Warhammer online?

[Jimp]

Is anyone here playing Warhammer online?
I wanted to know what people think of it and if it is worth getting.

[Innis Cabal]

I tried it. Eh. Not great for RP. As predicted. Another MMO that could have been great but fell short. EQ2 and WoW are still around though.

[Myatar_Panwar]

I played for awhile, got to rank 30 and stopped. I definitely had my moneys worth in fun during that time (mostly due to my guild, probably), but I just think that they need to work on how they view RvR and how to entice people to do it. Often you would form a group and do a keep siege, only to have nobody in the RvR lake to fight against.

This is mostly because the primary way of leveling, scenarios (think WoW BG's) were just too good and convenient. People never really had much of a reason to do non-instanced PvP, especially when it gives abyssal EXP compared to instanced PvP.

Overall though, its great fun. Best PvP focused MMO to date probably, and I look foward to see how future developers use their ideas and improve upon them.

[LoopyZebra]

I largely agree with what Myatar_Panwar said.

The game was fun, but I ended up quitting because my friend (who was playing the game with me) did. Scenarios were far too easy, and the solo content too boring, and the non instanced pvp too hard to find. Admittedly, I did find one huge world pvp at one point, where 20 or so people organically formed into armies to fight each other. (By that, I mean there was no "LFG" being shouted everywhere, people naturally came to the battle.) We lost, because the enemy outnumbered us, greatly. I've heard that the game gets a lot funner as you progress, and I really only got to lvl 10 or so. The game certainly seemed to have a lot of promising ideas, such as guild and city levels. Overall, I think it could be a very great game with some tweaks.

[Dragor]

It's good fun- with friends. It's a mediocre MMO when there's nobody around. When there are (when you get, say, 30v30 in the oRvR lake) it's immense fun. Projectiles and people flying everywhere, tanks slamming into each other- its brilliant.

[AgentPaper]

Played it for a while, and I'm probably going to try it again later on. The game has a lot of potential, but it really requires a lot of people playing to pull off the open world RvR and "WAR IS EVERYWHERE" stuff. There weren't enough people when I was playing for this to work out well, and my friends couldn't play it, so I'm holding off on it for now.

[Athaniar]

It's said it would be WoW killer, but i haven't tried it.

WoW killer? DO NOT BLASPHEME! DO NOT BLASPHEME! The World of Warcraft is immortal! Many have tried to slay it, and failed. Let this serve as a warning to you who dream of wealth and fame.

[Myatar_Panwar]

Its sad, but WoW will probably never be dethroned.

Its biggest advantage is that EVERYONE is playing it. You are playing it, your friends are playing it, her friends are playing it, his friends are playing it. Everyone is playing.

Thus when you go to Shat or IronForge, you can expect alot of bustling around. No one likes an MMO to feel empty and WoW is never empty.

If you want to try a new MMO then you are leaving behind all of the friends that are not converting, and no one likes that, so they won't move.

Even if significantly better games are released, I have a feeling that WoW will never be overthrown simply because of these odd chains blizzard has thrown over their customers.

[Innis Cabal]

WoW runs on...everything, and thats why it won't ever die. Simple as that. If the game itself can't find a computer that won't run it, then most MMO players who want a quick cheap game will go for it over the one that needs a new computer every time the game upgrades itself.

[Erloas]

WAR was never supposed to be a WoW killer, at least not as far as the developers were ever concerned. They designed a PvP based game and they knew fully well that a PvP game will never have the mass appeal of WoW.
WoW will die eventually, just like every game that came before it, sure some games like UO and the first EQ are still around but they are a shadow of what they used to be, and WoW will eventually hit that point.
But no one single game is going to kill WoW, what is going to kill WoW is a lot of more specialize niche games which only appeal to a small portion of the population and steal players from WoW small chunks at a time.
WoW is on the downhill slope, in so far as it is no longer really gaining players. For every WoW player you run across you also find someone that has left WoW, and someone else just playing WoW until something else comes along. Its going to be a slow downhill, but it will happen.


