“RealID” is what the name suggests: it displays your real life name to friends once you have accepted their request to be a RealID friend. well, i have no issues with that. people that are my real life friends naturally know my real name and vice versa. however, there is a little twist to RealID: a little feature called “friends of friends” quite similar to Facebook with the most notable difference that Facebook offers several layers of privacy options (ok that is up for debate but still) and you can always just use a nickname or fake name on Facebook. RealID uses naturally the name of the WoW account which usually is the name on your credit card and hence you cannot really change it or billing will be messed up.

as mentioned i have no problem with real life mates knowing my name in a virtual world but i am worried by the fact that my real name is visible to friends of my friends who i may not know at all. the most popular argument in this debate is “oh come on, it’s just your name and not your address or any other personal details”. well, it might be just my name but a simple google search using my real name does come up with things about me (professional things mind you) that i do not want people i play a game with to know. i strongly believe in keeping the professional life and the personal life separated and RealID threatens to break down that separation.

one great aspect of the virtual world is that you can be whoever you want to be, you can create a virtual self that can have as much or little in common with your real self as you want it to. mind you, virtual worlds like WoW are a fantasy after all. it’s not like i have something to hide from my virtual friends but it kinda defies the purpose of a virtual life as outlined by Sherry Turkle in her book “Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet“: virtual worlds offer us the chance to have multiple identities and experiment with them as we form in true postmodern tradition something that can be called “patchwork identity”. i am a female tauren deathknight in WoW and a media scientist in real life and i want to keep it that way.

i strongly hope that Blizzard will add some privacy options to RealID in the future that either offer you to display a nickname or deactivates the “friends of friends” feature. i like RealID but as it is right now it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.

so the basic promise of the Dungeon Finder is to provide easy and fast access to five man group content. each instance party needs one tank, one healer and three dps and if you queue up you get to select the role(s) you want to take over. for dps classes the average wait time until a group is found is around 20 minutes, whereas tanks (and possibly healers) get a group significantly faster (apparently the wait time for tanks at lvl 80 is 3 seconds!). if some member of your instance party drops out, you can tell the Dungeon Finder to look for a replacement. which works well if your healer or a dps bails, but if your tank legs it, you are most likely screwed.

i love the underlying functionality of the Dungeon Finder to be able to access five man instances from everywhere in the game world. porting you directly to the instance and using the cross-realm battlegroups as “pools” for player recruitment it does enable indeed easy and fast access to small group content. however, the social side of doing instances gets a bit lost. you don’t know which people you end up doing an instance with which can be both a blessing (if they suck) or a curse (if they are awesome). either way, if those players aren’t from your server the chances that you will ever meet them again are slim. so what i would love to see included in the Dungeon Finder is being able to add people from your cross-realm battlegroup to your friendlist so you can invite them to a party and queue up with them for instances if you enjoyed playing with them.

lotro’s second “expansion” – Siege of Mirkwood (SoM) – came out on December 3, 2009 and now at the end of January 2010 i have two characters at level cap (level 65) that are raid ready (enough radiance armor for the new raid instance Barad Guldur) and a third alt at level 63. my main character did all quests in the new area of Mirkwood, leveled several new legendary items to level 70, maxed the skirmish soldier and farmed the 3 and 6 man instances ad nauseam. additionally, my kin Hope and Glory completed Barad Guldur, the new 12 man raid instance in normal mode one week ago. granted there is still hard mode to crack but everyone seems worn out and you can clearly notice a general raid-fatigue.

there is no word from Turbine yet on when the next content update will be released or what it will contain. i remember vaguely that they mentioned some announcement to be made in mid February 2010 and if this is actually true i would not expect to see the next content patch going live before mid March. what is one supposed to do until then? level more alts to level cap? grind skirmishes? farm Barad Guldur? there is no easy answer to that. an expansion that raises the level cap by five levels, introduces one new area (Mirkwood),  no new skills, virtues or traits, three 3 man and one 6 man instance and one raid instance that contains three bosses… seems a bit thin content wise, doesn’t it?

i really like lotro, it is a great game, no doubt about it and the dx10 graphics are just awesome. the lore, the storyline, questing and instance design is well done and it really developed into a polished, enjoyable mmo over the past 2.5 years. content updates came pretty fast in vanilla lotro: about every two month something was added and come to think of it, the free content patches that introduced Evendim or Forochel were as elaborate as the paid “content patch” that brought us Mirkwood.

my theory is that selling lifetime-subscriptions wasn’t such a good idea and now Turbine lacks the funds to keep developing free content updates in an acceptable time frame. during the lifespan of Mines of Moria (and that’s roughly 12 months) we saw two major content updates and a few smaller ones. the major updates included Lothlorien and the raid instance DN (with six bosses) whereas the small ones introduced minor things like new crafting recipes or the disappointing lair boss known as the Turtle/Toitle.

