it does the opposite.

I think you misunderstood/missed the "try to be as constructive as you can" part, so next time please stay on topic and reply in a constructive way.

On a second thought this reply might be as constructive as you can get, so I apologize, and feel sorry for you if that's the case.
 

@server congestion. You can argue that Mythic misjudged the pops and should have added more but as it stands servers around the world are crashing whenever they push towards the fortress. Averheim crashed yesterday, Eltharion has the same problem, there's regular threads on servers crashing during the fortress raids on the VN forums, EU-Karak-Hirn and Karak Eight peaks have the same happening according to this thread(Dutch though).

The servers simply don't seem to be able to handle it, so rather than a miscalculation it was perhaps more a conscious decision to keep them low after realizing the limitation of the system. They already decided to instance the city siege for this reason, I guess it didn't dawn on them that the same congestion would happen around the fortresses instead.