Where will Kaja go?

Burlok is dead, its remains smouldering in ashes. Kaja the dwarven Rune Priest stands ‘tall’ and looks around. She has a choice of new homes, aside from Karak-Azgal where the evil Ailil bounces on her disk.

Ok, I’ll prob move her to Karak Eight Peaks on monday. No idea what the new guild is doing, but these days I’m more of a soloer. And it sounded like a fun server on saturday.

RP server closures are sad to me, because they offer something that you just don’t find elsewhere. But WAR demands on numbers, and equality. And the numbers are so LOW on the RP servers, that these moves are inevitable. And wherever I go, I’ll be using Flimgoblin’s awesome new RP addon.

Hrrm, the move is on the same day my 6-month sub runs out. I was going to take a few weeks break from the game and then continue playing and move any new WAR commentary to my more general blog: Nerf the Cat. Yes folks, after a new breath of life for the Age of Blogging, the Book of Grudges is most definitely coming to an end.

It shows how things have progressed in 7  months. I’ve gone from uber-excited about every announcement, to slightly cynical and needing proof of things. I gave up on end-game and enjoyed the simplicity of tiers 1 and 2, and could play those all the time! I look forward to the Land of the Dead ‘expansion’ stuff. But I miss my guild, my friends, my server – and let’s face it, Book of Grudges is in no way as good as it was when I shared duties with Spinks and Hawley.

I am determined to keep an eye on WAR, I hope I enjoy my new server when I get back to playing there. It’s going to be a bit weird to make sure my friends (whose subs have run out) get to the same server. I’m not even sure it’s possible, so that will be seriously upsetting for all of us. I even got some great ideas for WAR blog posts at the pub gathering over the weekend. Those posts will be on Nerf the Cat, however. Not here.

Thanks to all for reading, commenting, visiting and keeping us in the feed-reader! It’s definitely appreciated.

A very quick thank you

To those that came to the pub yesterday and braved meeting me & Spinks as well as fellow players, thanks! I had a really great time, and it reminded me how much MMO players can sometimes have in common (in one case almost freakishly so, but in a comedic way).

Will write more soon. Hear from Warhammer Alliance over twitter that Mythic apparently care enough about Europe to start working on equality of marketing and give-away codes. They didn’t send any for our fan-run pub gathering, though! They’ll get there, in another few months.

Shame no-one from GOA could make it. Shame more people didn’t come. But, having said that, was truly glad to be able to chat to those who did in-depth, because they were all remarkably interesting people.

Who knows? When the dust settles and I’m home, I may consider it more.

Weekend draws near

Ok, I leave the house at 5:45am tomorrow to start my journey down to London. Friday I’ll be geeking out at the IMAX for Star Trek around 3pm, and then on saturday, from 4pm onwards I’ll be at the Cittie of Yorke pub in Holborn.

Spinks will be there for sure, as will my ever-dutiful husband, and we’re supposed to have the front room of the pub booked (whatever that means). Am hoping Ardua and his wife will also be there for sure, and I know a few others are coming, such as Skar!

My real name is Rebecca (hi all), but I think you’ll be able to just ask for the front room and from there we should be fairly obvious. I have no idea how many will be coming, hopefully enough that the pub doesn’t turf us out back into the main room – but if it does, we’ll still be at the pub, so find us.

Am sure we’ll all be as nervous as one another about meeting people from the online world, but every time I’ve done something like this the nerves soon dissipate, so don’t let those put you off!

Anyone is welcome. I doubt people will just be talking WAR, so if you have friends you’d like to meet in town, bring ‘em along also!

And spread the word, because this is genuinely the last time I’ll be able to pimp it without twitter assistance! (and if you need/want my mobile phone number, just comment and ask for it here and I’ll send you an email, same if you want to contact me for any reason!)

Long time coming

I’ve been neglecting my blogs, and as I’ve just compiled some links for Nerf the Cat later in the week, here’s the WAR-related ones I’ve been checking out amongst others:

Werit summarises info from the Land of the Dead video, neatly and succintly and it gave me just enough of a taster to go watch the video, since I’m a little distrustful of marketing at the moment! It’s nearly June too…

I’ll really miss the colourful and sensible diagrams and dots from Breakfast at WAR, so here’s Pancakez’ view on the old chestnut of Rock, Paper, Scissors. It’s plainly awesome.

Frustration at the endgame continues with Bootae’s comments on his recent experiences at trying to get into a city siege and what happened. I have to say, I’m still not tempted to try city sieges, I enjoy the early tiers too much these days.

