I’m not just talking about the game’s audio but since I brought it up, let’s address that first: this game is quiet. From sound effects to what little music there is, everything is very quiet at maximum volume. I end up cranking my speaker’s volume up — a control I almost never have to touch — and when out of WAR if I forget to turn it back to normal (which I do constantly because until WAR I never needed to touch that knob) I scare the hell out of myself when I play music or another game because everything else is now so loud.
Oh, and maybe I’m just “adventuring” (if I can truly call it that) in the wrong areas, but WAR could stand to play some music in the background more often than it has been…
No, the real issue is the silence caused by a near-complete lack of life. As I had feared, my usual play time of weekday mornings are having an extremely negative effect on my WAR experience. Actually, it’s much worse than I’d feared: for a brand-spankin’ shiny new game like WAR, it’s shocking just how few players are around. Those hours have always been problematic finding groups in MMOs, but it’s doable and there are usually other people to chat with at least. In WAR, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone. Complete and utter silence. No one playing. It’s difficult to complete a Public Quest without a Public. It’s difficult to compete in Realm vs. Realm if I am my entire realm and there is no other realm to fight. Scenarios? Forget it, I’m in an infinite queue with no entry in sight.
If the solo PvE content were more entertaining perhaps I wouldn’t be feeling this way. In LOTRO, Vanguard, even back in WoW I could be quite content if necessary soloing around and chatting with people until I found a group for something. WAR? Nada. Say something in chat, silence. Say something in a PQ, silence. Say something in an Open Group I manage to find or create, it’s a toss-up but silence has been outweighing conversation so far. The worst has been guild chat. When I was this excited to be a part of a huge blogosphere community guild only to see my “good morning, good afternoon” with smiley emotes, and other comments, mostly go unacknowledged, my heart sinks.
Just to clarify, I’m not upset because they’re ignoring “me” because no one knows who I am anyway. I’m not the type to say “Behold! I am Scott from Pumping Irony!” and expect to be lavished with attention. I don’t think I’m that arrogant, anyway. While I may have a huge list of blogs that I read, I have a fairly small circle of blogs on which I actually participate on a regular basis so I would imagine my initial feeling of a “bond” with anyone would be limited to those few until we all get to know each other. I wasn’t there during beta to be part of the initial clique, and I’m not one of the “Big Name Bloggers” of the guild either. I’m fine with all that. It’s just that I’ve just never been part of a guild where when anyone says hello and makes an effort to be social and fit in, they’re ignored unless they’re a Big Name or a Clique Member. I notice I’m not the only Outsider who’s been trying to fit in…
To be absolutely fair, however, as well as to attempt to avoid breaking that unwritten “The first rule of Blog Club is you do not blog about Blog Club,” I will say that the guild population is tiny during the hours I play and there’s little, if any, conversation happening anyway. Also, while technically the default colors for each chat type are different, they’re close enough that I find I have to actually pay attention to tell if a line was normal chat or guild chat. Given the obvious and depressing low population already and possibly being half-asleep from the mind-numbingly boring solo quests I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it’s just a matter of no one even noticing the chat.
It’s also a two-way street. I’ve not exactly had a glowingly positive experience with WAR so far, and that directly effects my enthusiasm for playing. I put several hours in Friday, doing some solo and some Open Groups doing PQ’s and such, as well as a few hours in a guild-only group which was a blast. Saturday, however, I was unable to get a group and logged out after 30 minutes, if not less. Same for Sunday. Guild or no guild, I didn’t come to WAR to piddle around solo all the damn time. So if I can’t get interested enough to play, the guild and I can’t get to know one another. When I do play I’ll make an effort to be social, fit in, be funny, whatever. But if I’m not playing, all of that quickly becomes “garbage in, garbage out.”
