it’s been three months since i first entered the world of warhammer online and although the game keeps getting better with each patch there are still things that feel rough or are downright annoying. this is going to be a review of some sort, of things that come to my mind and that need to be addressed to make the game more enjoyable.
let’s start with something positive. the latest patch 1.1a finally introduced a little icon next to the character portrait of an enemy player so that you can identify the class immediately. this “feature” is pretty standard in each other MMO yet it took the developers of WAR (Mythic) almost 3 months to incorporate it. granted it wasn’t a big issue in scenarios (instanced RvR battles, comparable to the battlegrounds in WoW) since you could always look on the score board and see who the healers are and hence hunt for them specifically. however in open RvR (non instanced PvP) its a pain in to indentify the class of the player you are currently targeting and with usually 50+ enemies around this can get messy. so the little icon (and listing the class name in the tooltip when you hover over a player) is definitely a step in the right direction to make RvR more enjoyable.
however, there are still several broken things in WAR and one of them is the completely messed up contribution/random roll system that is used for loot distribtion when you retake a keep in open RvR. quite similar to Public Quests (PQs) each player who takes part in a keep take gets a score called contribution which in turn is added to a random 1000 roll. the higher your contribution, the higher is your chance to get one of the three goldbags (which contain parts of set items) that are up for grabs in keep takes. theoretically the contribution should be based on how active you are during the battle for the keep: your taken damage, your dps, your healing… those factors should all be considered for contribution. as it stands now, contribution seems to be completely random. i saw people getting the highest contribtion of all who joined into the keep take like 30 seconds before the keep lord was defeated and hit the lord maybe once. rumors have it that contribution is a random number assigned to each player when they enter an area. the observation that the same people won goldbags at both keeps in one area seems to confirm this assumption. this needs to be addressed and fixed so that actually the effort of the player is rewarded.
this brings up the issue of fortress sieges that are considered a part of “endgame RvR” in WAR and apart from rewarding goldbags are a prerequisite to siege the enemies city and capture their king. currently, fortress sieges are a lag fest. with around 200 people at a fortress the server lag is insane: people popping out of thin air and disappearing the same way, instant spells and attacks taking up to 20 seconds to fire, and server crashes basically make fortress sieges unplayable right now. additionally, there is a time limit for the siege and if the server crashes or too many people lag your attempt to take the fortress will inevitably fail. right now i cant see myself invading the enemies city anytime soon since you need to capture two fortresses (out of three) before you can make an assault on Altdorf or The Inevitable City.
last but not least the most annoying problem are still the random CTDs (crash to desktop). out of the blue the game just closes, no error message, no warning, nothing. its annoying to say the least and especially annoying when you are about to kill a keep lord and CTD. you will find yourself back at the “nearest” warcamp once you log back in and will miss out on renown points and potential gold bags.