MMO Cold Turkey

I mostly took last weekend off from MMOs and it was an invigorating break. 

Rob at MMOCrunch recently posted about making a much bigger break — walking away from his MMOs altogether.  His article is titled “I got my life back.”

 …I always KNEW there was a real world outside of MMORPGs, as I used to be quite social before I started devoting every weekend to grinding pointless levels in some silly game or other during the last decade, but I’d kind of forgotten how much fun it is to meet new people and tell each other our stories and have some REAL LIFE fun…

A couple people left our WOW guild recently and their goodbye posts read a lot like Rob’s.  More power to them, I say.  When playing a game starts to negatively impact your physical or mental wellbeing, then a change makes a lot of sense.

Personally, my enjoyment of MMOs will always have to take a back seat to my real life responsiblities.  It means my gameplay is a bit more restricted than I’d ideally like, but I think it’s a healthy compromise that let’s me keep playing without feeling too guilty about how I use my time.

How about you?  Comfortable with your MMO playtime?  Or ready to take a short — or long — break?

WOW patch 3.02 to go live today

Blizzard is extended its regular maintenance cycle today to roll out the 3.02 patch for World of Warcraft. 

The patch notes literally go for pages (and Blizzard was quick to say that there are more changes coming before Wrath of the Lich King).

Too Many Anna’s has a nice link-list covering many of the changes.

Weekend off :)

I just finished a three-day weekend away from the computer (with only a tiny bit of back-sliding).  Instead of dissecting every sentence coming out of Blizzcon or parsing developer’s intentions out of Warhammer patch notes, I raked leaves and picked apples with my children.  It was a highly refreshing break.

Warhammer Game Update 1.02

So, I was just speculating on Mark Jacob’s comments on future improvements for Warhammer.

 

Now, we have some new info:  the 1.02 patch notes are out on the Warhammer Herald (props to Spinks at Book of Grudges for pointing out its existance and offering his own insights on some of the changes).

 

The change I find most intriguing is this one:

 

In order to promote realm and population balance, some realms on some servers will now award their players with a +20% bonus to renown and experience. This is not a permanent bonus, but rather a temporary incentive to promote balance. Realms currently offering this bonus are marked on the server list with a colored icon; blue for Order and Red for Destruction – Check the Herald for the latest list!

Will it work?  Should be interesting to see.  I know a temporary 20% bonus would definitely NOT be enough to influence my own decision on something that would permanently affect me for the rest of the game like the server or faction I chose. 

 

However, I can see that individuals and/or guilds who are joining the game — or rolling alts — and don’t have a particular preference might be quite happy to grab even a temporary levelling advantage.

 

A couple other quick comments on 1.02 improvements:

 

• Join all scenarios button — Yay. Wonder if it’ll include all the options of  the addon I just installed.
• Chat changes — Yay, bug fixes.  Boo, not automatically delivering all the improvements to existing players.  Bigger boo, still no word on the chat changes like item linking.
• Reduced delay when mailing to alts and guildmates – Yay, speedier mail is great.  Now how about that Auction House?

 

 

Mark Jacobs on Warhammer improvements

Syp at the Waaagh Blog passed along an interesting post Mark Jacobs made on the VN Boards about future improvements to Warhammer. 

Here the quotes and a couple comments:

1. Open RvR is crucial to this game’s success. If we don’t have enough people doing open RvR, the game will not succeed as much as it could and should. We’re looking at all the data from the servers and if what is being reported here is true (too much emphasis on scenarios), we will certainly look at encouraging people to get involved in oRvR earlier than they may be doing right now. This will not involved nerfing of scenario exp, rp, etc. though.

Comment: Hard to argue with this.  Scenarios seem to be the most efficient way to level, and if everyone is constantly grinding in scenarios then who’s left to do open RvR?  This is a nut WOW never cracked – despite many attempts, organized world PVP there is essentially non-existant.  WAR, whose primary focus is RvR, has to find more ways to encourage open RvR participation, especially at the lower levels (where are lot of RvR lakes are ghostly quiet). Good luck doing this without nerfing scenarios. 

2. We will have an improved chat interface/filters very quickly (hopefully in the next version). As I’ve said before, we really messed up on the presentation of the chat system. It really is quite powerful but too many people just didn’t know what they could do to make their lives easier. That’s our fault and we will correct that. Once I had my chat system set up properly, I was very pleased with the results. So, the next version you will see will have: a) more tabs by default; b) more filters; c) a reminder on how to set things up your way. Further down the road I want to see a chat editor similar to our layout editor. I also sent an idea to the team about a simple slash command (and then a button) to make gold spammer reporting quite easy.