WAR is a very good game, but as I mentioned earlier, it is a niche game. If you don't want to PvP and/or don't have the time to get into larger PvP groups to do the PvP gameplay then the game isn't going to be that great. You are of course going to find a lot of people that played the game and it didn't really fit for them, but that is to be expected from a niche game. The question is how big of a niche does WAR fill up? Is it 300-400k players, is it 1.5million players? Only time will tell. Every single game that came out that lasted for very long had a launch peak, lost some people, and then starting growing again as the game and its player base found eachother. As an example, of the people I knew from DAOC that moved to WoW, they had all stopped playing WoW after about 2-4 months to never play it again. That didn't stop WoW from becoming what it is though.


I love the classes in WAR and think they are the best classes I've played (as a whole) in any MMO to date. I liked some of the class designed from LOTRO, and I liked the reactionary melee combat skills of DAOC, (I can't think of any classes from WoW that really stand out to me, half of the shaman was good when I played it) but overall I think WARs classes are better.

The PvE in WAR is pretty good, its not great, but its pretty good. Of course personally I never saw what was supposed to be so great about WoWs PvE and their idea of end-game raiding and the elite system is something I hate. Unfortunately WAR did adopt a few of the item progression sort of end-game things from WoW.

The PvP is of course what WAR is all about. The early levels, and especially right at launch scenerios were where everything happened and about all that was going on. However that was mostly because WARs PvP design isn't one most people are/were familiar with so it takes a while for people to learn the system and start taking part in it, and the aformentioned people that aren't really part of WARs niche design were/are the ones driving so much of the scenario action. Once you get into tier 3 and 4 if you are on at prime time you should always be able to find open PvP action going on somewhere if you take the time to look for it (and are on a reasonably populated server, which is a side issue of the original swell of people that didn't fit with the game and left).

[Myatar_Panwar]

The problem I have with WAR is exactly the population issue. It is soooo depressing to be doing stuff and no one is around. I was usually on a high pop server too.

With WoW when you are doing quests and stuff you always sees people, and it keeps you going. In WAR I hardly ever saw anyone while exploring the world.

But damn, something even sadder is that the most fun that I ever had with an MMO EVER was during the WAR Preview Weekend and Open Beta. So many people, restricted to a level cap and a set of areas/servers, just gave an AWESOME feel. Everyone was playing the game together, PQ's always had people on them, and RvR was happening everywhere all the time with craploads of people. It was amazing, to say the least.

[Shades of Gray]

The major fault is the abundance of servers. DDO originally had 14 servers, but reduced it to 5. That Kind worked, but it is still underpopulated.

The whole "free character transfers" thing didn't help, as it continues to spread people into separate servers. CoH has ~10 servers, but Virtue the RP server and Freedom the, um... Annoying Noob Barrens Chat server, have twice the amount of people in them.

[toddex]

I had fun but for some reason it just didnt keep me interested. My server was VERY active and outside of scenarios you couldnt get anything done because of the zerg rush of chaos.

[Jimp]

I love to PvP, so that's the main appeal for me. I've stopped playing WoW since everyone in my guild has stopped playing and just a general lack of interest.
Is anyone here still playing it currently, or did everyone try it after release and stop?

[Erloas]

I'm still playing it.
Although thats only kind of accurate, since I haven't logged on in a while. Though that is because I've got 2000 points worth of eldar to paint (and prior to this put together) and I've been spending all of my time doing that. Because I know when I log on I don't get a whole lot else done.

There is an order guild on sylvania and a destruction guild on magnus, that isn't a GITP guild per say, but they do have most of the GITP people that I'm aware of that are playing WAR in them.

[Jimp]

I ordered the game this evening. Should be playing during the week. Looking forward to the whole PvP focus since I've always loved PvP.
Quick question: are the servers split into EU and US like on WoW?

[JBento]

Yes, they are. I'm currently playing on the EU server Burlock (RP server). If you like PvP, you're going to love WAR. I NEVER PvP'd on WoW, I never liked PvP'ing on WoW. On WAR? I PvP ALL THE FRIGGIN' TIME.
Really.
I have to tell myself sometimes, "no, I want to see how the story progresses, so PvE, you bastard, PvE". You can easily lose track of time (as in, hours) while siegin keep after keep and taking BO after BO. You shouldn't have any pop problems if you go to a Core Server. I'm in a relatively low pop RP server, and only have trouble finding folk for PQs (PvE content). And by trouble, I mean I have to wait two or three days to get enough folk for the PQ (and I'm convinced that's because I only play 2-4 hrs a day, and only late at night), and STILL I don't get bored because I can always PvP in the meanwhile.
It's also worth noting that I only need more people for the PQs because I want to finish all the stages for each PQ to get all the unlocks - the PvE story/gear is fuly doable/acquirable solo

[Mike_the_Mystic]

I would like to play WAR, but just a trial because I don't know if I want to spend the money to buy it. So if anyone who plays has a recruit-a-friend key code, can I have it?

