-The Importance of the “thing”- was the original title/topic, but things evolved towards the end and I don’t feel like changing shit around again. It’s time for my weekly GD post already. lol
 

Objectives in PvP that don’t have much to do with crushing in a skull or putting the sharp end of my buisness doer into a bleedy target annoy me. Something fierce. There’s exceptions of course. I’m quite fond of picking up the UberBall of Death and melting someone, even if it does make me a big target. Temple of Isha has one of these. However, that’s the only current scenario I know of that encourages you to grab the “thing”. As a bonus feature, that “thing” is also only available to the underdog, which makes it even more enticing. Yep, the “things” in WAR mostly consist of flags and parts that do nothing besides get claimed and captured. They serve no higher function or reason than that. Doesn’t that annoy you a little bit?

It’s like back in the day when we had the dudes who stood by BO flags and gave out little buffs. Yeah, they were shitty buffs most of the time, but it gave you a reason to run by and collect them. They made it WORTH something to go out and capture the BO’s. I guess the current BO system does too, but it’s forced really. By that I mean, you HAVE to capture the BO’s for the game to progress. Otherwise everything just sits there. Being forced to do something just for the sake of progression is a point of contention for a lot of MMO gamers that want things to have reason or meaning. Adding value to a BO would have been a much better way to integrate it than making it required. Decisions like that just piss me off a little.

Yeah, it’s simpler to make it required. Wonderful, now all the windowlicking zerg herding retards will be able to figure out how to RvR. How did DAoC manage to thrive for so long without any real endgame and still have interesting RvR? Seriously, I only dabbled in the game and towards the end of things too. There was no streamlined rollercoaster that guided you from A-B-C in your epic quest to knock over someone else’s sandcastle. Even in Shadowbane, no one ever forced your hand to go out and destroy someone else’s city. You just did it, because you could, and they fully expected you to do so. So WAR, instead of being having a campaign where you need to weigh options and be tactical, has just turned into this very linear and repetitive path.

It’s always been that way, I’m just looking at how things have changed over the years in my mind. I guess for a long time in WAR there was always so many things that you could be doing. The options were solid. I’ve never really been one to run with a full warband and do the cat herding thing, but a full group or two usually makes for the best fights anyways. With a group or two you could take a BO and hold it just long enough to fight off pretty much any opposition. It used to be the game for us, see how many zerglings would come rushing over this time, and it was hilarious. IIRC, I was vocal about the removal of the BO guards, and the buffs that they passed around too. If anything, there needed to be MORE of a reason to run around and capture them. Not less.

The other “things” besides BO’s are all the crap in scenarios that people have ingrained into their skulls that need to be done. Things that make for a lot more running, and a lot less fighting. People that incessantly run the part in Serpents Passage when you have an enemy that is more than willing to spill some blood and RP’s with you. Maybe back in the day it was important to win scenarios, VP’s to collect and whatnot (note: more watering down the system), but we don’t need that today. All you get from winning a scen is a little extra chunk of renown, so who cares about the “thing”? You get points for killing! You can see the same behavior in all the flag based scenarios as well. Emblem Factory is particularly bad due to the insane speed that flags dish out points. Battle for Praag is usually flags up until the opposing spawn camp. Nordenwatch is a long string of useless flags.

All of these “things” be them flags, or parts, or balls of uber death, or lonely battle objectives, they mean so little. They’re not a point of contention, but a tick box to be checked. There’s no REASON to do any of them besides the fact we’re being told “THIS IS HOW YOU WIN”. Fine, but what do we win? Why isn’t it something tangible? Where is the value in winning this? Did I really work hard for something? Am I doing absolutely nothing and getting nothing as well? It’s like a dutch rudder without the second person, yeah, it gets the job done, but aren’t you really missing the point?

What it all boils down to is having something to fight over. I feel like more often than not we’re being given empty walls, or a point on a map. The only thing that keeps us from running rampant around the world and taking things that actually have some value is the fact that we can’t. At least the city is semi-important, but it took a classic Mythic move to actually accomplish that, which was moving pretty much every necessary vendor into the city and causing all the warcamps and keeps to dry up in population. You see? The city is important! It’s the only place you can buy RvR gear! Defend it! 

Why is it that this persistent world of an MMO keeps shrinking on us in so many ways, when all expectations point towards expansions? I’ll say this, it’s not an expansion, or even new content if it was already in-game. Part of the expectation of world building is fixing shit that’s broken. What I’m going to laugh my ass off about in the coming month or so, is when 1.4.1 reintroduces old scenarios that haven’t changed much at all regardless of the intent when they were removed in the first place. It’ll be nice, I’ll definitely dump some more time into the game because of it, but I’m not expecting anything different.

Warhammer reminds me a lot of the city that I live in, and that would be Detroit. There’s a huge expanse of area around here that is vacant, but still mananges to be called city. Much like Warhammer, you can wander some of the maps and find no one doing the PQ’s. Yeah, it’s a PvP game, but with all that extra space going to waste. Another comparison would be me wandering around the streets with a crowbar looking for a fight, and a RR90 stepping around the corner and pulling a pistol. Well, that was a fun fight. All the shops getting closed down and either relocating downtown, or moving out of state, well you can see the comparison there I think.

All isn’t lost, for Detroit OR Warhammer. There’s enough of a game here to rebuild, and we have a couple crazy bastards that are still hanging around. I’m still around, but I’m checking out other locales as well. WAR made a big impact on the MMO scene, and it’s impressive how far some of their gimmicks went. I also like when I wander in other games and Warhammer is the second MMO that comes up as a topic in general chat, although that might be a factor of PvP servers. Really what’s needed is someone to throw down a wad of cash, elect a new city council and start putting the bricks back into place.

Eventually.