:grumble: Making me roll out from under my rock…

Oh, what’s this bickering going on in WAR this time? More things about 1.4 and the RvR packs no doubt. Gosh I’m glad I set my expectations really low, this isn’t nearly as disappointing to me as it might be to the rest of the MMO community that have been secretly hoping WAR was actually on an uptick. Well they must be! The guys over at multiplaying.net are running around in WAR so it’s surely a sign of better days. Only a few short weeks after the Reenlisters campaign to bring back players that abandoned this wooden ship on a river of lava, we see the pricing for these microtransaction services…

Oh, bleeding anus. Someone bring the lube! 

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning proudly introduces an all new service for our players; Account Entitlements!  These services are available now for purchase from the EA store and include the following features offered at special introductory prices:


Server Transfer – $19.99 USD, this will grant you a code that can be redeemed for one server transfer for a single character.
-Seriously. It’s now your problem if your server is lacking in action and you’re so desperate to get something out of WAR that you’d pony up 20$ to transfer a SINGLE TOON. Oh, and you can’t transfer to a highly populated server either (looking at you Badlands). Mythic, do a forced transfer and merge the other three servers that aren’t Badlands. Oh, nevermind, go ahead and suck money out of paying subscribers first and THEN transfer the rest of Iron Rock for free.
Sensible Price? 20$ for a 24 hour window granting 1 transfer per toon.

Starter Mount Pack – $8.99 USD, all characters on an account will receive a deed to obtain a mount usable at level 2 giving players a 25% speed boost and have a 100% chance to dismount upon damage.
-A 25% speed boost. I’m not sure if that’s going to even be noticeable, although you might pick this up for your Endless Trial account so you can mount up in T1, it’s not worth 9$. 
Sensible Price? I’d pay 3$, EFT players might go for 5$.

Trusty Mount Pack – $9.99 USD, all characters on an account will receive a deed to obtain your choice of a new mount usable at level 20 giving players mounts of up to 60% speed boost and have a 55% chance to dismount upon damage.
-Well, this is actually the equivalent of a guild mount, so I suppose if you’re not in a guild it might be useful to catch up to the rest of the zerg. However, we’re fairly late in the game with WAR. Finding a capped guild that’s recruiting is not a challenge in the slightest. Still, they have new models which might be OK for bragging.
Sensible Price? Again, 10$ for a mount that’s easily availble with a guild is too much. 5$ would be my high limit.

Trinkets of the World Pack – $4.99 USD, all characters on an account will receive two tokens to spend at the new Trophy Vendor in the capital cities. Each token can be used to purchase one of 14 different trophies.
-Instead of actually fixing the hundreds and hundreds of trophies already in the game, the bright idea is to make some new ones from scratch that actually work and provide them as RMT items ONLY. That’s pretty shitty and low. If you’re buying these, kudos for having a money tree, but there’s a lot more in-game items that need to be fixed.
Sensible price? 1$ per token. These trophies do absolutely nothing. The time invested should have been used to fix existing trophies for free.

Specialized Training Pack – $9.99 USD, all characters on an account will recieve one War Tract that will allow them to immediately advance one full level when used.
– The sky is falling! WAR is selling levels! Wait, not really. Singular level. As in one. Oh, and it’s not for renown either so wash that out of your head too. You can get up to 3 free levels if you were affected by the billing issues earlier this year, and I’ll tell ya, it still doesn’t let you escape much of the grind to R40. This is one that, if I were planning on leveling more characters, I’d buy before they hit R36.
Sensible Price? Cut it in half. You only get one, and it doesn’t apply to your PvE capped toons anyway. 5$ for one level I’d pay for.

Herald Pet Pack – $9.99 USD, all characters on an account will be granted adoption papers to the Snotling Herald vanity pet. This pet will follow you around and give you a boost!
-Finally the snotling. This is great for Destruction, and a little off for Order. I could see Order with a Gnoblar sooner than a Snotling. Anyway, owning one of these will give you a permanent 3% speed bonus, enough to move faster than another player but not enough to move faster than a PvE mob. Also, you can buy talismans to give you permanent speed boosts from renown vendors so it’s not something new and unbalancing to the game as some people would allude to.
Sensible Price? 3$ until you can see them in RvR. Then maybe 5$. I never understood the point of pets that your enemy can never see you flaunt. It’s not like they’re targetable or anything. I was also hoping there would be some sort of way in-game to earn them, but apparently not. Chances are I will not have one. 😦

There’s the RvR Packs coming down the line as well. The Personality Pack isn’t really all that notable provided it’s priced reasonably, there’s a fair amount of things that are included. (reasonably 15$ or less) Although, with the prices we’re seeing for the RMT items, chances are it’ll be closer to 25$. There’s nothing in it however that screams out to me tugging at my soul and forcing my fingers to dip into my wallet. I’ll probably skip it.

The Progression Pack seems mostly geared for the RR80’s that have been rolling around thwap-ing nubs for the past XX months. It unlocks RR100 and if the brief blurb about it in the patch notes is correct, it’s also the key ingredient to Renown scaling more favorably upwards (although I understood this to be a function of 1.4). This brings up a point for me. My highest toon is RR65 and I have a handful in the RR60 range. If the scaling is coming from the progression pack, then I’m definitely going to need to pick it up as I’ll be getting a whole lot of value. If it DOESN’T come from the progression pack, then I’ll be waiting until at least one of my toons hits 80 before picking it up.
edit- well fuck me… in the patch notes a bit further down…

Renown Ranks 0-80:

* Players that have purchased the Progression Pack will find that their Renown gain has been boosted for Renown Ranks 0-80.
Renown Ranks 80+:
* Players now have the ability to progress past Renown rank 80 with the purchase of the Progression Pack, available separately at the EA Store.
* Similar to Ranks 0-80, each Rank past 80 will award an additional Renown point to be spent on Renown training.

Now things all come back to expectations. We all knew that we would be getting paid server transfers. There was an blip in a White Dwarf magazine ages ago that alluded to purchaseable pets with the upcoming WAR expac. The Devs have been saying for a while “We like Mounts”. Finally, when it came to talking about F2P, Carrie brushed it aside and talked about RMT’s. They don’t want to give up their sub money if they can gouge us on top of it. If these “special introductory prices” are going to increase in the future, chances are I won’t buy ANY of them. Ever. They’re too much, pixels jut aren’t quite THAT important to me.

Sometimes it’s hard for us as fans to read between the lines. We expect great things, always. There’s no reason not to expect great things. Hell, I’d imagine some of th
e Devs think they’re pumping out great things. It’s all relative, because the great things in WAR might just end up looking like garbage compared to other games. Maybe Mythic is really up against the rocks here. Maybe they really are desperate to keep the lights on and keep people in jobs. It’s hard to stand back and look at any of this and be excited paying 10$ a pop for a single piece of something interesting, especially when I’m shelling out 15$ a month to begin with. There’s a reason why we don’t call these microtransactions anymore.