While my honeymoon with LOTRO still isn't over, I thought I'd followup my last post about criticisms that don't really bug me-- with some that do.

These are relatively minor for me, but I'm fairly tolerant. I found none of them show stopping, they're just things I wish Turbine would fix:

• Pathing problems. Pets and mobs both get "confused" sometimes and literally stuck because they cannot find a path to their target. Usually the solution is to walk up in melee range, but that can get messy for groups. Pathing is hard to code, I'm aware, but I would have hoped that a game that's been out since 2007 would have advanced this by now.
• Quest Text cannot be resized. It's small and although they've enabled customization in much of the rest of the UI, for some dumb reason the font size cannot be changed on the Quest log.
• Minimized Crashes. This is minor, it only happens when the game is in fullscreen and I'm travelling (horse paths). The solution is to switch to Windowed-mode and that's pretty typical of a lot of games, but still it bugs me to some small degree.
• DX10 isn't stable. Not for me at least. I get the blank screen of death everytime I try to use DX10 with LOTRO. It's most certainly driver related and Nvidia could be to blame, but it's also the only game I'm having this issue with currently. I'm not going to take Turbine to task over this, as it kinda goes along with the whole 'Vista sucks' paradigm. Hopefully it's fixed by the time Windows 7 gets released.
• Rubberbanding on zone change. This past week or so, something has been up with Turbine's servers. When you change areas, sometimes you'll hit a 'rubber wall' just as you're making the zone change (when the area's name pops up). This doesn't seem to be lag related, it's more as if that area just isn't accepting players for a few moments. Turbine says they're working on the issue and I didn't see it happen at all yesterday, so hopefully they've resolved it.

These are listed in the order of importance by my reckoning, so you can see I'm not too concerned with temporary server-related troubles or getting a few extra shadows in DX10. Your own mileage may vary.

Mythic's Patch 1.03 for WAR looks promising, although some points may look familiar. To put a positive spin I'll call it further progress in the areas of Pet behaviour, gold spam reduction, chat improvements, etc..

Some notable points:

• Potions will be dropping less to help bump up Apothecary? I thought Mythic was against making crafting professions a must-have. I've done Apothecary so far, but I've been considering dropping it because it's just not enjoyable to me. I don't want to feel obliged to continue, so this change irks me.
• You'll be able to retrieve your own Standard easier. Good, because so far it's too easy to toss away 2g. Standards should be harder to capture, once the novelty wears off it's no fun to basically just give your enemy a prize at your actual expense.
• Double-queues (two Scenarios popping at once) is supposed to be fixed. Yay. I suspect this is why Scenarios are sometimes short-handed, we had several this week that ended early due to the sides being severely unbalanced.

Hopefully they keep the small fixes rolling, but I'd really like to see them tackle some of the bigger issues that are haunting the game so far.

Mythic has announced their first big bug patch for WAR: Update 1.01 It's a doozy, at least in comparison to the minor fixes they've applied so far. The new patch should be going live sometime today.

I've been impressed so far with how small (as in filesize) their fixes have been so far, they've been barely noticeable to download but certainly appreciated in-game. We'll see how this biggun' goes.

Some highlights:

• Autoloot added.
• TAB targeting improved (thank God).
• "Target is Out of Range" bug fixed (This was driving me insane!).
• Various chat fixes like ignore actually working and your friends list not saying it's full with just three people on it (/facepalm over these in the first place).
• "The Gunbad instance lockouts will now be 30 minutes instead of 24 hours." (Good, I thought Mythic was against long raid-style lockout timer bullshit)
• "Player pets have learned to behave themselves." Plus other pet fixes (Yay!).
• The /petname command is now reserved for White Lions only. (Bastards! Let me name my Squigs!)
• The mail delay has been reduced to 5 seconds (Bankalt thanks Mythic).

If the pet changes are effective, I'll be a happy Squig Herder.

Sometimes something is so good that the flaws stand out like thorns on a rose stem. I'm sure that my next batch of posts about Warhammer are going to seem very critical, but I wouldn't bother pointing out what is wrong with the game if I wasn't enjoying it so much.

I hadn't expected to love WAR. I wasn't even sure if I'd play the game, it seemed in many ways to be contrary to what I prefer in an MMORPG. But what's there, the core of gameplay, is fun.

There are, however, a LOT of bugs and issues. But these are easy to forget when you're having a good time.

I was the same way with World of Warcraft when it was released. It was such a wonder at first that most players glossed over some significant issues that they would otherwise roast a game for. WAR is much the same, some of the issues are big, even close to show-stopping (the poor ways WAR handles lag come to mind), but it's worth playing.

That won't stop me however, from being very critical of Mythic. Some things need fixing now, while others should be addressed sooner or later.

Sooner or later I was bound to take this snapshot, because it's been nagging at me. This is my 2004 World of Warcraft retail box:

A whole lot of people either have selective memories, or they arrived on the scene later, but the release of WoW was not 'polished'. It had numerous bugs, abysmal server stability, barely passable Endgame and virtually none of the faction-PvP features that were highlighted during pre-release.

Sieges of course, were not included. Nor was the "mighty Dragon of Blackrock Spire", although Nefarian did arrive 7 months later.

It was still a great game.

Accolade it for what it was and what it became, not what it wasn't.

Following much criticism over their twice-weekly patching schedule and quality assurance issues, Funcom has moved to a weekly patching schedule and is now providing a test server hosting the next upcoming patch.

Details for downloading and installing the Testlive client are listed in this AoC Forums thread. An existing and current Age of Conan account is required.

Hopefully this helps them hit that threshold where a significant amount of bugs get squashed and the new content begins to outweigh the issues.

I've also noticed that today's patch contains mostly bugfixes.

In case you hadn't heard, there's a disparity between Male and Female damage output in Age of Conan. This was predicted by many during pre-release because it was obvious that Funcom was rushing the female animations out the door in time for release.

It's a no-surprise bug based on motion-captured animation speeds that while perfectly reasonable technically, is no doubt a PR disaster for a game that's already ripe for sexist accusations. There've been more than a few "OMG how could they let that one happen?" reactions.

Age of Conan's biggest selling feature is the melee combo-driven combat. It's very animation-based, which is what gives it a tangible charm (rather than say, watching a casting bar). You push buttons to whack at things and you ~see~ yourself whacking at things in "real time" (or a close approximation). This takes meticulous animation work, which is astounding considering how good their animation is and how much variety they have of it, including death animations.

Funcom has now addressed the issue to make players aware they've been working on it. I'm not sure if that was the wisest thing to do because it's likely to hit mainstream media now that it's been confirmed.

They were bound to slip on this, if not on gender then on classes. The biggest downside to me right now is how much the game will suffer from a lack of new animations while their teams put in many hours fixing this problem. It will also be keeping their QA department busy, which is noted in the post linked above.

I'm glad they're making progress on this, but geez this is an epic bug.