"How to fail at producing a competitive product", by Hiromichi Tanaka

The development of Final Fantasy XIV occupies all my time, so I do not have time to play other games. I am therefore sorry to say that the last game that pleased me as a player is Final Fantasy XI.
- Hiromichi Tanaka (exerpt from the interview below)

This is like saying, "We want to build the best car in the world. No, we did not test any other cars currently in the market. But, the car that pleased me most as a driver was the last one we built."



Translation below:

"I worked on Final Fantasy XI for 8 years. I was able to collect a lot of feedback and testimonials of MMORPG players. But I also heard many moving stories from the players. A lot of things happened between them. So I had a great pleasure in working on a new MMORPG and I will be able to hear many new stories written through the game. We do not try to compete with World of Warcraft. We really want to convince the fans of Final Fantasy who have never played an MMORPG. But also show to casual gamers that MMORPGs are very exciting to play. We really hope that Final Fantasy XIV will be a good first experience for those new players.

With this title we want to bring new players to the MMORPG experience, so we spent a lot of time to manage the play time. We know that MMORPGs can consume a lot of time for players. We have therefore created the "Guild Leaves" and an armory which will allow players to use their playing time effectively. This is one of the main novelties of this Final Fantasy XIV. We really wanted to make quests less repetitive as possible for players. In Final Fantasy XI, when you were done with a quest, it was not meant to be repeated. Instead in Final Fantasy XIV we really want the players to repeat them as many times as they want. Attempts are being made to make these quests as pleasant as possible so that players do not feel bored.

The development of Final Fantasy XIV occupies all my time, so I do not have time to play other games. I am therefore sorry to say that the last game that pleased me as a player is Final Fantasy XI.

We have not yet anything in mind to the Playstation Plus members. You'll have the traditional achievments for all players, but nothing special for Playstation Plus members. "

Source

I think FFXIV would be a better product if someone with more relevant production experience was at the helm, and Tanaka had the role of Lead Designer instead of Executive Producer. I'm going to assume that FFXI purists will be happy with FFXIV. But, if you have enjoyed other games, it will be unlikely that the things you enjoyed in those games will be in FFXIV. I further speculate that despite an initial spike in subscriber numbers, the game will struggle to expand its market (especially in the first few years) and settle somewhere close to current FFXI subscriber numbers; basically migrating players from older Final Fantasy games to FFXIV.

Fantasy Earth Zero: initial impressions

A couple of days ago, I was browsing around for an MMORPG that emphasizes skill over grinding and gear, when I noticed a peculiar banner at the bottom of my screen:

Hmmmm... that font and those colors look oddly familiar. Is this a Final Fantasy knock-off? I did a quick search and found its wikipedia entry. It seems that it was indeed a Square Enix game. But, oddly, the official website is http://fez.gamepotusa.com. What's the deal with "Gamepot"? Wikipedia explains, "Several months after the release, Square Enix canceled the game because of severe lack of demand. The publishing rights to the game were later bought by Gamepot, where the game has enjoyed much greater success as they dropped the subscription based element present when under Square Enix's PlayOnline service, and became a "Free to Play" game." The game just arrived on US shores on January 2010. Free-to-Play you say? I'll give anything free a shot.

"Fantasy Earth Zero is a 3rd-person action-MMORPG. There is a large emphasis on PvP on a massive scale.
Sweet! I like PVP.

"One of the features of FEZ, that makes it different from most other fantasy-setting MMOs on the Free-to-Play market, is that attacks must be aimed manually and there is no auto-attack. Players manually aim at their opponent and then click the left mouse button to attack."
Hmmm... interesting. Aim to shoot? Sounds like an FPS or Global Agenda.

At this point, I had enough motivation to check the game out, so I downloaded it and explored the initial gameplay a little



I rolled a Sorcerer. The first set of mobs are melee mobs. They have an overhead strike that they telegraph with a slight pause, so it's easy to dodge them with sidesteps or simply moving away. The second set of mobs have a ranged attack that looks like a vertical cleave that travels along the ground. The cleave travels slow and is given away by wind-up animations, so it is easy to dodge too. At this time, I have a small AOE attack, and multiple single-target ranged attacks. Another thing to note about the video is that in the first set of mobs, I use the targetting system where my cursor is free to move, and in the second set of mobs, my cursor is locked to the middle of the screen (like in an FPS).

First thing that comes to mind is that it plays a whole lot better than Age of Conan (AOC). AOC had the whole sidestep thing and directional attacks too, but the following are what the differences are. In AOC, the sidesteps are useless because you cannot evade attacks with them. Here, the attacks are either telegraphed by an initial animation root, or they travel slowly to the target. So it becomes a game of timing, attacking, faking attacks and counterattacking. Furthermore, In AOC, each directional attack was a unique ability, taking up many hotkeys or hotbar slots just to be able to swing a weapon overhead, over the left shoulder, over the right shoulder, etc. This is exacerbated by the design of AOC's gameplay that gives each person many abilities. In FEZ, each class only has a small number of abilities (you select them with the mousewheel or keys 1-6), and you use the cursor to point and attack. This frees up keyboard real estate for "sidestep" keys, keeps things simple, and doesn't distract the player from the action.

As described, you do have to aim to shoot. But the game doesn't require you to be accurate. It's more like sloppy targeting. The hitboxes are pretty big, so you can hit the targets even if they're not directly under the cursor. Although, I don't know if this will change as you advance in the game.

One thing I haven't experienced yet is the PVP:
"Armies of up to 50 players, each from their own Kingdom, can go head to head in a type of war known as "Kingdom vs. Kingdom." The KvK battles are balanced so that, on the battlefield, one side will have 50 players max and the opposing side will have 50 players. KvK battles are all held on the same server."

"Kingdom battles also have many elements that are similar to a RTS game. Players "mine" crystals by crouching next to a giant crystal. After a certain number of crystals are mined, players must trade crystals with each other to get the appropriate amount of crystals they need to build a structure or summon a unit of war. Units of war are essentially "Summons" like in Final Fantasy games, but the Wraith and the Giant require structures to be built before they can be summoned. When a player character summons a unit, they assume the form of the summon and directly control its action. Buildings can be built on the battlefield and each has its own purpose. Obelisks are used to capture enemy territory. Gates of Hades are used to summon Wraiths. War Workshops are used to summon Giants. Arrow Towers fire arrows at the opposing side."

It looks like PVP involves waging war with neighboring territories and then coordinating buildings and summoned units, in addition to personal combat. I haven't figured out how this part of the game works, so I have no comments here.

