I’m not taking time off work unlike a co-worker, and I’m not really anticipating being able to play WoW tomorrow at all. Last night’s plans of fetching some Dark Iron Ale Mugs for the Darkmoon Faire fell through when the servers were down for emergency maintenance until nearly 10pm. I don’t have a lot of faith in the WotLK launch at this time. I might spend the time looking at art books: World of Warcraft: The Art of The Trading Card Game) is great, while I wasn’t quite as pleased with The Art of World of Warcraft even though it did have concepts and art that are only now making it into the live game (like Northrend) and some that still haven’t (the Emerald Dream).

Rivendare wasn’t bad at all. Becky thinks she didn’t need to use her Earth Elemental Totem, and I felt we could have had better placement for taking out the skelly adds. The biggest problem we had was Baroness Anastari–next time, we’re going in the service entrance, clearing to her, then one of us will leave the instance while the other kills her off.

So, as a 65 Paladin and 67 Shaman, mostly in Hellfire Peninsula quest gear (a few blues, mostly greens), we managed to kill the Baron and walk out with bags bulging with blues and greens, just no horse. I’m going to start selling the shards and dusts to try to make back some of the money I spent leveling enchanting. My Paladin is almost to Revered with Argent Dawn, so I’ll soon get to start turning in all my Minion, Invader, and Corruptor Scourgestones, turn in more bone chips, etc.

I also picked up three of the four pieces of level 70 Undead Slayer plate from the Scourge invasion event, and a horn, book, and banner to go with the tabard. I need to get back to skilling Enchanting so I can disenchant the purples I got from the Scourge camps. I only wish Becky or I had gotten the new characters to 70 in time to get Daemonique outfitted in the welfare epics.

in my WoW cancellation reason for Blizzard, I entered:

Zombies. After this last weekend, I’m not sure I want to spend any time with these people.

I sent my share of petitions for foul language. All in all, I’d count the zombie weekend as a disaster for anyone who wasn’t already bored of the game. It was enough to make my wife and I walk away from WoW, and she has an overpowered fresh level 61 Enhancement Shaman she leveled from creation in the time it took me to go from 43 to 57. That’s pretty damn good alienation of your casual customers, Blizzard.

Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t play well, or for very long. I cut myself with a steak knife while preparing pet food on Sunday evening. I spent three hours in the emergency room before being discharged.

There are parts in there that you’re not supposed so see. Something was nicely severed that looked like a spaghetti noodle. The doctor was worried about tendons, but I still had a good grip.

The stitches go in. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how many. I couldn’t watch, except through the phone’s screen. It’s funny how I needed the experience to be mediated.

Almost done. This is about where it started to hurt: the local wasn’t very strong on the inside edge of my thumb, but I wasn’t about to ask the doctor to add more. The anesthetic makes your nerves feel like they’re burning as they start to shut off. I could feel pressure for sure, and definitely the sting of the suturing needle.

All stitched up and waiting for antibiotic gel. I asked about the suturing kit: it’s less expensive to throw it out than it is to autoclave the instruments. Later, the nurse came back and cleaned most of the blood off my hand and wrapped it.

The sock is tube gauze, stretched over a metal frame and pulled over the horse wrap and sterile gauze. My thumb and hand itch and the thumb hurts, and every time I stretch my hand to do things like move a chair, type, or tie a shoelace, I can feel the stitches pull and the would stretch open. Although I’m splinted, I’m also double jointed and can pull my thumb away from the splint.

Yeah, it was a lot of blood. The kitchen looked like I tried to paint it with an airbrush. We’re still finding blood two days later.

For 10 days, no fun coding (I can’t really type now . . . I’m a two handed, home-row typist) and no FPS gaming. WoW is barely playable, and mostly if I just use the mouse for everything.

Returning to Ekrund as a level 12 Shaman, I figured I’d be the right level to basically be leaving the zone, based on my experiences in Beta. I could whip through the quests and be on the beach sipping seawater from salamander skulls in no time. Unfortunately, on my first encounter with a level 9 Dwarf Skeleton, I was turned into a Chicken, lost nearly 1000 hit points, and then was blown up by feedback (!) on a DOT. I found myself resurrecting at the nearby town, paying to get the health debuff removed, and figuring I just came across an odd bug. This seemed to be borne out until I grouped with a level 8 Squig Herder who was a little over his head in the same Dwarf tomb, then was (again) turned into a chicken and blown up by one of my DOTs–from his perspective, I was insta-killed–when I attacked the named ghost mob.

This makes WAR basically unplayable. It was bad enough that I would chicken when moving to a lower Tier, but I didn’t have to worry about that until after level 20. Now, I’m being chickened on mobs just a couple levels below me, well within my current Tier, and as the next stage in the storyline.

I reported the bug, but I can pretty much say that I don’t think EA/Mythic is going to be receiving any subscription money from me or my wife. They fixed a lot of warts in the game in the past couple weeks, or last couple patches, but this is game breaking and a real sign of code and design quality. It’s just too bad and it shatters some of my hopes, but I’m afraid WAR isn’t going to be my casual MMO gamer destination in the end.

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WAR Closed Beta was down. A note stated that they were preparing for the preview weekend, which I’ve been dreading all week as I figured I’d end up stuck in a newbie zone, waiting for named mobs to respawn, and tripping over other players. I figured, however, that Mythic would have to have plenty of servers up, and maybe I could leave a quick note with Becky that she could come play WAR today while I’m at work.