I did put some time in this afternoon and forced myself to stay logged in long enough to get Tukeela to level 8 (is it level or rank for PvE? The game seems confused on this, using “rank” in one place and “level” in another. Make up your mind!) where he got a very slow-casting, but strong, heal and his first morale ability. I haven’t managed to work his morale bar high enough to use it yet, but I’m looking forward to eventually exploring that mechanic. I also managed to find an RvR Open Group which was another shaman and a squig herder. We were seemingly alone in the area (I think it’s called Eklund or something like that?) just running around killing a handful of NPC’s. The squig herder ran into a keep and a Champion level NPC chased him back out. Next thing I know, a lvl 10 Order is back-stabbing the crap out of poor little Tukeela! Cowards! I think I managed to turn around and get a single DoT on him before I went down and noticed he was in a group of five, all level 10+. I was rather annoyed to discover I respawned in a completely different map! It took a few minutes of running to get back to the same RvR area we were fighting in, which was a little ridiculous. If the whole PvP death/respawn thing is supposed to be meaningless and quick like in an FPS, shouldn’t I be respawning near the action? I did in the other RvR’s I did last week, so this was weird. Anyway, Tukeela is only Renown Rank 4 and if I am understanding this correctly (and I highly doubt that I am) even if the RvR area buffs (or debuffs) everyone to Rank 8, you’re still fighting with the skill levels appropriate to your true rank. Needless to say, we were outnumbered and under-ranked and the cowardly Order gang sliced through our poor, pitiful goblin trio like warm butter.
Tags: Warhammer
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It is quiet… too quite.. (eerie music begins to play)
Lol, btw I have found a severe deterrent to chat is you don’t get a helpful “ding” when someone gives you a tell like in wow or lotro, or even a little image like in lotro. Sheesh. I have missed tons of chat messages already because of that. Don;t take it personally if people don’t talk back, they may not even know you’re talking cuz the chat is so borked.
p.s. the order CoW guild wouldnt respond to me till I said stuff three times but after that they got the hang of it and were very nice.
WAR sucks when theirs no one around. You should create an alt on the Oceanic servers. Their prime time would be close to your play time. It might help to lost the feeling of loneliness.
I’ve got Order character on Anlec, if your interested. Not sure what the ping would be like though
Don’t take this the wrong way, but playing during the morning hours is going to be an issue with a game that just released because a majority of those people are at work. The game just got 500K subs, it doesn’t have the 10 million that WoW has or the 1million that I’m sure Lotro has. You have to give it time. Besides, they have been cloning servers so people will spread out because during peek times, like 5pm est, people are flooding the servers. I’m sure after a few months you’ll see more people on.
Now on the order side, I’ve not had any issue finding people to do stuff with at say 9am till noon but that is on the weekend and not during the weekdays. But the guild does have a lot of people playing that are overseas and or have to work at night on the order side.
Now, I like the sound. It has great ambient sound that adds flavor to the game….birds chirping and explosions from the bombardments. I honestly don’t think you need a music when your central them is War, what kind of music would you expect, happy killing music? I was playing WoW last night and although they have great music, It’s pretty silly to have it playing in all the zones. I mean you don’t hear music when your walking thru the red wood forest unless you have your Ipod with you, so why would you have music playing in the Hinterlands. And they repeat the music a lot in different zones, WoW that is, to the point that once you’ve heard it, you’ve pretty much heard it all.
Granted, I agree they could have a sound that notifies you when you get ingame messages. They are really lacking in the chat department. I find the selection of fonts and sizes to be bad. Everything is bold or a font that doesn’t read well in a chat window. But you can customize what you messages you get in the window thru the filter and you can change the chat color to something easier to read.
I still think your trying to compare Lotro with WAR to some degree because you love Lotro and expected so much more from WAR and your not getting it. This is not a slam, but I know you really like Lotro and when you really like one game, it’s hard not to compare it to the new game coming out. I did it when I tried Lotro, CoH and Tabula Rasa. I compared all of them to WoW and found them lacking because I liked WoW so much.
But I commend you for giving WAR a try and not passing judgement based off of screenshots or other people’s blogs like some game bloggers do. At least you took the plunge to see what the game was like for yourself. If it doesn’t meet your expectations then it just doesn’t. I thought from what I was reading about Spore that it would be the new great Sim, but it just isn’t, but I’m basing that on my actual playing the game and not other people’s insights.
I do think your complaints are valid, I just don’t think they are game breaking. I’m very impressed with the way the game launched and as the start to tweak it, I’m sure a lot of what we are seeing now in the game will be changed or enhanced by this time next year, just like WoW and EQ2 did. Hell, EQ2 changed their whole class structure because it was a pain. Even SWG had the infamous NGE that was suppose to make the game better but only broke it for hardcore players. (man, I should have posted all this on my site lol)
Anyway, I’m sorry your still not getting 100% out of the game, but at least you can say you tried.
Oh, now I feel bad
I was on the other day (Saturday morning I think) and I saw the message “Tukeela has logged on” and I thought to myself, “Hey, I think that’s Scott from Pumping Irony!”. But I didn’t say anything…because I was still sleepy and needed caffiene.
