Players the source of Warhammer's problems?

You can't say that WAR doesn't hand-hold players. If they step off of the scenario treadmill for even a couple of minutes, the quests they get assigned just "coincidentally" take them through or along the edges of every Public Quest, and into the lobby of almost every instanced dungeon. If you play any PVE at all, even the tiniest amount, you know that the stuff is there.

And if you play when there are other people around, you can actually do some of it.

Gods' pity on people who just grind scenarios until they get to tier 4, though, because open RvR is a learning experience. The open battlegrounds pick up a new mechanic, and change at least one old mechanic, with every tier. The best PvPers are the ones who PvPed, both scenarios AND open RvR, from no later than level 5. For the others, the learning curve is too steep, they don't know what they're doing, they assume that they get beat because the other side has them outnumbered or because the other side has overpowered character classes, and they quit. And whine on every forum in the English-speaking world.

The only other thing I can think of that they could do by way of hand-holding would be by level-capping you until you've done certain checklist items. Let's say you ding level 11, the last level for tier 1 open RvR. They could, I guess, popup a message that warns you: "Once you get to within one XP of level 12, you will not gain any further XP until you've done all three stages of at least one public quest, and captured at least one battlefield objective." Then at level 21: "Once you get to within one XP of level 22, you will not gain any further XP until you've captured one tier 2 battlefield objective, captured one tier 2 keep, and defeated at least one wing boss in your side's level 11-20 dungeon." And so on.

Otherwise, people will pick something slow, boring, but PREDICTABLE, that doesn't require them to risk anything, that they know will give a result (however tiny) every time with as little down time as possible, and most importantly, that won't require them to learn anything new themselves, least of all anything about playing effectively in teams.

But they won't, for reasons intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.

Fanboy says; Gods' pity on people who just grind scenarios until they get to tier 4, though, because open RvR is a learning experience

How players decide to play is there business. Sure if you are a lore person and want to "experience" the content then fine do it. A level cap is in place for a reason? The obvious goal is endgame and of course getting the best gear you can get. The problem is that EndGame is lacking according to players. Listen to your clients or lose them.

That article certainly expresses some of the same sentiments as me, but with completely different reasoning.

"Who would have guessed that the biggest problem facing WAR would not be content, bugs, or stability, but rather player motivation? Clearly not Mythic, but now lets just hope they move quickly to provide that motivation, and get players into the great content they already created."

Now the blogger goes on to talk about leading players to dungeons etc., but to my mind the motivation failure is that WAR has forsaken both itemization and customization entirely.

I know people poke fun at the visual & stat excess of MMOs like WoW, but when you play those kind of games the rewards are new, shiny and varied - that is what keeps players motivated and jumping through hoops.

There's nothing you can acquire sub-R40 in WAR that doesn't look like everything else, function like everything else and won't be invalidated minutes / hours later - this is a huge de-motivator when it comes to doing anything but grinding through the path of least resistance to R40.

Why should anyone - but the most dedicated of completists - feel that it is worth the time and effort of co-ordinating a 'tank & spank' party to conquer a R11 lair when the reward is just a hat for 1 participant, which will be replaced by a visually identical mathematically superior hat within 2 levels ?

In this regard, I think WAR has made the exact same mistake that AoC did at launch ; just presenting the players with a simple winning-is-its-own-reward game and expecting they'll pay £96 a year for the privilege of playing it.

Winning-is-its-own-reward works for FPSers, console & offline games because action is fast, furious, flashy and with zero downtime ; it just doesn't work for slow cooldown-watching keyboard controlled games where minutes of W-holding scenery scrolling are required to even reach your target.

Beating a giant monster with a 50 hit joypad-busting epilepsy-inspiring firework display as a sword & gun shirtless floppy-haired demon hunter = WIN.

Beating a giant monster with keys 1 to 3 on "performance" graphical settings as rank & file trooper #4, following 5 minutes of steering autorun = FAIL.

The evolution of "push button > get cookie" MMO gameplay is NOT going to come from eliminating all the cookies, and I hope developers start to grasp that before we get another game going the way of Tabula Rasa & Conan.

I think the problem is that MMO developers won't completely change the paradigm. Yes, the problem is the mentality of the MMO player, but that's not going to change. The designers need to adapt to this. I hope the death of the level based system is near, and not replaced with a grindy skill-based system. The second you finish the tutorial/introduction, the end game should start. How does one accomplish this successfully, but still reward players for their time? I don't know, but there aught to be a way, and I a truly groundbreaking MMO will have to find that way.

