The Inevitable City is something of a disappointment, as tourist destinations go. Proving myself as hopeless at punditry as usual, after last week’s alarm clock siege Order have popped in for tea, biscuits and mass pillaging twice more; Destruction don’t seem to be putting up so much resistance in fortresses, whether they’re not so interested with zone flips being more frequent, or whether it’s because there’s an awful lot of Choppas rampaging through tiers 1 and 2 I’m not sure. Their cause isn’t particularly helped by the Chaos fortress lord frequently mtaking it upon himself to go for a bit of a wander, rather than staying in his well defended room, which was how we found ourselves taking The Maw surprisingly easily at prime time on a Friday night, and carrying on to the Inevitable City courtesy of a previously locked Elf fortress.

Same drill as last time: several instances of the City, up to 48 players per side in each. A couple had heavy Destruction presence, a couple had almost none, and initially I ended up in one of the latter. Two stage public quest: firstly kill 150 defenders (NPCs, if no players around), hold two objectives, set fire to 50 things (mostly by clicking glowing crates and tables). Secondly, a Lord spawns accompanied by four Heroes, and you have eight minutes to kill them all.

With no player opposition the first stage of the PQ is trivially easy but tedious, it’s tempting to slack off and let everyone else do laps killing random mobs, but of course then it just takes longer. The second stage requires a touch of co-ordination. It’s imperative not to drag the Lord or any Hero too far, or they reset. A debuff from the Lord prevents healers resurrecting other players, so you need to respawn and make the fairly short run if you die, rather than spamming chat channels begging for a rez. Finally, everyone on our server is under strict instructions not to use taunt or detaunt powers, it’s suggested they cause the Lord to employ a particularly nasty AoE attack. I don’t know for sure if that’s the case or if it’s one of those MMOmyths that spring up, but still. With a co-ordinated warband it’s probably also fairly trivial, each mob is tanked, dps focus fire on a mob at a time, and Bob’s your chaotically mutated uncle. With a PUG, with members covering a range of levels and varying levels of gear, it’s a bit more challenging, especially when it takes a good few minutes of sustained DPS just to bring the Lord down, so almost any reset after the first couple of minutes won’t leave you enough time. Still, after two fairly close attempts, getting down to just the Lord on around 25% health as the final seconds agonisingly ticked away resetting everything back to the mob farming drudgery of stage one, everyone just about had the hang of not running away, and our instance took the Lord down, hurray! Our reward (after distributing the bags)? To do stage one all over again, hurray! Wait, no, not hurray…

Now bear in mind this is with almost no player opposition at all. If you happen to get an instance with heavy defence, stage one of the PQ is much more interesting as the two sides have the same objectives. Blood flows in the streets, objectives change hands in bitter assaults, it’s a little like a 48-a-side scenario on a grand scale. That’s good. Stage two of the PQ, though, is a bit tough. If two pick-up warbands were *just* able to defeat the final boss within the time limit at the third attempt, imagine how much harder that would have been with a balanced party of Destruction joining in the fun, let alone anything approaching parity in numbers.

If you can “lock” the first part of the Inevitable City, I believe you progress to another public quest, with even tougher mobs at the end. To lock the city, though, it seems you have to complete that first public quest again, and again, and again, and… well, you could also do the Inevitable City scenario. If it popped. Which it didn’t while I was there.

So in the excitement stakes, it’s somewhat lacking. Never mind, though, MMOG players will do any old crap for hours on end so long as you dangle something shiny in front of them, and that’s the point of pillaging isn’t it? Four successful fortress assaults and another four hours in the Inevitable City, I’d hired a wagons to haul all the lovely loot away, and cleared plenty of space in the bank vault to store it. Net loot result from all that?
– One level 36 green axe (dropped from a player, won via a Greed roll)
– One level 40 green cloak, from a green bag for completing the IC public quest

And… that’s it. Luckily the wagoneers took the axe in payment, or I would’ve been down on the whole deal.

OK, I exaggerate a touch. While running between walls during a fortress attack, a Conqueror Keysash happened to drop from some random mob and I won a Need roll for it, but still; nothing from the Inevitable City itself. It’s a subject considerably covered around the blag-u-spore (f’rexample at The Greenskin), but worth reiterating, in terms of loot the WAR endgame can be most frustrating. You’re either competing with anything from 20-100 people on the roll for a few decent bags, or going down the WoW route of running instances and hoping bosses drop something for your class. Tokens have been mentioned for loot in the upcoming Land of the Dead zone which sounds a bit more hopeful, as with the Inevitable City not offering much in the way of fun or loot I’m going to need a new holiday destination.

… I’m Seriously Bitter. At least according to my latest title, for completing all ten of the Bitter Rivals tasks in WAR. I’d predicted, based on complex scientific reasoning, that there would be a lot of grind involved in Bitter Rivals and I was almost right, apart from being totally wrong in every respect. Bitter Rivals has involved almost no grind at all, a fairly familiar set of tasks (doing a PQ, killing a number of players, participating in the new Twisting Tower scenario and throwing a few pies there, /swearing at all the enemy careers etc.) being wrapped up in short order. The Twisting Tower is a slightly confusing scenario, I still haven’t really got my bearings in it (maybe that’s the idea), but a change is as good as a rest and all that. The event rewards aren’t wildly inspiring, a couple of titles and a new siege weapon, though of course there is the chance to roll a Choppa or Slayer a week early. All in all a little on the lightweight side purely as an event, but with all the other patch 1.2 changes plenty to be going on with before Day of the Slayerchoppas.

