2 Big Questions for Mythic about WAR

Now that I’ve been devoting the vast majority of my time to Warhammer Online again, I’ve come across a few issues once again that were there before and bothered me.  I had hoped these issues would have been resolved within the past month since they are, at least to me, dire.  Warhammer has several design issues that need fixing and a dozen or so bugs that are bothersome, however, the problems relating to my two questions are what I feel should be fixed tomorrow if at all possible.

When is Keep Contribution going to be fixed?

For probably as long as I can remember, Keep Contribution has been in a state of total disarray.  You can show up in the last 30 seconds of a keep siege and stay on your mount yet place high enough to get a gold bag or you can be there the entire time working your little goblin butt off for an hour and come in 45th.  If Mythic is going to stick with the contribution system here (I don’t think they should… but more on that later) then they need to get this system working -NOW- instead of later.  I’m tired of taking half a dozen keeps every day and not even placing above the people who stay mounted.  When is it going to be fixed?  I really think the players deserve a working system here.

When will the fortress lag and zone crashes be resolved?

In the past few days I’ve participated in three fortress sieges and whenever there are too many people present the entire zone crashes or becomes so laggy that 1 second cast times turn into 15 and people phase in and out.  I’ve spoken on this before but it needs to be reiterated: Fortress are bread and butter gameplay.  They must be working in order for city sieges to be working.

I don’t think that these are unfair expectations.  I don’t think it’s unreasonable to at least expect an ETA when the issues are plagueing the most important part of the game.  These issues are borderline game breaking – albeit the game is still fun and playable with them in their current state… imagine what it would be like if they were fixed.  Once these issues are corrected then we can move on to the nitpicking of different designs and wishcrafting what could be better, but these ones are fundamental.

  • I wonder when Blizzard fix their own lag in Wintergrasp (impossible to defend due to lag), Northrend overall and most importantly 10/25 man instances. Should I mention “Cannot launch anymore instances” when trying to do 5 mans?

    But yeah point was Mythic is not alone with this annoying problem and I bet they and Blizzard aren’t happy with it. Hopefully we will see some fixes for both games sooner than later…

  • word around town is they are revamping keeps and forts. Added more ways to get in rather than 1 choke point and for forts bring the lord down a floor.

  • @Fugazi

    Fixing Wintergrasp is easy; delete the piece of crap.

    @lumio

    My hopes are that the rumors are true. Keep sieges are still fun for me, but I would really like to see more diversity among the different keep layouts. Destructible walls would be great.

  • In reference to Mythic’s lag and contribution issues….these are two of the top reason I quit playing WAR. I feel that the optimization of game performance is quite terrible given the graphical quality of the game. Perhaps they simply try to set the basic draw distance too high? Not sure…but it was a HUGE resource hog.

    As for the comments about Wintergrasp…its my opinion that WoW delivered on what Mythic promised….IE a casual friendly mass combat area. I experience far less chopping and hitching in Wintergrasp than I ever did in a Keep Seige.

  • Oh, and bottom line is that stuffing 200+ characters into a small area in ANY game with graphical complexity greater than EQ1 is going to lag the “average” box. I was under the impression that Mythic placed performance over graphics (which is why the game looked as horrible as it did), but I didn’t see any smoothness in game play to back up that assumption.

  • I wonder if Mythic’s choice of 3rd-party game engine is related to the lag issues. It could be due to the texture handling, everytime I’d witnessed it was with large numbers of players in the immediate area, but in quieter parts of the same zone it was fine. It could equally be purely network traffic too, it’s hard to tell unless someone analyzes the packest to / from their client.

    I’d hope that it isn’t the Gamebryo engine, because Mythic would be screwed on any sort of quick fix timeline. They’d be submitting tickets and priority-wise they aren’t NDL’s biggest customer.

    I still run into the blurry texture problems sporadically in certain zones, that’s not a good sign. =/

    On the other hand, it could be server-related, the zone crashes certainly are. The solution there would probably be hardware upgrades, but is EA / Mythic interested in doing that while the game population is still settling?

    … Either way, it sucks, I never got to experience any sort of proper Fort action, everytime I arrived it was either one problem or the other. =(

  • I think people get a bit stuck on performance being frame rate based. It’s possible that performance/lag could be network traffic based. Not on the client but on the server?

  • Re read the 1st line of the previous post. What I mean to say is, if the server is struggling to handle the traffic/load of 300 400 people, then it may not be able to send out enough data for the clients to be able to function at a nominal level. I see that when I am trying to cast and the insta’s and cast time’s go through the floor. This may then be causing the game engine to able render.

    Now obviously you only get data traffic for people who are in your vicinity, which is why it’s fine else where.

