Punkbuster Inclusion, Removal of 4 Classes and 4 Capital Cities from WAR's Release

[Jtmk]

If they cut 4 of the capital cities and 4 classes from otherwise polished and ready to be relased game it isin't fail, it would be fail if some mechanic is gut down like PQ's, or scenarios or keeps. I know some of you would rather want to wait more and wanting them to delay, but is there really any sense? What you will miss? At best situation they will get the first two capitols, and maybe two of the careers in 2-4 months after the relase and in that time you prolly have barely even scratched the doors of the only capitols. Maybe you've got to the point you got to siege the capital, but ultimately pushed back by the defenders or couldn't even find tactics against the first two PQ bosses in the city. Or perhaps you want to pay to play AoC's open beta, thats fine go ahead. About the classes, look at the ones which didin't get dropped, every of them has something unique and I bet every of them will be extremely fun to play, I think no matter of what class I would pick I would enjoy it. But with the dropped classes the situation may not have been so, so they had to remake them, but still couldn't reach what they wanted, and now they just don't have time but don't want to delay it anymore. In exchange of time, you will get capitols with doubled amount of content, dropped classes will get extra extra amount of care and thinking, thus you just have to be patient.

And if youre fine with the idea of delaying the game, why don't you just wait untill all the content is out there? Its still the same experience couple months later than others, but you still can try and pick as new server as you can.

Cheer up fellas.

[|MA|Kroy]

If we end up with having to part with cash to get the first major expansion that includes new cities and careers, this day will not be forgotten.

[Mbj]

Folks,

Let me add a little more detail to the rotating of the capital cities thing.

One of the things that *might* work really well would be if 'X' months, one city pairing became the focus of the RvR campaign. While that pairing was the focus, the other pairings would be worked on by the team and improved, cleaned up, changed. The new pairing would allow the players to have new quests, new PQs, different layouts based on what we learned from the previous pairing(s). This would add even more variety to the game and allow us to really keep things more interesting over the long-term. Now, if we find out that having multiple CCs as potential targets works better because the one-pairing thing wasn't working as we hoped, then we wouldn't rotate the cities in and out. I'm intrigued by the idea as a way to keep the content fresh for the players, to clean up any design errors and to provide a steady stream of new or freshened content to the players. As to whether we would keep the city in the game while it is being freshened, not sure yet as this is just an idea.

Mark

[Syr]

It's refreshing to see posts like yours Mark.

As has been the case in the past the people at Mythic are open and honest well ahead of time. I've seen so many MMOs where something like this would be swept under and never mentioned. If anything the game looks more promising to me when announcements like this are made. It's just like the past time extensions, when a company is open and honest it shows they have confidence in their game.

[Rondaror]

Originally Posted by Shandris

Just read the Mark Jacobs response on Warhammer Vault and it still doesn't quite resonate well with me. Throughout the entire post, he never addressed the possibility of just pushing back the release date again. So here are my specific responses to each issue he brought up as he numerically outlined. Also, here is a link to the post by Mark Jacobs: http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_on...07896043/p1/?3

1) Essentially I got from this that capital cities are important and are very bad if they are unfinished. No doubt, I totally agree, absolutely and earnestly. But that still begs the question: why not wait until you do finish them all and release them at the same time?

2) "Because we are focusing on just 2 cities, the team has been able to pour more time into each city and really make them great. They truly are living cities and what you will see and experience in them would not have been possible to do if we had to get 6 cities ready for launch even if we had a lot more time."
So if this is true, why will there even be 6 cities later? Is this imprinting Altdorf and Inevitable City as being the main hub for their realm if they have more stuff and attention in them than the others? I also highly doubt that it would not be possible to make all 6 cities equivalent in quality of product even if there was more time. That statement seems to defy logic and reasons for even putting in other capital cities.

