---

Andy wrote:

I wanted to take some time to let you know what the Community Team is currently conveying as important issues to the Dev Team and what the Dev Team is working on. Please keep in mind, this isn't a complete list, but rather a compiled list of things that we consider "Hot" issues since the launch of 1.3.2.

 

Our goal is to provide players a steady stream of information regarding these concerns in the coming weeks. This information may come in the form of our future/immediate plans for these concerns or informative posts/articles to help educate the community on what was changed and why we did it.

 

• Tier 4 Campaign: We understand that the frequency of City Invasion is a primary concern for the community. We're accutely aware that the amount of times that cities are being cracked right now is, to put it bluntly, high. This was not an unexpected result of the removal of Fortresses, and there are positives to this, the least of which is exposing more players to WAR's endgame. That being said, we plan on having more details about the much anticipated Underdog System soon. Also, please be assured that we understand that these concerns go hand in hand with population balance concerns in general.
  
  

Doing this without the underdog system was a terrible decision.  In theory alot of the changes sound good, but the 2nd ramp in keeps, reduction in AoE/CC, removal of forts, still only need 2 pairings(poor unused dwarf v goblin pairing), and now easy mode to stage 2 you've actually made the losing side worse off then at any point in this games history.

 

0/10

 

• State of the City Siege experience: We hear the players concerns about the city siege experience. There's number of concerns about parts of the City Siege ranging from the Stage 1 Lord encounters to players becoming disinterested after the first hour of the City. We're actively investigating solutions to this and want to have more information to you soon.

 

The city siege in stage one is great, stage 2 I will log one of my destro 50+s and see since all servers have altdorf on farm(who knew more order would bail for aion).  On the losing side of stage 2 is the worst game design I have experienced yet.  Really you all thought it would be fun for people to do the same PQ over and over and this time have no opposition?

 

3/10

We've also been looking into player concerns about the City Siege VP, and yes, we did find some issues making the transition from Stage 1 to Stage 2 more difficult than it should be. We should have some fixes for these issues very soon. 

---

Overall I feel the changes were good. The removal of forts has made battles over locks more intense and suspenseful, and open RvR has enjoyed a large increase in participants. I have also noticed a decrease in lag and client issues, which is always good.

However, I feel like this patch was crafted without all classes in mind, in particular the WL. We were shafted yet again, now burdened with exorbitant AP costs, an even buggier (is this possible?) pet, and the pet for some reason having a channel ability that roots it in place. Not to mention our CC is even less reliable than before, making timing our knockdown with our burst impossible. We had the worst CC in the game pre-patch, and now it's a joke, a crapshoot at best. The WL receiving all of the blanket nerfs with none of the individual consideration other classes get has left most of the WL community demoralized and bitter. For a more consolidated list of our grievances, I will direct you to a thread on the official forums http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=highelf_wl&thread.id=6321  that I hope you will find helpful in approaching this class in the future.

In general, I think this patch was good, but the mishandling and outright ignoring of the WL class is getting absurd.

My big concern is the city sieges. As it is when a city is under attack it is the only thing you can do it T4. If I don't feel like doing the city then I have to log. The city is only one zone with no sc's for T4 and 3 bo's. That's very little content compared to the rest of T4, and with this patch it's the vast majoirty of what I see. Anywhere else in the game you have a variety of things to do. Doing the same boring PQ over and over and over for 8 hours gets old fast. When destro reaches stage 2 twice in a day (which happened on Volkmar) that's 16 hours of nothing but city sieges. No orvr, no sc's, nothing but PQ farming. Period.

Whatever you do with forts, make them available during a city siege. I don't know of anyone that actually enjoys the city siege and would be happy with something else to do.

How about if whichever pairing is not completely locked in T4 is still contested? That way we can still do T4 orvr and sc's when we don't feel like doing the city. Like if destro locks the empire/chaos and elf pairings, but doesn't capture KV to lock the dwarf one, then we can still fight there for vp and do sc's. The orvr and sc's are what a lot of people enjoy. As it stands, if one side does to well, you take the fun out of the game by taking the sc's and orvr away.