Before WAR launched, there was speculation about population balances and what would happen when one side was frankly overpowered. Werit returns to look at what’s happened on his server, Averheim and it seems players do prefer to be overpowered. Perhaps not surprising, but still somehow revealing.

Podcasts, podcasts – Stonetroll Certified and Warhammer Alliance have new podcasts out, both worthy of being in your list. (OK, so due to twitter I know the WHA one is due out very soon, but keep an eye on their site, it’ll be worth it and has a special guest!)

Snafzg, over at The Greenskin, shows us exactly how and why his blog hit 1 million views with an awesome screenshot of Destruction standing in an orderly queue for a Live Event kill task. I ‘awwed’ at them. So cute, and so far from being chaotic, eh?

There’s no getting out of this one, the decrease in WAR blogs, highlighted by Blame the Healer. At some point soon, I’ll also be moving my main blogging over to my ‘catch-all’ blog, but I’ll still be peppering it with WAR posts and speculations… for me it’s just too hard to keep two blogs going with any sort of quality control!

Bootae provides my favourite headline for a while, raising the issues of how the game could possibly spread players out across zones to avoid 10+ warbands all going after the same goals. I still think bringing in the other Cities would have helped with this somewhat, but truthfully we as players often choose easy kills/keep takes over the more disputed ones, so it’s definitely one of WAR’s problems. He also touches on the recent Winds of Change controversy, which has been picked up by many many blogs, and which I read in quiet disbelief. Snafzg sums it up on Massively, Skar also keeps me up-to-date, and Roo gives the subsequent nerdrage it’s own made-up word. Awesome.

On a lighter and more impressive note, Gaarawarr continues his insane PQ trawl which makes for a fantastic read. I wish I’d thought of it! This time he’s at the home of the elves (ok, so now I’m glad I didn’t think of it…)

And back to The Greenskin for my final link of the day. Snafzg has decided to start a semi-regular column about what he’d do if he were Mark Jacobs. It’s a useful call for constructive criticism and an interesting read. The first article covers gear grinding, something close to all our hearts.

Phew, sorry for the wordiness, it’s been a while I know. There’s a lot of great stuff still being done in WAR and written about WAR, so keep an eye on it all! Later this week I’ll be back to discuss more about the London get-together where me & Spinks hope we get to meet many of you and take lots of photos!

To the Lighthouse!

There’s one thing Mythic are good at, listening to their players. It doesn’t always mean they can change things at the pace some would like, but they do pay attention. Since the game launched people have been arguing about the interest levels of the endgame, saying that the early levels are more fun (they just are, less skills to deal with etc etc) and waxing on with nostalgia about their days in Nordenwatch (when it was the only T1 scenario to pop).

And so Mythic give us the Nordenwatch Weekend, when all players, all tiers can go participate in Nordenwatch. Go. Play it. You KNOW you want to. I will be (tomorrow, since I work today). It runs through the bank holiday in the UK, so until 9am CEST on Tuesday. It’s great news and just the kind of mini-event that can be run for any scenario at any time. Definitely a good thing. And how much do I want to play Mourkain Temple with my rank 40 Rune Priest? A lot, make it the next one!! (then Tor Anroc, of course!).

We’re all a bit down on WAR at the moment, or the majority are. I have a lot of posts I’ve set to one side to comment on further here. But rather than go through things in order, I’ve stepped up to publicise a mini-event I think will be a ton of fun.

What are you still reading this for? Go grab the Fortress, and for heaven’s sake – fight BY the flag…

Intermission

I had  no internet for 22h this week, followed by some heavy-duty overtime at work. Trying to catch up on reading/gaming tomorrow, so expect more then!

WCPI (again)

I’ve been remiss in my linking. I know that, this blog hasn’t always been at the forefront of my mind. But I do still read up everything people are contributing about WAR, and the various forums, and for that reason my WCPI contribution for this ‘period’ can only be Warhammer Alliance.

I’ve had some issues with Warhammer Alliance in the past, I don’t think we need to go into those. But, the site has truly become a fan haven, and has gone from strength to strength in terms of community involvement, and producing original content that truly worth reading. It’s become an information hub more than a series of forums.  And its front page is now one of my primary stops on the net, and I read all the articles before I even consider heading to the forums.

Poor Ol’ Hawley

In the April 2009 US WAR newsletter we get a mention in the sidebar. That’s always a nice shout-out, but still leaves me with a bit of a feeling Mythic are a little out-of-date with some of their fan/community info.  Here’s the quotation that actually made me laugh out loud:

“arbitrary, Hawley, and Spinks, three lovely MMO-playin’ ladies”

I’d like to state for the record, that although lovely, Hawley is VERY MUCH a man!

