Can anyone provide a brief history of warhammer?

[Brules]

Things that were wrong with Warhammer:

 

Taking falling damage from getting stuck on a rock, or a twig, or any piece of dark elf architecture or weaponry. This was a big deal. If I "fall" from a 6" height I should not take damage as if I fell off a bridge in Dragonwake. Physics is important.

 

Non-mirrored mirror classes. "The what?" you might be asking. Mirror classes were not the same. Some of them had gear and spec options that the other did not, though generally they could fulfill the same general role in a group one side was better from a min/max perspective.

 

Mechanics. DoK / WP mechanic became nullified completely when they changed their top tier gear set, you ended up being able to spam your group heal without any worry that it may run you out of juice. Sorc/BW mechanic was a bit out of control, granting them a near 100% crit rate and a 150% crit damage multiplier at the minor inconvenience of being hit for ~10% of your life when activating skill (easily offset by group heal, see above).

 

PvEmpty-Instance. The biggest joke at the end of it all was the instanced city sieges. Players would use the "scenario scoreboard" to quickly determine that they had "win" or "fail" instance and would decide to leave or stay (much like warzones). As a result what was supposed to be the culmination of all that is PVP ended up being a raid against NPCs that did not fight back. They followed a path and 'did stuff'. Well technically they were supposed to be 'prevented from' or 'protected while' doing the stuff, deepening on what faction you were and the city you were in.

 

Population Is Fine? On Iron Rock the population was so balanced that we were "defending" (lol see above) Inevitable City, the destruction capitol, every 3 to 6 hours. There would be one instance where destruction would manage to have a full raid, order players would leave this instance (I can't blame them for this, as it was usually a bunch of Pug-order and a pre-made raid of destruction). And there 3-6 instances where it was a full raid of order against half a group +/- pugs, who also had no choice but to leave.

 

I will not comment on the Skaven 'expansion', other than to say it wasn't good.

 

I can use the words carried and baddie in the same sentence regarding your wall of text.

[Slurmez]

i played warhammer for 2 years, from launch until the release of rift.

 

the first 6 months was a bugfest with little incentive to pvp. keep/zone trading was the norm as actualy fighting slowed down your progression. the upper managements response was that the game was fine and they liked it how it was. very head in the sand kind of deal.

 

after about 6 months a bunch of folks at mythic lost their jobs and faults were admitted. things started to get better. bugs were patched, classes were moving towards balance, although the brightwizard/sorcs would always be flavour of the year. pvp/rvr started to happen in a big way. unbalanced server populations were still a problem. but for balanced servers the game became noticably better.

 

land of the dead expansion was introduced as a massive step backwards. mostly pve, the new zone was about first one side opening up access, zerging the hell out of any enemy faction players they found, then pveing until the other side regained access and zerged them back. only one faction could have access at a time, making reinforcements impossible.

 

towards the end of my time in the game, city sieges were altered to make them less pve in the later stages (top end gear), however premade warbands (24 players) dominated just as they do in warzones/warfronts/scenarios. pugs had no chance and it wasnt uncommon to see 3 or 4 pages of pug names on the scoreboard from the large number of quitters.

 

on the rare occasions it happened, premade vs premade city siege warband fights were epicly fun.

likewise the open world keep sieges, when numbers balanced (and this did happen, atleast on the badlands server) we a lot of fun for all involved.

 

easilly the best pvp experiences i've ever had in an mmo came from warhammer.

 

Anomandar - Blackguard - Badlands - Warhammer

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/236/index/8260604

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/236/index/3259064/1

 

Haha, I remember fighting your pansy turtle BG () in the reikwald fortress on my WH (Torquemadra) with Aldoorn in "old" city when we used to remorselessly camp access to Aldorf. Now that WAS fun, having a warband come out and chase us around the fortress as some of their members couldnt get to the city.

[Balmuck]

so after reading some 1.2 patch notes(and thinking about the choices made so far) I cant help but shake my head and wonder if I'm only playing this game because of the star wars name power...

 

 

Ive read bit and pieces on the forums about how most of these devs came from Warhammer..what happened to that game? did it fail?

 

even reading some of their quotes make me think this is a big troll...does anyone have faith in these developers?

 

Warhammer's PVP, especially the world PVP, aka, RVR is 1000x better then anything this game has. The Scenario system, aka, WZ system, is also 1000x better then SWTOR's..

 

 

Warhammer is a PVP game, first and foremost, so it caters to people who wanna MURDER the **** out of each other.

 

SWTOR is not. It allows idiots who have no strategy or skill, to actually suicide and die into objectives and win games, as far as WZ's are concerned. I mean, look at the que system. Your fricking group doesn't even stay together after you come out of a WZ.

