One of our guild members deleted his characters after some frustration with Scenarios. I don't blame him, he was new to PvP and the imbalance of premades while you're queue'ing solo doesn't leave room for a lot of satisfying wins. Hell, those Scenarios are filled with players trash-talking their own teammates (lacking options to trash-talk the enemy), so that's bound to raise some blood pressure.

And let's face it for most of us, WAR at this point is all about the Scenarios.

I'm fairly happy with the Scenarios myself. My frustration factor is low, but I've been hammering away at PvP stuff since Pong. It's hard to get too upset after a billion quad-damage gibs in Quake and headshots in Counterstrike. I find the teamplay a blast, although certainly more fun when I queue together with Nelg, Sakkara, Taek, etc. than just by myself.

Still, it would be nice if WAR had more to offer, because I can't see myself paying a monthly fee forever for something I could get from Team Fortress 2.

I'm critical of Mythic on this one, I don't see how they could have missed this coming. There's the convenience factor, the population imbalance, the zerg-is-no-fun state of RvR and just the fact that they've bet so much of their "Open world" content on Warbands or just plain large crowds. It's not one factor, but all of those elements that leave the Scenarios as the most entertaining element of the game.

So here we are in Queuehammer. Scenarios are good enough for now.

But-- I'm holding out hope. I'm waiting to see if Tier 4 has some small team content that will be an escape from the Warband-or-Scenario situation.

I haven't really looked at the state of Dungeons and Public Quests at Tier 4, it's going to be a see what's there when I get there. I've been slowing down my leveling on Skereye these past few weeks while I let friends catch up and that'll continue since most of them are still in Tier 2.

Mythic's got some time to re-balance their game and tweak their content. I hope they aren't too much in love of their "epic" "massive" sieges like Funcom was with Age of Conan, because what's most disappointing to me is the insistence on gathering crowds of players before fun happens. I also hope they add some half-decent mob AI: WAR's aggro and threat systems are bare-bones, below par from other games. The PvE could use a lot of love.

I'm praying for some real honest to goodness old-fashioned group / party content. WAR needs more meat and potatoes, good hearty basic meals.

I'm going to be patient, WAR is what I'm playing for awhile. At least until Left4Dead comes out.

There are essentially five driving forces for MMORPG players. These games, by their very nature have numerous (or at least multiple) activities and each player is motivated by the following:

1. Progression - Experience to level, or obtaining gear at Endgame.
2. Rewards - Gear, currency, notoriety or any other status-symbol or in-game possession.
3. Fun Factors - Is the activity just plain fun to do, or awe-inspiring in some way?
4. Competition - Many players are keen to compete and compare their performance with other players / groups / guilds / factions.
5. Social Interaction - At the core of any multiplayer RPG is the basic social satisfaction from hanging out with your friends & guildmates, teaming up in a cooperative way and meeting / interacting with new people. Human desire to be accepted as part of a group should not be overlooked.

Each of these can motivate players in different directions. For instance, an activity could be fun, but the players may feel discouraged if it doesn't provide experience. It's great to be social, but if solo'ing is the fastest way to level, players will shun teaming up.

The first two motivations can be considered incentives in their purest form, in a way they are both rewards although it's important to separate them because one will motivate a certain type of player whereas the other may not.

In an interview with Ten Ton Hammer, Mark Jacobs repeated an established adage in MMORPGs:

I'd call this more truthiness than truism, because it's missing an important element--

Add Convenience

Convenience is the sixth motivator and it's the trump card. You can take any combination of the above and mix in convenience and whatever the activity is, it will go over in a big way. One example is if quests are trackable on a map, most players will naturally complete the quests that are closest rather than any sort of story-progression.

Players will always find the shortcuts.

For Warhammer, Scenarios match multiple categories, they're certainly competitive and fun and if the queues are short the experience is good. But above all, they're super-convenient.

Mythic may try to nerf Scenarios, or more likely boost the incentives for other activities, but the fact of the matter is that they need to boost all of the motivators, not just exp and rewards if they hope to make their game more well rounded and get players deeper into RvR and Public Quests.

The title on this post sums up what I think of Mythic's new recruit-a-friend prizes. Spend real money to get a sidekick / apprentice feature that should have been in the game in the first place? Very poor form.

Mythic is sinking pretty low on this one. It makes me glad I'm done with that game, because this would have made me cancel my account in a hot second.

I admire Keen's persistence and passion, he so badly wants WAR to be the game he imagined it would be. He's created a map and an outline for what he hopes the Land of the Dead update will be.