As a summary: the graphics are kinda kooky, but that's Final Fantasy style for you. That's fine by me since I don't really care about the style of the visuals of a game, as long as they look polished. What I really care about is the gameplay. The music is Final Fantasy-esque too. The combat feels pretty slick, and I can see what kind of experience they're going for. I really want to PVP, so this game's next "success or failure barrier" to me is how easy it is to get into the PVP.

Aion stun defense: case study of a bad C&C patch

Somehow I still get Aion newsletters, even though I have unsubscribed. I am always curious about game design changes, so I read it anyway. The newsletter talked about the introduction of a new 'stun defense' ability that will be introduced for 'balance'. I will first paste what they have to say about it, and then I will talk about how this is an example of an overzealous designer (Chris "Kinslon" Hager) trying to fix a problem by not completely understanding the crux of the problem, doing too much, missing the mark, ultimately not really fixing anything at all and creating more problems elsewhere. This happened time and time again in WAR and I wish I had documented every counter-productive patch and hotfix. But I guess better late than never:

Aquilanius: How exactly will the stun defense skills work?
Kinslon: You can purchase the Remove Shock skill from your character's appropriate skill trainer (preceptor). Once your character has learned the skill you've purchased, if your character becomes stunned in combat, Remove Shock becomes available as a chain skill that you can use to remove the stun and increase your character's resistance to stun, knockback, and similar conditions for 7 seconds. At later levels, class-specific skills that you can also learn will act as chain skills that let you go on the offensive in addition to the basic abilities of Remove Shock.

Aquilanius: What purpose does this stun defense have in overall class balance?
Kinslon: With each update in an MMO, the game designers need to rebalance the game's classes as players progress in skill and learn tactics that allow them to optimize (and sometimes overly optimize) specific class abilities. In the Aion 1.9 update, every class can now counteract and counterattack stun blocks to a degree. This strengthens the balance of all of Aion's classes. Future updates will continue to balance and shape each class, allowing players to shift tactics as new and different skills are introduced, and 1.9 is no exception.

First of all, it's good that the designers are aware that there is a problem with some classes (e.g., a well-geared Assassin can burst someone down from stealth while his target is stunned/disabled the entire time). But the problem with the stun defense is that they plan to give it to everyone. Here's a example to illustrate why this is a bad idea using Spiritmaster vs Chanters, since I am familiar with them. The only ranged stun a Chanter has is Soul Strike. It's a 4 sec stun with a 12 sec cooldown. If Spiritmasters are given this "blanket" stun defense ability, Chanters are pretty much f*cked. They just took away the only ranged stun a Chanter has, and the only way for a Chanter to get into melee range or kite a Spiritmaster. To make matters worse, Soul Strike doesn't even stun 100% of the time, AND pretty much all the CC a Chanter has is in the form of stuns! Might as well rename the 'Remove Shock' ability to 'F*ck you Chanters, LOL'.

Besides, I'm not even sure if this will fix the original problem of classes like the Assassin. Okay, so you can hit the button and be stun-free for 7 seconds. But within that 7 seconds, Assassins also can cast a buff to resist 2 magical attacks (this includes CCs). If you do wipe that buff off, there's no way you can CC him either. Snare/root him and the game already allows people to remove that with a potion. And now, he's buffed to be unstunnable as well because the new stun defense grants everyone the 7-second stun immunity. This change only marginally improves the problem scenarios, and hurts everyone else that didn't have a problem with stuns to begin with.

What they should have done instead, was specifically fix the problem classes, instead of taking this lazy one-size-fits-all fix.

Aion: analysis of the last grind that broke my back

Some of you may have noticed that I no longer post Aion videos. I have retired my Spiritmaster a few months ago and moved on to Global Agenda. Aion has some unique characteristics that I believe will prevent it from ever being successful in the western market. Sure it's grindy, but many people are okay with grindy. More than that, there is something unique about its grindiness that I have been wanting to talk about but haven't gotten a chance to (until now). I will attempt to paint a picture of Aion below, with key issues bolded.

Those who haven't played Aion may not appreciate what I'm talking about without some more background information about Aion's "endgame", "PvPvE" and "the grind". In summary, it takes a while to get to max level (50). In the time it took me to get to Level 50 in Aion, I could have gotten 3-4 characters to max level in Warhammer, and maybe 1-2 characters to max level in WoW (or 6 characters via the Recruit-a-Friend bonuses) .

The grinding in Aion is split in to what I think of as "grind buckets". Every couple of levels, you receive quests or get access to certain zones that place your character in a particular "grind bucket". The first grind bucket rewards you with Boots that give you +20% run speed. This is a tremendous advantage and necessary for PVP. You can either get your 20% speed boots via PVE by killing a thousand elite NPCs, or by doing Abyss/PvPvE stuff to get enough Abyss points to spend on the PVP version. The next couple of grind buckets involve grinding to obtain player abilities or grinding a few thousand more PVE kills to claim a nice gear reward. But almost invariably, every grind bucket requires you to spend money. Killing NPCs alone isn't enough --- the game often requires that you spend money crafting or buying some expensive item to turn in along with whatever crap you've been picking up from the NPCs.

Everyone in the same "grind bucket" may group up and keep each other company through the grind, to get whatever reward is associated with the bucket. The first few buckets may take days to weeks of playing time, while the last few buckets take months. When people graduate from one grind bucket to move on to the next, they usually never want to revisit the previous grind bucket. If you miss the train, or don't grind as fast as everyone else, you will be left behind and on your own. Throughout the game, people are constantly left behind in grind buckets, alienated and ultimately demotivated to unsubscribe. This may not be as apparent in games like Warhammer or WoW, because the grind buckets aren't as severe.

It was the "end game" grind bucket that killed me. You had to do things like kill thousands of silly NPCs. You had to wait for spawns all around the world at different times of day (there was a chance that they did not appear). You had to level a profession to Expert, costing insane amounts of money if you started the wrong profession (once you've started the expert quest on one profession, the game didn't let you change) and it involved standing in the crafting area for hours, just clicking on the 'craft' button. Then, you had to pass the Expert crafting exam by crafting a rare item that costs a lot of money or rare materials with a chance to fail. Many people's banks were bled dry by this point. But it's not over yet. The pinnacle of this chain's grind was collecting rare materials that came mostly from PVP zones. The drop rate was something like < 5% per NPC at a contested PVP zone, and you needed more than a 100 of them. For reference, I was getting one of them every couple of hours of playing. If you tried to cooperate with friends to farm them, you wouldn't necessarily be faster since you would have to split the drops with everyone. Needless to say they were expensive, so it was either grind them or grind something else to get enough money to buy them. But there's more. After you've collected all your rare items, you don't simply turn them in for your reward. You need to craft something with all of the materials, and THEN turn in the crafted item. What crushed my soul was the fact that you had a chance to fail at crafting the final item. I believe it was a 20% chance to succeed, 80% chance to fail.