 

 

The world PVP is so horrid that they're actually removing it all together. 1.2 is removing all dailies that have to do with Ilum.

 

 

I played WAR for 3 years and I had the best time out of any game I've played. The server community was amazing, even the casuals, and the overall goal of reaching the opposing faction's city meant that EVERYONE had to work together, especially in the early days of the game.

 

I'm already bored with this game but WAR, at least for me, never got boring. This might have been cuz I played the most gimp class for majority of my play time but I became a legend on the game for it.

 

WAR

 

-Fulkan 80 Engineer

-Balmuck 80 Slayer

-Harvesterr 80 BW

-Captainhawt 100 Zealot

 

 

SWTOR...

 

Fulkan, 76 Sage and I'm already bored out of my *********** mind.

[Balmuck]

Haha, I remember fighting your pansy turtle BG () in the reikwald fortress on my WH (Torquemadra) with Aldoorn in "old" city when we used to remorselessly camp access to Aldorf. Now that WAS fun, having a warband come out and chase us around the fortress as some of their members couldnt get to the city.

 

Lol, I actually remember you from the brief time I played on Harvesterr on Baddielands. I got him to 80 in two months and then all the destro left so we hit the EU servers.

[Rogoo]

so after reading some 1.2 patch notes(and thinking about the choices made so far) I cant help but shake my head and wonder if I'm only playing this game because of the star wars name power...

 

 

Ive read bit and pieces on the forums about how most of these devs came from Warhammer..what happened to that game? did it fail?

 

even reading some of their quotes make me think this is a big troll...does anyone have faith in these developers?

 

1. WAR had TERRIBLE performance in Open world PvP.

2. They had no official forums.

3. As such they had no server forums.

4. They opened way to many servers and 3 months after launch most were ghost towns.

5. They had no idea on how to balance their classes.

6. They had a premature launch.

7. They had a lot of basic features missing at launch.

8. The performance in the main city hub was terrible as well.

 

Anything of the above sounds familiar ?

[kronomandar]

 

I will not comment on the Skaven 'expansion', other than to say it wasn't good.

 

there were some elements of the skaven expansion i didnt like (renown cap increase/new OP gear)

 

there were other things i liked a great deal.

 

manticore/griffon rides from friendly keeps to hostile keeps were a great idea.

taking a flight to a besieged keep, dropping onto the outter oilhouse and clearing off all the defenders made for some epic fun fights. for me atleast. blackguard exile punt and away cretins aoe punt ftw!

 

also siegeweapons that could be deployed any where made the stale final months of the game a little more interesting.

[kronomandar]

1. WAR had TERRIBLE performance in Open world PvP.

2. They had no official forums.

3. As such they had no server forums.

4. They opened way to many servers and 3 months after launch most were ghost towns.

5. They had no idea on how to balance their classes.

6. They had a premature launch.

7. They had a lot of basic features missing at launch.

8. The performance in the main city hub was terrible as well.

 

Anything of the above sounds familiar ?

did you play beyond the first 3 months of WAR?

doesnt seem like it.

1. this was improved over time.

2. this was added

3. likewise, added. better than the SWTOR server grouped forums.

4. agreed. might have been less ghost towns if it wasnt for #6. also the huge number of servers meant that EVERYONE who wanted to play, could play. with no login queue.

unlike SWTOR, that had early days prime time long queues, and restricted signup. (swtor launch only permitted north american players to signup - i'm an aussie - bioware dropped several hundreds of points in my personal regard of their company for this alone).

5. they didnt want identical mirror classes, so they tried something different. different = riskier. class balance is always the bane of MMOs. always has been. always will be.

6. this was more EAs fault than Mythics.

7. see #6. in the rush to get it out the door many things had to be dropped. they came later.

8. this improved over time.

 

i will say this for WAR and particularly for the server i played on. after the first 6 months/year, it had a great community.

[Jonesos]

@Fulkan

 

./wave

[Elmuerto]

"Warhammer's PVP, especially the world PVP, aka, RVR is 1000x better then anything this game has. The Scenario system, aka, WZ system, is also 1000x better then SWTOR's.. "

 

There were how many Scenarios, like 10 at launch or something?

 

This is correct. I played War from Start till SWTOR. I am aware of everything everybody has said here but what kept me playing was the chance of some pretty awesome small scale rvr or epic zone battle.

 

Eng game City wasn't good, but being part of a large Alliance working together to capture zones with voice chat and maybe 5 warbands co-ordinating, once the lag was somewhat improved, was really the best gaming I have experienced. Working together created, for a while, a great community.

