Its not WoW yet... But WAR is WORSE!

Most of my friends already know about my love and affection for the game that is... WAR... Warhammer Online.

I originally started playing this game in the early early phases of the beta tests, most likely because I had 2 active Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC) accounts at the time and had signed up with those two...

DAOC was an mmorpg that Mythic had created before they got their filthy hands on the Warhammer project. ... I said WAS because they murdered their own game when they tried to convince DAOC players that WAR was going to be the new DAOC... obviously it wasnt, since alot of the DAOC players went right back to DAOC after trying out WAR :P

Some of the DAOC players just lost faith in Mythic completely and never went back to DAOC, causing both WAR and DAOC to feel empty and very much devoid of the action you're normally used to on an mmorpg.

Anyways... I was looking forward to WAR and thrilled that one of my favorite mmorpg developers were making a new game... but little did I know that they intended to use the same crappy old engine they had used 4-5 years earlier for DAOC and try to cover it up with a bit of fancy texturework (the textures are good though! I'll give them that ;) )

Now I am not an expert on these matter... at all... I can only comment on what I experienced when I played the game... and what did I experience in beta? INSANE LAG! Monsters and players rubberbanding left and right before my eyes. Mobs getting stuck in terrain and either resetting or becoming unkillable.

Now, Normally you would say... Oh, but thats to be expected from a beta!

aaaand... Normally I would agree with you... BUT... I saw the exact same thing with DAOC in its beta, the game was behaving very much like the age old DAOC that I had beta-tested years before... And I remembered how long it took for them to actually get around to fixing it! So naturally I was now dreading that I was going to have to go through a year of awful beta testing, followed by a year of PAYING for beta testing (Thats what I call it when a company decides to release a game thats obviously nowhere near ready for release... wether its due to lack of content, lack of gameplay, or ridiculously buggy like the EverQuest2 Fish that ran on water... or in this case... the Destruction Faction being able to listen in on the Order Faction's private chat.

Good luck coordinating an attack on your enemy when they have access to your communications and intel ;)

Anyhoo... I was starting to lose interest in the game due to technical reasons like freezing and not being able to move properly in the mass/zerg fights that took place in the game (you know, the game was basically advertised as being the next big zerg realm versus realm mmorpg... so you would expect it to be able to handle 50 vs 50 players without choking... sadly it wasnt... at all... able to handle it :P )

However, Since I had a whole bunch of guildmates ready, roaring, and wanting to fight and play WAR I decided to stick with the game and get the best of the situation so that I could have fun with my guildies. I now knew that the RVR/PVP part of the game was not going to appeal to me, since it was so clunky and imbalanced. Instead I focused on the PVE part, and greatly enjoyed the Tome of Knowledge feature of the game, which is basically a big book of accomplishments... Whenever I explored a new area I would be rewarded with a tiny snippet of history about the place, or if I had killed a sufficient number of creatures I would unlock more parts of my book.

Eventually I got really hooked on the Book and started searching for new and secret things to unlock for my book, ranging from the AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! Title and its upgrades, that involved me jumping off a high tower and dying... oh... about 100 times? possibly more... I cant really remember, I think I lost a fraction of my already fragile sanity at the time :P

And now, I bet one of you will say... Oh but you didnt actually HAVE to unlock these titles, they were just fluff! Like... if you were bored, you could go and do them for a change of scenery!

Yeah? Well guess what? I WAS BORED! The game at that point sucked ass and I quite honestly felt more compelled to masturbate with a broken bottle or swim naked through an ocean of barbed wire, than to play WAR in RVR/PVP. So I did the Tome Unlocks, and they too were hellishly boring...

I killed 10.000 Dark Elves just to see what I would get for it... and now, I dont even remember what I got... I just remember that I was incredibly disappointed that the game had yet again laughed in my face for wasting my time ;)

The Tome also had some positive sides to it though... For instance, if you unlocked enough pages or achievements within a certain category, you would be able to unlock Tactics, which are basically passive bonuses for your character that you can equip in special Tome-Tactic slots, so that they wouldnt interfere with your normal RvR Tactic slots.

When I got my first Tome-Tactic i was ecstatic! To me that was a pretty cool accomplishment, and of course I started searching for more of them and I even managed to upgrade some of my existing Tome-Tactics to high levels... Things were great for a while...

That is... Until I found out that these fucking Tome-Tactics were bugged and that most of them were not even implemented or working properly!!!

Grumpy (well... more grumpy than I usually am...) I decided to try and do some PVE in the various instances the game had advertised prior to release... The game had... 3? group instances??

Now someone will probably argue with me and say: oh noes, because each instance had several wings/sections to it, so it was in fact more dungeons than just 3! (or whatever the total number was)

Well I say F U ! When I zone into an instance... I'm there... regardless of wether its a Quest-Hub or a single wing instance... So to me, Khorne's Playground was 1 dungeon, even if it had multiple wings...

I love variation in my mmorpgs, so realising that if I wanted to do PVE/Dungeons, I would be forced to run the same handful of dungeons over and over and over and over and over...

I sorta lost the will to live for a moment there ;) well, actually... first I threw up a little in my mouth because a company like Mythic that had developed a game like DAOC with so much PvE content would even dare release a game with so few dungeons... AND then had an urge to KEEEEEL Mythic for being so bone-headed... and then I lost the will to live :p

I started doing some RvR runs with my guildies after I got over my little emo-phase, but quickly had a relapse, since I found out that the game was so poorly designed that I would constantly hammer my computer with updates, caused by one of my Group-Buffs...

Yes, I had a group buff that added extra hitpoints to everyone in my group, and whenever I used that spell, I would freeze every few seconds, basically turning my WAR game into a very colourful slideshow of pictures that showed my character getting raped in every possible way by the enemy forces.

I have to admit, there were a few evenings where I found it particularly arousing to watch my warrior-priest getting butt-raped by semi-naked female Witch-Elves that I happened to know were being played by either:

(A). 12 year olds who hadnt seen vagina since they came out of their mom's

OR

(B) 40 year old virgins living in their mom's basement for the last 15 years and living on welfare... Who also hadnt seen vagina since they came out of their mom's

ps. The internetz doesnt count! It has to be rl ones :p

Then I found an addon that allowed me to increase the time between updates, and this let me play the game with less lag. It still wasnt completely fixed, but it did improve the experience of playing RvR for me... GREATLY... like... maybe 10 or 100 times better now!

However, according to my grade-school math teacher... 100 x 0 enjoyment = 0 enjoyment :(

FAIL!

I have only just tapped into the fountain that is the Retardation of Warhammer Online.. But I will save some for the next update...

So I reckon, next time I will discuss how Mythic screwed up with their Land of the Dead Update... How they took some skills out of the game in beta because they said the skills were too extreme and then decided to reintroduce the skills to the game 6 months later without even having changed them, they just added them to a new class ;)

Or how to exact mirror classes could be SO different from Destruction vs Order..

Maybe I'll go over how to build the perfect Keep (One that has shitty pathing which will cause Keep Lords to get stuck so everyone can kill them... and how to make sure you build an idioticly narrow and winding staircase leading up to the main fight, just to frustrate your players because the developer never actually tried taking a keep with more than 6 people attacking and 6 people defending :P )

And to those of you who frequently ask me: Do you think you will ever play Warhammer again?

My answer is of course a nice, quick and polite: No thank you, I would rather build a time machine, travel back to ancient egypt and have my jewish ass kicked by pharao whilst i build his pyramids, and for a break, I will push heavy carts full of stone... WITH MY TEETH!!