Becky has felt that the last phases of this beta could have been handled better. Although Mythic has emphasized communicating through the Herald, she still felt cut-off as the standard has been set that patch notes, downtime, and important updates are displayed by the patcher–which rarely showed anything up-to-date. I ended up getting my best information from the Warhammer Alliance boards and a couple guild sites I’d check now and again.

It looks like the authentication server is acting as a significant point of failure in the process of selecting a server on which to play, and that the servers themselves are capped at 1600 players, about half of the server cap for DAOC. I can assure you that, at least until players spread out from gaining levels, 1000 players on the server make most of the low-level zones feel crowded.

Becky has had such poor customer experiences from the beta, with (to her) randomly downed servers during the middle of the day, the crowded newbie zones, and the RvR-based elder game that she’s looking to take a pass on WAR altogether–and can’t understand what I like about the game. (Is it enough that WoW is old?) We both realize this is a beta, but she was expecting it to be more like LOTRO’s beta and less like Shadowbane’s.

Edit:

It looks like Mythic raised the server caps. I can log in now–of course, now I have to leave for work.

I’ve only taken notes on the Empire starting area (it’s new to me), and I’m going out of my way to try to identify history and lore and notable NPC unlocks. I’ve submitted a bunch of bugs and gameplay issues, and I only wish that Closed Beta was going on a little longer so I could get more done before the masses arrive.

I think Becky is going to take a pass on Warhammer. Dungeon Runners is very appealing to her right now, although she dislikes how much larger the dungeons get after the first set (Algernon) simply because it takes much more time to clear them, and she really needs a break from World of Warcraft. She’s still trying the WAR beta but the game doesn’t appeal to her very much. I think I may now have a shrinkwrapped WAR collector’s edition with unused pre-order keys arriving on September 18.

RvR has been about what I expect. My Goblin Shaman tends to be pretty hard to kill, although I specialized into healing instead of damage so it takes me quite a while to kill tank and healer classes. It typically takes duos or trios to take me out when I’m paying attention to my health, although this might be a little harder for them now that I’ve picked up a couple more RvR-specific abilities. I’m still most interested in the game for PvE at this point, and that’s pretty rich and well polished. Public Quests are downright addictive, especially because they give you great equipment rewards for rolling at the top for the chest loot and from the local rally master. Finally, in PvE or RvR, tanks tend to be pretty rare (apparently, Shamans are the FOTM for Greenskins, even more than Squig Herders), so every Black Orc can easily form a group and get a couple (or three) pocket healers following him around.

• The artistic style is quirky and fun and well done
• The game has significant polish
• The most fun we’ve had with it so far is when playing Greenskins. Other races we’ve tried have more serious storylines and starting areas.
• WoW Hunters might be looking forward to the White Lion, but that should really be for people who miss playing their Beastmasters from EQ. The closest WoW Hunter analogue is the Squig Herder. No kidding.
• Low level Demonologists play like Animists from DAOC
• Public quests can be a ton of fun, but quest mobs for unrelated quests should be moved outside the public quest area (they may not respawn until after the public quest is complete)
• We’ve had two client crashes, one each, and one zone crash. This isn’t too bad considering that the game still has five weeks before release.
• Character customization is in, although the slider IDs aren’t necessarily matching the character body part, and there are some very gory choices available
• The zones feel, overall, smaller than WoW zones, more on par with starting zones in DAOC (which makes some sense)–Becky described it as a very urban feel in that she was constantly rubbing elbows with other CE closed beta players
• WAR has the hands-down best map implementation we’ve ever seen in an MMO. CoH/CoV were good, but this is better.
• The characters we’ve played don’t feel particularly weak, even in my case where I rolled up primary healers. Becky has no complaints about her Squig Herder.
• High Elves don’t have enough money to train all their skills at level 5 or 6. Greenskins don’t run low on money.
• There’s an interesting mechanic to some “green name” drops before making them usable. I had pretty good luck with drops on my Shaman.
• As always, big races are a pain to see around or click NPCs
• There are (or were) queues to get into the lowbie RvR. It looked like you could start that as early as level three simply by following quest lines.
• The quest tracker has a great implementation, definitely a step up from WoW
• The Tome of Knowledge takes a little getting used to for navigation and isn’t always obvious–it made more sense to me than to Becky
• On the other hand, I was more likely to get lost and not be able to find my quest mobs or locations (at least without the help of the map) than Becky who pushed through the quests (all new to her too!) about half-again as quickly as I could
• There are a lot of bottleneck named mobs with three to five minute respawn times, and a lot of players who don’t understand grouping for that kill
• We’ve still seen other graphical bugs, such as channeled spells that have the termination end prematurely for the player but continue indefinitely when seen by other players
• You need to watch your message log, such as when logging out–there are few popups

The game runs better and is more fun than Age of Conan, which is a much more serious game. Becky’s overall impression is that WoW doesn’t have anything to worry about in the long run, and the however much fun WAR is, it’s tempered by the density of players and how difficult it will be to start a new character and complete quests in the first few months. On more than one occasion, we’ve missed named quest mobs who weren’t up because they died within seconds of spawning or had to fight with crowds for even relatively common spawns.

Becky believes the Dwarves and High Elves were the most popular races she tried, although the server population skewed 5:3, Chaos to Order (the opposite of a typical WoW server).

The trick is to gather, sell your greens, and be consistent in your pricing. Weekends will knock down commodity prices, and you might end up relisting stacks of Iron, Mithril, or even Gold several times, but you’ll eventually get what you ask (depending on the server’s market, of course).

I also have bought very little, relying mostly on quest gear and the occasional low-priced green.