Please allow us to use guild scrolls no matter how many stars the city has. It doesn't make sense to take this away. It's just one more thing to discourage the losing side, and when they get discouraged then they are less likely to log on, if they log in at all.

So the AP thing is fixed, that's nice to see.  It's now easier to get into a city siege, also nice to see even tho I play order on Gorfang and we basically get shafted on that one.  At least the AP bar now serves a purpose, I was thinking it was just a nice bottom border for my health bar.

My real "concerns" involve the actual UI and the really messed bugs that show up with patches.  It's just a hot mess, no other way to describe it.  The game has been out for a year now and the UI is still riddled with bugs.  The minimap doesn't always show the terrain when I fly into a zone.  The randomly showing people in a group or warband as distant when their standing right next to you, or how about saying their dead when in fact their not?  With this latest patch being dropped I now get crashes to my desktop with no error codes or anything saying why it crashed, but if I let it crash 3 times in a row with a restart I get a guaranteed hard lock of my system! yay!  Oh, and today I logged on and went into an RvR zone and got bombarded with tells asking why people couldn't join my warband.  And the kicker...I was solo, no in, not formed, not even still in one from the night before.  But there I was listed as a warband leader in the 'open party/warband' page!

I will admit I haven't been playing the game this whole year. I played for the first 3 months or so on a rig that just couldn't handle the large scale RvR.  When the '10 days free/please come back' offer was emailed to me I tried it, after getting a disconnect 10 min. into trying it again I promptly canceled my subscription.  But I've come back two months ago with a rig that can more than run it and found new content.......but a lot of the same bugs I saw at release.  And this really, REALLY, just boggles me.  The game itself was, and is still, packed full of potential. Sure, the servers are less laggy, there's LotD.....now city sieges are easier to get into.  But the one part of the game that everyone has to go thru, the User Interface, is still rubbish.

  If the time and effort had been put into polishing and fixing the existing game and building a UI that was absolutely flawless instead of the new content and holiday events, I don't think there would have been such a large exodus of players.  I just remember all the hype and being disappointed with the bugs and what appeared to be a beta version that I was paying for to play.  And I hate to say it, but it's a year later and it still looks like the game is in a beta test phase, and  I'm actually paying to play it...again.

As for the buggy patches...I don't know what to say.  One thing gets fixed and a good two to five other things get broken/new bugs arise.  Every time I see a so called hot fix now I think of band aids, it's something to cover up a booboo you made. 

Now on to the good stuff.  I do love the game enuff to continue my subscription.  And from talking to other people that play the game, they are just the same.  When it's working, the game is great.  The RvR system is incredible.  The actually battles don't really come down if you have the best gear, it's if you know how to play your classes right.  The lack of having to grind for gold all the time to do stuff is great.  The public quest system, love it.  There are so many great ideas and executions of things.  The redesign of gear sets, they look awesome.

I just want to see the game actually live up to all the hype there was before release.  I'd also like to say that the money I spent to buy the game was well spent, I'm still not blown away with my purchase.  Have your developers, or programmers, or whatever their called stop trying to come out with new stuff and fix the stuff that is and has been wrong for way too long.  We could have lived with the fortresses to get a new UI that had absolutely no bugs.  Make sure that patches are not going to cause computers to crash because of them.  If this means firing and getting new people, then so be it.  Or go poke the big EA guys with some pointy sticks till more funds come pouring out of them to fix the game.

So as a recap.... great game, but stop trying to bring out new stuff and try to just polish the existing.  New UI? Please? Or fix it so it works flawlessly?  And no more patches that cause more problems than they fix?  And try staffing more CSR's for in game problems, I spent over six hours today waiting on a ticket I put in, I ended up fixing the problem myself before finally just canceling the ticket.  And I've yet to hear a thing about the crashing to desktop.  I've put in bug reports in game and posted on the forums....nada in return.

