* 4.7.09 - This article has been corrected, references to 14 hours of PVE have been changed to 14 hours of game play since some RVR had to happen. *It appears that we are finally seeing reports of an actual king kill in Warhammer Online. It only took these European players a total of 14 hours of game play and the coordination of 6 guilds to make it happen. A 14 hour stretch to do anything in a game is beyond hardcore in my opinion, and to me it qualifies as the absolute worst thing in any MMO in my book. I was a part of nightly 4-6 hour raids years ago in WoW. Farming Blackwing Lair and Molten Core was nearly the death of me, and lead to the inevitable burnout that the WoW raiding treadmill can produce. Even that experience pales in comparison to this 14 hour stretch. The amount of actual PVE game play required in an RVR game to accomplish this task can be debated, but the fact remains that killing a king in Warhammer Online is not for the faint of heart. Its nowhere near casual friendly if you want to see it through from start to end, and you must have the gear, coordination and preparation before you even start out on this task. Its definitely not for me.
I saw the writing on the wall with this long ago, and its one of the bigger reasons I quit the game. 14 hours of play time is required to fully sack a city and capture its king? No thanks. I knew that this was something I would never see, and figured I'd move on. By the way, anyone surprised that it was Destruction capturing Altdorf? Perhaps early population imbalances have manifested themselves in the end game, since one side might be more geared out than the other?
Worse than Blizzard's raiding treadmill?
I'm not necessarily going to sing Blizzard's praises and rip on Mythic, but lets think about the target audience for your content here. Blizzard made this same mistake up until Wrath of the Lich King. A very small percentage of its player base ever got to see most end game instances. Places like Illidan's Black Temple probably only had 1% of the overall population pay a visit in its hayday. Blizzard has since fixed that (probably too much, see any discussion on it being too easy now) and many more players get to experience a Kel'Thuzad fight in Naxxramas for example. They stopped designing their content for the "hardcore", the 1% that have insane amounts of time to play the game to reach the pinnacle of PVE. The more casual crowd, folks with families and jobs, now get to enjoy some of Blizzards best content work as a result.
Mythic seems to have not noticed that this is a bad thing. Its bad because you can't have a game with mass appeal if you cater to a small group that is capable of 14 hour play sessions. That is a crazy time investment for anyone with real life responsibilities. No mass appeal, no big subscription numbers. Mass appeal is what World of Warcraft has that many other MMO's don't, and while they keep trying to get to WoW's heights they seem to regularly over look this principle. Keep in mind that the players in this case spent hours farming gear out of instances just to get to the point that they could attempt a city seige. And this makes no mention of the organization involved to pull 6 or so guilds together for such an event. Mythic intended for it to be difficult, and it certainly seems that they delivered.
A tough nut to crack
Its a double edged sword. Making something difficult has always meant a huge time investment in MMO circles. I know Mythic wanted this to be the pinnacle of their game, but engaging more than just a tiny fraction of the player base just won't happen with this design. For a company that wanted to compete on a high level with World of Warcraft, catering to the small percentage of players that can actually pull off such a feat only ensures that WAR will be a niche game. Players that don't have the time to invest in a city siege are left to toil away at the repetitive T4 keep sieges, and that has little replay ability.
Its certainly my opinion that game designers should design for the larger audience and perhaps more might subscribe and feel engaged enough to keep playing. I'm not saying it needs to be dumbed down to the point that its trivial, but the Mythic guys are smart and I know they can come up with a way to get more of the player base involved with this content. A king encounter (should be) the best thing they have to show the players, although this video of the final phase of the fight is terribly boring and makes the encounter look very bland. That might not be a particularly fair criticism since I wasn't actually there though.
Grats to You Lunatics!
Before I forget, here's a serious congratulations to the players that completed the feat and now have Karl Franz locked up in Inevitable city. You have more time, determination and skill to complete such a goal than I ever had, or ever will have.
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April 19, 2009 11:10 PM
blog comments powered by DisqusHonestly Warhammer has no idea where it is going right now. They have gear grinds for Wards, token systems, rep grinds. It is becoming WoW 2006 while WoW is becoming an easy Romper Room game. I sure hope Mythic finds its place soon. I would rather play Conan right now to be honest, at least it is improving
@Br3ntbr0 - Words from my mouth, you haz taken dem.
Even if I wanted to participate in a city siege, my RL responsibilites prevent me from being able to do so. Scan all the city sieges across every WAR server since release and I think you'll find that the vast majority of them have taken place during the wee hours of the morning.
To make matters worse, where is my motivation to propel others toward content I can never dream of experiencing? Why would I spend my entire four hour gaming session pushing to a city for other people in my realm?
That may sound selfish, but I'm basically paying $15 per month to propel others to the endgame. It makes absolutely no sense. Why would anyone want to do that? People play these games to be the hero, not some pathetic pawn.