Comment: This one worries me.  I don’t see any of the keywords I was hoping for — item linking, mouse-based shortcuts, new default chat channels.  Instead, I hear him saying they messed on the presentation of the system, that they didn’t explain it well enough, and if we just understood it better we’d be happy.  That sounds a lot like “Our chat system is already great. You just don’t get it.”  While there may be a lot of untapped power in the built-in filters (others have already pointed out to me that it’s easy to filter out NPC chatter, for example) — it doesn’t change the fact that there are a lot of simple, widely used chat features missing from WAR.  Mark Jacob’s idea of a slash command and then a button to report a gold spammer still sounds like more steps than I need elsewhere.  Maybe Mythic’s technology simply doesn’t allow for these simple improvements, but I’m sorry to see Jacobs skip blithely past them altogether.

3. I love the core crafting system and we definitely want to add a lot more stuff to it as the game evolves.

Comment: It’s got potential is the nicest thing I can say so far.  I’m glad he has it on his list of things to improve.  Not mentioned here is the flip side of a robust crafting economy — the mail and auction house system, which are both borked badly.

As to what else is coming, well, that would be telling but I guarantee that you’ll like what we are going to do before the year is out and afterward. As I promised before we launched, we are keeping the team on WAR and not moving them on to the expansion pack yet. Launching was only the first step…

Comment: Mythic has been very active with tweaks and bug fixes so far.  I’m glad to hear Mark Jacobs publically stating their initial work isn’t done yet and that more improvements are on the way.  I’m sure he knows that these next few months will make or break WAR in terms of customer retention – and I feel pretty confident that Mythic is going to do everything they possibly can to deliver on their promises to further improve the great game they launched. Color me optimistic.

r1ft Gaming: “Meh” to Warhammer

(Ran across this mentioned on Massively.com)

 Daedren at r1ft Gaming’s take on Warhammer:

To summarize, my thoughts are basically this: Warhammer Online is a mediocre remake of everything we’ve already seen in the industry. It lacks passion, it lacks real creativity, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t provide a unique or memorable experience. Or yeah, something like that.

Can’t say I agree.  Daedren’s real criticisms seem less to do with Warhammer and more to do with the whole MMO genre. 

But it’s definitely a well-crafted article and there are a lot of points that do resonate.  Well worth a read.

Is it me? My failures moving inventory items in WAR

Ever since I started playing WAR in the open beta I’ve had more than a bit of trouble moving items around in my inventory and to/from inventory to my character “paper doll,” bank vault and mailbox.

It’s not that I can’t do it. I can. It just seems to take an inordinate amount of attention and careful mousing. 

WOW inventory icons seem to shrink when being moved (see green square).

In WOW, I’m constantly moving inventory items here and there with hardly a thought. In WAR, I often seem to not grab the item in the first place or end up dragging to not quite the slot I wanted.

One issue seems to be a small but noticeable lag whenever I click on things. That delay is just enough to mess with selecting and dropping inventory.

But I think I also noticed something else the other day. 

In WOW, when I select an inventory item, the icon I’m dragging seems noticeably smaller than it appears in a bag slot.  So when I move it to another bag slot, the “target” I’m trying to hit is bigger and easier to hit exactly with the smaller icon I’m moving.

In WAR, that doesn’t seem to happen. An inventory item’s icon seems to me to be the same size whether it’s in a bag slot or being moved.  So now the “target” I’m trying to hit is the same size as the icon I’m moving and being off just a hair may mean I’m starting to touch the next bag slot over instead and thus confusing WAR about which bag slot I was really aiming for.

In WAR, the inventory item seems to stay the same size when moving (see green square).

(I tried to grab screen shots of this difference, but screenshots from both WOW and WAR drop out the icon being moved. So I manually drew in green boxes to roughly simulate the difference.)

Of course, I could just be crazy. What do you think?

Installing Addons in Warhammer

Ok, I admit I’m a fiddler.  I like to adjust, tweak, finetune, you know, fiddle.

And I’m lazy too.  If I can find an easy way to do a repetitive cumbersome task, I’m all over it.

So I’ve dipped my toes into addons for Warhammer.  These are user-created modules that add or improve the basic Warhammer UI.   I use several addons in WOW so was really happy to see Mythic has a similar system to let users improve and customize their interface.

To install addons in Warhammer:

1. First go into your Warhammer directory (for a retail copy of Warhammer, I think the default is C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\).
2. Make a new folder called “Interface” in that directory.
3. Open your new “Interface” folder and make a folder called “Addons.”
4. Copy an addon file to your new “Addons” folder (again, the default setup probably looks something like this C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\Interface\Addons\) . 
5. Addons typically come as .zip files and have to be “unpacked” (extracted) before they can be used.  Windows XP/Vista has this feature built into the operating system, so you can just right-click on the addon .zip file and choose “Extract.” Make sure you extract the files to the Addons directory you’re working in.  You can also use third party programs like Winzip to extract .zip files (if you do, make sure to check off the “Use Folder Names” options so that it maintains the correct subfolder structure of any extracted addon files).
6. That’s it. Now in your Addons folder you should now have a new folder named after the addon you were extracting.  Your addon should automatically work in Warhammer now (if it doesn’t, double-check the steps above and re-read the addon’s description — some addons require other addons be installed for them to work).