This just piss me off.... its the game designers job to not allow the game to be played in other ways the designer wants it. Or else its a bad design.

And it may not be fair to compare a game that has been live for 4 years to a game that has been out for less than 6 months. But that is what happened when the less than 6 months old game ask the same monthly feeds them the 4 years old on! Only the price tag on the box is more high WoW still goes for $19,95 :D

So players want the same or more account of content for there money and WAR does not deliver.

Also WAR VS WoW Wotlk make WoW win by a long shot Wotlk is out for less them a month and is running more stable them WAR and the first view content patches are already incoming!

Problems with levelling games:
1. you put effort for rewards that will be meaningless in short time (i.e. run a dungeon for days waiting for a particular drop. Then you level and an easy quest gives you a better item as reward)
2. for many levels, you miss many abilities that should define your class (i.e. a hunter in wow get his pet at level 10. Those first 9 levels are an awful experience in my opinion)
3. you can't travel anywhere, must stay in the zone appropriate for you level: do you want to explore? BAAM! a high level mob one shot you.
4. usually at low levels you travel slowly, you get mounts or other ways to move faster at higher levels

They already hand-hold the players in WAR more than in WoW.

Mythic went wrong by making PvE content, at all. Everything should of been RvR related, with all zones full RvR, screw the carebears, screw the boring quests, make it all RvR and fun.

Beyond that, bugs, unfinished things, imbalances, bugs, no fluff, and bugs just ruined the fun.

This is an easy one. Warhammer fizzles out for a lot of people once they hit Tier 3. Once they hit that level the game becomes a massive PVE grind, gear issues arise that force you to PVE, PVE is more efficient solo than to group, you've got no incentive to help others on quests you've already completed, RVR is still unrewarding and there are too many RVR lakes, zone control is impossible when the other side quits fighting, and then you've got to farm a massive amount of PVE to get greater Ward gear to survive once you put the capital city in a contested state. One of the biggest things I hear is that the game cuts you off from your friends if you outlevel them. I mean come on, this isn't 2001. Games have apprentice, mentor, etc system in place to lower level people can always group with higher level people but somehow Mythic missed the memo on this one.

Scenarios aren't bad, but they should have been clustered like WoW did with the battlegroups so you have a large population to pull from. But other than some renown and exp, scenarios and PQ's should never be a factor fro zone control.

To me if you capture the keeps and BFO's and the other side can't get them back within an hour, then the zone should be captured so you can move on to the next one.

Fail after fail after fail. Mythic needs to stop the baby steps, and take a meat cleaver to the PVE, roadblocks to people gaming together, the gear imbalances, and the zone control.

Instead they are responding on about the same level that Funcom did in AOC, and the result is that their servers are becoming ghost towns just like AOC's did.

Great comments.

I have to agree with the concept of a big level being a problem. Of course the whole point of a level is to raise it, so then players are going to find the fastest way to raise them and right now, scenarios are that way. Well, quests are faster, but you get renown and levels in scenarios - so that is where everyone goes.

Micro-levels are cool (influence areas, faction rewards, skills, etc...) but a big level painted on you avatar - well, who doesn't want to raise that to the max?

And to the comments regarding PQs in not having good loot - uh, you should serious play more PQs. I have had some gold and purple bag drops in ch12-16 PQs that had awesome gear in them. The truth is, no one runs them to the end often enough to find out. But it is just like taking a keep - you have to run them a few times before you get the bigger reward.

There is a LOT of good gear in the PvE and PQs out there that people never see because they are leveling past in scenarios without ever going out and doing anything else.

I really think WAR would be a lot better without scenarios. Not that I don't like them, i think they are fun, but then Guild Wars makes scenarios so much better (without a monthly fee) that I have to say I would rather see a world filled with people doing PvE/PQ/oRVR over an almost completely scenario based world anyday.

This article is saying what I said about a month ago. The player base is cultured to just churning out whatever they have to to get higher and that leaves the rest of the world completely barren. I did all of 2 PQs all throughout tier 3 and I only half did one in tier 4 (in which the other 2 people left after we wiped). It just became a vicious cycle of following the path in one territory, reading the mostly poorly written quest dialogue, grinding influence in PQ's alone, then jumping to another race' territory to do the same chapter in that section.

Another problem was that I'm somewhat of a completionist and SO many of the tome unlocks revolved around killing rediculous amounts of mobs. Seriously who the hell wants to grind out killing 1000 of the same freakin' thing, let alone 10 or 100 thousand.