 

I Believe there is a will behind the developers at SWTOR and hope they can learn from what was good in War regarding pvp.

[Fleshsaber]

war's biggest downfall (after they fixed the initial launch stuff) was the fact that if you joined late or stopped playing for a time (say after patch 1.36) you had a miserable month or two (maybe more depending on class/playtime/RR before 1.36) before you could even be competitive in SC's and RVR. i can remember hitting turtles like anomandar for single digits as a rr ~40 and thinking how broke the game was. they eventually came up with a solution (not capping RR in the lower tiers) but by then the game was finished and everyone knew it. it's a shame, i hit rr 92 before i sold my toon and was having fun, but the server pop had gone to **** and it wasn't worth logging in most of the time. warhammer had great potential, but too many bad ideas/implimentations to survive.

[Fleshsaber]

"Warhammer's PVP, especially the world PVP, aka, RVR is 1000x better then anything this game has.

 

warhammer's pvp was better than any other mmo i've played. if you really want to make a bold statement by comparing this game's bad pvp to another mmo, go with...lotro's pvp was 1000 times better than the open world pvp this game offers. if they want to make this game's open world pvp better they HAVE to include real objectives/defensible positions and for the love of god include collision detection. there was nothing better (in WAR) than standing in a keep door with a handful of guys while a horde of enemy players did all they could to get inside.

[Scudmungus]

..there was no real endgame.

 

They tried to setup sieges of capitals

but they ended up with queues of players

waiting outside, trying to get in.

 

Once in, it was a case of finding an empty

instanced version of the capital and farming

for..

 

 

...bags!

 

More 'hope I get a bag, hope it has the gear I can't

get any other way' rubbish.

 

 

There were good times, good fights but aye, more

attempts to 'stop griefing' by turning folk of X levels

into chickens when they went into a certain area.

 

Now, I don't like being ganked as much as the next

mon, but to me, if we're gonna have whines, I would

hope it was about ganking/sods being jerks in low areas

etc.

 

....ya know, kicking sand in the faces of folk.

 

Great way to start a fight.

 

With WAR there was a sense of actual conflict -

take the wrong road and you'd end up in a fight.

 

Aaaah yes...

Edited March 22, 2012 by Scudmungus

[Elmuerto]

war's biggest downfall (after they fixed the initial launch stuff) was the fact that if you joined late or stopped playing for a time (say after patch 1.36) you had a miserable month or two (maybe more depending on class/playtime/RR before 1.36) before you could even be competitive in SC's and RVR. i can remember hitting turtles like anomandar for single digits as a rr ~40 and thinking how broke the game was. they eventually came up with a solution (not capping RR in the lower tiers) but by then the game was finished and everyone knew it. it's a shame, i hit rr 92 before i sold my toon and was having fun, but the server pop had gone to **** and it wasn't worth logging in most of the time. warhammer had great potential, but too many bad ideas/implimentations to survive.

 

Yes I also finished playing at around rr92. There were ridiculous balances at times and the trinkets and gear were making terrible differences. SWTOR should note this also.

 

Once I had the trinkets and some of the lower top gear I enjoyed it more being at least somewhat more effective. It never really affected my will to play as teaming up was easy, and I liked being an underdog. I used to love being chased across an entire zone by a warband because I knocked off one of their high RR players when they weren't looking, good times.

 

Still the large RvR battles were a different story and pretty awesome.

[Rogozhi]

The nostalgia is making me want to re-sub to WAR.....

[Jinnz]

WAR can be summed up by 'mara/chosen stackable cast time increasers'

 

Anyd ev team letting that through knows they let their playerbase down BIGTIME. And they did. The combat and basic rvr was good, but everything they tried to do was just complete fail, there no other way to describe it.

[Elmuerto]

In a world without creative boundaries we could all land in Riekland in my Geranium Falcon sally forth and take the keep! Imagine the look on their gobbo faces. Empire and Chaos would have to unite against the Torites!

[Faeldawn]

WAR can be summed up by 'mara/chosen stackable cast time increasers'

 

Anyd ev team letting that through knows they let their playerbase down BIGTIME. And they did. The combat and basic rvr was good, but everything they tried to do was just complete fail, there no other way to describe it.

 

It would be summed up for me by the phrase "funelling".

 

THE defense tactic of the game was to abuse the collision detection system so players couldn't get through a doorway easily while the defenders just sat inside out of LOS aoe spamming the entrance.

 

Thats it folks, the most used tactic was an exploit, pure and simple and it's one of the main reasons they got rid of the forts in the end.

Edited March 22, 2012 by Faeldawn

[Fleshsaber]

The nostalgia is making me want to re-sub to WAR.....

