Thursday, September 18, 2008

Actually Improving the Game

One thing that has impressed me about Warhammer is how much they've added to the game since the start of the open beta. (Perhaps I should, instead, be horrified that they didn't bother to do this stuff until the very last minute, but I'll take the half-full glass for now.) A few things that jumped out at me:

- Thanks to the anonymous commenter from my last entry for pointing out there there IS now an option in one of the game options menu that allows you to turn off self-clicking so that you don't get in your own way while looting/targeting. My poor Dwarf engineer unlocked the "Ow! My Eye!" achievement for being accidentally clicked on 100 times in the five levels I gained before someone pointed this out.

- Not really an added feature, but queues seem to have died down somewhat as of last night (the final day of the headstart). There are four servers that are simply overcrowded (and even then, three of those will let you in if you're playing Order). It will be interesting to see if the queues are actually worse tonight for the official, this-time-is-actually-it-we-swear retail launch. (Many stores appear to have distributed their preorders yesterday, adding yet another milestone to quite possibly the most separate launch dates in MMORPG history.)

- I previously complained about repeating a PQ four times (coming in first overall once) and failing to obtain any loot all four times. Well, Mythic seems to agree that this can be aggravating, so they've added in a bonus for previous no-loot attempts. It isn't a huge bonus (100 points, which gets added to your roll of 1-1000 and as much as 500 points for contribution), but it supposedly stacks and it does a lot to ease the frustration.

Overall, it's encouraging to see changes like this getting added to the game so rapidly. I'm not sure if the closed beta testers had just gotten used to the problems and not complained, if livability stuff like this was somehow deemed too low a priority to fix until the week before launch, etc, but fixing problems is definitely better than not fixing them.

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