For Ravey..

this is what Mark Jacobs posted on the 29th on the Herald. I know I was supposed to post this earlier, but I forgot, soz....

Folks,

Well, the cat is out of the bag (or would that be the Liche High Priest out of the tomb?) but hey, that's what happens when there is a lot of excitement about a product. We’ve already seen a flurry of interviews and videos about what we are going to be working on over the next few months, so I won't go into excruciating detail now. I will though focus on some of the main things that we are working on, including the "Call to Arms" expansion, over the next five months especially if those things do not fall into the CtA expansion itself.



First, as for the Live Expansion pack, we have always believed in giving our players a lot of subscription-based content for the game. This "Call to Arms" expansion arc represents a large amount of content that will be spread out over a few months. When you factor in all the content that will be added as part of this arc, it certainly makes it one of the largest subscription-based content upgrades/addons done by any MMO developer. CtA alone is pretty cool but it does not, in any way, represent everything that we are working on (or have been working on).

Second, as for the new careers, what can I say but they are both very, very cool. Players have asked us for a year whether we would put the Choppa back in and many have asked (especially here on the Vault) that we please add the Slayer. The Slayer was never planned to be a part of the game but based on both player feedback and the support we got from GW on this character, we were able to create a very cool career. When we first removed the four careers from the game during development, there was a lot of teeth gnashing and speculation that we would not put them back in until we did our first paid expansion pack. As I said then, we would not do that and we have kept our word. Once the Choppa/Slayer go LIVE, we will have added four careers to the game over the first 6 months of its life, and at no additional charge to our players. No other subscription-based MMORPG that I am aware of has ever added 4 new careers to its game as part of a regular update/addon/free expansion.

Third, as for the Live Events, our previous LEs have been quite successful, so we thought we would add some more over the next few months.

Fourth, as for the Tomb Kings and the RvR dungeon, I think it is very safe to say that DAoC's Darkness Falls was one of the most successful addons to the game. Over the last few months we've gotten a ton of feedback and requests (once again, here on the Vault) asking us to create a next-generation DF, and we are in the process of doing just that. So, if you liked DF, then this zone/dungeon we are creating is right up your alley. It is truly the spiritual successor to DF and I expect that when you see where we're going with it, you'll like it a lot.

Fifth, over this expansion arc, we will also be focusing many other areas of the game. The list of changes and improvements that are happening over the next five months are rather lengthy but here are some of the highlights from the first of two major patches (1.2 and 1.3). Some of the things that we hope will be part of the 1.2 cycle (1.20, 1.21, etc.):

1) Bug fixing - Correcting bugs, even little ones, is still a priority for us. The list of bug fixes in the next couple of patches is lengthy and we will continue to hot fix bugs on an ongoing basis. The team has been working on everything from small bugs (tooltips) to larger issues.

2) RvR code fixes - Over the last two weeks, the number of Fortress crashes have shrunk down to a total of one per week total across all servers. The number of Fortress takes/sieges has also increased every week and it is safe to say that things are better than ever in this aspect of the game so I can happily steal a line from The Princess Bride and say "Have fun storming the castle!" even now. Work will continue until those crashes go down to zero. Once that happens, we can look at increasing the hard cap.

3) RvR changes/improvements. - This is a rather lengthy list which includes a new scenario, changes to the Zone control system, lots of Keep Upgrades (this is only our first pass at it), oRvR events and additional rewards for Zone and Campaign captures.

4) Career balancing - Lots and lots of changes/fixes in this next patch across all careers. As I mentioned in one of my posts, I was going through the preliminary bug fixes/balance changes patch notes and after reading through 15+ pages of them, it’s safe to say that the C&C team has been rather busy lately. We know how important balancing the careers of an MMO is to the players and that’s why the team has put so much effort into it to date and will continue to do so going forward. Every career has gotten some attention from the team in 1.2 whether it is fixing bugs or balancing their abilities. The team has paid particular attention to crowd control abilities and will continue to do so with 1.3.

5) Changes to "quality of WAR" such as new armor and mount color diversity for high-level guilds, flight masters added to every zone that doesn't have one, ability to attach multiple items to mail system, improvements to the Guild and Warband UI, and improvements to our Guild Reward systems.

So, that's just some of the things that will be coming down the road over the next few months. Again, this is just patch cycle 1.2, patch cycle 1.3 will see even more stuff coming from us in 1.3 and even 1.2. These patches contain a tremendous amount of content, fixes, the introduction of new systems and balancing, and combined with the appearance of the Tomb Kings and their RvR dungeon, the new classes, etc. represent huge additions to the game. Patch 1.3 is another big patch from us and we’ll start talking about it after 1.2 goes LIVE. Expect that we will continue to focus on oRvR (some new systems, improvements to fortresses, etc.), careers, guilds, bugs, and a whole lot more.

In terms of 1.2, that is intended to go to the Public Test server in early February. Normally I’d do a full “Sneak Peak” at the patch by the next week (and I still might) but as I’ve been saying over the last few weeks, I wanted to talk about some of the other highlights today. There’s already a lot of coverage of the expansion around the web and if you haven’t been to some of the major sites that cover WAR, you might want to take a look at all the cool stuff that we are working on.

