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Waging WAR: The blame game
In this installment of Waging WAR, Greg flips the world all upside-down-like and examines the soft, warm underbelly of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The PvE side. He holds a mirror to some of the questions he's found himself asking in bad situations involving mean, unforgiving bosses, and he shows us all how not to play The Blame Game. Oh, and HAPPY SECOND ANNIVERSARY, Warhammer Online!!! Ahem, we now return you to our regularly scheduled Waging WAR content. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is primarily about the RvR. As such, we don't often discuss some of the things in the PvE instances throughout WAR that we've all experienced at least once (or at least most of us, anyway). Whether you're heading into Hunter's Vale in Tier 1, setting up for a boss in the Tomb of the Vulture Lord, or preparing for any number of instances in-between (I can name five major ones off the top of my head), we've all been there and done that. Things have inevitably gone south for all of us at least once. For some of us, things have gone south repeatedly, on the same boss, with the same group, in the same instance. Frustration and enmity start to set in, and people start wondering, "What is going on here?" What follows then is usually a series of questions tracing a certain pattern that we ask ourselves as we try to figure out what the problem is. I guess it is only human nature to enter into this type of internal dialogue when faced with problem solving in social situations. Follow after the break to see what I'm talking about.
Waging WAR: Finding the sandbox
In this installment of Waging WAR, Greg takes a look at Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning from a few different angles and goes in search of the proverbial "sandbox" in a game that contains neither sand nor boxes. Somewhere along the line during my childhood, I developed a habit for playing games with nearly every game I've ever played. I can even remember a time in my early teens when I sat down with a few friends and collaborated on making our own version of battlechess. Pages of chicken-scratched rules and several dice results-tables later, and we were off and running for a solid week of the most entertaining chess matches I've ever played. Or there was that time with The Sims when I started creating experimental families and then leaving my computer on overnight and not interacting with them, just to see how successful they could be without my help. I could bore you for hours on end with examples of how I twisted the rules and made my own games from the games I've played. I suppose I can blame my penchant for metagaming on my early introduction to pen-and-paper roleplaying (i.e., D&D 1st Ed., to be specific). All I had was a sheet of paper, a handful of dice, a description of the world around me, and my imagination. By its very nature, PnP gaming is sandbox gaming. The reason I'm bringing this up now is that, until WAR, I had pretty much been able to "find the sandbox" in any MMO I was able to get my hands on. Whether it was building hardcore Dungeons & Dragons Online characters, roleplaying in City of Heroes, or achievement-chasing in World of Warcraft, I've never really been troubled with finding something to do when the grind started to wear me down. But now, with WAR, I'm finding most of my old tricks for MMO metagaming just aren't working. To read about what I've tried, and why it didn't work in WAR, follow along after the break.
One Shots: Suspension (of disbelief) bridge
While the orcs in Warhammer Online may not be prized for their smarts, they do generally have the ability to tell when something is not quite right. With that said, apparently this very silly orc decided that despite the missing bridge, he'd just stomp out where it should have been -- and amazingly enough, it worked! Today's amusing image comes to us from Cory, who writes in: "I've been playing Warhammer Online, and this is me on the bugged invisibridge in Hunters Vale: Legchoppa and the Last Crusade." Have you captured a strange image from your favorite game? Would you like to share it with us? If so, just email those screenshots in to us here at oneshots@massively.com along with your name, the name of the game, and a description of what we're seeing. We'll post it out here and give you the credit for sending it in! Easy, and fun. %Gallery-85937%
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.
Snafzg returns to WAR (week four): A gilding guild (part 2)
It feels as if I'll never fill up my RvR influence bars. Killing someone solo yields 100 influence, which is great, but killing someone in a warband might yield 1/10th of that. The influence from battlefield objectives seems to have been nerfed since I actively played because they now reward 65 influence instead of 100.
Snafzg returns to WAR (week four): A gilding guild
Welcome to the continuing adventures of Snafzg returns to WAR! Just to recap, week one provided an introduction for this crazy project, week two highlighted Tier 2 on Iron Rock, and week three highlighted Tier 4 on Phoenix Throne. Snafzg returns to WAR was even featured on the last episode of our Massively Speaking podcast. Next week will be my final impressions post, so make sure to come back for that one!In this article, I'll focus on my continuing journey into Tier 4 on Phoenix Throne as a rank 40, renown rank 45 Squig Herder named Snafzg. Let's recap some of the goals I set out for myself last week: find a guild, participate in a city siege, raid Land of the Dead, check out the Wild Hunt live event, top up my RvR influence bars, obtain a fourth piece of Sentinel gear for my set, and most of all gain a general feeling for what has changed for better or worse in the past few months. I'm happy to report that many of these items have been checked off my list.
A Wild Hunt leads to Warhammer's one year anniversary
What happens when you don't appease a god in the Warhammer Online universe? They get angry -- very, very angry. And then they smash things. Unfortunately, it appears as though the High Elves have been too focused on the RvR campaign to properly honour Kurnous with their annual sacred hunt and it has greatly displeased the God of the Hunt and Lord of the Beasts. His retaliation sets the stage for a new Live Event called Wild Hunt, which releases August 31, 2009 and leads into the game's first anniversary.Mythic just released Grab Bag no. 21, which is full of Hunty goodness. Players will be granted special access to a new dungeon called Hunter's Vale for one week. This dungeon is accessed from RvR areas and is not warded, which puts the tier 4 version on par with Bastion Stair. Each tier will get its own version and lower level players will even be bolstered once inside so they can contribute.A lot of effort goes into the game's monthly Live Events and they seem to be quite a hit with players. Some of the events will be annual, like the Wild Hunt and Night of Murder and some of them will be unique and introduce game-changing content to the world (e.g., Rise of the Tomb Kings and Bitter Rivals). It doesn't appear as though Mythic will be letting up any time soon.
