A Flawed Design

by Seyon, in Games: Rant, Video, Warhammer Online (1 Comment)

[youtube id=”mjhwdQ0ReLg” align=”center”]I enjoy playing Warhammer Online (WAR), even with the bugs, declining populations, defective mechanics… and I could go on. It has its faults which, by and large, I can forgive. The larger problem is that the game is built around a core idea that is broken from the start.

Now let me start by saying that I am, in general, not a fan of player versus player (PvP) in MMORPGs. Not only do I prefer the play style of player versus environment (PvE), I dislike the attitude of the hardcore PvPer. They tend to be more fickle, moving quickly onto the next Game of the Month; just compare World of Warcraft players to those doing the Age of Conan > Warhammer > Darkfall > Aion hops. Still, in WAR, PvP has been more tolerable than in most, especially in the scenarios which are fifteen minutes of PvP capped off with a scoreboard.

As I played more PvP (dubbed RvR in WAR), the more I saw how faulted it was in the game – it is designed in such a way that one side is always the underdog to the other. This is not seen as a flaw by Mythic: it is openly promoted that way.

Mythic says that WAR is at heart a PvP game with only minor PvE. In reality, end game content is not raids or crafting or getting the best armor and weapons. It’s all about the City Invasions where, through a series of PvP and PvE, you get to the ultimate fight, the fight against the ruler of the other realm, a PvE encounter.

The problem continues in realm balance. As anyone who has played a MMO knows, it is damn near impossible to balance a class based game. This is even more so true for WAR where there are mirror classes but not mirrored skills. One side will always have an advantage. In most MMOs, this imbalance would be answered by giving an advantage to the underdogs, eg. in Guild War alliance battles, the further the battle is pushed into a territory, the larger the advantage of the defender. You will never have this balancing in WAR because the ultimate goal of the game is City Invasion. (This makes the layout of the Tier 4 RvR all the more odd: each pairing has its zones setup in a linear progression. Attackers must take control of one zone to get access to the next, suggesting that defender advantages were probably built in at one point in development.)

A single contested zone per pairing works against the underdog because fighting can only happen in that one zone. Small groups are unable to capture battlefield objectives to help the the realm because of zerging enemy warbands.

There can only be one outcome from this. As people lose repetedly to the zerg and are unable to earn any Renown (experince for PvP), they become discouraged and after a time they quit the game. After all, no one enjoys losing always. This continues to happen person by person until the underdog realm is practically nonexistent on the battlefield. The remaining zerg realm can now push to the City with little resistance and finally get to the end game. And the way Mythic wants it, well Mythic gets it (excuse the Cool Hand Luke reference).

Then there is the other side of the coin: the underdog realm has largely left, so for the zerg realm the game becomes a RvDoor (realm versus Keep door) game. They spend their time going from Keep to Keep and zone to zone, flipping control earning endless Renown. Scenarios have long ago stopped popping. They started playing WAR for the PvP but there is no one to kill and, slowly but surely, the zerg realm loses interest and quits, further adding to the dwindling population.

If you don’t play PvP at all and think this doesn’t affect you, consider this. Mythic ultimately would like to see people pushing the Cities nightly and they will continue to balance the game until they get that. The problem is if your City is contested, Tier 1 thru 3 players are comepletely locked out and it is only defendable by the Tier 4’s. And what if you only have limited play time every week? Now you can’t even access the only place with storage and the Auction House; along with resolving many quests and getting new ones.

The one-year anniversary is right around the corner and we are still in WAR. We originally started playing the game to play with a friend but he has since quit. That seems to be the norm now. Server mergers continue as the population continues to shrink. With Guild Wars 2 just being officially announced and Blade & Soul still looking awesome, I have a feeling when we stop playing the game, we won’t be coming back for the any new content that comes out. It’s a good game compared to most, but just not a game for us.