WAR Report, Day Something

30 September, 2008. 1,414 words.

More notes from WAR. I don’t know what it is about MMOs that inspire a lot of commentary. I guess everyone has an opinion about how to make MMOs better.

I’m starting to notice some repetition in the gameplay at level 15-17. I find myself grinding on the stage 1 public quests quite a lot in order to build up influence points to get the cool influence rewards. It’s not very fun. But it’s the only way to do it because you hardly ever find any groups doing public quests.
I actually started leveling an Ironbreaker (a dwarf tank) just to mitigate some of the above tedium. Ironbreakers are a completely different animal from witch hunters. For one thing, combat is really, really drawn out. This is because tanks are designed to stand there all day in the middle of a melee and draw the attacks of all the bad guys away from the soft, vulnerable spell-casters, but to balance out their relative invulnerability, they don’t have a lot of damage potential. So when you’re solo, it takes quite a while to kill mobs. Everything turns into an epic battle.
But back to the witch hunter. At level 16, I suddenly started to notice that I was picking up a lot of gear that required level 17 and 18 to use. Even some of the quest rewards were above my level. I think it’s because I ended up in a slightly higher level area than I’m supposed to be for level 16. But my guy doesn’t have any trouble finishing quests with mobs of level 19-20 so I didn’t really notice. I don’t know if it’s because witch hunters are super powerful or if I’m just lucky a lot.
It also seems like I’m finding a lot more gear for other classes now. Through levels 1-10, it seemed like almost everything I picked up was something I could use immediately. Not so much anymore. I’ve had the same sword and pistol for like 5 levels now, and my bank is filling up with gear I can’t use.
I’m up over 20 gold, so I should be able to easily afford a horse when I get to level 20.
My scavenging skill level is up over 100, but I have no idea what the effect of a higher skill level is. I’ve never not been able to scavenge a corpse. I suppose I’m getting better and/or more useful crafting supplies from it, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
Speaking of which, I finally figured out (by reading a web site heh) that if you use two cloudy waters when making potions, the stability meter goes up to maximum and they don’t fail. Once I found that out I was finally able to start making potions from the crafting stuff I scavenged from corpses, so my apothecary skill is finally moving up. Maybe one day I’ll be able to make useful healing potions, because you don’t find them very often. (On the other hand, I find entirely too many potions to restore action points, which I never need. I’m carrying like 40 of them now.)
The Tier 2 Stonetroll Crossing scenario is not very fun to play (as opposed to the Tier 1 Nordenwatch scenario). On Grimnir, there just aren’t many people on the Order side who seem to “get” the concept of capture the flag. They mostly just run around in a group looking for a fight, while a handful of coordinated Destruction players stroll around the sides with the flag and win the games by like 500-2 in a couple of minutes. Fortunately, you get renown points just for participating. But it’s just not very fun to be the only person with any kind of situational awareness. Unfortunately since I’m a witch hunter there’s no way I’m going to pick up the flag… it doesn’t take a lot to kill a witch hunter, especially with the entire Destruction team on you. (The flag carrier should be a tank or maybe a healer to have even a small chance of a solo capture.) And for the privilege of getting spanked in this scenario you usually have to wait for like 20-30 minutes in a queue before getting in (presumably waiting for enough Order players to arrive, since Destruction outnumbers Order by 2:1 on Grimnir, as on most servers).
As far as I can tell there are not very many Order players on Grimnir participating in RvR battlefields. Destruction controls everything in the Empire vs. Chaos areas, and I never see any Order groups in the RvR areas of Troll Country. Just a few people here and there probably doing the same thing I’m doing — fulfilling quests in RvR territory. Certainly nobody trying to actually reclaim the battlefield objectives. It’s sad because I don’t think it would take very much effort to take them - I never see any Destruction players defending the objectives; it’s all NPC guards.
Every now and then I see an animated marquee square on the map… I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. Is that where a bunch of people are fighting? It’d be nice if you could mouse over it and see an explanation.
I can’t find the “doctor’s plagued cache” anywhere in Wolfenburg! I’ve been through that silly town like 20 times and I still can’t find it, even though there are tons of boxes and carts around the area. It’s got to be a bug.
I got a WAR add-on called SpamMeNot. I’ve been getting gold and leveling service spam (only $299 to level your char to 40!) approximately once every 5 minutes, and every day it was a new random name sending the tells. It just got to be too much work to put all of them on ignore. (Also I think there’s a bug in ignore because I still got tells from people I was supposed to be ignoring.) Anyway since I installed SpamMeNot yesterday I haven’t gotten a single spam. It’s been so effective that I’m actually suspicious: It’s not saying that it’s blocking any spam; they aren’t sending them to me anymore. Almost as if the gold seller somehow knows I have this thing installed and stopped sending because of it. Curious. Anyway I removed it again to see if the spam starts up again. Hopefully it’s completely innocent and Mythic coincidentally blocked this guy’s IP at the same time I installed SpamMeNot. I’d hate to think the gold sellers had infilitrated the WAR add-on community already.

And finally, a few words on Need vs. Greed rolls. If you’re in a group, and anyone loots an item, each person is shown the item and asked whether it’s something they need (“need”) or something they want (“greed”). You can also “pass” if you don’t need or want it at all. The game will give the item first to someone who chose “need,” otherwise it will give it to someone who chose “greed.” I believe this is (yet another) concept taken from WoW. Theoretically, if the item is something your character needs and can use, you click on “need.” If it’s something your character can use in the future or maybe one of your alts can use it, you click on “greed.” Otherwise you click on “pass.”

Now I didn’t play a lot of WoW, and certainly not much in groups, but even I can tell you that this is a horrible, horrible system of loot distribution and it defies explanation why Mythic carried it over into WAR. The vast majority of humans are going to act like pricks if given an opportunity, so almost everyone automatically clicks “need” on everything whether they need it or not, so they have the highest chance of getting the item. If it’s not something their character can actually use, they’ll give it to an alt or guildmate or sell it in an auction.

Tobold had a good idea for one solution — automatically bind items to players who select “need.” That way they have no choice but to either equip it or sell it to a merchant. I think that’s a great idea, but I think it would be even better if they simply gave the loot to a random person in the group without any choice. Mainly because it’s incredibly annoying to have to stop and examine an item and then click a “need” or “greed” button when you’re in the middle of a fight.

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