Now that is ridiculous. Most people can tolerate a grind if there is a certain end in sight. If the end is certain, you know that any time you put in will bring you one step closer to your reward, and that you will eventually get the reward. It was only a matter of time. But once you place a random number generator at the end, it's demoralizing. If you are lucky, you could get it on your first try. But since it's random and each try is independent, you could be unlucky and fail 100 times. There is also a probability (even if it's slim) that you fail 1000 times. I wanted to PVP, not battle a random number generator.

Needless to say, I only focused on one character in Aion, which is a shame because one of the fun things of an MMORPG is trying out different classes/careers.

All this wouldn't make as much of a difference if Skill > Gear. If Skill > Gear, there will be less pressure to grind, and less reason for activities like botting and RMT to flourish. Unfortunately, Aion rewards grinders and encourages Gear > Skill. In fact, Gear in Aion is allowed to negate Skill so much that it's not even worth trying to fight sometimes because the chance of winning is almost zero. For example, the set bonus from completing the final epic gear quest bumps up magic resist so much, that someone else who has not completed the quest and has not received the full set bonuses has a slim chance of landing any magical abilities. Another example: if you are an Assassin with good gear, you can pretty much sneak up on someone, open up with some Combos that lead into stuns or a disable, and kill even tank classes --- all within the brief period of time that the player is disabled. You literally cannot do a single thing. Well... except go back to grinding.

But this points to another problem. Once you fall behind the gear race in Aion, it's almost impossible to catch up. The reason for this is that the final gear grind buckets requires "grinding" in a PVP zone. But since Gear > Skill, once you are outgeared, you will most probably be roflstomped in the PVP zones, and any PVP-zone-related quests will be inhibited. You will be unable to advance, while your opponents are free to extend their lead, causing the gear gap to widen exponentially. Not surprisingly, my guildie tells me that this is exactly what has happened on Zikel --- the entire "Core" (the highest-level PVP zone in the Abyss) is dominated by Elyos and Asmodians cannot do anything about it.

Ultimately, it wasn't just the grind. As much as I loved my Spiritmaster and PVP, the PVP environment in Aion wasn't that great. There are only a few ways you could PVP in Aion:

a) Rift into enemy territory
This required you to teleport to the enemy zone via a "rift" that would spawn at a random location in the friendly zone. At max level, you probably only had one rift that you could enter through every hour or so. The nice thing about rifting is that the zones are no-fly zones; and you don't have to suffer Aion's broken flight combat. The cons about this is that the rifts are not always available, and you need to pay for a resurrection kisk to resurrect in the enemy zone. Without a kisk deployed, deaths send you back to your friendly zone and you'll have to try to find a working rift again.

b) Go to the Abyss
This is an open PVP zone where everyone is flying most of the time. I typically stay away from this zone since flight combat sucks in Aion. This is also where all the artifacts and fortresses are, but I stay away from them too since they encourage zergy PVP.

c) Dredgion
Every now and then, action in the Abyss unlocks the Dredgion 'scenario'. This is an instance where you have human players on opposing factions fighting for similar PVE objectives. I like to play this whenever I can. The downside is you can only play one Dredgion game each time it becomes available.

I think the only reason I kept playing for as long as I did was because I enjoyed the Spiritmaster class. I still feel that they did a good job with core PVP combat (all else being equal). It was the world they wrapped around it, flight, their flavor of grinding, and how they let gear rule the world that sucked.

Final Fantasy XIV: PVE > PVP?

If you asked me a year or two ago, I would have scoffed at the idea of playing a Final Fantasy game. But the way games have been going lately, I am expecting a PVE-centric game like Final Fantasy to be a nice change of pace, even for the PVP fan that I am. My rationale is as follows.

Fewer design constraints
If PVP is excluded from the picture, many constraints are removed from the equation, and there is less pressure for the dev team to get things right. I.e., there are fewer ways for the dev team to screw up. This allows them to focus on other parts of the game instead of tinkering with and breaking this and that (optimization is a more difficult problem than adding PVE content and an amateur dev team will typically fail).

It's okay if classes are not balanced
In a PVE game, classes do not have to be balanced for the game to be healthy. As long as each class is fun to whoever plays it, the game wins. In a PVE game, no one will complain if a rogue class is able to stealth indefinitely, if a glass cannon class has no way to get out of stuns, if a healing class can also do decent damage; or about something more detailed like "melee class M has 3 CCs while ranged class R only has 2 counter-CCs".

Everyone is allowed to be "overpowered"
In a PVP game, if one class is ever allowed to 1-shot another class by design, many people would be disappointed. It's like the phrase from The Incredibles, "when everyone's super, no one will be". In a PVP game, no matter how powerful your abilities may seem on paper, you can bet that your opponents will have equally powerful abilities. You will never get the feeling of superiority that you thought you would, even as you hurl fireballs from your finger tips and shoot lightning from your ass. This is because a PVP game will never allow you to "overpower" your opponent. You are never supposed to fight 10 enemies by yourself and expect to win. In a PVE game, however, your opponents are allowed to be lesser beings, and you are allowed to feel... "super". Isn't this why people play RPGs in the first place? To feel awesome?

No gear grind?
MMORPGs typically offer a gear progression and reward players with better gear after a 'grind'. This necessitates a grind in order to be competitive in PVP. The people who don't (or cannot) grind as much will always be at a disadvantage to the people who grind more. Thus, an invisible "bar" is set by how much effort everyone in the game is willing to grind (or pay for someone else to grind). If you fall below this bar, you will almost certainly have a worse gaming experience than everyone above the bar. Also, note that the bar always rises and never falls, since everyone is always upgrading their gear. Leave for a week-long vacation? Get bogged down by RL commitments? The invisible bar would have inched higher and you are a little less powerful than you used to be, relative to everyone else. In a PVE game however, no one suffers for the benefit of another person's enjoyment. The "bar" would have been set by the game designers as a prerequisite to PVE content, but it is static. Fall a little behind because of RL? That's alright --- the content is waiting for you exactly where you left off --- you're not going to suddenly get facerolled by noobs who grinded more than you.