[ObadiahtheSlim]

I played WAR for a while but I kinda got bored with it. It started off very strong like the starting Greenskin area. Great fun there. Then it got pretty samey and gridarific (is that a word?). When I got to the end game of the RvR I gave up. Pretty much you are either playing Doorhammer where taking the keep is pretty much just waiting for the door to come down, or having the impossible task of getting up a flight of stairs because there are 30 bright wizards who can AE you all down before you have a chance of getting up those steps. Also there is a good chance of having both happen when you try to take that keep or fortress.

[The Orange Zergling]

I played for about 1-2 months, but then lost interest and quit. It's well designed and all, and had quite a lot of good ideas, but it lost steam after T2. It also probably didn't help that I rolled one of the weakest careers in the game (Squig Herder).

It also seems like some of the ideas they had were counterproductive... Like, the fact that you don't need to physically loot a monster to get, say, it's small intestine. This might be good in some situations, but when it boils down to it, this is cutting the already-small pool of MMO quest types to just "Kill X of Y". And the ability to dye your armor, which was an awesome concept, didn't really work because you had only a few dyes available to you and to find other colors you had to find rare drops. In addition, there was a hideously small pool of armor skins/models, so everybody looks the same anyway, just in different colors.

I only got to rank 24 though, so perhaps this gets better in T4.

[Erloas]

And the ability to dye your armor, which was an awesome concept, didn't really work because you had only a few dyes available to you and to find other colors you had to find rare drops. In addition, there was a hideously small pool of armor skins/models, so everybody looks the same anyway, just in different colors.

I only got to rank 24 though, so perhaps this gets better in T4.

Well with the dyes, even if it were only 5-10 dyes, that would still be an infinite amount more dyes then almost any other game has. The nice thing about it was that it was cheap enough to do right from the start and not have to worry about it, so you didn't have to go through 30 levels before you were getting armor you were keeping long enough to make things like that worth doing. Its much better then some of the atrocious colors you get on items in other games, and the combinations of random ones was worse.

As for the items, yes, like every single other game, at the low levels there is a limited diversity of item skins, and like other games as you progress to higher levels the item appearances diversify a lot more. Of course if you were playing end-game only for a year or two on some other games you would forget that they have the same problem at low levels. One good thing at least though is that all classes do look unique from the very beginning, unlike many games where the basic melee classes all look the same and the casters all look the same, you can unmistakably tell virtually every class apart simply by looks.
That is one promise they made that I feel they delivered very well on.

[kc0bbq]

WoW is on the downhill slope, in so far as it is no longer really gaining players. Never mind that the number of accounts is still steadily increasing. They announced 11.5 million accounts, which is more than the previous 11 million not too long ago.

[Zeb The Troll]

I play WAR. Not as much as I'd like to because of real world things going on (like grad school) but I love it. It had a rocky start once the influx of players at release settled down, but with the server consolidation (which is very normal for games after the buzz phase passes) things got a lot better. I came from DAoC and I know they had a rough time trying to work out population balances between the three realms there, but I honestly feel they've got it nailed for this one so far. (Evidence, admittedly from them, is here (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=573)).

Another innovation that they have that I love is the LIVE events they do. Since release they've already done two of them. One for halloween and one for New Years. It consists of a fairly simple list of tasks that need to be accomplished in order to get nifty swag.

As for oRvR populations, it definitely gets better at Tier 3 and the reason is that T3 zone control is not only helpful, but imperative when it comes to T4 zone control. Whenever a T4 zone is near to being locked down, there is always a call out to have T3 oRvR migrate to a certain zone to help lock it down (which can be facilitated in several ways, but the most important is taking control of oRvR objectives). That's what they've done to encourage oRvR at the upper tiers. At T1 and T2 it's just fun to get a PUG together and roam around and take Battle Objectives (BO's) from zone to zone until the other side gets ticked and comes out to stop you. :smallcool:

[Erloas]

They have also pretty much confirmed that in the next newsletter next week they will have information about the Orc Choppa and the Dwarf Slayer class being added to the game.