All in all the game had some really neat elements, I love the idea of open groups and PQs for example. Unfortunately most of their ideas were either extremely poorly implemented or there was something else in the game that prevented people from doing it, the main culprit being scenarios. Scenarios should've been in the game just for fun with very minor rewards, NOT as a valid means of leveling your character. That just made the already bland leveling experience even moreso by eliminating the majority of players from it.

I think it also doesn't help that I didn't find keep taking to be any more fun than what Alterac Valley in WoW has turned into, just a bunch of dudes trying to out-zerg each other. I might have stuck around through the grind had every experience I ever had with sieges not turned out to be either standing around doing nothing or completely overwhelming the opposing faction's poor, helpless NPC's.

The article here is a red herring and avoids the real issue which is: Players leaving is Mythic's problem.

I kind of agree with Hardcore/Casual, but then do we really want another WoW?

I like WoW and still play but don't need two of the same games! WoW can be fun, but caters primarily to end game raiders and arena junkies. They do not have any new content for lower levels, so after the first few times leveling it truly is a boring grind.

With WAR admittedly I've done the quick route via scenario's/rvr to get leveled on my highest lvl toons as I wanted to try the higher level RvR content. BUT I do the PvE content on my lower level alts from the different start areas for the fun of it and to experience what has been created.

I don't think this game is as awful as some say, nor is it dying as some predict - I thought WoW sucked big time when it was released and couldn't get out of the start area's.

I do think Mythic's use of the live events has been great and quite enjoyable. It's even motivated those that stand around waiting for SC's to pop - can we say the WoWheads sitting in Shat group - at least they're getting out a bit even if its for a reward!

I do like that everything isn't spoon fed to you with a big glowing arrow over it. Maybe the average player is just to lazy to put any effort into playing/learning a game. I find the ToK fun and what an interesting number of unlocks for truly creative!

But seriously having seen/played a number of games at release, this has been the best so far.

Any game is what you make of it and there will always be those that think end game is all there is regardless of what the MMO has to offer. Look at the dude that dinged lvl 80 Wrath in 18 hours? Whats the point of that? Bragging rights?

I can understand why ppl rush to max level.

Ppl believe that orvr begins @ endgame...this point is true, if u r not lv 40, how can u help in conquering the capital city of your enemy?

That's why everyone rush to lv 40 ASAP. EA should have expected this result.

So if an aspect of the game is not working as expected it's the players who are at fault? I find this to be a faulty premise.

If I still payed for WAR I would be insulted a little. You cannot give all the credit to EA Mythic for the game's successes only to turn around and place the blame for the shortcomings on the players.

From my point of view how could they have not known that this would be the way of things.

The problem is I think that there are a lot of WoW Players that the only MMORPG game they ever played is WoW and they compare everything to WoW...

As has been stated, WoW is a really really Easy Game to play...everything is super easy to find...the hardest part of WoW is Grinding for you gear. Woo Hoo...thats what I want to do is grind for gear all the time.


FORGET IT! I'm so done with WoW...I'll not buy another xpac in that game just to "Rep Grind" and "DKP Grind" in Dungeons with Whinny...MMORPG Noobs"
WoW has no Depth what so ever...its all a Shinny Grind.

Now, that being said...

Yes...I am very disappointed in WAR too. I was expecting it to be something like Full Blown All Out PVP all the Time Every where you go...Instead all it wound up being was the WoW rejects that were waiting for the Xpac to come out...and so they did the same thing they do in WoW..."GRIND BATTLEGROUNDS FOR GEAR"...Losers.

PLEASE GO BACK AND PLAY WOW AND SHUT UP!

K Thanks that is all.

Hey Blizzard...I'm a grown up adult...and I have a life...I can not play your game all day long in order not to get laughed at by the "Cool Kids" or should I say "Fat Kids" that have no life.

Sorry.


Happy Powerleveling to cap lvl...then Gear, Raid, and Rep Grinds...WOW GOONS!

If there is anything that I have to do with it at all...I'll not play that game again.

It would have to be the only game in the world to play.

I'd rather play Planet Side...At least it is what it is...log on kill a few people ...or get killed a few times...have some laughs in Command Chat...then go to sleep. Like normal People

Not trained MMORPG WOW Zombies. All that grinding just promotes people to quit their job, drop out of school or college, and cut off all Real Life interaction in order to get the most wonderful things that requires that amount of time spent to aquire in your game.


Blow out your Blow Hole Blizzard! I'm so done with WoW...Try making me a new game. Then I might give you a try again.