• the epic grind: i can live with seven digit numbers required to level up if the “grind” is masked by doing quests that require you to kill x or bring y or deliver z to some NPC. questing is something i consider essential to any RPG and it should give you sufficient amounts of xp. lotro does it right: there are more than enough quests to go around and you will easily hit the level cap by doing quests only. aion however has a minimal amount of quests (around 5 quests per level) that in turn give you around 5% of the total xp required to level up. so to fill that 95% of your xp you need to grind: kill the same mobs over and over again for hours on end. not my idea of having a good time in an mmo.
• the free for all zergplay PvP: for a game that claims to focus on PvP you expect epic battles and that skill > numbers of players. well, another disappointment here. skill doesnt matter, the side that brings the higher levels/more numbers win. at lvl 25 you enter the abyss, the huge free for all PvP area and there is little protection for lvl 25 characters: they will get ganked/zerged/killed repeatedly by bored higher level characters. at least in WoW you had a chance to move to another area if you got ganked and corpsecamped somewhere.
• the ridiculous harsh death penalty: if you die, you have a permanent xp loss and suffer from soul sickness, which requires you to pay a rather hefty sum of ingame money to get rid off. by doing so, you get a certain percentage of your lost xp back. granted, you dont suffer from permanent xp loss if you die to another player in PvP. however, if you take damage from another player and get some mobs trained on you that kills you, you get permanent xp loss. its not exactly fun to blow 80% of your ingame money on soul healing bills on one single evening. (trust me, that can happen easily.)
• the flying combat scam: flying around and fighting sounds like fun, but in reality it isnt. in most areas you cannot fly and when you can fly, your flight time is limited to 2 minutes tops. so if you fight in the abyss chasing opponents and you run out of flight time and there is no place to land safely.. you plummet to your death. and guess what? yep, soul healer bill here i come.
• PvE instances with bosses who dont drop loot: imagine you do a PvE instance for 2 hours, you fight your way through thrash mobs and when you finally kill the endboss he drops… nothing. not even money or some vendor trash. now how fun is that? your effort of doing an instance should be rewarded in some form or another. having endbosses of PvE instances drop some loot only once a blue moon… outrageous.
• crafting is just a time and moneysink because the crafting process can fail and you can lose the materials you gathered. same goes for slotting runestones into your gear: if your armour piece has 4 slots and you managed to put 3 runestones in it… theres a chance that the attempt to slot a forth one can fail and hence destroy all of your runestones in the item.

i guess i could go on why i consider Aion yet another mmo fail. one thing is for sure that i wont fall to the hype of upcoming mmos again… WAR and Aion did in fact teach me a lesson.

the game itself is standard mmo fare, you get quests to kill stuff, bring items or the famous fed ex type where you have to talk to someone or deliver something to someone. combat feels smooth although there isn’t any skill queuing so you do end up smashing buttons. however, there is something very asian about combat: your in and out of combat health/mana regen sucks and you do end up sitting down and resting a lot. several quests have nice cutscenes and your campaign quest chain is really very well done and prompted me to say “wow” several times.

classes are pretty generic mmo as well: tank, dps, caster, healer. at level 10 you get to chose a sub job and can specialize. the first char i tried was a scout (dps) and at level 10 i had the choice of assassin (melee dps) or ranger (ranged dps). i went for ranger but only to discover that its not my cup of tea in Aion. naturally you have to kite the mobs you are killing but eventually you will end up being in melee range and having to melee them down. to do that, you need to switch weapons because you can only have either your bow or two melee weapons equipped. i found that bothersome and the fact you need to buy arrow and carry a nice stack with them around made the decision to dump the ranger easy.

next i tried a mage and although being very squishy its the typical nuker/glass canon. at level 10 you have the choice between sorcerer (nuker with CC) or spirit master (dots and a pet/summon) and i opted to go for sorcerer. i enjoy nuking and seeing those big numbers on your screen.