What I'm looking out for now is either a PVE game, or a PVP game where skill > gear. I'm definitely going to check out FFXIV since my girlfriend's a big fan. We'll find out if I'm right about a PVE-centric game being a nice change of pace. They're supposedly upgrading their PVP experience, but I'm actually hoping that they stick to their bread-and-butter and keep it PVE, for the reasons above.

PVE: a look at the failure of game design and how to make it better

  

If you think that PVE is more fun than PVP, feel free to stop reading now. But for everyone else who is a PVP fan and thinks that PVE sucks in comparison, it's not your fault. It's the fault of the game designers. I believe that PVE can be fun, provided the game designers gave a shit and actually put in an honest effort for once.

The typical path of PVE combat design failure:

1. The single "Boss" paradigm is the single most destructive concept to PVE in MMORPGs.
   This automatically makes a "Boss" fight a many-vs-one fight --- the "many" being the group, and the "one" being the PVE boss. For the sake of discussion, let's say that the group consists of 6 human players.
2. Boss fights are required to be challenging. But in order to be challenging in a many-vs-one fight, the "one" must be much stronger than each individual human player. Consider what the group brings to the fight: 6 players who can do damage, take damage, heal and/or CC. How can one "boss" counter the damage of the group? Or the healing? How can it prevent being chain-CC'd? To address these issues, game designers continue making bad decisions and travel further down the path of failure:
3. Silly game design decision: "We can't have the boss chain-CC'd the entire fight. That'd be too easy. So let's make the boss immune to all CCs."
   CCs are the spice of tactical combat, and opens up a gameplay of interactive attacking, defending, timing and counterattacking. CCs also serve to provide some balance between classes. When game designers decide to make an NPC immune to all CCs, that is a cop-out that nullifies a significant chunk of every class' abilities. This means that every healer will only mash heal/defense abilities and every damage-dealer will mash damage abilities. The secondary effect is that no one has to move. In PVP, squishies kite with CCs and non-squishies chase with counter-CCs. By removing CCs from the equation, everyone simply stands still and mashes buttons. Designers: if your attempt to make a fight 'epic' includes removing CCs from the fight, you are doing it wrong.
4. Another silly game design decision: "With 6 people nuking the boss, he will take alot of damage. But yet, we can't let him go down quick since it's a boss fight. So, let's give the boss a billion hitpoints, and perhaps toss in some uninterruptable heals or defensive buffs to unnecessarily draw out the fight even more.
   In PVP, the direct counter to damage is healing. However, the boss cannot be given the same healing abilities as regular players, since the designers already made the boss immune to CCs. If the boss could chain heal but not be uninterruptable, the boss will never die. So the typical scenario is to give the boss a billion HP to draw the facerolling encounter out.
5. "Aggro", "Enmity" or "Hate"
   What happens in a PVE encounter? A tank runs up to the boss, and "tanks" it. He then holds "hate", and the boss focuses on the tank the entire fight, and no one else.
   What happens in PVP? The complete opposite. Everyone runs by and ignores the tank and goes for higher-priority targets. The tank is not able to get someone's attention by simply spamming "taunt" abilities. Instead, the tank is always running, using positioning, infiltrating the enemy lines, using tactical retreats, and using timely CC abilities to be a threat to the opposing group... all while supporting his own group defensively. The concept of "Aggro", along with CC immunity nullifies everything that's interesting about being a "tank" class. Like everyone else, the tank just stands there in front of the boss, "tanking" it.

The above issues are what I think the key failures of current PVE design are. They are responsible for boring, stationary button-mashing fights, as well as the dichotomy of PVE and PVP gear. Why can't it be better? Why won't game designers try harder?

For instance:

• Allow CCs back in the boss encounter.
• Lower the HP of the NPCs.
• Give the boss some helpers. Give him a healer, a nuker, etc. Allow them to be CC'd.
• Have the healer heal and require the players to counter the heals.
• Allow the NPCs to CC the players too.
• Have every class use every ability in his arsenal to win.
• Then, remove the concept of "aggro" or "hate". The biggest threat to the "boss" should be the one who gets hate.
• If the healer is healing so well that the "boss" can't do any damage, the "boss" should go after the healer.
• The tank should not be able to "taunt" the boss back. CCs are required since they are now back in the picture, just like in PVP.
• If a nuker is hurting the "boss" badly, the "boss" should target the nuker.
• Allow the "boss" to perform "tactical retreats". If he's hurt, he should CC the players and kite away, to buy some time to heal up. It is up to the players to counter him.

PVE doesn't have to be boring, and it does not have to suck. Come on designers! Try harder! The door is wide open for you to deliver the world's first engaging PVE experience.

Recollections of a battle for Thunder Mountain: Part 3

Checkmate... and a revelation of where WAR's "RVR" fails.

We now had a positional advantage. With the Order defense committed to the west keep, the defense at BOs *should* be much lighter. But we didn't have much time left now. We only had a few minutes before the zone was captured. As we were grouping up at the south warcamp, we noticed some Destro flying in. REINFORCEMENTS! Apparently most of the Destro were in other zones, waiting for them to lock. That was why we were outnumbered here in Thunder Mountain. We spammed region chat to tell everyone to hit C. We didn't have much time left to try anything fancy.

With about 1 minute left on Zone Domination, we managed to take and hold C.

It looked like the Order force was demoralized --- BO after BO was taken easily, followed by the Keeps. Dv was nowhere to be seen, and there was little Order resistance left in the zone. As expected, Dv probably took his zerglings to PVE elsewhere.

After all that fighting, we congratulated everyone and thanked them for their support while they PVE'd the rest of the zone. It would probably be one of the most epic battles we would have experienced in WAR, from the scrappy fighting to the winning against the odds and the final push with a minute left on the clock. But that got a few of us thinking. What did we get from the few hours of fighting? What were we hustling for? To chase f***ing timers! We spent a few hours trying to stop some silly "timers" from handing the zone over to Order. One of my buddies commented that it would have been more beneficial to not defend the zone and let the zone flip so that we could work on a fresh zone. He was right. And even if we lost the next zone and Order unlocked our Fortress, Fortress defense was much easier than offense, and it would have been free RP and gear for us if we let Order flip the zones to a Fortress. We virtually got nothing for working so hard to defend the zone. Just piddly honor from the few player kills we got, and the measly 500 RP for the 2 or 3 times we flipped a BO.