Next time I’ll make sure to say hello!
Regarding the music, here’s where I stand: I’m practically the only person on the entire server, at least on Destruction. Or at least Destruction, Tier 1. The game seems to go out of its way to separate everyone so I honestly can’t tell how active the server is, I can only tell how active the little area I’m in is. Or isn’t, as the case has been. So, I have the server or zone to myself with nothing to do but the terribly boring solo quests. Yes, I absolutely expect (and in WAR, crave…) some background music to try to draw me in, something I’ll remember. The bigger a group gets and the more hectic the battles get, music becomes less important because I’m drawn into the action in the current situation.
GW, LOTRO, WoW, Vanguard, even some Asian F2P games have always had gorgeous soundtracks. Some would stick in my head for days. WoW eventually got to be the exception because you start noticing that they really only had a handful of tracks that were repeated depending on the type of environment you were in. So at that point, I started streaming RadioRivendell.com in the background rather than WoW’s music. But I do recall a time in AQ20 where we’d gotten comfortable enough to just do the raid with very little necessary communication over Ventrilo, and we decided to actually turn the music on (normally totally off to hear Ventrilo) and we were surprised that AQ20 actually had decent music and not a track that played in Azeroth.
I guess it’s that I’m already feeling alone and lonely in WAR, and I don’t even have good, memorable soundtrack to keep me engaged.
@H00LiGAN: LOL! Ya know, I’m equally guilty in the mornings too. I’m not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination. I’ll text chat just fine, but there is absolutely no way I would punish myself and anyone else by getting into a VOIP situation until I’ve had my coffee and a few hours to wake up. Otherwise I just growl and grumble at people, which tends to not make the best impressions.
I think WoW is the first game where I actually left the game music on. I’m not a big fan of game music personally, which is why I’m not bothered by the lack of it in WAR. I’m more interested in the ambient sounds, they tend to draw me more into a game than some Overture by some over paid orchestra or in WoW’s case synthesized music. But, again, it’s all subjective, just like the PvP or PvE aspect of the game. I like blue, you like red, etc. Nothing wrong with that for sure….Oh My GAWD.
Sorry, broke into a bit of Valley girl there.
It has a lot to do with your frame of mind. If you use to having your MMO’s a certain way, it’s hard to except a new one when it differs. Differences can grow on you, as long as you have an open mind. I can see that you still do, but for how long I’m wondering?
If you wanna see people you gotta queue for lots and lots of scenarios early on. Later on (tier 2.5/3) the world rvr starts to get a little bit of life to it.
Tier 1 is essentially empty right now on most servers I’d imagine as the bulk of the folks that have joined up are in Tier 2.
But, if you and I had the same schedules I’d play with you.
Fairly certain I’m sick of the WL’s buggy-ness and will be rolling something new this week at some point. At least until Pet-Issues are fixed.
How? I queue for a Scenario as soon as I load up, but there’s only ONE available to me at any given time.
I’d love to get to Tier 2+ but it’s very hard to do alone. For me, anyway. I have a very difficult time imagining anyone is enjoying those solo quests. Then again, I always had a difficult time imagining people enjoyed grinding games like Lineage 2, etc.
Imagine a rather fat guy sitting at a computer typing this sentence out, and you can image that say, rather fat, guy enjoying solo questing. LOL
It’s not as hard to image as you might think.
Hey, I’m semi-sveldt and I enjoy solo-questing.
Not as much as grouping, but sometimes just hanging out and exploring by myself is more therapeutic than anything. WAR’s PvE is no greater or lesser than any other Trad-MMOG, really. It’s just not nearly as fun as the more hectic and spontaneous RvR in the game by comparison.
I’ve just read that Mythic is opening cross-pairing queues. Being able to queue for all 3 scenarios in a tier will have to help queue times somewhat.
Only thing I have to say is what I posted on Random Battle Scott. Not sure your EXACT hours but
The guild thing rings true. My only suggestion would be to tap the players in the guild ON the forums, make it known you need groups at that time, that is why we have those boards and communicate issues.
Once you roll into a night or day of keep taking and open objective taking, you wont forget it it is a blast.
Unless Xen of Onslaught shows up and PWNS everyone. Damn those bastards!
Also this isnt a grinding game that MUCH. I take like 12 quests, go to the red areas on the map, do them all, turn in all 12 at once and I gain a level. Easy stuff
Seen it before, but its easy