i also tried a priest but i am not level 10 yet, so the decision if i should go cleric (main healer) or chanter (support class with buffs and some healing) still has to be made. currently i am tempted to try chanter because a pure healing class is most likely a pain to level.

i think i wont try the tank class. templar is the sword and board main tank and i can’t see myself playing a tank in a mainly PvP game. gladiator sounds like a dps warrior with aoe capabilities but again, i don’t think i want to be a melee class in Aion.

open beta still runs until sunday.

more content, fewer bugs
for all the games i have seriously (i.e. longer than 30 days) played i can only point out one single game where not enough content and too many bugs are an issue. i can’t say that WoW and LotRO lack content or are so bug-ridden that it impairs your enjoyment. the most important aspect of content is the so called “endgame” content since i am not an alt-o-holic and i want to keep enjoying the MMO of my choice once i hit the level cap. again, WoW and LotRO do quite well at endgame level, providing enough group and raid content to keep both casual and hardcore players happy. however, with WAR things aren’t that great really. granted the game is still young but the proposed endgame is not accessible because of stability issues (i wrote about it) and bugs (fortress lord aoe’ing through the floor would be the prime example).

a social world
the ideal MMO has a good balance between solo, group, and raid content. i don’t want to be forced to group up all the time but on the other hand i don’t like to play solo contantly because all quests can be done without the help of a group. in this matter i think WoW has the best balance, whereas LotRO’s focus is slightly shifted towards group play. WAR however emphasizes “soloability” which in turn makes the game feel like a single player game at some times. i do not play MMOs to have a single player experience, i want to interact and play with other players. hence forcing players to group up is actually something good in my book. however, there should be alternatives available if you cannot seem to get a group for a party quest.

point, click, repeat – delete
i honestly don’t mind clicking the same buttons for a few hours but that’s just me. what bothers me more is running the very same instance again and again. WoW (in The Burning Crusade) and LotRO (in Shadows of Angmar) tried to bring some variation to instances by making the encounters more random. the Black Morass instance and the Angmar battleground come to mind: both featured dynamic spawn mechanics. waves of mobs did not always spawn at place A first, then at place B and after that at place C. it was random, you had to observe and react quickly in order to succeed. i’d like to see more of these dynamic encounters in MMOs.

an RPG without a story
from what i have been told about WoW: Wrath of the Lich King so far, the storytelling seems to be impressive with the use of phasing so that your advancement is reflected in the environment. the overall LotRO storyline is awesome as well, complete with cut scenes and you really feel like you are helping Frodo. there is some kind of phasing in place, too: key quest NPCs are placed in instances you can only enter as long as you are on the quest. once completed, the instances are closed to you because in the storyline the NPCs have moved on in their journey. WAR does not offer an ongoing storyline except the war between order and destruction.

so what is in fact endgame in WAR, a game that focuses on RvR (PvP)? the ultimate goal is to invade the other realm’s capital city, toss the righteous owners out and kill their king for glory and phantastic loot. sounds fun in theory, doesn’t it? something different than the usual endgame PvE dungeon crawls! that raises the question on how do you invade the other realm’s capital city? by “locking” zones (no time limit) and capturing two fortresses within 12 hours. let me elaborate: imagine a map from north to south with The Inevitable City (Chaos capital) in the north and Altdorf (Empire capital) in the south. in between to have the zones (areas) Chaos Wastes (by default Destruction controlled), Praag (by default contested) and Reikland (by default Order controlled). the first step towards Altdorf would be to lock down Praag. you do that by capturing all keeps and battle objectives (BOs) in Praag, killing enemy players, winning Praag scenarios and doing PQs until you have accumulated 100 victory points (VPs). once Praag is locked the war moves on to Reikland where you repeat the process. after that its fortress siege time: you have an hour to invade the fortress Reikwald and kill the lord there. if successful, you need to repeat the zone lock and fortress siege procedure in another pairing (either Greenskins vs. Dwarves or Dark Elves vs. High Elves) within 12 hours and then you get a shot at Altdorf.