Curse.com now has a section dedicated to Warhammer addons.  They’re a pretty reputable source for safe addons, but, as always, be careful (my personal rule is to not install any addons that come as an .exe file).

So far I’ve added the following:

Libslash  -  This is one of those “helper” addons that you don’t really use directly but is required for a lot of other addons to work.  One nice feature — with Libslash installed, you can type “/addon” to see a list of all your addons.

Clock – Puts a simple digital clock onscreen that you can customize and move around.  Funny how game companies never seem to want to show that information onscreen in their default UI (guess they don’t want to remind players how much time is going by while they’re playing <grin>).

NPC Item Sell Price – Adds a line to item descriptions showing the NPC vendor buy price.  Handy to let you see what it’s worth keeping and what’s worth dumping when you’re low on bag space (which I always seem to be).

Mobhealth – Based on an addon from WOW, once you start fighting an enemy player or mob, it adds the numerical value or percentage value to the enemy player’s or mob’s health bar.

Warhammer Scrolling Combat Text – Another WOW addon ported for Warhammer, SCT dresses up the onscreen combat display.

Scenario Join All Button – Adds a one-button option to join all available scenario queues. Definitely beats havng to join them one at a time.

EZCraft – Adds pull-down inventory menus to your crafting screens so you can see what components you have in your bags that can be used for each crafting slot.  A great timesaver, especially since I find interacting with the inventory slots fairly awkward (more of that in another post).

SpamMeNot – This blocks incoming spam from gold sellers and automates the reporting process to Mythic (supposedly it complies with Mythics reporting requirements).  It’s not a perfect defense but is worth using.

What about you?  Are you an addon-fan or a strict default-UI player?  Have you found any can’t-live-without addons for Warhammer yet? 

Drop a comment with your thoughts and discoveries.

Blizzard’s new committment to PVP met with open arms

 

Well, not exactly

Syp, over at Waagh, takes the high road.

Regis at Wizards & Wenches calls it like he see it.

And Syncaine of Hardcore Casual corpse-camps the Blizzard post…over and over.

Me? 

I like WOW and I like WAR.  I think they’d both be better games if they’d steal more ideas from each other and I hope they do. The players will only benefit from that.

But even a  Pollyanna like me can’t help but wonder about Tigole’s incredibly vague and tepid comment on improving PVP.

“…Our general thought is that we could provide more BG content over time. The BG content that we could provide could be of higher quality with a higher degree of accessibility…Please don’t take this post as a promise. This won’t be an overnight process. Not all of these things are set in stone and guaranteed to happen.  It would take us a while to shift in this direction…I think it’s important for you guys to know some of our thought process in regards to PvP.”

The only thing I can parse out of the above comment is that they’ve been thinking about making more and better battlegrounds, but that nothing is going to happen soon (or perhaps ever). 

As a way to give WOW players a glimpse of Blizzard’s future roadmap for PvP, it seems hardly worth typing.

As a sop to WOW PvP players considering a look at WAR, it seems transparent and weak.

(Brewfest picture credit: AzyxA.  Motivational poster designer: Bighugelabs.)

How MMO competition benefits players

(This forum post by Tigole was mentioned by Mike Schramm on WoWInsider).

Actually, we have been discussing new battlegrounds quite a bit lately. Wrath of the Lich King will feature Strand of the Ancients (attack/defend) as well as Wintergrasp (non-instanced, world PvP).

But past that, we are exploring ideas that would involve expanding our Battleground content in future patches and beyond. We believe we have some strong ideas for improving Battlegrounds and PvP as a whole in the game and we’re definitely going to focus on improvements in the future. Now, it’s very early to be talking about some of this stuff but I think it’s important for the community to know that it’s on our minds.

Our general thought is that we could provide more BG content over time. The BG content that we could provide could be of higher quality with a higher degree of accessibility. Overall, we’d like to have more content and variety. We also want the gameplay experience in the BGs to be better directed. We’re also exploring the concept of a complimentary “competitive” bg system as well. Over time, we’d like the focus of PvP to shift back to being more BG-centric and more focused on Horde versus Alliance — the core of our game.

We’re also planning on improving some Battleground and PvP features in general. For example, we want to give you the ability to queue for Battlegrounds from anywhere in the world. We’re also going to explore EXP gain through the PvP system as well as low level itemization to support that.

Please don’t take this post as a promise. This won’t be an overnight process. Not all of these things are set in stone and guaranteed to happen. It would take us a while to shift in this direction. But these are some of the current thoughts on the development team. I think it’s important for you guys to know some of our thought process in regards to PvP.

Hmmm…

• A greater variety of battlegrounds.
• Queueing for battlegrounds from anywhere.
• XP from battlegrounds.
• More focus on faction vs. faction play.

Where could this sudden burst of creativity be coming from???