As always, we thank you for your patronage, support, and patience.

Mark

And here's something else for Ravey to Troll during work lol.....


Folks,

So, I’m pleased to announce that in the next few months Mythic will be hosting, for the first time, its own Official Forums for one of its games. Now, I expect that some (okay, a lot) of you are wondering what form these forums will take and why, after so many years of being rather vocal against OFs, are we doing them now. I hope to answer both of these questions here today.


First, as to the form the forums will take, I think it is safe to say that our Community Management team has the mandate to create and moderate the best game forums for any MMO. We have spent a lot of time both looking at other games’ support forums and talking about how we can do even better. Our forums will have all the expected niceties as well as our own twist on things. We will also have only full and part-time paid experienced moderators on the forums who will be part of the Mythic team. The forums will be laid out in an easy to access manner, low on the graphics/flash nonsense and we will not be running ads of any kind on the forums. We will have a code of conduct on the forums which the moderators will enforce but this code will not be there to stifle debate but to ensure that name-calling, insults, threats, etc. whether to Mythic, EA, other developers and other players will not be tolerated. This is a similar policy to the one we had with our beta forums and similar to that found on some other forums.

In addition, only players with an active WAR subscription will be allowed to post on the forums. There will be a number of different account “levels” on these forums and players who show that they can contribute to the ongoing improvement of WAR, whether through suggestions, critical evaluation, user-generated content, peer-to-peer (in other words, contribution has its privileges) will be given greater access to private areas of the boards where Mythic developers (including myself and strike team leads) will be posting extensively, in addition to our posting in the public forums, and talking to these players about key issues/concerns. As an FYI, simply praising Mythic will not get players this access, we’ll be looking for those people who have shown either through our beta program or post-launch that they are actively interested in engaging in the kind of critical thinking and/or bug reporting that can help us continue to improve WAR. Also, we plan over the long-term to give additional rewards, centered on the game, for those that have really helped us out. However, players who engage in behavior that violates our Code of Conduct will have their posting privileges restricted and they will be denied access to the forums.

We will be releasing much more information about the forums in the coming weeks and we hope to being inviting people into our forums in February to participate in upcoming Public Tests. What you see when you log into our forums will only be the first stage of our development of these forums. We’ve only been working on these forums since December, so we haven’t had a ton of time to work on them, but we think we’re off to a great start.

Now, as to why I have reversed my rather vocal stance on internal support forums for a game. Quite frankly, I still believe that OFs are not a panacea to cure all the ills of a game. I still also remain convinced that having OFs are not a guarantee of success for an MMO. However, I do think that right now we should have our own OFs because it will allow us to communicate with and better support the players of WAR. I spent a long time thinking about this and then talking about with this with Rob and senior leadership at Mythic. It wasn’t an easy decision to make due to a host of factors, including the cost of running these forums properly but in the end we decided that it was the right thing to do. And I want to emphasize that one of the most important factors in running these forums was that we were going to spend a significant amount of money in order to run these forums properly. While I don’t want to put too fine a point on it and say we are sparing no expense (two movie line quotes in one sentence, FTW!) excellent (and upgradeable) forum software, paid moderators, etc. in order to give our players a great place to post and interact with each other and with the Mythic community management team and developers. If we couldn’t have done that I would not have changed my mind.

We have had some great experiences on public forums over the last decade but the time is right to operate our own forums. I would be remiss if I didn’t take the time to thank places like the IGN Vault and the Warhammer Alliance as well as the other sites that I and/or Mythic folks have posted to over the years. We hope to continue our relationship with such sites even as we move forward with our own forums as a thank you for the support (and the occasional rotten fruit and salad mixings) that have been thrown our way. I still believe that there is a major role that these sites, and others like them, can continue to play for WAR and other MMOs in the future. Our CM/marketing team will be happy to talk to you about that going forward.

So, every journey begins with a first step and we are in the process of taking our first step into the world of official forums. I expect we will make mistakes and encounter bumps and bruises along the way but in the end I hope we will have the best forums of any MMO. A bold statement to be sure but that is our intent.

Mark

Thanks! But I already left work. I'll come back and troll on Monday

When this game was first announced back in like 2006, and they said they were totally against official forums, and that official forums were the source of all evil, I thought, "wow, how stupid can you get."

I even got a temporary ban from WHA (back when they actually moderated it) for continually bringing the discussion up and trying to get Mythic to understand that if they don't at least PRETEND to communicate with their community that they were being morons.

And now, I feel like necroing all those old threads with a big fucking I TOLD YOU SO MOTHERFUCKERS!

In fact, it might be worth another temp ban to do it.

Mutter wrote:

And now, I feel like necroing all those old threads with a big fucking I TOLD YOU SO MOTHERFUCKERS!

In fact, it might be worth another temp ban to do it.

Always worth it. It's the internets, why let them get away with being assholes without a celebratory hahaha you're fucking dumb post

I still smell a giant witch elf nerf coming....But I'm particularly excited about them "working" on CCs though. Hopefully this includes an immunity timer that's worth a damn and higher cooldowns for CC skills. We can dream right