The RvR is quite good.  Not perfect, but good.  Keep assaults are a lot of fun, and even undefended it can be satisfying taking them back and getting your XP and Renown.  Scenarios can be fun also, though some of them are so awful that I refuse to do them in favour of others.  As much as I enjoy RvR, I don’t want to do RvR every time I log in, or for five or six hours straight.  This brings us to PvE.

I’ve never been a huge fan of questing, anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that.  I don’t hate quests, and some I like, such as the Heritage Quests in EQ2.  I don’t really mind the “kill 10 X” or the “deliver this message” quests, when they’re done for a point.  The Fed-Ex quests are a good way to send you to new zones or introduce you to a new NPC.

I can’t quite figure out what it is about Warhammer’s quests, but I struggle to bring myself to do them.  I just find them so dissatisfying.  The XP isn’t that great and the rewards, if you get any, aren’t of any use to you.  The quest directives are often vague, but not in a good way, and many of them send you to a PQ, so completing the quest solo is difficult if not impossible. 

In fact, I don’t like much of WAR’s PvE at all.  The PQ’s are a good way to grind XP and get good loot, so those I don’t mind.  A grind never really bothered me when there’s a prize at the end of it.  And with PQ’s you get a chance at a chest as well as the Influence rewards you get for it.  Problem with PQ’s though is that you need to be in a guild and/or organise a small warband to be able to complete all stages.

I decided to check out Mt Gunbad, a Tier 3 dungeon, to see what that was like.  I’m a bit of a dungeon crawl fan; it’s how I like my PvE.  EQ2 had a lot of great dungeons and so did Vanguard.  I’d been to Saccelum in the Inevitable City and wasn’t at all impressed.  So I headed to Gunbad in a group of four of us; a Black Orc as the tank, my lovely Witch Elf Kyrana, a DPS specced Disciple and me as the healer.  And I wasn’t impressed with that dungeon either.  This surprises me because Dark Age of Camelot had some great dungeons.  There’s a Tier 4 dungeon that I need to check out, Bastion Stair or something, when I hit T4.  I’m eager to get to T4, I’m getting a little tired of T3 now, and I want to see what this game really has to offer.

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“So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009”

It is regrettable.  I picked up my copy of TR the day of its release and was captivated by the game.  The world looked good, the graphics looked good, the characters looked good.  Combat was fun, the guild I joined was great, and doing instances together was a lot of fun.  Unfortunately, it all got a bit dull very fast.  After six weeks I had stopped playing.  I went back to it a few months later and tried it for another month.  Again, it was fun for about three weeks, at which point I once again cancelled my subscription.  I was always hoping to go back to it and give it another try, so the news of its closure is a little sad.  My Exo-biologist will cease to exist.  Never again will I be able to load up the game, select my avatar, and play.  A sad day.

A few people question the reason for the games failure.  Is it the blend of “shooter” combat and MMO’s that fail to work?  Is it a lack of interest in the Sci-Fi setting?  Maybe it is these things.  I know what I didn’t like about it, and it’s the shift from the classic tank/healer/dps dynamic.

While the game did contain tank, healer, and dps type classes, there was no need to have any particular type in your group.  While many might argue that this is a good thing, no more need to wait around for that elusive tank or healer; it was that lack of dependence on other players that turned an MMO into a single player game.  That and PuGs.  Why pay $15 a month to do what you can do in Halo for free.  Certainly the game lacked in content and replayability, and many things that were slated to be in the game never got there.  And I experienced the worst PuGs of any game, so even if you could get a group together, which you couldn’t, you didn’t want to.

It’s hard to believe the game will be no more.  It really wasn’t a bad game; it just lacked a reason to keep playing.  Openedge mentions Stargate Worlds, another Sci –Fi MMO due for release, and is of the opinion that it will be a failure.  I can’t help but agree, and I think I’ll wait a while before trying it.  I’m getting a little weary of trying games straight from release.  Tabula Rasa, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online.

So what of NCSoft?  Their next flagship title, Aion – The Tower of Eternity, is currently in Beta and should see a North American release around the middle of 2009.  Apart from that, there is not a single MMO on the horizon that has me excited.  Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place.

