It's a really fun game, from what I've seen, don't get me wrong. Some highlights include:

-Lots of character and style. Where WoW has basically been homogenized to the extent that everyone looks, sounds, talks and acts exactly the same way, WAR is as varied and different as they come. Black Orcs have their own armor, Witch Hunters have their own weapons, etc.

-On that note: there is no sissy race. Whereas WoW humans are all pleasant greetings and handshakes, WAR humans are grunting, dour jerks who are more interested in why you're not fighting than why you're talking to them.

-The RvR is fun. You can tell this because there's actually very rarely a case where one faction easily dominates the other. Order does well in scenarios, yes, but they get hammered in World RvR, and both sides do pretty well in PvE. Order tends to have more advantages since scenarios award more victory points than anything else (and, as stated, Order's classes are significantly stronger than Destruction's).

-A lot of the RvR problems are caused by imbeciles who think it's going to be like WoW's PvP. You really can't solo in this game when it comes to PvP. If you have a guild, this shouldn't be a problem. I expect that they'll thin out after awhile, too.

-The environments are really cool. A word of advice, though: you might want to save the Greenskins environments for last, because they are, far and away, the coolest.

-One thing I really loved was the ambiance. The whole world feels like it's perpetually at war. For example, you won't be finding a dwarf doing god knows what in Nijel's Point as he asks you to collect scorpion venom for some vaguely retarded reason.

What you will find is a GIANT FUCKING SAW devouring trees as you are alternately yelled at by a goblin overseer who tells you to feed smaller goblins to the troll that's powering the saw via a giant hamster wheel and a huge fucking orc who's yelling at you to go stomp stunties because it's fun as hell.

There are points where the game needs addressing.

-Some glaring RvR errors. As stated, Order doesn't have the advantage just in teamwork. Their classes are more refined and polished. The Ironbreaker takes the most damage and deals the most damage of all tank classes. The Bright Wizard's AoEs do much more damage than the Sorceress'. The Shadow Warrior has more shots and more abilities than the situational Squig Herder's. The Engineer's turrets are champion-level HP and can shoot a fly off an orc's nose while the Magus' horrors just stand around looking stupid.

-Graphics. Not quite as refined as WoW's, but that's because the game is stuck on medium settings for beta testing right now.

-Some classes are just not up to par of others. Squig Herders, White Lions and Witch Hunters have a hard time competing.

All in all, the game will be fun after three weeks or so of refinement. It'll still be fun before that, but after it gets the final tuning, it should be great.

Seeing as that's all I care about.

Check this for all class abilities.

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Folks,

Okay, it was a wild and crazy weekend in WAR and while some of you might be tempted to go all Samurai on us for a couple of the bugs, overall things went very, very well. As long-time readers of my notes now, I won’t do a Nick Winters and we are anything but pathological liars so we’ll always own up when we make a mistake and we made a couple here. So, let’s talk amongst ourselves and have a little chat about the top nine list of the biggest issues and where we stand in regards to them.

(1) Client Crashes – I’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why we didn’t release the NDA until recently. Here’s the current status.
- Just a little too many currently. While we are better off than we were in beta, we must do better still before release.
- A number of players will lower spec machines had more CTDs than higher spec machines.
- Number of fixes already in pipeline. They are working their way through our testing servers and will be pushed to the players once they have been vetted internally.
- Engineering time for CTD issue has remained heavily committed; our top engineers are working on the various issues.

(2) Monster Pathing and AI – Well, what can I say other than not even all of King Tut’s wealth could have made us feel better for messing up on this one. Well, maybe all his wealth. happy
- “Yes, that monster seems to be behaving a little oddly”. Monster responsiveness was very sketchy, odd pauses and tethering issues.
- “Oh, was I supposed to go in that direction?” Pathing sometimes wonky - mobs get stuck or go in wrong direction.
- Utter confusion at times as both monsters and pets will engage and disengage seemingly at random
- Internal server optimizations last week broke the pathing/AI. And I mean really, really broke it. This truly was a “Opps, we broke this code” moment for us and we don’t have many of them.
- Going to ensure that this problem is fixed this week. As I said in my first Preview Weekend, this is a major concern for us. Fortunately we have no underwater combat in this game or some of the NPCs may have been appropriately dubbed land sharks.

(3) Pet Responsiveness – With similar issues to Monster Pathing and AI, this was not our finest hour.
- Need to transfer "combat responsiveness" fixes to pets - have pet move immediately on button press.
- “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Pets suffer from same pathing and lack of response as general monsters. Pets hopping around like they were headed to Del Staters.

(4) Global Cooldown Timers –This seems to be a hot topic for players to talk about. However, things aren’t always as they seem.
- Reality and perception are two different things, Warhammer has a GCD of 1.4s, WoW has 1.5s
- “Ability not ready” messaging needs to be improve, a sound effect if Global Cooldown in effect, maybe more cowbell?
- Need to improve on the feeling of sluggishness of the GCD and UI. Bug with display where our timer shows 2s when it is really 1.4. We need to improve on anything that makes the UI feel more sluggish than it is.
- The next best thing to a queue is? We will add in better "slop timer" to allow players 0.3s extra to pre-queue a second ability followup.