The people who got rewarded more were the Destro in the other zones, who PVE'd the other zones with little resistance, then received rewards for locking the zone. On the other hand the Destro who were furiously fighting to prevent Thunder Mountain from being locked got little, compared to the effort that was put in. Those who were rewarded were also the Order warbands that we demoralized at Thunder Mountain, who went to PVE in a fresh unlocked Zone instead of staying where the action was and fighting to retake Thunder Mountain.

And these are some reasons why WAR's RVR system fails. The reward/motivation system is screwed up. PVEers are rewarded; people who run away from the fight are rewarded. Players are not rewarded for confronting each other in the battlefield and fighting. And I shall refrain myself from going on a rant about the silly "Zone Domination timer" bandaid.

That was the last time I led a warband, or joined one for that matter. That was also when I started giving up on WAR's rubbish PVE endgame and decided to look for PVP fun elsewhere. It was just too zergy, and everyone's motivations and the game's reward system were all messed up. Although I had fun leading a guerilla warband against the zerg, when it comes down to PVP, what I really want to do is fight. I didn't want to spam heals in a zerg. I didn't want to PVE, or try to motivate zerglings who would rather PVE objectives because it was the most rewarding thing to do. I didn't want to PVE in order to unlock even more PVE: more doors to destroy and more horrendously laggy/crashy, population-capped PVE encounters. NO THANKS!

Anyway, possibly to come in the distant future: commentaries on each RVR zone, based on my roaming experiences. This will include my favorite hunting spots, and my opinion on the unique features of each zone from a RVR perspective. It'll be chance for me to relive some of my fondest moments in Failhammer, when I had to break away from what the game was designed for to find some fun for myself.

Memories like these remind me that no one really leaves Warhammer because they do not like it. I feel that the majority of the people who left the game saw tremendous potential in the game and really wanted to like it, despite all its shortcomings. It's a shame that for whatever reason, the Mythic team kept making bad management and design decisions, and could not deliver or turn things around.

Aion's aerial gameplay issues

At first glance, flight in Aion seems like a good idea. But the more I experience it, the more I start to see areas that don't seem to be as well thought out or nailed down. In general, they've designed combat and classes to work a certain way. However, these combat mechanics and classes have to work both on the ground and while flying. While they work for the most part on the ground, they do not completely translate to a similar visceral experience in the air. I thought about it for a little yesterday, and the following are what I believe some of the reasons are:

Flight speed is faster than running speed
While not instantly obvious, this has very significant implications for combat and mechanics. All abilities in the game are tuned for run speed and do not readily work in the air without mechanic adjustments. E.g., how a 3s ability works on the ground is not the same as 3s in the air. Even quick melee abilities suffer, since quick on the ground often translates to "target is out of range" in the air. To have combat feel as good in the air as it does on the ground, they should have done something like shorten cast times by the % difference of run speed vs flight speed. Then, reducing defense stats while flying should keep it balanced.

Animation root
Many abilities have an ending animation root. While it is annoying enough on the ground, it is exacerbated in the air because more distance can be covered over the time that someone spends being rooted by animations. E.g., get caught in an animation snare in the air and your opponent can be long gone. They should shorten or remove animation root when flying.

The factors above are reasons for aerial class disparities, and why some classes appear to have a significant advantage over other classes when in the air. The classes that benefit from fighting in the air are the classes that have low/instant cast times and short/no animation snares. 

Area effects are 2-dimensional
Many AE abilities (e.g., buffs, mantras, fear, heals) only work in 2-D. If a target is on a different z- coordinate, they will not be affected.

Flight as transportation
I believe that this is a bad idea. It implies that long flight times are necessary and goes against original intent that flight should not be overused. When players roam around in a typical 'grounded' or 'no-fly' zone, they can run around indefinitely. They can run up hills, down hills, glide across vallies, into caves, around rocks, sit, hide, etc. However, this is not the case in the Abyss. Once you're in the air, your flight timer starts to tick down.

The Abyss is mostly empty space
In fact, too much empty space. Each layer of the Abyss is a large zone, sparsely populated by islands that only have 1 or 2 levels of flat land (but typically only 1). While this is fine if flight combat was not clunky or if Aion was a space/flight simulator where you could actually have fun fights in open space, this is not the case in Aion and battles in open space are clunky. It's also easier to run away from a fight in the air than it is in the ground, and lame strategies such as running someone's 5-10 minute flight timer down are common. As vast as the Abyss is, there's a lot of wasted or practically unusable space. They should have scattered more platforms or large asteroids all over the place to make things more interesting. They could also have added more features to the Abyss islands' terrain. E.g., caves, tunnels (think Star Wars), and more levels.

Flight time
Everyone can easily consume flight time potions to stay in the air for a long time. Why not just allow everyone to fly for 5 minutes if that's the kind of combat they are trying to encourage? Right now, the zone layout and flight mechanics require that people chain-chug flight time potions like water in the Abyss.

No special flight abilities
This is especially disappointing for me. Flying in Aion is pretty much like running in 3-D. You don't get any acceleration from diving toward the ground or any variation in speed at any time. You are just an object that moves at a constant speed in 3-dimensional space and there are no special aerial attacks or maneuvers. There's also a lame limitation that prevents you from falling too far. If you tried to fold your wings and dive, the game won't let you go very far before crashing you into some invisible plane. Basically, being in flight dumbs down each class and renders many abilities virtually ineffective.

Despite these gripes I have, flight can still a good idea, provided that the developers make an effort to tune and clean up the mechanics, and rework the flying zones. Being able to fly is still great, along with being able to fight in 3-D. But the developers really need to get off their thumbs and put more thought into their flight system (combat, mechanics, zones) if they want a winning product. Just allowing people to move (like they were running) in 3-D and passing that as 'flying' does not cut it.

Currently, aerial combat is a dumbed-down, more restrictive, and more broken version of ground combat; with the exception that you can move in the vertical direction as well.

Case study: why lower tiers are more fun

People are always talking about how the quality of gameplay plummets in T4. I am going to try to elaborate on this because I feel that this is one of the weakest points of WAR. The fact that people are experiencing a significant and noticable decrease in their gaming experience is a gigantic hint to some of the fundamental problems in WAR. From here on, note that I only speak for myself. As much as I hate the RVE endgame, I believe the problem is not because of Fortresses or Keeps or BOs, or any of that RVE bullshit.

The problem is combat and mechanics.