I agree with both camps.  I think Scenarios are great for Tier 1, where players new to the game can experience some RvR and level both their Adventure level and Renown Rank quickly into the next Tier.  Does it take players away from ORvR?  Certainly.  For the most part I prefer ORvR but you cannot deny that Scenarios are a much quicker and easier way of earning XP and Renown.  While laying siege to a Keep in the RvR lake is fun, you can spend hours attempting to take a keep without success.  And while you can take a poorly or undefended keep quite quickly, and capture objectives quickly, earning you nice Renown and XP; what if you already hold all the keeps and objectives?  Unless the opposition wants to form a party to take them back, running around the RvR lake in a warband is a waste of time and will earn you nothing.

Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) didn’t have Scenarios.  It had Battlegrounds that had a five level range starting at level 20, as well as the Open RvR areas (later they introduced lower level Battlegrounds).  The level 20-24 battleground had only one keep and a couple of towers to capture, and this particular battleground was always busy (peak times), with the keep almost always under siege and towers swapping hands over and over again.  The reason for this is that if you had a level 50 character (level cap) you could /level an alt straight to 20, making that particular battleground a highly populated place with alts being tested and new mains created.  But the other Battlegrounds weren’t that busy, and it wasn’t until you got into the ORvR areas that you would see large scale battles.  So what’s this have to do with Warhammer?

Taking Scenarios away won’t necessarily improve the lower Tier ORvR.  It might make a difference in the Tier 4 area but I don’t think it would greatly change the ORvR in the other tiers.  The removal of Scenarios, in my opinion, would improve the PvE aspects in those tiers however.  But once you have captured all the keeps and objectives, what is there to do?  And if one side has the numbers, the other side tends to shift to another zone in the hope of taking a few objectives unmolested, and it becomes a case of waiting for your allies to feed you information as to the movement of the enemy, then the warbands takes flight in pursuit.

Mythic needs to add more value to the Tier 2 and 3 lakes, either with additional keeps or Battlefield Objectives that actually matter.  Perhaps the Tiers can be similar to capturing the city, in that you must take the Objectives first, then control a couple of towers, before being able to move onto the Keep itself.  While there has been adequate ORvR action in Tier 3, I’m looking forward to hitting Tier 4 and getting a feel for how it all works there.

“Join us as we undertake an ambitious Roleplaying Event that will lay the groundwork for many more to come”

Why I’m surprised is because I didn’t consider Tabula Rasa to be a roleplaying game, not from the developers’ perspective in any case.  It doesn’t have a roleplaying server for starters, not officially anyway.  It does have an abundance of great emotes though.

The other thing doesn’t surprise me, and that’s the letter from Richard Garriott in which he informs us that he’s leaving NCsoft to pursue other interests.  He hasn’t been around much since the release and flop of the game and there was talk about whether he was even still with NCsoft and contributing in any way to the game.  Here’s the letter in full.

Fellow Soldiers of the AFS,

I am happy to finally be able to write the players and community of Tabula Rasa. We’ve been on quite a journey together. First in creating a game unlike any other on the MMO market, then growing a loyal community and finally launching the game and its players into space with Operation Immortality. It has been quite an unforgettable journey, one that I will treasure for the rest of my life.

I am very grateful to you loyal players for sticking around through what I think we can all honestly say was a rough launch. I thank the development team for pushing hard to get polish, updates and new content out every month since launch…a feat that I think is unusual in MMO development. They have a lot to be proud of.

Many of you probably wonder what my plans are, now that I have achieved the lifelong dream of going to space. Well, that unforgettable experience has sparked some new interests that I would like to devote my time and resources to. As such, I am leaving NCsoft to pursue those interests.
This news is difficult for me to deliver. I am honored to have worked with the team I’ve had and I’m grateful to the community who makes this game so unique and fun.

Thank you and farewell.

Richard “General British” Garriott

There’s still some RvR going on, but some days it’s hard to find.  And it seems whenever I log in, Destruction (my side) has control of the whole Tier.  Occasionally I’ll get a chance to join/form a warband and we’ll go and take a keep, but it’s often undefended.  This isn’t a doom and gloom post, some days there’s lots of RvR going on, but there’s days when there isn’t, and if you don’t like questing all that much then you have to find something else to entertain yourself with, which is why I’m not levelling.

And I rolled my first Order alt on one of the other roleplay servers, Ostermark.  I only had about an hour to play so I decided it was a good opportunity to try Order, so I made an Archmage.  There’s not much I can really say about the Archmage because I only got him to Level 4, other than to say he’s a healer/caster.  I did a few scenarios and he’s a lot squishier than my Disciple of Khaine, that’s for sure.  I’d have Witch Elves running up and 2 shotting me.  Perhaps the Archmage will get better with some more levels under his belt.