AP thing is fine but why do some classes have next to no AP management issues while others are just standing around in fights waiting for AP to replenish.  I mean really, sorc's and bw's with bottemless pools again -_-

i should have just rolled a dok/choppa/sorc/chosen and id be laughin my bum off now.  seriously, just charge people 50 or 100 bucks to allow a class change on the same side and youd see the cash roll in.  and think about this...you could remove more than half the classes so bugs and balancing is even easier!

at least im still happy that i have 3 seconds if being hit by 'something' (the last of which is pistol whip) and im dead before the effect is off.  awesome stuff, really it is.  i think everyones a huge fan of literally not being able to cc or detaunt due to lag then being cc'ed and slowed so you can do anything as you die.  what armor and rank will it take for this not to happen?  rr95 and the crown of thorns set?

---

Webspinr wrote:
To be perfectly honest, I feel the constant city sieges to be tiring.  Pushing the city several times a day leaves no opportunity for my T4's to do anything else.  The same city siege every night is boring when there is RvR and a worthless waste of time when there is no RvR.  It is especially bad when it appears that Gorfang's Altdorf is bugged somehow.  I've been a player since launch and believe that the push to the cities are far to easy, unchallenging and underwhelming.  I honestly feel cheated of my efforts.

---

This.

I actually have something else to add to this thread.

When are we going to see some real action from the Devs on preventing cheating in this game?  My opinion is that most of the player imbalance is driven by the incessent cheating happening.  Cheating discourages players, results in subscription loss and reduces the desire to participate in group activities.  Cheating also encourages further cheating.  If you truly plan to keep this game viable, your focus should be on eliminating the cheaters, game hackers and multi-boxers.  Any other focus on game experience is simply toilet fodder beyond this.  We need a long term ban on first offences and a perma-ban on 2nd-time cheaters (or at least their account reset to 0).  Otherwise your subscription base will be reduced to only cheaters and Mythic will leave an epic bad taste in "real" player's mouths.

---

Andy wrote:

I wanted to take some time to let you know what the Community Team is currently conveying as important issues to the Dev Team and what the Dev Team is working on. Please keep in mind, this isn't a complete list, but rather a compiled list of things that we consider "Hot" issues since the launch of 1.3.2.

 

Our goal is to provide players a steady stream of information regarding these concerns in the coming weeks. This information may come in the form of our future/immediate plans for these concerns or informative posts/articles to help educate the community on what was changed and why we did it.

 

• Tier 4 Campaign: We understand that the frequency of City Invasion is a primary concern for the community. We're accutely aware that the amount of times that cities are being cracked right now is, to put it bluntly, high. This was not an unexpected result of the removal of Fortresses, and there are positives to this, the least of which is exposing more players to WAR's endgame. That being said, we plan on having more details about the much anticipated Underdog System soon. Also, please be assured that we understand that these concerns go hand in hand with population balance concerns in general.
•  
• Believe me, it is not a 'positive'.
  
  
• State of the City Siege experience: We hear the players concerns about the city siege experience. There's number of concerns about parts of the City Siege ranging from the Stage 1 Lord encounters to players becoming disinterested after the first hour of the City. We're actively investigating solutions to this and want to have more information to you soon.

We've also been looking into player concerns about the City Siege VP, and yes, we did find some issues making the transition from Stage 1 to Stage 2 more difficult than it should be. We should have some fixes for these issues very soon. 

 

Try under 10 minutes.

•  AP Regen: We understand that many players right now are having a difficult time adjusting to the recent changes to AP regen. Over the coming days we plan on giving the community greater insight as to why we made this change and how we feel it will effect gameplay moving forward. For the immediate (coming weeks) future, our plan regarding these changes is to observe, report, analyze and react.
  
  We are not making any immediate changes nor will we make knee jerk reactions. As has been our approach with all of our recent Combat and Careers changes, we have a set plan of attack and we are sticking to it. So far, player reaction to this change has been mixed, skewing more towards a positive reception than otherwise.
  
  Again, please watch the forums and the Herald for more information and educational posts regarding this change.
• I don't mind the AP changes as such, but they are highlighting overpowered abilities and gear, and they are playing right into the hands of such things as 'bomb groups'. Are 'bomb groups' (just like the disaster that was 'timer dumping' in DAoC) really the direction you want this game to go? I need to know, because if that is your 'plan of attack and you are sticking to it' I'd like confirmation asap so I can cancel sooner rather than later.
  