Mythic is so out of touch with the average casual gamer it is hilarious. Just look at the new token system. In typical Mythic fashion it's going to be a huge grindfest. You will probably have better luck getting the gear from their currently borked contribution system than you would collecting hundreds upon hundreds of tokens to use as currency.
Mythic pitched WAR as a casual RvR "game" that was much more casual friendly than any other MMO out there and since launch they've done nothing but backpeddle on that.
First off, the developers of WAR specifically said over time that they weren't trying to compete with WoW. It could be argued that they are competing, but they are competing with every MMO if that's the case. WoW is the big seller, but it's not a PvP game.
I think WAR is getting better at too slow of a rate to appeal to most people. I can only laugh at some of the ideas Mythic proposes. They need to stop trying to save a sinking ship with buckets and get a tugboat to pull them to shore. It's not too late, but they've taken a lot of water.
WAR is even a pretty simplistic PvP game with AOE damage/healing so high. As a healer in T4 you're more or less limited to spamming group heals and throwing around hots if you have time. The only real challenge in WAR is trying to take out large groups (lets say 20 or so) with small groups (6-8). Even that is easy if there aren't enough solid players in the opposing warband.
WAR needs help and lots of it, but it's still a fun enough PvP experience to keep some subscribers.
Just because the developers said they weren't trying to compete with World of Warcraft, that doesn't mean that EA and Mythic heads weren't wanting exactly that. Its naive to think that they didn't want WoW's subscription numbers, and the only way to get that is to hype up a game and start stealing its player base away. That's just what they tried to do, and fell short. Their left hand was saying "we aren't competing with WoW" while their right hand was doing everything it could to compete.
Mythic was and is trying to compete with Blizzard, and they have admitted to being in it for the "long haul."
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/mythic-blizzard-is-in-for-a-lengthy-battle
"This is the beginning of a rather lengthy battle with the guys at Blizzard," Jacobs explained. "We’re in this space to be successful and, when you have a competitor that is as successful and important to the games industry as WoW has been, you don't go into this space unless you're willing to spend money and spend time and really compete against them."
And there you have it. Thx Snaffy!
I wouldn't be too critical of Mythic. I mean, this is the first time they were supposed to do it right? I'm sure when the first few level 60s in WoW attempted their first raid they failed epically and it took them a long long time before they got anywhere.
The concern should be about what Mythic is now going to do in the future to fix this because 14 hours of PvE is rediculous
You got it a bit wrong.
The encounter itself did not take 14 hours.
That time refers to locking down 2 T4 zones, each with 4 BOs and 2 keeps (so 8 BOs and 4 keeps in total), capturing 2 fortresses after that and proceeding through stage 1 of the city invasion.
All of that is RvR, and there was quite some defense to overcome until stage 2 of the invasion was triggered. Form that point onwards the defenders get locked out of the city and it becomes PvE only. You need to kill 2 subbosses, then the palace gate becomes accessible and you can engage Karl Franz.
There were *a lot* more people involved in actually getting there than the group that took him down, both during the zonelocks as well as the fortress pushes and stage 1 in the city where you fight the opposing realm.
Also, there´s a video in the making that contains all stages of the final fight; it is overall a little anticlimatic considering the effort a whole realm had to put in though.
There are a few things that bother me about the whole city siege and how it progresses, none of them have to do with what you mentioned so I won´t go into detail here.
It needs more work and thought, that´s for sure.
Gear grinding is insane, I think we can all agree on that - esp. with a contribution system that works like ... well, it doesn´t really.
If one of the folks involved wouldn´t have passed on the Warlord boots the group wouldn´t have had a main tank in full Warlord gear. Which is pretty much required in order to not get one-shotted; and even then it can happen.
Still, tons of fun in the game if you get a few likeminded folks together and roam the RvR lakes during the busy hours you can have a lot of PvP / RvR action.
We barely take keeps anymore as we don´t need the gear at all, ambushing other groups while they are trying to assault keeps and cap BOs is ten times more fun and you get to fight actual players.
Or roam in small groups and do 6vs6.
The game is as much fun as you make out of it :)
Oh, and Re : "I believe 14 hours of PVE tops the end game raid of just about any other MMO out there" - take a look at FFXI or google Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden ;)
And those are indeed PvE all the way through.
The assumptions and assertions in this article are fairly out there. Assuming that WoW was a mistake until Wrath of the Lich King is the biggest. Did having something in the game that few could ever do (naxx/BT) hurt the game at all? The millions of subs that existed before WotLK say no.
Blizzards idea to make raiding accessible to everyone is also not the solution. Easy raiding is as boring as hell, and worse. Some people just do not care for raiding, but do so nevertheless, nothing else left to do and they want the items, after all.
The fascination of world first kills seems to have gone back since the days of EverQuest. They only mattered to the hardcore part of the community anways, and then raiding got its cult status, raid leaders and guild becoming famous as rockstars and their bands in the MMO gamer circles.