  • Keep Contribution. Point given should be count as the time in the area and the skill cast. The skill cast is counted by time too. Example- If a person stay in the area for 100 seconds and casted the skill for 100 seconds. this guy should rewarded with gold. While a guy in the area for 100 seconds and casted skill for 50 seconds this guy should be rewarded less as he afk for 50 seconds.

  • Lag we talking about is server based, nothing to do with client performance or network connection. This is case in WoW at least but from description it is same in WAR (hello 10 sec “instant” casts).

  • @Fugazi & ThatsSkarWithAK: It can go either way really, don’t always assume server-side.

    Network drivers in Windows for instance usually get less priority than the graphics card on the bus, so feeding into texture memory in particular can actually create poor network performance. CPU and other usage may be fine, but moving memory around can definitely bottleneck.

    If the game engine is bugged or slow, especially with something like player / gear textures, each client can end up dropping a lot of packets. In the end, it’s both texture-loading lag and network lag, only via the clients instead of the server. I’ve noticed that WAR’s servers are very tolerant of poor latency and heavy packetloss without disconnecting the client.

    So no, I’m not really talking about framerate, although that’s not likely to be great in these situations either. I’m talking hesitations in small bursts and yeah signs of serious packetloss: skipping, players ‘phasing out’ as Keen describes, delays on casts, etc.. these are not latency issues, these are packetloss ones.

    In situations of players crowded around one region, this is as much a possibility as standard network lag or packetloss (regional, bottlenecked, server-side take your pick) and the results are very similar.

    If it’s server thrashing, the entire zone will suffer, not just groups of players. That has happened too: everytime I’ve seen it, it’s been a precursor to the zone crashing.

    Like I said, I think both situations are happening. There’s plenty of evidence that the engine has some serious texture-related issues, I’d be pretty shocked if it didn’t happen with large numbers of players actually.


    I’m sure some people don’t really care to think about the technical aspects, they just want to see it fixed. But a simple explanation usually means a simple fix, Mythic would have it done by now.

  • Ahhhhh got sucked back into this game since I have a new computer and can play pretty much lag free on low settings. Still same old same old…just canceled, again.

  • You got a new computer and got to play on low settings… wtf did you buy, a toaster?

    I agree though Keen, Fort crash/lag CAN be terrible. I say can because I’ve attended a few that were very very playable, and that same Fort the next day will crash. Can’t really figure that one out, but serious improvement has been made in recent weeks.

  • hey anyone bought this game off steam? WHen do they send you the product key for account registration? I’ve only received a receipt in my email

  • Sorry for the double post, the other one is in moderation due to a link.

    Anyway @lazy: Try launching the game from the Steam interface, it should pop up with your receipt screen and activation code. You may need to have Steam running as administrator too.

  • @ Syncaine: Nah man I can play on the highest settings fine but the Keep sieges, when hundreds of players are on the screen, I have to play on low settings to get zero lag, well almost zero lag, no ctd’s but think the game just gets old way to fast for me.

  • hey thanks guys, i hadnt completely dl’ed the game yet but was trying to create an acocunt before it was finished. Turns out you just have to wait until its dl’ed and then it gives you the cd-key

  • Two bigger questions:

    1. When will Mythic address the painful disable/disorient imbalance between factions? I’m sure it’s pretty fun for Chosen and Marauders to shut down entire warbands with abilities that are not mirrored on any Order class and cannot be countered, but it’s not that fun for the other side.

    2. What steps will Mythic take to address to completely screwed faction population imbalance? The forums are rife with Destruction posting the wildly inaccurate Waralytics numbers, but I still log on primetime to see medium/full(212) on the only accurate representation of the ratio we have. Maybe Ruin/Ruined/etc. will help offset the problem on DC when they hit T4, but this is a gamewide problem that needs to be addressed by the developers, not the subscribers.

  • Call me crazy, but I LIKE the keep contribution being random. I think it gives those guys who just hit t4 a much better chance to get gear.

    I’ll put it this way:
    When you finally hit t4, will you really expect to place first in contribution at level 32? Do you think you could contribute more than all those 40’s who already have all the gear you are looking for?

    Now, I know it is annoying when guys just walk into a keep (or sit on their mounts during the entire siege while scavenging corpses) end up walking away with a gold bag for doing nothing. So what I would suggest instead is a contribution threshold. Break the threshold, and you’re entitled to be in the random contribution lottery. Watch from the sidelines on your mount and its tough luck buddy…

  • I think that a straight random roll once a threshold is broken can be a good idea. I’m also more inclined to institute a form of reward for EVERYONE participating (more than the little bit of influence) – something longterm. I’m going to write a blog entry on it tomorrow.