3) "Each CC takes a tremendous amount of time to design, iterate and release. No matter how much time we spend on the cities during development and beta, once the game is released everything changes. The history of MMOs has shown all of us that no matter how smart the developer or experienced the team, mistakes are made. Given the complexity of our cities, we can expect the same thing to happen to us."
I have heard time and time again in life to not second-guess yourself. This statement seems to say that Mythic will be constantly second-guessing themselves throughout all of the game. If you second guess yourself about how things will change once you put more and different types of players in, the game will be forever changing, and could only be released with a minor image of what it will be. Expecting to make mistakes for which you feel you need to wait out only diminishes your ability to make strong decisions, AND have the community be strongly behind any decision that you make in the future. We, in the community, have heard many times about the tremendous time put into the game. I do not doubt that. But what I expect from the game at the beginning is what I expect to see in the end. If many areas are up in the air of how they will be come release time, I have little idea what kind of gameplay I am getting into, other than there will be good emphasis on RvR and public quests.

4) "Keeping (1) and (2) and (3) in mind, if we had made the decision to keep in all 6 cities, the chances of things going horribly wrong at launch and post-launch would have increased tremendously no matter how long we worked on them. The last thing that we would want to happen is to launch a great game but when players actually got to the city siege part, things were not working. We will not go down that path. By focusing on 2 cities, we lessen the chance of that happening considerably."
Once again, this is second-guessing yourself, especially the beta trials, for which they have been very selective. I do not see how you can second-guess what will happen in the sieges without fully testing it. The conclusion I come to at this time is that siege testing went really bad the first time it was tried in beta, and the only way to get feedback on what does work is to try it with a large amount of random players that can only be reproduced in a post-release setting. Also, I don't understand the last part. How is just focusing on 2 cities going to lessen the chance of something going wrong? If you are needing to know exactly how it works, I have always assumed that was what beta testing is for. If the sieges are really similar to each other, then its not going to matter how many sieges you have going on, if theres a massive problem, either way all of the sieges (1 or 3) will have the problem. If the sieges are inherently different, or have many differences in mechanics or maps, then much of the feedback you get from the single siege won't really be helpful to the other 2.

5) "One of our most troubling concerns was what would happen post-launch in terms of each side's ability to take a city. Having in all 6 cities would mean that the focus of each side could have gotten distracted, the player base more spread out. If this happened, city sieges may have taken a lot longer for each side to accomplish and that would not have been pleasing to anybody. I'm reminded of the line from Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldman says "Now eventually you might have dinosaurs on your, on your dinosaur tour, right?" If players said to us "Now eventually you'll have capital city siege in your RvR game" to us, that would be very bad."
Herein lies a major problem that has been reiterated by several people in the community since I started paying attention to WAR. I understand this possible problem completely. Not knowing how many people will be on a single server to be able to capture a city is a possible problem. But I see it as a basic mechanic of the RvR game design. By eliminating the other cities, you are essentially holding the communities hand to accomplish an end all goal that should be very satisfying to the winning side that they accomplished it together (as is how RvR works). If a side is not working together or not focusing their attention like it should, it is failing and should exhibit results as such. If there is only one way to attack, it more of looks like an American football match of just pushing one way or the other with one man holding the ball and not being able to pass it. It makes it too simple. Simple is good for beta, but I don't find it to be good for release. By eliminating the choices for a realm, you are being too controlling on the player base.

6) "We expect over the months post-launch we will learn a lot about how our cities actually function in a truly LIVE environment." To me this is essentially saying that beta just cannot test for what they want to test.If this is the case, why not sooner or later open it up to open beta. I hear people from Mythic quoting the number (around 750,000) of applicants for beta quite often, so it's not like there is a shortage of possible players to test sieges with. I therefore don't understand what difference post-launch gameplay will have from beta gameplay city testing.
"We will apply these lessons to the new cities and look at possibly rotating cities in and out of RvR to not only spice up the RvR experience but to allow us to tweak and improve the older cities. This will be both in the short- and long-run to be a major win for the players."
Obviously, this is a huge idea, that is independent of the problems iterated earlier. This more of seems like an alternate idea of introducing cities if indeed there won't be all of the cities siegeable at the same time. This still results in the community having its hand held throughout the experience and telling them where to attack next. This statement is again second-guessing the ability of Mythic to produce a good city the first time, or the second, or the third, and while that could be nice, I just don't like my gameplay constantly changing on me. If changes need to be made, thats fine, but it seems that those changes would have to be relatively important for entire cities to be rotated. This sounds like a very advanced concept that grows out of the inability to put all the cities in by the currently announced release time (fall quarter).

And while I do question why further testing and a later release date couldn't solve the missing classes, my opinion is that they would/will have relatively little impact on the gameplay compared to missing capital cities.