But nowadays we have indeed a much more casual and widespread audience, it does not seem to interest them much that Karl Franz got killed. "Oh, I got killed yesterday, too... ah, Franz is a boss? Awesome!" :)
You are right, the time investment is huge, seems as if killing Franz is supposed to be the reward for hardcore players. There is indeed the question if the challenge should also consist in demanding half a day of online time.
@anonymous under Chappo
I'll likely correct the article to reflect that it likely wasn't 14 hours of straight PVE, you are right that its more likely that alot of it was keep flipping for zone control. Still, I'd wager that there's way more PVE involved here than most want to deal with. Regardless of how much PVP/PVE there was in that 14 hour stretch, it was still a 14 hour stretch for a large group of people. That fact remains, and is the main thing to take away from this article.
@anonymous 2nd under chappo
My comments come from personal experience, and Blizzard's own assertions that their content before WotLK was too exclusive, not enough people were able to experience it:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/world-of-warcraft-wrath-of-the-lich-king_7
"But I think Burning Crusade was way too hardcore out of the gate, at the lower raiding tiers. Even the entry-level 25-person raid, Magtheridon, was way too difficult. I'd like to have the 10 and 25 both start off very accessible and understandable, so that players of any skill level who had hit max level would be able to have success, and then progress from there."
Yet the fastest growth in subscribers were pre-wotlk. With their growth rate, WoW should have hit 12 million in february-march. I wouldn't put too much weight on any assertion made by a company itself. Of course they want to say that the last expansion wasn't it and this one is. I'm sure that on the 3rd expansion they pick some other thing that they will put WotLK down. Like: "Oh, WotLK was far too easy.. This expansion we are spot on!" ;)
br3ntb0"Still, I'd wager that there's way more PVE involved here than most want to deal with."
Oh yeah, no doubt; just wanted to point out that - while it was more than I personally want to deal with - the amount of pure PvE during those 14 hours boils down to stage 2 and 3 of the city invasion. As I mentioned, plenty of RvR around before that which was mostly enjoyable :)
The overall time investment does seem a little silly and over the edge, but bear in mind that it was the first time people got there.
As a comparison, the first times I ran MC it took ages and would get spread over a few evenings worth of raiding, usually 3 days at the very start. With practice and gear it became more and more trivial and you´d have more than enough time to squeeze in 2 worldbosses after clearing the instance.
It´s not entirely the same for WAR of course, as you will always have non-scripted encounters (a.k.a. other players) that delay you, but stage 2 + 3 will become easier and faster to complete with people gearing up and getting some experience with the encounters.
That said, the 2 subbosses in stage 2 are quite good imo and make a nice change from the usual tank + spank. Didn´t get to the emperor myself, but from what I gathered after speaking with a few people involved the fight as such was a bit anticlimatic.
If we view killing Karl Franz as a world/server event, then it shouldn't be a 5 minute job. If you have any world event which is meant to have serious reprecussions, then we have to accept things are going to happen at times when we aren't on. Otherwise, it's going to be just like a 4 hour wow raid.
There are a large majority of us, whom will never fight a king. But in the grand scheme of things, that's one encounter. Yes it would be nice, but it's not the end of the world. There are plenty of other things to do.
Hell if you compared this to when I played WoW, I never went on a raid, since I couldn't find the time to do 2/3 hour raids. So I really don't view this any different.
"anyone surprised that it was Destruction capturing Altdorf" if i am not mistaken...there was an order side guild made up primarly of devs that sacked IC 3-4 times before that destro server managed it. Even then, Mythic currently has the problem with overcompensating for balance issues. One patch a class is way op, next patch, its useless, patch after, op again.
They need to learn to take steps in moderation, instead of doing things like increasing the amount of resistance to get 1% protection, and lowering the cap by 25-35% in the same patch.
Not sure how it is on other servers, but on my server, pre-1.2 usually on the weekends, order would band together and by sunday night sacked IC, and during the weekdays, usually by thurs-friday, destro would sack Aldorf.
After 1.2 order has sacked IC every single night, and sometimes twice in one day.
I am sorry but, for such a huge swing in the balance of the server to happen basically overnight with one patch....they need to pay attention to what they change before they patch it.
Also there is problem with mods and hacks that somehow exploit the game. Other day myself(dps spec tank) and a healer, went head to head with a order healer 2 levels below us....not only could we not damage him below 85% but he hit so hard that my healer friend couldnt keep up. Looked up his gear on warhammeronline.com....he was in nothing but greens and a few blues, had about 2/3rds the armor and 1/2 the resistances of my healer...how can he do that? Did a little research, there is mods that can alter the effectiveness of armor and resistance per point for your character?!
Mythic needs to crack down on mods and addons that can do that and put in placements to make them not work.
That way they can actually get to balancing the factions correctly.