Warhammer developers own up to preview weekend issues
by Michael Zenke 
Aug 29th 2008 at 7:00AM
Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, New titles, Warhammer Online
Some of the issues honestly don't sound like they're going to be addressed before launch, but the biggest problem (pathing) sounds like it's going to get squared away. Says Jacobs of the technical problems, "while some of you might be tempted to go all Samurai on us for a couple of the bugs, overall things went very, very well. As long-time readers of my notes now, I won't do a Nick Winters and we are anything but pathological liars so we'll always own up when we make a mistake and we made a couple here. So, let's talk amongst ourselves..." Apparently based on a dare from a forum-goer, Jacobs' address is full of Saturday Night Live references. Check out the post for more from that wild and crazy guy.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mr. Pickles said on 7:19AM 8-29-2008
Atleast it's better then Age of Conan and how that went. Their PvP Beta Weekend was a complete bug fest that was really screwed up (people could actuall walk through a wall and be under the map shotting other players with spells and bows). What really blows out the ass about it was that they kept bragging about PvP XP and levels, and it was even in that PvP weekend, but it was NOT IN LAUNCH (nor has it been in yet, and it's been pushed back again and slated for the Sep 10th patch at the earliest).
But, Age of Conan somehow got a mircle patch between Closed Beta and Open Beta/Release because the game was way more stable....and that was only temporary as every other pach Funcom released after that broke the client more and made stability a joke.
The Preview Weekend for WARhammer was excellent, and I only came across two problems the entire time: 1) Wasn't able to log into my Greenskin characters for a bit of time (not sure what it was about, only two hours, but I could create and log-in to a Dark Elve just fine in the mean time on the same server)...maybe it was over population of the Greenskins, IDK and 2) Client closed out on me...not a crash, or a freeze, it just closed (I had this happen to me twice on TF2, I think it's in association with this shitty Vista).
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EmEmOH said on 8:29AM 8-29-2008
I think it is very refreshing to see such openness and honesty from a developer. Far too often we hear "Working as intended" when aspects of gameplay are clearly in need of patching.
Hopefully this will start a trend.
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recursive said on 9:00AM 8-29-2008
The honesty is a nice change from how Funcom did it but considering this client was supposedly locked down to lower settings.. well that's still quite a lot of work to do in 2 weeks. We'll see how it fares on the 7th and, more importantly, launch.
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ScytheNoire said on 9:07AM 8-29-2008
My issues I had with the game were very few.
The pathing, which isn't very good, although I can't think of a game that came out with good pathing in it. WoW was horrid at launch.
Then there is waiting to get into a scenario, it just seemed to take too long, way too long. They need to fix this.
Queues for servers, not cool. Hopefully they don't have this at release. It's a hot topic in the WHA forums. They will need to have free guild transfers for those servers that do get over-populated. Queues will have people not playing, and not always be their choice.
The Global Cooldowns just feel clunky, I agree with that. It needs a bit of work, just to have a better feel.
The crafting system is still missing, and right now, it's the weakest part of the game. It's just pathetic. Hopefully this gets improved upon.
And we are missing too many melee classes. There are way more ranged classes, and melee is suffering from that. They need those missing classes back into the game ASAP.
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Vrain said on 9:13AM 8-29-2008
The waiting for scenarios is only long because you were on the more populated side. On Order on Mad Dog Pass, I never had to wait longer than 5 minutes and often it was 30 seconds or less.
Logo said on 9:54AM 8-29-2008
Yeah the pathing blew at times. Fortunately that's one of the things they owned up to.
The scenario wait has more to do with the people playing the game. Mythic can't really force people to queue and many people decided to do open RvR and PQs instead of scenarios. Still on some of the more populated servers you could get a queue pretty fast.
As for queues, it's something WoW had as well for quite a while. It's a problem that tends to sort itself out. Players who are guildless or small guilds will typically move themselves to another server rather quickly and eventually it resolves the problem to a great degree (though sometimes server transfers are needed as well).
GCD, this was one of their issues. Mainly there was a very unforgiving overlap of when you could input the next action after the GCD was up. If you hit a button .2 seconds before GCD was up you'd still get ability not ready. What they're doing (and what WoW does) is give you a more generous GCD so if you hit an ability say .3 seconds before the GCD is up it'll 'queue' it and still fire it off when acceptable. Also the fact that the GCD was showing 2 second cooldown instead of 1.4 was an issue.
What's wrong with the crafting system? I found cultivation and alchemy quite fun. Scavenging was likewise entertaining in the sense that I was able to loot killed players. I don't see how the system is any worse any WoW's system (and in many ways I think it's better). Sure the # of trade skills is limited but not having armor/weapon crafting trade skills is actually going to help the game overall I think (issues around balance, twinking, and the effects it has on the economy).
Buckeye said on 9:23AM 8-29-2008
Yup, they could have pulled a John Smedley and claimed it was working as intended or just shut the forums down when people started complaining.
Kudos for the Mythic team manning up and taking the time to interact with thier player base.
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Dass said on 10:44AM 8-29-2008
Hold on a minute issues of a preview weekend when the game was in beta?! Oh no!! Developers that talk to the Folks!!?? Insulting Nick Winters?!!
Oh I so gonna get this game :D
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Brian! said on 10:55AM 8-29-2008
I like that Mythic seems to be very into communication. Hopefully they will continue.
This news is a few days old though. I love Massively, but I read this post a number of days ago. It is worth having the reporter start checking the WAR fansites a bit more often.
WarhammerAlliance is cool because on their front page they have a listing of recent posts with developer responses in them.
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brandon said on 12:01PM 8-29-2008
i'm definitely happy they are being so honest about it, i have respect for people like that and want to play the game even more now.
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SomeDude said on 1:12PM 8-29-2008
I really didn't have issues with most of the weekend preview, it's beta. I expected there to be some bugs.
As to Cultivation as mentioned by someone else above... holy jesus, it's terrible. All the other tradeskill/collection stuff is pretty fun. Apothecary is fun. However, sitting 12 minutes dropping dirt, water and fertilizer on a plant every minute for 12 minutes to grow 4 plants is NOT fun. Cultivation needs a revamp because right now it's the polar opposite of what people expect these days in MMOs.
12 minutes to grow 4 plants that takes 12 seconds or so to make into potions? Come on guys! Balance! We want fun, not grind.
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moemoe said on 12:47PM 9-02-2008
Mark needs to thank Sanya for showing him the ropes on open lines of communication. This was pure S. Weathers. Even if it's not what the players want to hear, just being up front can keep your player base hanging in there and loyal. I bet he misses her at launch, I know a lot of us from Daoc will.
Funcom could have taken a lesson from this approach. Unfortunately they did not and we can see the writing on the wall in that case.
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