I am going to go on a blog commenting binge for any gaming blog I can find that has a WAR article. Everyone loves comments.

Who’d have thunk it?

Man, I just wish there would have been some sort of warning that there would be a 2-to-1 Destro/Order imbalance… I mean really, the open beta didn’t foreshadow this at all. I really feel bad for all of the Destruction players too, at this point if they wanted to switch to Order for a better game experience they’d have to walk away from a whole 5 days invested in the game so far to start over. It’s really not fair.

Here is a system wide message example from WAR that occurs when a gold spammer gets banned - “Tchar’zanek has ordered the slaughter of [insert name of gold spammer] and all others of his kind who weaken the Raven Host by providing wealth and power to the unworthy”. Simply amazing. Public ridicule of Gold Spammers will likely do nothing to stem the tide of gold farmers but I hope Mythic continues their hardline stance against them. It really is annoying to get spam /tells about buying gold during the headstart - before the game actually launched!

So, Mythic decided to announce that they are going to phase in the announced servers by CE headstart and SE headstart dates. I don’t think this is a very good idea.

Lets take a core server for instance: There are only 5 core servers for the CE launch. So for the lucky folks that have the CE they get to play in a nice little environment with a healthy population. Then the SE headstart starts… Mythic opens another set of servers. The five core servers that were already open continue to get flooded with an inordinate amount of new players because you have people joining up with their friends who were already part of the CE headstart. Finally when the official launch happens everyone else flocks to those 5 servers because all of their friends have already started there. I bet those 5 servers are plagued with queues until people get fed up with it and just consider it a loss and abandon the server wholesale for when with a robust yet not queue inducing population (nice run on).

WAR is a godsend for MMO’ers who are PvP enthusiasts. Non-pvpers, hmmmm… probably not so much.

I have PvP’ed in several MMOs (SWG, WoW, and EQ2) and have never had the level a level of enjoyment as I have had playing WAR. I consider myself a PvP’er at heart. I’m not particularly good at MMOs or PvP but I enjoy the persistence and interactions with the many people that play MMOs. I am in a guild that is fairly organized and has an active membership. When we get groups/warbands together we dominate.

There is no way a PuG can compete against an organized group with with voice communication.

Now, with that said, how does this affect the solo-MMOer? First of all, WAR has mechanics to make it easy for soloers to band together with the open party system (pure genius by the way). BUT, I don’t think it will be enough for the solo minded player to truly enjoy the game. So much of what makes WAR fun is the PvP. PvP can be a miserable experience when you are getting thumped.

On my beta server, the hotspot for Tier 1 PvP is Nordland. In Nordland, there have been epic battles raging all night long. Most of the time the Destruction zerg is overwhelming and the good guys are pinned back to their Warcamp (shooting the warcamp cannons at a horde of destruction players is great fun too though). With a couple of guild groups formed in a warband we can usually push the zerg back to their camp - great fun. What do you do if you aren’t in a guild though? You are always at the mercy of riding someone’s coattails or usually getting beat. You can’t decide to make a difference, you can only just wait for some other group to make the decision and then tag along. The times that I have gone in the RvR area as a solo player have been fun… but not great fun. As the game progresses and players become more organized I see the solo-player being more and more marginalized.

The same thing goes for scenarios. Join a scenario as a solo player, you will probably lose. Join as a group you will probably win. Now, have we lost a scenario joining as a guild group? Yes, but not often.

Winning at PvP is fun and PvP is at the heart of WAR. If you are going to plays solo… expect to get Pwnt.