The past few months WAR has seen a lot of changes, big and small. Some of it goes with the territory for any MMO release. The more game-changing stuff has been accoladed while my mouth is agape. If the game didn't need the changes so much, the playerbase might have revolted, but like Keen they're a persistent lot: They want their RvR that bad. And it still has a long ways to go.

WAR is so obviously broken to me. It can be fixed and it probably will be fixed, possibly over and over again. I'm not predicting any sort of gloom and doom, but there are frustrations and those will continue. Let's face it, this game hasn't just been beta-tested while we play, it's still being designed. Or redesigned, depending on how you'd like to look at it.

There's a school of thought prevalent in the community, that DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot) was closer to the mark in RvR goodness. In that case, this community is even more stubbornly sticking with Mythic, because that taste is still with them and they want it again.

It does beg the question though, why didn't Mythic just upgrade DAoC? Aside from the updated graphics engine (with many of its own problems), is WAR a downgrade from their previous game? DAoC v0.9?

I burned out waiting for the outcome, but I find myself ever curious where this game is going to end up.

(Related: I Has PC has an article up regarding incomplete MMOs and the possibilities of commercial betas.)

I've been harsh on WAR lately, but here's one area where Mythic has shined: community support.

A lot of game companies (MMOs and others alike) have difficulties exciting their fanbase, or even finding it in the first place. Common attempts usually involve just throwing up some forums and an info site, maybe some fancy flash apps and web-based minigames. They may do the rounds with the press, giving 'exclusives', holding contests, pretending to care about player feedback-- That's the usual stuff.

That formula can work really well. Turbine is a good example. With good community managers they rally their fanbase like troopers and as Brasse points out, that effort can be credited for the game's accolades, almost as much as the game's own merits. Turbine is also going the walled-garden route with my.lotro.com, where players can create LOTRO blogs on Turbine's own (Wordpress-powered) blog system.

Mythic's approach:

Mythic took a different turn for WAR. They shunned official forums, pointing people to 3rd party sites instead. They visited blogs and posted comments, just like regular folk. Of course they didn't get treated like any face in the crowd. Mark Jacobs and Paul Barnett elevated into austere figures within the fanbase, like good Generals on their horses in the frontlines with the troops. They spoke, they conversed, they ranted and often. Aimed directly at the playerbase, skipping the traditional media middleman.

The center of the WAR universe isn't even www.warhammeronline.com. It's located at your blog, your forums, your interviews. Mythic didn't just beckon the fans in, they reached out to them in their own local haunts.

It's not just a question of working with the 'new' media. Lots of companies are trying that, they've got their Myspace and Facebook pages, maybe even a blog or two and some fiddling with their own Wikipedia entries. But Mythic sought out and found where players were really hanging out, specific to their game. They did right to encourage folks like Keen, Syp and Snafzg, plus a host of others (a full list would be huge). They sent out whimsical press kits. And they created viral videos of Paul Barnett ranting like a fool, but somehow everyone loves him, even when he misses the mark or swallows his entire foot. Perhaps because he does.

Mythic gave themselves a human face and the fans are giving back because of it. A whole host of blogs just celebrated an "Age of Blogging" event that was completely fan initiated. It was more successful for WAR's promotion than anyone could have imagined.

Being a Warhammer player means being part of a community and that keeps people in, always looking for the best parts of the game.

This topic went 'round the blogosphere a few months back, but I'm revisiting it because the situation on the ground has changed.

I think Mark Jacobs was just playing the marketing game, it was a defensive 'WotLK won't hurt us' much like his recent 'layoffs won't hurt us'. He was just trying to put out fires.

I didn't buy into it. And if it was true, why should Mythic be proud of it?

MMORPGs encompass a variety of activities and gaming urges for the players. So if your game's population is taking time to play another MMO, then you've probably got some gaping holes in your content. In other words, if it was as compelling as it should be, they shouldn't be wandering so easily.

I understand playing other games, that makes sense. MMOs don't cover the same kind of gameplay as say Guitar Hero or Wii Fit. But to jump back and forth between two Diku-derived MMORPGs? These are time and focus consuming: Players invest in their characters.

So it probably wasn't true back in October, but it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know I clued in that WAR's PvE content lacked a good foundation. And Mythic's emphasis has shifted fully to RvR (PvP) since release. It's become the 'why would you come here for PvE?' game.