 

i get that feeling quite often, but sadly, i sold my toon to prevent that notion from taking hold and getting me to waste more money on a dead game. on the flip side of that coin, i was able to get $200 for a rr 92 sm in full df w/ sc weapon just before they consolidated to just one server.

[Faat]

I played WAR from launch 'till dropping my sub recently (had a RR100 black orc).

 

WAR ORvR was the funniest part of the game. The gear gap and hidden levels mechanic was what destroyed it for me. IMPOSSIBLE TO LEVEL AN ALT, after playing my RR100. The replayability went down the drain because of that.

 

SWTOR needs a huge patcha with new maps and objective based RvR. That would be a lot of fun. But I won't hold my breath on that. RvR is a niche playstyle. Many players dislike fighting against the odds, and that' what RvR is all the time. There's always 1 faction outnumbering the other. But tight knit guild groups and alliances can succeed even when outnumbered 2 to 1. That's what was the most EPIC fun in WAR. ROFLSTOMPING the zerg.

 

WAR had much glaring class imbalances in the early days, and they took too much time to balance it out. It even took an 'elite' bunch of players to literally farm the dev team on PTS with bright wizards bomb groups to make them acknowledge there was a problem. That was hilarious, devs were surely QQing like mad in their offices. They lost many many subs in the early days due to class imbalances, exploits and glitches. Now with SWTOR they seem to react faster. Maybe they will overnerf, but I much better like them to take immediate action instead of waiting.

[Fleshsaber]

Thats it folks, the most used tactic was an exploit, pure and simple and it's one of the main reasons they got rid of the forts in the end.

 

how was using the collision detection at a choke point to hold a keep an "exploit"? as a tank, i loved that part of the game play. it was really nice when (per usual) we had massive aao due to the pop imbalance on badlands during primetime for some of the pacific tz players (aluba shrimp anyone?) without cd, they would have just walked right on through with their superior numbers and wiped the floor with us. granted, they usually ended up doing that anyway, but for the most part we'd hold them off long enough that the renown we got was at least worth it.

[Fleshsaber]

I played WAR from launch 'till dropping my sub recently (had a RR100 black orc).

 

WAR ORvR was the funniest part of the game. The gear gap and hidden levels mechanic was what destroyed it for me. IMPOSSIBLE TO LEVEL AN ALT, after playing my RR100. The replayability went down the drain because of that.

 

SWTOR needs a huge patcha with new maps and objective based RvR. That would be a lot of fun. But I won't hold my breath on that. RvR is a niche playstyle. Many players dislike fighting against the odds, and that' what RvR is all the time. There's always 1 faction outnumbering the other. But tight knit guild groups and alliances can succeed even when outnumbered 2 to 1. That's what was the most EPIC fun in WAR. ROFLSTOMPING the zerg.

 

WAR had much glaring class imbalances in the early days, and they took too much time to balance it out. It even took an 'elite' bunch of players to literally farm the dev team on PTS with bright wizards bomb groups to make them acknowledge there was a problem. That was hilarious, devs were surely QQing like mad in their offices. They lost many many subs in the early days due to class imbalances, exploits and glitches. Now with SWTOR they seem to react faster. Maybe they will overnerf, but I much better like them to take immediate action instead of waiting.

 

gear imbalance should never be a problem in mmo's imho, simply becuase once the majority of a population starts clammoring for "advancement", they should create a new tier (something WAR failed to do), not creating better gear and/or levels for those already in the top tier. there was nothing more pathetic than having a sub rr 70 player try to take on an rr 90 in full DF.

 

as for pop imbalance, that's a little more tricky. no one likes being the lead star in a bukkake style zerg beat down, but pop balance isn't easy to control in mmo's either. what needs to happen is for the underdog to have MAJOR incentives to play against terrible odds. the aao system in war was nice, but didn't go far enough. rather than just give added xp/rr for kills, they should have had a stackable stat boost that scaled with the ratio. another incentive would be to earn underdog coins that can be used to purchase rare items that further enhance your character.

 

that being said, the imperative in all of this is that there must not be huge gear imbalance, or you get aao farming, which is what happened in war as well. you'd have a small band of highly geared players marauding through a zone with a bunch of low rr players and having their way with them (sometimes whole wb's couldn't take down a 6man). so, first things first, don't create a massive gear gap, then add MAJOR incentives to playing the underdog. open world pvp balanced and bob's your uncle...problem solved.