The rest of the newsletter makes really interesting reading though, from podcasts on Land of the Dead, Live Event details for the Beyond the Sands  and Rise of the Tomb Kings events, Dungeon details for the Necropolis, and new mounts!!!!!!!

Ok, so the pictures of the new mounts made me a little jealous and giddy, they look amazing (manticore and griffin). But reality soon set in, it’s for the recruit-a-friend programme, which we don’t have in the EU. And you need to recruit 6 subscribers. That’s a hell of a lot. A little bit too much to just fake and buy for yourself, even if you were crazy enough to do so.

Both the EU and US newsletters also have a list of events that the WAR team will be coming to in the coming year, so they’re definitely worth checking out from that angle. The EU team will be at Dreamhack, Cologne Games Day and GameCon, UK Games Day, Paris Festival de Jeu and Poznan Arena Pl.

We’ll be at the London get-together on 9th May from 4pm onwards at the Cittie of York pub in Holborn. If you can make it, pop in and say hi. While Hawley won’t be there since he can’t make it, but at least me and Spinks will be there to show off our authentic female-ness!

WAR’s Groaning

Enough niceness, eh?  Bloggers, and in can be assumed others in the community, are testing out other games until WAR gets fixed or until the Land of the Dead brings people back to the game.  Hell, it’s what I’m doing. I’m even sometimes choosing grinding in LotRO over what it plainly fun about WAR – Tier 1 and an alt on many nights. People are doubting their subscriptions.

And Mythic? Mythic are tied to their desks trying to fix stuff and bring in new stuff that will need fixing with their lesser numbers in QA and elsewhere. The game needs these fixes and changes, and they’ve been promised to us. A number of people I know are pretty excited about Land of the Dead but not really bothered about much before, so this ‘live expansion’ is very important to Mythic, don’t mistake that. If it all goes wrong, it might be the end of a number of subs on both sides of the pond. The community is flagging a little and could do with pepping up.

Not heard of Paul visiting many blogs recently, or even updating his own. And that’s the problem with community involvement, once you start it, people expect it to continue. I expect these luminaries of Mythic to be doing all they used to do, marketing-wise, even when it’s unfeasible from a grander scale. But I’m sure there will be a ramp-up in community chatter and involvement with the Land of the Dead, there needs to be!

I’m finding WAR quite suitable for a casual game, but that also means if something more interesting comes up, WAR gets dropped for the night. I still enjoy the game when I play it, but even that’s somewhat because I’ve disengaged myself from the endgame, I’ve heard too much about it being unsatisfying, and I know I enjoy sleeping, so I don’t go to city sieges or defences, preferring to try new characters and play them through Tiers 1 and 2, safe in the knowledge I have my preferred char at rank 40 just in case I need a top level character.

WAR needs enthusiasm. It needs to be fun. If you’re not enjoying it, try alting, or play another game and keep your eye on info about the ‘expansion’.

And come talk to us all about it on May 9th at the Cittie of York pub in Holborn, London (while arranging to meet the rest of your guild there, of course). Seriously, I think we need more people for this or we’ll get moved out of our booked room… so ask around and drum up some interest, please!

Catching up

It’s been a while since I linked to some of the stories that have kept me amused/captivated and so here’s a catch-up. They’re not all brand new, but that doesn’t mean you caught them or that they’re any less good.

Gaarawarr’s epic PQ trawl is a cautionary tale in madness, but reading it actually made me want to give it a shot. He’s also updated his armour guide to include all the new tokens etc.

Regis is RIGHT, we need recruit-a-friend in the EU. In fact, things have been trundling along fairly quietly on the ol’ EU vs US front, so sometimes it’s worth sitting back and reflecting on how the different treatment has worked out. In some ways it’s ok, but in terms of marketing, Mythic is definitely in front.

Over at Incoming Pull, you can read about WAR’s swan song (ie. city sieges and more disappointment in the game’s end’game)

Snafz gives us a definitive token cost list and reminds us to go read Tome of Knowledge and all the work over there put in about the Land of the Dead expansion. It’s neatly summarised, and a fantastic resource.

And finally, over at Lagwar, there’s more misery at 1.2.1, listing bugs and problems that this patch has introduced to the game. I get the feeling I’d have experienced more of them if me and Spinks hadn’t been playing extremely casually and not really spending a huge amount of time in the game.