On the forums, on the blogs, on the channels in-game-- It's evident that a good deal of players are playing WoW (or EQ2 or LOTRO) for PvE and WAR for PvP. In the blogosphere alone it's getting hard to find WAR players that are solely for WAR, it seems like they've all re-subbed for WotLK. I could make a long list, but more effective is Tome of Knowledge's "A Tale of Two Hunters" comic:

(Note: Not my comic, it just illustrates this so well. Go visit Tome of Knowledge to fully appreciate it.)

The problem for Mythic is whether Blizzard clues in. I suspect it'd be a lot easier for WoW's PvP to get patched into something more compelling, than for Mythic to rework most of WAR's PvE. I'm of the opinion that PvP content is much easier to create, the players do much of the work for you. That's WAR's driving force altogether, in the masses of players.

And here's the bottom line:

I don't think players want to subscribe to multiple MMORPGs. They do it because they want both experiences to be great: PvE and PvP. If one of the games does both well, they wouldn't need the other.

I'm a little late with it, but here's my personal recap of 2008 gaming to pile onto the bonfire. It was a busy year:

WoW: I started the year fresh from quitting WoW. After 3 years I had burned out. I piled on the criticism pretty thick for awhile, especially regardingly Blizzard's metagaming trickery, their tendency to stretch everything into a grind, and how their main storyline is reserved for raids.

Overall though, I still recommend WoW as the best MMORPG for any new player to try. The leveling, open world and dungeons are all superb.

My best days in WoW are in the past and it'd take more than one expansion to get me back. My lack of playing won't hurt Blizzard in any way, they'll keep on wearing money hats.

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AoC: If you read some of my early posts about Age of Conan, you might think it was fantastic. I did too, there were parts that were amazing, the combat and character animations in particular. But the devs at Funcom spent too much time tinkering with their combat system and working on features where they had no clue (like PvP sieges, ouch). If they had focused on their strengths (PvE questing and immersion), who knows how much better it could have been.

Who's going to trust Funcom now? Oddly, I still think The Secret World could be promising. Maybe I'm just a sucker for the storytelling stuff (it is Cthulhu-esque), but I'm probably in the minority.

In the end I realized AoC was fun played as a solo / single-player game, but as an MMO it was a mess.

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WAR: I didn't have as high expectations of Warhammer, but at release I was surprised with how good it seemed. WAR's world appeared to be complete with significant content. They sure fooled me, even for the first few weeks of launch. The storefront was full of shiny toys, but inside it turned out to be an illusion.

The Public Quests? One of those illusions I mentioned. The first few were great, but past those the scripting was lame, the mob AI even worse and the influence grind via repeating "kill 150 mobs" was just nasty. This is from the designers who criticized other games for kill X mob quests!

PvP-wise, WAR is the best there is for current MMOs. That's WAR's saving grace, but it's also something I criticize deeply, because it still has a long way to go before being great even in this one category alone. My experience in RvR wasn't really PvP at all, it was zerg-style raiding on Keep Lords. I hate zerging, so I'm surprised I stuck with WAR as long as I did.

Bottom-Line: I think WAR will do well as the PvP niche MMO. The classes are well balanced for the core PvP. There are enough people that crave that so much, they'll look past Mythic's failures and even declare it great, because they lack any other good MMO choices for PvP.

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CoH: I wandered back into City of Heroes briefly, but I found the changes minimal and what was truly different I didn't like. The 'crafting' feels wedged in and out of place, plus it spoils much of the game's original balance.

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Vanguard: I purchased Vanguard this year after rumours that it had recovered from its failings. That was a dumb move. Ugly, ugly, ugly game.

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Left 4 Dead: One of the few non-MMO games this year that had a strong effect on me. It has the best elements that many MMOs are missing: Cooperative gameplay that's satisfying as both PvE and PvP. It's fantastic. This will be a LAN favourite between myself and my gamer-nerd friends for a long, long time.

Valve really has me on board with Steam at this point. Now I wish every game (new and old) was available via Steam.

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EVE Online: Speaking of Steam, that's how I finally gave EVE Online a spin. It's involved. Really involved. The geek in me could get totally absorbed, but I prefer to play these games with my less geeky friends, not leave them behind in a stats obsession.

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LOTRO: I'm still in the honeymoon stage with Lord of the Rings Online, so I have few complaints at this point. Everything has been great so far, I love the leveling pace and the attention to detail in everything from graphics, mob AI, lore, quest logs... even down to the facial and emote animations on the characters. This is the style of MMORPG I prefer, one with a lush rich world and a ton of side distractions so I can immerse myself into everything. Nelg, Lurch, Michelle and I have been playing non-stop. We'll be wrangling more friends in to join us soon.

I'll probably be in Middle Earth for awhile.

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Next up, my expectations for 2009...