Somewhere between Tier 3 and Tier 4, almost every class begins to get armed with the The Cheese: disables that last a long time, AOE CCs, and powerful AOE damage. Prior to this, no one person had the power to do enough damage to single-handedly slaughter multiple people simultaneously. There was also limited CCs such as silences or stuns, so for the most part, classes had to rely on good ol' fashioned single-target damage. There were fewer AOE snares and disables, so everyone was free to run around and brawl. No one felt helpless for losing control of their characters due to CC.

Furthermore, there was not enough damage that someone would be vaporized within one GCD. But yet, people died, and fights were won and lost --- even though damage was lower, it was never a stalemate. In any prolonged fight, eventually people would fight smarter and do a better job of focusing fire and selecting targets. And that was what made fights fun. There would be clash and a battle. But without crazy damage, the battles could mature and people could got a few good licks in. There's also enough time to experience the joy of a "tough" battle, and being able to go through a process of figuring out what is going on, who we're fighting, and rallying the mob to outsmart the enemy. Thus, giving every fight (even over something as boring as a BO) a chance to blossom into an epic fight.




Fights like these will NEVER happen in T4, because of the AOEs and CCs. Note that in the first video, Order and Destro were fighting in close quarters. In T4, it would have played out like the following: AOE CC (frustrated victims), AOE damage (dead victims). T4 combat deprives the players of the chance to see battles mature into "epic battles". Another thing to note in the video is the number of people fighting. Even though the number is large, it doesn' feel "zergy", because no one gets "steamrolled". And that is key. Large-scale combat can be fun. It is not fun in T4 because of the "steamrolling" effect from AOEs and CCs. Large-scale combat is fun in the lower tiers because of the absence of them. And take a look at all the melee careers! Look at how happy they are being useful and swinging their weapons.

BTW, Shamans are overpowered :) Our shammies had no problems holding our own in T3, even though we were only lvl 20 and 22. Check out what I picked up yesterday at level 21: Gork's Barbs. Shamans get AP drain + healing debuff? Damn. Lylia picked up I'll Take That! with only 6 Mastery Points. My Zealot needed 10 Mastery Points to get something similar, but inferior: Boon of Tzeentch (requires Harbinger and has 5s cooldown). Other stuff to come in this tier are RunAway, EEEEK! and Gork Sez Stop. Shamans have the tools to disassemble any class.

In other news, Aion Beta opens today!

1.3 Single target vs AOE damage changes on PTS

AOE damage needed to be scaled back, so when Adam announced their plans, I was initially happy:

AdamG wrote:

Patch 1.3's major balance changes focus on the balancing of direct damage vs. area-of-effect abilities.   All careers should expect to see AoE effectiveness reduced across the board. This reduction can come in a change to damage/healing, AP cost, or effect radius, and will vary from ability to ability.

My response:

THIS IS A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION! 

This will yield lots of win in many aspects of combat in general, and for many careers. Off the top of my head: pressure on healing (particularly group healing) reduced, restored importance of melee careers, the rebirth of hybrid careers, and more meaningful and tactical combat. 

Once this patch is over, tweak CCs in 1.4 and WAR combat will be fantastic.

But after finding more info, as usual, they were overzealous and reckless (link):

Teddymonster wrote:

On top of that melee is hitting a lot harder now to where squishies are getting 2 and 3 shot.  Everyone knows that a WH can basically already do that to us out of stealth and they're going to do even more damage??  And on top of that add WLs, Slayers and WPs hitting for 2k....

I would without a doubt have to cancel my account if 1.3 even resembles what is happening on the test server right now.

My response:

This change of theirs is what boggles me. Now, on top of the lame disables and CC, they want to make it so that one person can 1-shot another person?

And that's not even taking focused-fire into account. If 1 career can 1-shot another career, in a team setting any target that is focus-fired will be instantly vaporized. 

I guess they want to make battles more like the gunslinging wild west where people die quick and people die often. If this is what combat becomes, I'm probably out too. 

They are about to do it wrong again by making too many changes at once. They scaled back AOE, AND buffed single target. The safer change would be to scale back AOE, but leave direct damage alone and this will indirectly buff DD. Meanwhile, the single-target heals/damage are balanced, and the group heals/damage are balanced. This will also be a safer change because in the worst case, damage is too low and combat becomes more tactical and require more teamwork; but they can incrementally balance this over time.

However, with the change they propose, the worst case will do the same thing the AOE + resist bullshit did since 1.1. Too much damage, meaningless combat, frustrated players, cancelled subscriptions.

A critique of Warhammer Online

One day I decided to compile a list of (almost) everything that has made me consider unsubscribing from WAR:
http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=pts_ff&thread.id=19474

Full text below:

Background

I discovered WAR last year, got all excited, and have been playing the game with my gf since Open Beta. Today, my T4 Zealot is semi-retired, and I have a T3 WE and a T2 Shaman. I have become increasingly disappointed with WAR, mainly because this game has so much promise but keeps falling a little short at delivering. I have had some extremely fun moments playing this game, but unfortunately those moments were few and far between. I'll try to express my thoughts on the game below to highlight the key reasons why I am no longer having fun, and offer a few suggestions on how to make things better.

Note: I may edit this post at any time.

Graphics

If I have my settings for fastest framerate and draw distance to nearest, I don't want to see waffleing inefficient implementions tree leaves in the horizon swaying in the wind. You don't need to waste all those polygons on things so far away that I don't care about. I'm sorry, this is Intro to Computer Graphics stuff, and an unnecessary framerate sink. I had to run around the T2 Chaos zone with my camera tilted to the ground to protect my framerate from the horrible tree leaves. My computer has the recommended system requirements but yet the game doesnt play smoothly at the fastest framerate settings, with everything turned off.

Spell animations are badly implemented. My instacast heal has a lingering animation. The group heals have lingering animations. If a spell is instant, make animations snappy and concise. Don't waste my CPU, memory or GPU rendering all that long drawn-out waffle, ESPECIALLY WHEN I HAVE FASTEST FRAMERATE SET. Also, think about how those animations look in chaotic, large-scale ORVR! Sure, it looks fancy and all if you view each model in isolation. But with 200 people spamming group heals and AOE, waffle.

Server performance

It's sad that the game advertises for large scale RVR, but yet fortress encounters are population capped. REALLY? The code can only handle 250 players? Even then, we have morales (still) not firing, spell cast lag, AP not regenerating, etc. If you can't get a monolothic model to work, find a distributed solution. Designing an MMORPG backend is hard. It's not something any engineer can do. Understand this and hire the right people for the job.

Bad server-client performance also kills the experience for melee classes. It's incredibly frustrating to see your target 1 ft from you, but yet have your screen spammed with the "TARGET IS OUT OF RANGE" error.