(5) Better animations
- So much more coming in the next two versions of the client. We are currently incorporating serious amounts of new animations into the game. Hopefully nobody will sneak a coneheads model into the game.
- Look at what my XXXX does now? Over the next month we will address many class-attack specific issues across all 20 careers.
- “U think you can dance?” Nope, but we have added new racial animations for movement, fidgets and redid some emotes.

(6) Texture Blurring
- Textures are currently cached in a manner that results in blurriness on entering a region.
- We will look at adding a client scalar.

(7) Client Performance – This is one of those issues
- Need better scalers on effects, sounds, graphics, etc to help lower end machines (already lots of additions to coders)
- This thing loves memory like Dan Aykroyd loves bass. We have already improved the memory consumption of the client and taken 100M out of current test best.

(8) Targeting, Camera, etc
- Currently our targeting system differs from many MMOs in terms of our features and how we go about things. We will identify and make a more standard initial setup but allow flexibility.
- Will add additional keybinding selections to allow flexibility

(9) Renown rank gear
- Unfortunately, a new bug (well an old bug we fixed and then managed to break again) which allowed Rank 10 RR 6 players can go to Tier 2 to get better gear and then come back to Tier 1 and own scenarios. We are currently working on a fix.

I hope you enjoyed the Preview Weekend and we thank you for your interest and we hope, patronage of our game.

Guess what folks, that’s the news and I am outta here!

Mark

P.S. You wanted SNL references, you got SNL references, lots and lots. happy See if you can spot them all. Hopefully, I get lots of bonus points...

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Willias Model 2000 was programmed to say:
This.

Makes it very tempting to roll Order side.

If I'm rolling Destruction, I'm rolling a Black Orc. If I'm rolling Order, it'll be a Runepriest or a Warrior Priest.

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Roll with a good group of friends and let that decide where you go. I mentioned before that my WoW guild is abandoning WoW for WAR; we've chosen classes specifically to complement one another. Rolling solo is just dull as hell.

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Kegwen posted

Precious few lessons learned from the WoW interface community

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No. Fuck the WoW Interface community. 90% of the third party mods are complete shit, and the 10% that are useful are so fucking useful that you're playing at a handicap if you don't have them.

Plus, configuring the fucking things is a lesson in why you don't reinvent the wheel in software--figuring out whether a mod uses shift-right-click, slash commands, or a map bubble is rather confusing (and it's not like anyone documents this shit, either). Blizzard's configuration pane they added in 2.4 is what they should have shipped with, but, well, too late--there's now six different third-party ways of doing it, and they're all confusing as fuck.

You also have to fix everything every single patch, and if something doesn't get updated by the developer, you're fucked!

Long story short, I prefer interfaces that don't require hours of tweaking to be worthwhile.

All I hear also is the 7th for open beta. I still check from time to time hoping.

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Nina painfully thought these words up:
Beta is down?

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Apparently it is for CE fags.

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nem-x attempted to be funny by writing:
update

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update to update:

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Folks,

Well, things have been, as usual, busy here at Mythic so I have lots of news to share. So, without further ado and no SNL references, here's the update on my update:

1) Significantly improved NPC pathing - Okay, in all fairness it wouldn't have taken much to improve on what we showed you folks during the PW. However, the NPC pathing is back to where it needs to be and while it still isn't perfect, well, it's a heck of a lot closer than it was just a short time ago. We identified a whole lot of bugs and squashed them.

2) Improved pet commands and responsivness - Well, pretty much same as above. Pets will no longer act as if obeying an order from you was the last thing in this world that they wanted to do.

3) Fixed an issue with textures blurring - Nothing like looking at textures through a blurred lens to make things look really sharp eh? Major improvements in and more OTW.

4) Enhanced Global Cooldown Mechanic - Well, for one the GCD actually shows the correct cooldown time and not the rounded up cooldown time (Hey, what a great idea, let's make it seem slower than it is. WOOT!). The slop timer is working fine right now and we'll continue to look at making the GCD and combat in general more responsive.

5) Continuing to improve Client Stability - As always, lots of fixes going in here. The client is supposed to be more stable (and looks like it so far) but until we get the masses back in...

6) Added new Graphics Settings and seeking more feedback from testers to guide future improvements. You asked for it, you got it. Well, in all fairness we were going to put these in anyway but it never hurts to nudge us a bit at times.

7) Target Nearest Target improved - Yeah! One of my pet peeves addressed.

8) Renown Gear changes and Potency of Potions increased. Tweaking, adding, subtracting, in other words (don't say "nerf", we're still in beta!) balancing.

9) Increased bonus for medal winners in PQs. PQs are supposed to be fun, joyous and not grindy. We'll continue tweaking and changing them wherever we need to do that to make it so #1. (okay, a ST reference)

10) Added more loot bags in Tier 1 PQs - Boy, it's going to be rather crowded when we launch so we just upped the loot for the Tier 1 PQs. We'll do the same to T2 as needed. And when the rush is over, we'll tweak downwards.

