Week of WAR – Day 3
Of all weeks to have to work extra hours, the had to be the week. I got home late last night so I did not get to play as much Warhammer as I would have liked. The good news is that I'm out of Tier 1 now. Maybe I can take part in a keep siege tonight.
Tier 1 just needs to be removed. Simply that. It lacks purpose and focus. The other thing that would help is if they had a low level keep and improved influence gains. When I spend a total of three hours in the RvR lake and am only half way to the first influence reward, things are too slow.
I have come to hate the Vegas roll system. Coming in first place for contributions but not getting anything for your efforts is terrible design. We were doing the chapter 4 public quest in Chaos lands where you burn wagons, fight soldiers and then a Knight of the Burning Sun. I came in first in contributions twice. The first time I rolled and 88 and even with the +500 was bottom of the loot charts and the second time I rolled about a 220 and only got one of the bad loot bags that does not have anything good in it.
The other solution for the Vegas loot system is change the way points work. Right now, first place contribution gets +500, then +450 then +400 and so on from there. Instead, set a pool of like 2500 "contribution points." Have the amount you get be in direct relation to the percentage of contribution they have you marked at. If you're at 50%, you get +1250, If you only did 10% contribution, you only get +250. Then have the Vegas 1000 sided dice roll after that. I often feel like I'm contributing a lot more compared to the next person on the list yet we're still only 50 points apart in this system. I would like more transparency to see the actual contribution percentages.
I explored the rest of the tier 1 map that I could explore. I found a huge public quest to the far south of the Chaos/Empire tier 1 zones that was marked as "Hard" since it was basically a PQ in a huge town. Obviously no one was there so I will never get to experience that one.
The night ended with me hitting rank 11 and renown rank 9, moving on to tier 2 (which I think looks a lot better than tier 1) and abandoning all my old tier 1 quests.
What I wonder is how many quests are carbon copies of each other. Since Chaos and Order are mirrored, how much variety are there in the quests for each side or do all the tier 1 Chaos quests have an exact mirror Order quest with just the names changed?
Also, I hope you do not expect me to write about the new WoW patch 3.1 news. There are a million other blogs already talking about it and you do not need me to repeat it.
February 6th, 2009 - 23:09
While I agree that Tier 1 seems very weak, I think there’s some kind of design concept that says your starting area should ease people into your game. And, I realize you are not new to MMO’s, I do think Mythic felt heavily obligated to include this kind of introduction area.
Given the speed you flew through it, is it really that bad?