Further, I don't understand how some serious problems are discovered only after being "tested" by paying customers. For example, fortresses crashing and population caps introduced. What happened to testing? If the game is supposed to support large-scale fights, at least test it internally to make sure it works. Stress test a fort encounter with bots. Keep adding bots and make them cast random abilities and chat with each other and observe what happens.

Besides, population caps are not the solution! Eventually (if people stay subscribed long enough), everyone will be in T4, and a single Keep can see the same population numbers as what had crashed the Forts. What will you do then? Have pop caps for each Zone?

Bad testing/evaluation methodology

The first sign was multiple patch notes proclaiming that "chat windows will not move when locked". If it was fixed, TEST IT, and make sure it's fixed. How can you fix something 3 times and yet it's still broken? Guess what, my locked chat window still moves today. If you can't test something as simple as moving chat windows, I don't know how you can test the complexities of class balance or things like RVR performance. No wonder so many game-breaking and player-estranging changes make it live (e.g., AOE bullwaffle in 1.2 and the BUG EXTRAVAGANZA of 1.2.1).

Testing cannot be an afterthought. Testing is not optional. If resources are limited, scale back on new content and manage projects better to maintain good testing coverage. You simply cannot release broken waffle.

Also, remember: you can't optimize what you don't measure.

Combat

Fact: No one likes losing control over their character, and not being able to do anything about it.

Counters - every attack should have a counter. Every CC should have a counter (even if each individual does not have a counter, give the counter to another career in the faction).
Otherwise, "I WIN" scenarios will always exist and frustrate the players.
A result of this is gimmick groups, where a group can employ gimmicks to win easily, without needing much effort or skill.
Example: (Electromagnet/Rift) -> Disable -> AOE (First step is optional).
Note that there is no counter for being Disabled.
Having alot of CC is okay, as long as there are counters (and immunities work correctly).

Corrollary: every action by the player must produce sufficient feedback to the player (the user should never have to think, "did that work?").

Example: the AOE stacking issue had to be addressed, but "fixing" it by nullifying one player's actions (without user feedback) because another player casted the same ability is unacceptable.

Endgame is not fun and not well thought out

"Fighting everyone all the time just for the sake of fighting" may sound good on a whiteboard. But is it really fun? There is no endgame in WAR. RVDoor is boring. RVE is boring. Fortresses and Cities are boring.
But let's scale back a little. Even RVRing in warband vs warband fights are boring and monotonous.
Zerg vs zerg fights go like one of the following:

• one zerg steamrolls other zerg
• back and forth fighting until people get bored
• one side retreats and fight ends up in a Keep, where more zzz ensues
• losing zerg moves to another zone to RVE, winning zerg finishes capping everything in the zone, then with nothing to fight, moves to another zone to either RVE or repeat one of the above

I PVP-ed exclusively in WoW. Probably only stepped into an endgame dungeon 10 times. But somehow, as much as I love PVP-ing, all I look forward to each week in T4 is Lost Vale, even though WAR is supposedly an RVR game.

Why have Keeps/Fortresses at all?

Honestly, what did you guys have in mind? Let's have a building, doors, ramp, and the "boss" of the building. Wow it'll be fun for people to defend it and hole up in there, pouring oil and AOEing. It'll be so fun for the attackers too, trying to break down the door and then funneling in through narrow chokepoints. Okay now repeat this ad infinitum and that's end game for you.

Is it really supposed to be fun? I don't think so! With people attacking/defending a building and being separated by a door, there is no real "fun" fighting that goes on. Everyone is limited in what they can do. There aren't really fun action or tactics. It's the same thing, every single time. If I had to rank the Keep/Fort experience with respect to every thing else in ORVR, it would definitely be at the bottom of my list.

Why it's not fun for Melee: crammed into a small area makes them fish in a barrel for RDPS. Collision detection = traffic jam, and limited usefulness other than being meat shields to hold/break the tank wall.

Why it's not fun for RDPS: RDPS have to sit back since they are squishy. With the layout of Keeps, RDPS have limited LOS, meaning the only available targets are through the cracks of the ramp, or all the melee fish packed in the barrel. Either way, RDPS invariably resort to spamming AOE.

Why it's not fun for healers: same reason as RDPS; squishy and LOS problems, so only thing left to do is... spam group heals til the cows come home.

Keeps are no fun if the building and the encounter don't allow players to go toe-to-toe with each other. No, using seige weapons isn't as much fun as you think it is. No, beating on a door for 30 minutes is not fun (keep upgrades... brilliant).

Powerful AOEs

Powerful AOEs are unnecessary and do not encourage teamwork. Focused-fire is enough. There is also a strong correlation between the use of AOE damage, and group heals. The more powerful the AOEs are, the more healing classes are forced to have and spam group heals.

If AOEs stay powerful, fine, but don't let a player chain-channel those AOE spells indefinitely. What happened to the backlash mechanic? Don't they have some mechanic that is supposed to prevent them from being insanely powerful all the time?

Oh yea...

Poor class design

E.g.: Backlash mechanic for Sorcs/BW. Do the designers realize that everyone runs around at 100 Combustion/DM all the time? If everyone is at 100 all the time, what's the point of the mechanic? Why not just remove it completely, cut to the chase, let everyone backlash just as if they were at 100 and give everyone the corresponding 100 combustion/DM damage/crit.
<insert top issues from class forums here>

What happened to the gospel of there being no namby-pamby healing-only classes? Show me a DoK/AM/Zealot who is MORE valuable to his team by doing damage.

Hybrid classes but no good way to be hybrids

Right now, the hybrid mechanic is just a handicap. There are no good way to heal while doing damage (and vice versa). Almost every hybrid class specs to either focus on thing or the other, but mostly "the other", since half of each hybrid just doesn't work in practice, whether it be because of mechanics, or because of gear.

Despite the new mechanics for hybrids like Shamans/AMs, unless there's a global change across all classes, healing classes will still be forced to heal to keep up with the damage.

And then there's gear. True hybrids have to find weird combinations of gear to stack mutually exclusive stats. This often results in gimping one role or the other. WoW addressed this with Spell Power. Being stuck with having to optimize mutex stats just gimps a hybrid in the end.

Tactics

I only have: {PVE tactics}, {RVE tactics}, and {duelling tactics}.