  
• Chosen Aura Bug: Watch the Herald tonight for some Hot Fix notes that include the following:
  
  "Fixed a bug which could occasionally prevent Chosen auras from toggling off."
   Good.
  
• Client crashes and data corruption amongst Trial Client users: We have identified the cause of this issue and it has been addressed on our internal test servers. This means it should be live soon, if it isn't already . 
• I haven't had CTD's before, yet I am now getting them occasionally, as soon as I click on a destination with the Flight Master. OS is Vista 64, and I repeat, I have had almost zero issues with the game, other than when I had a rubbish motherboard in a temporary system that had a rather non-compliant chipset on it.

 

So these are just some of the issues that we've identified as areas of concern to the Community since 1.3.2 went live. As always, we're reading these forums night and day, spending time playing side by side with our players and overall enjoying all of the amazing performance enhancements introduced in 1.3.2. This patch cycle has been an exciting one and we're equally excited about what the future holds for WAR and all of it's players.

 

Put it this way - it's finished me with T4. It's also finished most of my Guildies with T4. Talking it up like that, isn't doing you any favours.

 

We're well on our way to making WAR everything it has the potential to be and we couldn't do it without the support of you, the  players.

 

Sorry, I'm coming to the conclusion that your just pandering to jerks that want to be overpowered douchebags. Just like with DAoC, all you will then end up with, will be jerks. Try and prove me wrong please.

 

We'll see you on the battlefield. 

 

Not in T4 for the forseeable you won't (and sadly the same can be said for most of my Guildies). Plus if you don't start to prove me wrong, in the very near future, you will not be seeing me in the game. At all.

 

Please keep conversation civil and polite. We will be heavily moderating this thread.

 

I tried my best.

 

Bottom line, the PvE MMO gear progression and reward system dependant upon introducing or even tolerating overpowered items and overpowered abilities, has no business being anywhere near a PvP game. It's supposed to be, Player vs Player, NOT Gear vs Gear or Overpowered Ability vs Overpowered Ability. 

 

All you have done, and all you are doing, is creating 'just another failed route' straight to Easymode (yes it takes time to get there, but all there is at the end of it all, is 'Easymode' - what a wonderful reward eh?).

 

I've about had it with this unworthy approach to 'gaming' (it isn't gaming, and doesn't deserve the word). You are going to lose the last of your genuine gamers, and that does not bode well.

---

But I thought having the ability to fly and immediate self rezing bright wizards was an ability you gain at a higher renown level.  Now I have nothing to look forward to. 

I hate my life.

On a serious note... yes this problem does need to be addressed.  It is very frustrating to those of us that actually do play by the rules and want to enjoy the game... even with all of it's flaws.

Tier 4 Campaign: We understand that the frequency of City Invasion is a primary concern for the community. We're accutely aware that the amount of times that cities are being cracked right now is, to put it bluntly, high. This was not an unexpected result of the removal of Fortresses, and there are positives to this, the least of which is exposing more players to WAR's endgame. That being said, we plan on having more details about the much anticipated Underdog System soon. Also, please be assured that we understand that these concerns go hand in hand with population balance concerns in general.

Please don't wait too long as there are many other side affects.  On my server, Destruction is in Altdorf 2 to 3 times a day ...and with the new VP system has left Order at 1 star with no way of defending with the population imballance.  So until we can get more than one star ... new level 40's cannot complete Lost Vale (quest issue), invader and up gear is not available for purchase since the merchants are in guild hall and kings area --- to name a couple.

Players on these imballanced servers have no recourse and I would encourage you to remove the 'star' restrictions on guild hall and city area until you can fully address the population issue.

---

 Please don't wait too long as there are many other side affects.  On my server, Destruction is in Altdorf 2 to 3 times a day ...and with the new VP system has left Order at 1 star with no way of defending with the population imballance.  So until we can get more than one star ... new level 40's cannot complete Lost Vale (quest issue), invader and up gear is not available for purchase since the merchants are in guild hall and kings area --- to name a couple.