On a side note, the WoWbois from work have been playing Wrath of the Lich King.  There’s been waits of up to two and a half hours to get onto the servers, and there were 1,800 people in the queue on that occasion. 

There were a few things fundamentally wrong with DAoC.  Firstly, buffbots.  DAoC had three specs for its healer classes, you could go DPS, Healing, or Buffs.  All healing classes could heal, but the spec determined how good, or bad, a healer you were, and how well you did at the other things.  What happened though was that people would create a second account, purely to make a buff specced healer.  Buffs had no range restrictions, so you could camp your buffbot in the safety of the keep and send out your buffed and incredibly overpowered assassin to reek havoc.  Warhammer has gotten rid of this issue by making all buffs an AoE type of thing.  Kudos to Mythic, though I do believe the area needs to be widened somewhat.

The other issue with DAoC was raid gear.  With the introduction of Trials of Atlantis expansion we saw the appearance of “raid” gear.  Awesome, you might say.  But the problem with gear is that someone who has been playing DAoC for 3 years, is level 50,  and is fully geared out in ToA stuff can slaughter a level 50 player who is new to the game and only just hit 50.  And in an open realm-vs-realm (RvR) environment, that can be a hard pill to swallow.  Mythic has overcome this by not having “raid” gear, per-se.

Next on my list is Realm Rank.  It gave you points to spec your character, making you a much tougher PvP’er/PvE’er.  Instead of Realm Rank (RR) we have Renown Rank (RR).  See a similarity?  For someone who hits level cap of 40 and then works his way up to RR of 60+, vs someone who doesn’t RvR much, is a level rank of 40 but a RR of only 23; how will he fare in Tier 4 RvR?  He will fare poorly, and he will get sick of getting his ass handed to him and roll an alt.  And he will do this again and again until he decides that the game sucks and leaves.

DAoC had a different RvR system to WAR.  It didn’t have tiers like war does.  It had “battlegrounds” which comprised four levels.  20-24, 25-29, 30-34 etc.  The intention was for the RvR to be in the Open RvR area of level 45+.  This is where all the keeps were, where all the benefits were to be had.  When I started playing DAoC, three years after release, and got into the ORvR zone, I got slaughtered.  Literally slaughtered.  I clearly remember being duo’d with a Druid, a level 50 Healer, on my Champion, a level 50 Tank, and we got taken out by one Scout (think “ranger” or “archer”) in melee.

So while Mythic has addressed the issues of buffbots and to a lesser extent Raid gear, they still have a “rank” system that boosts PvP skills.  While that’s all good and fine for the first few months of a game, what about new subscriptions in a year from now?  Will they hanker to the “Old School” that make up the player base and shaft new players, or will they shaft the long time subs and create/modify a system?

The answer is obvious to me.  They should have Raid gear that is beneficial to raids only.  And they should have a PvP ranking system that benefits PvE only.  So you will want to PvP/RvR to boost your PvE skills.  But being a hardcore PvP’er won’t make you invincible.

 Anyway, today I had a chance to visit some of my favourite blogs, and one struck a cord.  Classy Gamer said farewell to his guild in Age of Conan, after perservering with a game that pleads perserverance, and claimed to shed a tear.  I’m currently on my second guild that I’ve started from the ground up, my first being in Everquest 2, and my current passion being Warhammer.  And leaving my EQ2 guild was a difficult decision, and one that took me months to finally decide on.  I was literally bored to death with the game and just couldn’t bring myself to login, only to grind crafting or levels, no matter how much I liked my guild-mates.

Which brings me to the point of this thread, the online friend.  My wife doesn’t play MMO’s, or computer/console games period.  It’s just not her thing.  She’ll often come into the “computer room” and tell me to get off a game because we have to be somewhere, and I’ll respond by asking for more time.  I’m in a group, they need a healer, I can’t just leave or the group will be stuffed, etc.  And she, in her ignorance, will say that it is just a game.  And while it’s true that it’s just a game we play, we play this game with real people.  Just like football, poker, or twister; there are other people to consider.  And for someone who might play a MMO for 20 or 30, or even more, hours a week, these people are a big part of their lives.

I’ve grown very attached to my online friends.  I spend a lot of time with them, indirectly of course, and we work together for a common goal.  Whether it’s to take down a Boss or to assault a keep, we learn to work with each other.  I value my online friends/guildmates.  They are the reason I play this genre of game.  I pay my $15 a month to get together with real people and achieve something together; be it a Raid, some RvR, or a bit of story-telling.

 So *hugs* to the online world.  Thanks for letting me play.