So, in terms of some other good stuff, lots and lots and lots of bugs fixed and lots of new stuff added to the ToK. But wait, there's more and we'll address some of it next week as well as more coming info in the next update.

Oh, and there's still no such thing as a miracle patch so don't expect one here. Just a ton of fixes, additions and adjustments. We have another major patch coming as well before launch. We don't believe in miracle patches (miracle whip is a whole other subject) here at Mythic but simply hard work and a talented team.

Much respect to my team that is really doing one heck of a job getting things ready for launch.

Mark

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Blackened had this to say about dark elf butts:
Does that Mark fellow always try to be clever with jokes or references because it's painfully not

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Tragically hip?

Preview Weekend+ starts tomorrow.

I have open beta access, but I didn't buy collectors edition because it's a fucking rip off and they didn't have any, so I'm going to get to play for the 7th through the 13th, but not the 14th, then again on the 15th through 18st?

Who comes up with these bright ideas?

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From the book of Maradon!, chapter 3, verse 16:
what the fuck

I have open beta access, but I didn't buy collectors edition because it's a fucking rip off and they didn't have any, so I'm going to get to play for the 7th through the 13th, but not the 14th, then again on the 15th through 18st?

Who comes up with these bright ideas?

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REPUBLICANS

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Peanut butter ass Shaq I'm New booooze lime pole over bench lick:
REPUBLICANS

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LIBERALS

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We were all impressed when Maradon! wrote:
what the fuck

I have open beta access, but I didn't buy collectors edition because it's a fucking rip off and they didn't have any, so I'm going to get to play for the 7th through the 13th, but not the 14th, then again on the 15th through 18st?

Who comes up with these bright ideas?

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Open Beta is more of a stress test though. They're giving you a level 20 character that you cannot advance and can only do tier 2 scenarios. Head start is the actual game.

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x--SkawO-('-'Q) :
Open Beta is more of a stress test though. They're giving you a level 20 character that you cannot advance and can only do tier 2 scenarios. Head start is the actual game.

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I was more baffled by the silliness of locking non-CE customers out of one lousy day of head start.

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Maradon! enlisted the help of an infinite number of monkeys to write:
I was more baffled by the silliness of locking non-CE customers out of one lousy day of head start.

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Because losers who bought CE were whining about not having any advantages to getting CE, except, y'know... A rare figurine, artbook and tons of other shit.

Note, I'll probably roll up Order first seeing that the majority is going with Destruction.

Willias fucked around with this message on 09-07-2008 at 05:25 PM.

edit: Oh, it's stuck on medium settings? I wish they'd express that on the options screen where it says I'm on max settings rather than artificially limiting it and only mentioning it elsewhere. Also medium looks an awful lot like medium on DAoC 6 years ago or whatever

edit #2: I am a bit biased because I have no plans on playing this even if I really, really love the beta. Too many people from back home have no desire to leave WoW

Kegwen fucked around with this message on 09-07-2008 at 10:11 PM.

Willias fucked around with this message on 09-07-2008 at 10:30 PM.

I have a good video card and now 8gb of ram. Is it because there are maybe 50 people in the starting area? Still, in a "massive rvr" game, it seems like a pretty big problem for the game to be running that slow with just that many people around.

I know that ruins my brother's frame rate. Other than that, I have no idea. My computer is a couple years old, and I get pretty good frame rates most of the time.

I alt-tab, and I'm fine. If he alt-tabs, the game runs like shit.

Which is kind of irritating because the game always has incredibly low volume and resets some of your sound settings every time you log in, and you have to alt-tab to fix them.

Also noticed that logging in and out several times makes icons stop appearing above npcs' heads and makes particle effects completely turn off.

Willias fucked around with this message on 09-07-2008 at 11:35 PM.

they'd better roll out the real graphic options soon

I mean they aren't stellar, but they beat WoW by a pretty good shot. The environments are more compartmental than lolvanguard but I'd put them right about at the same level. Maybe I don't understand what you were expecting from an MMO?

I just wish they'd run at more than a handful of frames per second. Disabling Aero helped a lot, but it still doesn't run that great.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 09-08-2008 at 09:56 PM.

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Maradon! wrote this then went back to looking for porn:
I have absolutely no idea where you people complaining about the graphics are coming from.

I mean they aren't stellar, but they beat WoW by a pretty good shot. The environments are more compartmental than lolvanguard but I'd put them right about at the same level. Maybe I don't understand what you were expecting from an MMO?

I just wish they'd run at more than a handful of frames per second. Disabling Aero helped a lot, but it still doesn't run that great.

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I've got six gigs of RAM, an EVGA 9800gtx, and a 2.4ghz 4mb cache Core 2 proc; runs perfectly smooth for me on Vista 64 with the default options. There are occasional hiccups if I'm just loading up at login but that's about it.