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Archive for April 1st, 2010

Scenerio queue changes in 1.3.5 – Warhammer Online

01 Apr

EDIT: This was an April fools prank post, to my knowledge, Mythic has not announced anything about changing scenerios in 1.3.5. The theory behind this post is actually quite solid, if you can accept a Warhammer game without solo queuing (which will be the ultimate CON to a system like this) it would actually solve a lot of problems and not be a horrible way to have the scenerio system run.

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Yesterday, Mythic gave some glimpses into changes to scenerio queuing that they plan to bring in with the 1.3.5 patch.

With large amounts of people complaining about scenerio afk’ers and premade groups, Mythic plans to take a chance at improving both of these by making scenerios a group only activity in Warhammer Online. The minimum group size is still being worked out, it could be as low as 3 people, which would still fit nicely into loading 12 into a scenerio.

The looking for group tool is already in place in the game and will have small improvements: When browsing for people to add to your group, the UI will show some stats like their damage/healing done in their last 3 scenerios, including the duration of the scenerio (in case it was a fast one). It will also let each player flagged as looking for group to set a comment about spec, like “defensive tank” etc..

Assuming people put together groups somewhat intelligently like when they do for PvE instances, competition in scenerios should go up across the board. Great premades will still dominate of course, but with everyone in a semi-premade the gap should close a little. Afkers will simply not be included in player created groups and it should effectively remove the problem of scenerio AFK’ing.

Another neat feature mentioned was the ghosting feature. Players that abandon queues after they pop will still show up in the scenerio list at the bottom and greyed out. This will add a little bit of clarity to players on why scenerios are going inbalanced and which players caused the inbalance.

Following the logic on these changes, its hard not to think this is a great change for the game. Sure solo queuing was a great convenience, but in a group vs group game, it caused a lot of issues. This puts more control in the players hands, forces them to interact more with other players and build relationships outside, and drives more players to open rvr (the true heart of the game) while forming scenerio groups. Who knows, on Iron Rock, where there are more guilds on destruction then active players, it might get people that normally run around in super small guilds merging and forming up with other guilds to create larger more organized groups.