 

 Lost Valle? What is it? Oh.. i know, i heard a tale about this legendary dungeon, but neer could go there  since I got lv 40.

"...players becoming disinterested after the first hour of the City...". Gee, grind the same PQ over and over again. How much fun can we have. Yay. Rah. In one hour I want to be DONE the city. 2 hours plus 30m for "rebuild" (whatever the heck that means) is too long. Chop an hour (or at least a half hour) off the City.

-Stav

We have some HUGE Issues with the Arena Warlord Instance i the IC It seems that the monsters never had their health tuned for 24 man runs and still have it set for 48 man. As well as there is some Severe Leashing issues that need to be addressed We got to the final Lord in the third stage I believe and we wiped but instead of the boss just resetting he ran up to our spawn point and was one shotting people as they res'd You also need to do something about his adds they shouldn't have as much health as the boss that is a ridiculous mechanic that needs to be addressed as well. 

Here is the Video so you can see what we went through exactly. We did end up killing him but ONLY our server went down for maintenance 5 minutes after he was defeated.

http://www.xfire.com/video/17985c/ 

The point of no developers replying to any of these posts is a good one.  Maybe we should physically call them and complain.  Might actually get a response then. But then again, if they can't answer a forum, or get to a CSR appeal, guessing we'd just get an answering machine.

As for the fixing of client crashes.  I've actually broken down and completely reloaded the game to see if that would fix my constant crashes, nada.  Instead of fixing crashes they've caused them for me.  And I've yet to hear a thing in forums from my post on the problem let alone the bug reports I've put in while in game.

I'd like to at lest be given a generic "we're investigating" or "we understand your concern" reply of some sort. 

One of the main impacts with frequent city raids is that there are no scenarios to do in t4, no open rvr in t4, and renown from the city is horrible for the amount of time you spend in the city. It's really crippling players' ability to increase their RR so they can actually USE the gear they can buy with all their Invader tokens from city fight. Which means, there is less chance that people are going to be able to do Stage 2 of the city (bwc/temple/palace etc.).

-Stav

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Aonaranach wrote:
APs: Seems of out whack right now, but this strikes me as a change in the right direction. There obviously needs to be a huge overhaul of abilities to ensure AP costs are in line with effectiveness, but I'm a cockeyed optimist so I hold out hope that'll happen. In particular, there needs to be an adjustment of ranged vs. melee costs, as melee are more often in situations where AP regen is slowed or prevented. I only have to worry about APs on any character when I'm in melee with an opponent, this obviously happens far more often on a melee character.

City sieges: making cities trivial to push without the promised underdog system is possibly the most brain-jarringly stupid development decision I've ever experienced. I hope the underdog system is both fast-tracked for release, and spectacularly brilliant, because that's pretty much what it's going to take to save T4 on Phoenix Throne at least.

Message Edited by Aonaranach on 10-31-2009 04:29 PM

---

Surprisingly intelligent post I just quoted. The AP change was necessary; however, the complete lack of need for AP management up until now has hidden how poorly balanced AP regen is from one ability to the next. A full audit needs to be done for every class and abilities AP requirements need to be normalized. Generally, they should be lowered in cost. I believe this is within the realm of Mythic's abilities... quite an easy fix with just one intelligent person in charge of normalizing everything.

I'll post more on the city sieges in the other developer board in the next day or two.

I'm concernec we haven't really heard anything from the devs for around two weeks now on the subforum labelled 'developer roundtable'. I'm also concerned about how dead the WL forums are. It seems most of the community there has just given up

A little more transparency would be nice is all

All content that is locked out by the stars is BS!.

Remove that and it will be atleast tolerable.   With no Guild hall.   The guilds mobility to move and respond to attacks is non-existant.  cant buy Sovering or Warlord gear,    Karl has shut his door and moving on.   Can't finish Eqpic Quests.  Same reason Door is shut.  Only way to increase stars...  Do Sewers YAY!  Just what I want to spend my time doing is sewers in Altdorf that is build for rank 20's.