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Waging WAR: Coming soon, to a theatre of WAR near you
We interrupt this week's scheduled career spotlight on Waging WAR to bring you Greg's impressions of the latest and greatest news from the floors of GamesDay: UK regarding Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and the new RvR content coming soon to a theatre of WAR near you. OK. So. Take everything you know about the Tier 4 RvR Campaign in WAR and press the "Delete" button right now. In fact, press it a few times. Actually, keep going. Keep pressing it until all you're left with is three pairings with three zones each, each zone containing four battlefield objectives and two keeps, and two cities as the capstone for each realm. OK. Now access that part of your brain that stores silly words and euphemisms regarding "the problem with WAR." See that entry for "Waithammer?" Delete it. "PvDoor?" Press the button. Actually, just go wild. Take every criticism you've ever had for WAR's endgame and just throw it out. We're talking total tabula rasa here (and not the ill-fated game). OK, stop. That should do. With an open mind and absolutely no knowledge of in-game mechanics, you're now primed to understand what I'm about to describe regarding the changes that are on their way, and more importantly, why I believe those changes are so critical to the glorious future of WAR. If your curiosity is even remotely piqued, click the "Read more" button.
Waging WAR: The taboo of cross-realming
What happens when you take Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (which offers arguably the best PvP in any MMO currently available) and mix it with controversy, corruption, and a heaping helping of taboo? Well, for one, you get this week's topic for Waging WAR: cross-realming. Today's issue takes a look at the what, why, and how of it all. Recently, during a conversation with a guildmate, it was suggested that achieving renown rank 80 was a simple matter, requiring little time or effort. At the time, I was flabbergasted. There I sat, at RR74 (after having spent innumerable months getting there), listening to someone tell me that all my effort was somehow misplaced. It was no coincidence that we were also talking about what my guildmate referred to as "organized dueling." It is my unwavering belief that WAR is not balanced nor designed to be a system of careers and classes based on 1v1 (or similar) odds. Thus, dueling in WAR has always seemed to me to be an effort in futility, and every time the subject comes up in the realm's general chat, I've been outspoken against it. I believe the addition of a duel mechanism would be detrimental to the base concept of RvR, and would inevitably detract from the very essence of group-based, organized combat. Indeed, my vision of dueling in WAR would resemble some sort of fight-club held in one of the old, abandoned Fortresses far away from any keeps, warbands or sieges, as combatants from both realms enter a pit from which only one will emerge as the victor (the other emerging a few moments later, after shaking off the effects of resurrection sickness). "But Greg," you ask, "doesn't that sound more like cross-realming to you?" Indeed it does. Let's talk more after the break.
Waging WAR: Revisiting the new player experience
Waging WAR moves a step backward this week to take a fresh look at the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning new player experience. Greg gives us his take on what he thinks we can expect from the Endless Trial or a Re-enlistment subscription with a new character. He takes us through his experience over a few casual days of play and tells us about the leveling process, scenarios, RvR, twinking and more. Lately, I have spent quite a bit of my time on my rank 40/70 Archmage, focusing on emblem collection and participating in the newly formatted Tier 4 city sieges. Earlier this week, as I considered topics for this weekend's column, I realized that it had been a while since I had experienced the low-level content. Conveniently enough, I was just starting to suffer a bit from healer's burn-out (thanklessly healing day after day can wear a person down), and decided I would take a break and tool around on a lowbie for some fresh kicks and giggles.
Waging WAR: Elitist alliances and RvR
No matter where you go in the MMO-verse, rivalries are bound to happen, and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is no different. In most cases, these rifts are the exception and not the norm; whether they manifest as a heated argument in scenarios, or a realm-wide feud between established guilds or alliances, there's always going to be some sort of drama. This week, Waging WAR takes a look at how the exception to the rule can affect the game as a whole. A few days ago I was playing on one of my Tier 2 alts running around with an open warband in the Shadowlands. We were taking some keeps and battlefield objectives for renown and influence, since the Tier 2 High Elf elite influence item is well worth the effort. As it turns out, a few of my guildmates were also leveling in the same warband. We ran into a keep defense at Spite's Reach that we weren't really prepared for, but we managed to muster a decent siege in short order. The hot oil started pouring and some area-of-effect magic started to blanket the warband on the ground as we pounded on the door. One of the players in my guild, a dedicated veteran (though not an officer), refused to heal someone else in the warband. I asked him why and he told me that it was because the person was in another specific guild, with no real reason beyond that simple fact.
WAR: Play both factions on the same server by patch 1.3.6
It's always important to eat your dessert first at dinner and then the main meal -- or so our rapscallion uncles taught us. So it is with developer articles. While the bulk of Carrie Gouskos' April Producer's Letter for Warhammer Online was devoted to examining the reasons behind the 1.3.5 patch changes, including the 100% RvR city sieges, it's not a bad idea to skip ahead to the final paragraph of the letter for one truly tasty tidbit: "By 1.3.6 players will have the capability to play as both Order and Destruction on the same server. We did this in Camelot, because we wanted to give players more choices about where they wanted to play and who they wanted to play with. We're aware of the possible downsides (such as cross-realming) and we're aware that people have a lot of realm pride, which we believe is very important, so we're going to be introducing a significant lockout timer to switch between realms." Up to this point, once a player rolled either a Destruction or Order player on a server, the opposing faction was denied to them unless they deleted every character and started over. This certainly represents a significant change in the the faction struggle of WAR, but could also solve the issue of friends being unable to connect on the same realm because one rolled Order and the other Destruction. Carrie highlighted other changes and revisions forthcoming to the game, including an auction house revamp and a pass at improving the open-RvR experience. Head over to the WAR Herald to read the full letter!