unfortunately, i can’t comment on how invading Altdorf (or The Inevitable City) works since i have never experienced it so far. the reason is that fortress sieges are currently impossible to complete successfully because of bad design (forcing 200 players up a small ramp) and server instability (the server usually crashes several times). i do play on the most populated server in EU (Karak Eight Peaks) and if a fortress is under attack you have like 300-400 player crammed into a very small space. the server lag is terrible, my insta casts take up to 5 seconds and spells with cast time up to 20 seconds before they fire. sooner or later the server crashes and while it does reset the fortress (both doors are back up) the timer does not reset and hence make killing the fortress lord impossible. in the current state i seriously doubt i will see the enemy’s capital city anytime soon. so much for the proclaimed “different” endgame in WAR.

however, there are other “endgame” parts in WAR. one being getting to renown rank (RvR rank) 80. this is nothing but an endless grind! with diminished returns for player kills in place, the only way to get decent renown is to take BOs (1000 renown) or keeps (around 1100 renown). this results in “renown trains” that do not bother to fight players but just take BOs and keeps and then leave for another pairing to do the same there. usually nobody really bothers to defend keeps or BOs since there is no reward for it but rather prefers “keep trading”: leaving an attacked keep behind to attack an enemy controlled keep at the same time. this is boring because taking an undefended keep is nothing else than PvE in the form of breaking two doors and killing the keep lord NPC.

speaking of PvE there are three endgame dungeons (instances) in WAR where you can get good gear that is on the same level than gear from fortress sieges and city invasions. since fort sieges and invasions are currently impossible quite a lot of players focus on doing the City Dungeons and Lost Vale at the moment. here’s another problem: all endgame instances are for 6 players only. however, there are 11 classes per realm and the bosses in those instances drop random loot. so your chance to get items for the classes in your group are rather slim. this is just downright silly and annoying. why not have the bosses drop tokens that can be exchanged for armor items of the respective classes? what makes matters worse is the 3 day lockout (6 days for Lost Vale) once you have killed bosses in those instances. the city dungeons can be cleared in 1 to 1.5 hours each which makes the 3 day lockout even more ridiculous.

last but not least there are still scenarios to keep you entertained if you are sick of keep trading and actually want to fight some players. however, scenarios at endgame level are not really fun. there is too much crowd control and too high resistances involved. as a caster i often see on my screen: “You are silenced. You are disabled. You are dead.” before i can even cast a single spell. for whatever ludicrous reason there are no diminished returns for crowd control effects (silence, knockdown) in place. the same goes for resistance caps. players can easily farm resistance gear and boost their resistances (spiritual, corporeal, elemental) to mitigate up to 90% of the incoming magical damage. a simple example: one of my spells can crit for around 2700 on rank 40 mobs. the very same spell crits for around 250 on a rank 40 tank. the base damage of the spell is around 550. while i do agree that resistance should mitigate magical damage to some degree i don’t agree with the amount of mitigation. there should be a cap on resistances like in every other mmorpg. no wonder a lot of people roll low level alts because there is little or no crowd control and no resistances in lower tiers.

i love the warhammer universe and the lore, i like the concept of RvR being the center of the game and i still believe the game has a huge potential but there are quite a few flaws and issues that need to be addressed as soon as possible. when people say that WoW wasn’t perfect in the first few months they usually forget that WoW did not have any serious competition back then and in fact could afford to mature over time. newer mmorpgs cannot afford that luxury because players do not put up with messed up things anymore.

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.

my very first impression was: this looks _exactly_ like WoW. the server selection screen, the character selection screens… the login screens… it is WoW all over. after you have picked a server (english, german, french, italian or spanish!) you have to choose a side: good (order) or evil (destruction). you can only have characters of one side on a given server. (this is again like in WoW where you have to choose between alliance or horde.)

unsurprisingly, the majority of the players go destruction. why? because destruction offers way more interesting “races” to play: dark elf, chaos or greenskin. dark elf is pretty self explanatory, chaos is very interesting, especially if you opt for following the career path (“class”) of a Magus for example. that’s one kick ass character, some sort of an evil mage and floating around on a disc. looks very funny and cool. greenskins are either orcs or goblins. the orcs are naturally ugly as hell but supposedly good tanks and the goblins are hilarious in any regard, i just looked at the names of the skills of a goblin Shaman and it made me laugh.

i haven’t explored the order side of the game yet but the available races are pretty generic for a high fantasy setting: high elf (the good elves), the empire (basically humans) and dwarf.