Didn't want to let MBJ's statement as well as you analysis gets buried without recognition.

4 missing classes among 24 doesn't really hurt. It's difficult to invent unique melee mechanics that are balanced and unique enough, so I understand the problem and see that even with more development time it is going to get better.

Missing 4 capital citites however is different. Altdorf and TIC are incredible huge and filled with a lot of content. The decision to not share all this content amongst the other CC's has been made a couple months ago. This means that Mythic does not really favour the 6 CC's mechanics at all, but want to focus on 2 CC's. Is it neccessary to make Altdorf that huge with so much content with which you could easily fill another 3 other CC's or is it just planned that Mythic wants to focus on one CC for each realm? At least one downside to this is clear...it's the RP element for every player that does not want to play Humans. One could respond realm pride > race pride, but if Mythic is going to implement racial pairings then they shouldn't make them superflux in endgame.

[Misanthrope Prime]

MJB, I normally agree with you. I normally agree with your design decisions. Recently, however, I have realized something... to be honest, I first realized this when I found out how there were only going to be two crafting professions.


You guys set out to make the perfect game and only now realized how that was impossible. It's your job to get us hyped, but I still feel betrayed. Claiming you will have something in the game IS a promise, do not say it isn't. Worst of all, however, is that you have been polishing the game for months, and only feel fit to tell us now that we will be missing content on release because it is not polished?

[Mbj]

Originally Posted by MagusJ

So the game is being released in september?

Nice try but what else did we announce today? Guild beta starting and after that.... Besides, I kinda had to put something down for a number.

Mark

[Galimatias]

Some one has a crush. Seriously it's all the employees but not Mark?

[baso]

I dont really have anything to add to you post but just a question that I am really curious about.

How much content can Mythic remove and still release the game and you and a lot of the positive spirits here would still be happy?

For example. If it was only 2 playable races, 2 classes in each and no cities. Is that ok? Just wondering. Because i really like that there are positive ppl on the boards but it seems like a bit too much "this is all for the good of the game" right now.

I dont agree with the ppl "i quit Marc sux..." but I understand them more than the "this is all for the best". For them I just want to know where the line to "enough is enoughm this is a fail" goes.

[|MA|Kroy]

.... nm. still got major concerns about longevity of WAR's end-game with this new raft of changes.

[Simonious]

edited forn content

[Galimatias]

Originally Posted by Mbj

Folks,

Let me add a little more detail to the rotating of the capital cities thing.

One of the things that *might* work really well would be if 'X' months, one city pairing became the focus of the RvR campaign. While that pairing was the focus, the other pairings would be worked on by the team and improved, cleaned up, changed. The new pairing would allow the players to have new quests, new PQs, different layouts based on what we learned from the previous pairing(s). This would add even more variety to the game and allow us to really keep things more interesting over the long-term. Now, if we find out that having multiple CCs as potential targets works better because the one-pairing thing wasn't working as we hoped, then we wouldn't rotate the cities in and out. I'm intrigued by the idea as a way to keep the content fresh for the players, to clean up any design errors and to provide a steady stream of new or freshened content to the players. As to whether we would keep the city in the game while it is being freshened, not sure yet as this is just an idea.

Mark

Isn't that how you run beta?

[Bisonberg]

Thank you MJB, that post helped to clarify things. Of course people are going to be upset. people always find a reason to be upset. At least now, maybe some people can say "I'm pissed off, but I understand the decision."

[Darlos]

See, removing the cities I can live with but 4 classes? For non RP guilds this is fine since they can mix and match but single race guilds just got hit in the teeth with a very large hammer. But then hey, what MMO has cared about RPers? Meh maybe i'm just annoyed but still.

Giving High Elves tanks and not Dark Elves will probably cause more balance issues than if you had a broken Black Guard class in at launch, even if it sucked. Swordmasters will pwn Sorceresses and....oh wait, we can't pwn their Archmages now.

[Mbj]

Originally Posted by |MA|Kroy

Isn't that why you have a team of thousands upon thousands of beta testers across the world?

Yeap but 1000s and 1000s is trumped by millions, we hope.

It really doesn't matter how many people you have in beta, once the game goes LIVE, everything changes. That has been the history of MMOs from the MUDS to the MMORPGS.

Mark