Edited March 22, 2012 by Fleshsaber

[Faeldawn]

how was using the collision detection at a choke point to hold a keep an "exploit"? as a tank, i loved that part of the game play. it was really nice when (per usual) we had massive aao due to the pop imbalance on badlands during primetime for some of the pacific tz players (aluba shrimp anyone?) without cd, they would have just walked right on through with their superior numbers and wiped the floor with us. granted, they usually ended up doing that anyway, but for the most part we'd hold them off long enough that the renown we got was at least worth it.

 

Because you could funnel while the tanks are stood at the side of the doors behind the walls and out of LOS, there didn't need to be anyone stood in the actual doorway to prevent the enemy walking through it, that was the exploit. In truth, players trying to make "shield walls" in big keep defenses were noobs (not on stairs, im talking doorways here), standing in clear view of the enemy providing them with targets to AoE off was counter-productive.

 

The only way to break this exploit was to push through superior numbers and choke them before you got splatted. When the doorway is clear but you can't run thrrough it because of the CD and lag and have to push your way past like walking through poridge...nothing you can see, target or hit...then something is wrong.

[OldManRelic]

I believe you're talking about Jeff "Witch" Hickman there. He was one of those devs who turned Warhammer Online PvP into a bad mess, and then pulled a Marie Antoinette attitude right afterwards.

 

If I remember correctly, it was....2009, patch 1.2(an ominous portent, perhaps) that turned the downhill plummet into a terminal velocity drop, when the dev team(all Order faction players except for one dev) decided to gut the Destruction faction and swing things horribly off balance.

 

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/239/feature/2807/page/1

 

I still remember the hornets' nest that he squatted on when people read about his class balance section of this interview, and saw firsthand the effects that happened afterwards.

 

Wow. Revisionist history much? At release, WAR suffered /exactly/ the same problem SWTOR did. The lore and art were more interesting on the destro side (and arguably, they had a few classes that were simply better than their Order counterparts.) The writing was on the wall before the end of Beta -- everyone was going to roll Destro on release.

 

So, release comes. There was something like a 1.2 or 1.3 to 1 ratio across all servers of Destro:Order. The Destro classes in general worked better than their Order counterparts. /Most/ (not all) of the good PvP guilds rolled Destro because of the above perception. Result: Order gets crushed in general. Destro players whine (rightly, on some points) that Bright Wizards are over-the-top OP. Sorcs (Destro mirror to BW), meanwhile, are just as bad, but their true power lay in single target damage rather than AoE.

 

The Mythic devs didn't favor Order any more than the BW devs favor Republic. No company in its right mind sets one faction up for failure -- they have invested many millions of dollars, not to mention years of their lives.

 

No, WAR died due to failure to address some fairly integral game mechanics. Physical damage was simply worse than magic damage. Classes that relied on it had issues. The changes to Open RvR (I forget that patch number) that made it basically a matter of NPCs doing all the work killed WAR, for me.

 

That said, there was no dev bias. I laugh at people who think devs sit in a room and decide to make one faction intrinsically better than another. It happens, but certainly not on purpose.

Edited March 22, 2012 by OldManRelic

[Tinkerhelll]

After leaving WAR for Rift, then SWTOR, I have to say I do miss the sheer variety of pvp options. I could hang with my wh buddies, acting as bw bait for gankage. I could attempt to solo que scs. I had great group options for premades.

 

But some of the best times I had were in open world zerg-busting wbs led by guys (cause they usually were guys) with great leadership and strategy skills. I also loved the city patch where we got to be BIG in the last phase. No mmo has (yet) matched the potential for open world that WAR reached in its heyday.

 

Not sure what they did right, but our community on the Badlands server was stunning. To this day badlanders seek each other out in mmos.

 

<3 my baddielanders, Tinkerhell

[Lemmy_DB]

They introduced the underdog system that actually worked wonderfully, enabling the numerically weaker realm to push hard

 

That was my idea, that was.

 

A lot of truths in this thread imho - but they applied at different times during the games lifespan...:

 

1. First 6 months - lag/bugs

2. 6 months-2yrs - 2 uneven factions = cycle of losers quitting (etc. as mentioned)

3. Open rvr almost dead - WZ's going ok until gear progression went overboard (new Sov, then doomflayer/warpforged)..

4. Who knows, I left at 3.

 

(But I do think people overplay class balance for reasons it failed)

 

Don't get me wrong, WAR was some of the best PVP I've seen - when the starts aligned.. The potential was there, they just couldn't figure out how to encourage large numbers of players to fight - especially when they're losing.

 

I don't see a massively diferent future for SWTOR.. Orvr already dead... gear progression will probably come, but lack of WZ variation or other upcoming games promising pvp may cause people to quit way before then.

Edited March 22, 2012 by Lemmy_DB