It takes so long to get out of combat that there isn't really a sense of "switching tactics" for a fight.
E.g., hybrids can have a "DPS tactic set" and a "healing tactic set". But there's no good way to switch back and forth in combat. Every class is forced to play within the confines of his tactic set until death. Or until the fight is over, at which point changing tactics is irrelevant. So really, the only time you change your tactics is before a fight. I'd like to see this being more dynamic.
Suggestion: allow tactic sets to be changed every 60 seconds, or allow tactics to be switched any time but requires 200AP.

Zone Domination

The person who sleeps last should not be the person who gets the easy pass to ORVR endgame. Zone Domination kills the game off-peak hours, when players exploit it to PVE their way to victory. How else would a King be able to be killed, despite the AOE bullwaffle from 1.2? Neither faction on Phoenix Throne has managed to take a single Fortress post-1.2 whenever the opposition was serious about defending it and there were equal numbers. Every such encounter has been driven away by AOEs, or bugs. How did K8P manage to take down multiple Fortresses, all the way to the King, despite crazy stacking AOE power? This baffles me.

Population balance

The game relies too heavily on population balance with no way to address population imbalances, other than a hope and prayer that things stay balanced.

Scenarios and ORVR cohesiveness

With Zone Domination, everyone became obsessed with chasing timers to lock or defend a zone. This meant that people queued for scenarios less because they were busy chasing timers. They also queued less because it is typically easier to lock a zone through ZD than grinding VPs.

Scenarios should contribute more than just VPs to the zone. E.g., scenarios could purchase a wave of NPC attackers, or mobile artillery. Integrate scenarios better. You could even have special scenarios for Fortresses or Cities when zones are locked and regular scenarios are disabled for the locked zones.

Ideas:

• get enough Fortress scenario wins and a hole is punched through the wall
• scenario wins award damage buffs or the dead are rezzed. Or extra catapults or rams.
• win a scenario, and you get a "ladder" to scale the wall. Lose the scenario, and a ladder gets tipped over

I know it sucks to instance stuff, but let's face it. Mythic devs can't make large encounters work. So why not expand on the Scenario idea, but make Scenarios seamless so that no one can even tell that they're in a Scenario? An advantage of having Fortress scenarios is that people who are locked out of the zone can still contribute to the fight.

Poor reward system and poor rewards

You've won a Gold bag!
You and your allies are dying from the remaining defenders' attacks.
Defenders cleared!
(You are dead!)
Now find the chest!
Click. "Opening chest..."
Click. "Openi..." Click. Click. "Opening chest..."
Click. "Opening chest..."
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Time's up, you've lost your Gold bag!

Then there's the problem of giving everyone their share of the pie.

Example:

Six warbands push a zone to a lock, then divide and conquer the offense. This includes interrupting reinforcements from the warcamp, guarding the postern, etc. Then comes the push all the way up to the Fort Lord. Front lines sacrifice themselves, bust out their R4 Morales, take tons of damage and basically suicide to give people behind them a chance to push up. Many of these people die with no chance to get ressurected, so they respawn and run back. Some of these brave people get locked out of the zone.

My point is that every single person may play a significant role in contributing to the Fortress seige, but only a handful of lucky people get the "grand prize". I think everyone should be rewarded equally. 

Another example: 5 warbands fight for 6 hours to push zones on Sunday. The opposing realm puts up a good defense, so the zones don't manage to get locked. People start logging off because it's getting late on Sunday and they have to work on Monday. Later, the graveyard shift guys take over and pick up where they left off, lock the zones through Zone Domination, and get Fort Gold Bags. The warbands of people who worked hard for zone control earlier get NOTHING. Is that fair?

And now, Fort defenders get rewarded too! That means you can watch TV or play on your alt while you let the other faction run over all the zones. Then, when the time comes, stroll into the Fort for defense, farm attackers for renown/gear/crests/medallions, and finally roll for Gold Bags when the Fort defense is done. Phew that was hard work!

If the Fort falls, no matter! Ride on to the City PQs where there's equal chance for Invader gear for both the attacker AND the defender. Except, when both teams are equal, the PQs can never be completed because one side has to fight both the human players AND the (buggy) NPC boss and his bodyguards. In this case, no one gets anything.

I'm not going to even talk much about gear itemization. It's horrible, and even worse for hybrids.

Renown Ranks are meaningless

It doesn't matter if there's an RR80, if everyone gets to it eventually. This also means that the people who grind harder will get it sooner. RR should be a representation of someone's significance in his realm, relative to his peers. It shouldn't matter how much someone plays.
Right now, all renown means is someone has "played alot". You can farm BOs/Keeps 24/7 to get RR80. There's something wrong with that. RR should be an indication of how dangerous someone is on the battlefield.

It is RENOWN after all.  A high RR should also command respect, and the game should facilitate that. Make it so that people take pride in being a certain rank in the army. As it is, the only reason anyone goes for RR is for the training, the mastery points, and the gear.
Make it so that when someone speaks in chat, a symbol of their rank shows up beside their name. Or some trinket that they can put on their armor. A high RR should unlock RVR abilities.

Lack of depth of play in ORVR

Give high RR people additional ways to influence the fight in the battlefield. E.g., battle formations: a high RR tank can call a battle formation to nearby tanks, and if the tanks stand in the squares on the ground to make up the formation, you get the equivalent of "hold the line" for example. Or healers can huddle to mitigate damage.

Making RVR objective and Keep-centric is just bad design. What's the point? If the PROCESS of getting to the King ITSELF is not fun, the carrot of gear rewards and RVE along the way is not enough motivation for warbands to run around all day over and over and over and over again to defend/attack zones. The running around the zone ITSELF must be fun, or people will just get bored and tired eventually.

Why is it not fun? Because the game doesn't encourage people to truly engage into a fight with each other. The objectives to lock the zone are the Keeps and BOs. That means, ultimately, the fight will end up at a Keep. And we all know how exciting that is. Then when the campaign finally reaches the City, holy waffle. A 6-year old could have imagined a more fun/interesting encounter.

Give people a fun fight. Give them rewards for fighting in the open field, not holing up like wusses inside a keep! Imagine if there were no Keeps! How fun would that be? It would be like one massive scenario of capture the flag with awesome fighting and no wussy boring bunkering in keeps, RVDooring, and 1-ability button-mashing.

Conclusion

I spend most of my time on my alts now. But they are lvling up and approaching T4, and I do not look forward to it. I am just drawing things out, hoping that WAR ends up being the game that it should be. But I don't know what I'll do when my alts reach T4. The fun is waning and patience fading...

Thanks for reading :)

Message Edited by Dr_Faust on 04-30-2009 03:06 PM