character creation is pretty standard mmo with the usual lack of customisation, i.e. once you’re done and find yourself in the newbie area almost everyone looks the same. the first character i have created was a dark elf “Witch Elf” since that was the career that is closest to assassin/burglar/rogue and i prefer playing DPS melee classes.

once ingame, everything looks pretty familiar if you are not new to mmo’s. standard GUI, standard controls, action bar, minimap, quest tracker… quest givers are marked on the minimap with a green dot and have a green book icon over their head. the starting area was insanely crowded but i believe WAR uses dynamic respawns because i never had to wait for a mob to respawn or found particular quest mobs to be camped.

speaking of the quests, they are mostly the standard mmo like type: go kill x mobs, bring me y items, find that npc and do something with him or to him, destroy siege engines, etc. however, the area where each quest objective can be found is marked on your minimap: it is a reddish filled patch on the map with a red border. so no more roaming all over the place in search for a quest objective. furthermore, if you need to collect quest items from mobs, they are a 100% drop. so no annoying killing of 20 mobs just for your last quest item. and if that wasn’t enough, quest items are stored in a special part of you inventory that is reserved for those items so they won’t take any of you precious normal inventory space.

in each area you run into public quests: those count towards the overall control of the area (either order or destruction) and the side that has a certain amout of those points you get by doing those quests controls the area. or so. public quests are a blast: they are timed, you can join any time or leave any time and you get infamy/renown points that you can trade for potions/armour/weapons. most public quests have 3 stages: first it is to kill x mobs in that particular area, next you usually have to either kill some special mobs or destroy braziers/traps and last but not least some elite master (called hero) appears and you have to defeat him. and the end of a public quests there’s a scoreboard and depending on your participation and luck of draw you roll for loot out of a chest. if you killed enough and are lucky with your rolls, you can take a dip into the chest and grab a loot bag. once you open the loot bag, you can select an item out of a list of various items. naturally, you can repeat public quests and get very nice gear (and xp and infamy).

the leveling pace is rather slow compared to lotro, my witch elf is merely level 8 after over 5 hours of playtime. but i guess that’s ok in the end, since the current level cap is 40.

the gameplay itself is a 1:1 copy from WoW. my witch elf plays just like a rogue in WoW. energy bar, combo points… straight out of WoW. and yeah, there are 3 talent trees (career mastery) as well, just like.. yes you guessed it… the only deviation and pleasant surprise is that you do not have to repair your gear and if you die your gear does not take damage. you have, however, 15 minutes decreased health but you can have that removed by a healer for a small fee.

the world seems to be large but i haven’t seen anything outside of the starting areas yet and i couldn’t figure out if there is a form of swift travel. loading times are non-existant so far, there is one loading screen when you enter one area and thats about it. the game itself seems to be pretty stable and lag free, i had only one crash so far.

i didn’t get around trying PvP yet, that’s something i’d like to do tonight.

now the things that aren’t so great about WAR:

the graphics. although they tried and really did a fine job with the warhammer universe (it was awesome to spot a war hydra marching down a ramp for example), the graphics are sub-par in my book. this is 2008 and the water, shadow effects, landscape… it looks sometimes like WoW or worse. maybe im spoiled by DX10 Lotro awesomeness, maybe i have too high expectations but in all honesty and personal opinion, the graphics look like most computer games did in 2005 or earlier.

character animations. they are just downright horrible. most characters walk funny or look like they need to take a leak or something.

attack bugs. that happens mostly with ranged mobs. they bug out too often (just like when a mob is confused in Lotro) but with the downside that although you can’t attack it, it can attack and kill you. that is very annoying and needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

crafting. i have no clue what to do, i learned salvaging and talisman making as my professions and managed to salvage some ingredients off a broken item but it is still beyond me how am i supposed to craft a talisman. (that is like a rune or gem that you can slot into empty slots of armour and weapons in order to improve its stats.) there seem to be plenty of professions to choose from, but you can only have two: one gathering one and one crafting one. there’s weird stuff like cultivation (similar to farming i guess, but no idea how to do it and if you need a crafting station like a field or something) or butcher (haven’t tried how that one works but my guess would be kill animals and use their meat for cooking).

well, that are my first impressions. the game has potential for sure, but it still feels too much like beta for my taste and since the beta is capped at lvl 20, nobody knows what endgame will be like. it’s too early to tell really.