The gates of the Inevitable City have been breached.

Before patch 1.2, the RvR campaign on Burlok was more or less at stalemate. Zones would sometimes flip, typically the Elf zones going back and forth, but the final push, to go from the last zone to a fortress, rarely succeeded. Either dedicated defenders would take a stand, or carefully orchestrated avoidance would deny the final few vital points needed to take the zone.

On the rare occasions one side would get to a fortress, killing the Lord was all but impossible. I’m only aware of a single successful attempt, when I believe a bug prevented Destruction players directly reinforcing the fortress, and a server crash halted the attempt on a second fortress that might have lead to the Inevitable City. The Infamous Tank Wall of Doom takes a heck of a beating, especially when backed up with a fortress lord and The Chaos Gods of Lag.

Patch 1.2 changed the zone control system so that holding the objectives and keeps in a zone for two hours is enough to take it, no faffing around with scenarios or public quests needed. It’s not exactly a Sun Tzu-esque leap from seeing that to working out that an alarm clock raid is possible, starting an attack very late at night or very early in the morning to ensure minimal defence. Some Order guilds got together and decided, 5am on Saturday, we’d make an attack. I wasn’t planning to join in from the start, Saturday mornings are usually time for a lie-in. As it turned out, I was having a weird dream, I think I was a substitute in some big rugby match, got called to go on the pitch, but I had to pull my jersey on, only the sleeves were incredibly long, and there weren’t any holes in the end, and I was madly flailing around, and… woke up. At 5am. I think my subconscious must’ve had plans… Seeing I was awake, I staggered downstairs, made coffee, and logged in to find 40-50 Order players hanging around Black Crag, with about half an hour on the Keep timers until we took control of the zone. It locked without incident, we took the fortress without too much trouble, and we carried on to Caledor for a repeat performance. A couple of Destruction players had noticed what was going on but not enough for a tank wall, not even a tank speed bump, the second fortress fell, and the gates of the Inevitable City beckoned! We had enough to get three instances of the City going (maximum of 48 per instance), and started on a public quest in there: a fair amount of preamble in Phase I, killing defenders, starting fires and holding a couple of control points, then in Phase II a Lord spawned, accompanied by four Heroes. In one instance it sounded like a couple of organised warbands were getting on with it. In a second, the few Destruction defenders had gathered, and though they couldn’t stop the us completing the first phase a couple of times the Lord and Heroes were more than enough of a handful, let alone with other players joining in, and their numbers were steadily growing until they reached parity, and started completing the first public quest stage themselves. At that point a few of us switched to the third instance, where there were no defenders, but less than a single warband of attackers, and though completing the first public quest stage was no problem, the Lord and Heroes were too much again for our smaller numbers, without well-warded tanks. Frustratingly we seemed to just about have the hang of the encounter (with a slow trickle of reinforcements helping) when the timer ticked down on our last attempt, and the attack petered out before we could get sacking the city properly.

The attack certainly shook things up. Firstly on the Warhammer Alliance forums, where, unsurprisingly, a full and frank exchange of views commenced. Alarm clock raids are a bit of a contentious issue, plenty of people on both sides feeling they’re not particularly honourable (fair enough), that they’re not in the spirit of the game (more debatable), and that anyone who takes part is worse than Hitler (as, by page 2, the thread plummeted past reasonable debate into usual forum territory). Actually I’m not sure Godwin’s Law actually kicked in, but someone really, genuinely invoked the war in Iraq. More relevant in the game itself, Destruction struck back, and were within minutes of flipping Reikland and attacking the Empire fortress when the server crashed, though I believe they managed a second attempt when it came back up.

Personally I’m not particularly proud of the attack, but unless something changes in fortresses I reckon it’s the only way either side will see a capital city, and if it’s shaken the campaign up slightly so much the better. It’s not magnificent, but it’s WAR.

Our Warhammer server seemed to have settled into something of a Phoney War in the run-up to Patch 1.2. It’s not a terribly populous server (there isn’t a giant hand from above that raises and flattens the landscape or a giant ankh that everyone gravitates towards), we get a decent turnout for big RvR pushes but it’s fairly quiet apart from that, and it seems to have been even quieter still over the last couple of weeks. With all the goodies coming in 1.2 and shortly after I imagine some people are over on the test server, and others are waiting for the opportunity to roll up their Slayer or Choppa. Personally I’ve been stockpiling cheap items to salvage, as gold dust (a component required in talisman making) has recently been like… er… something that’s unusual and desirable and difficult to get hold of, I’m sure there must be an appropriate simile. Patch 1.2 includes a fairly major crafting overhaul, though, so I’m hoping to churn out a few more talismans after that.

The guild has also been quiet, to the point that in the last week we merged with another guild; it was a shame to hit the “Leave” button, Insult to Injury have been a great bunch, but as one door closes, another opens. If you tie them together with a bit of string. And they both open the right way; I mean, obviously if they both open inwards then it won’t work, and if they both open outwards then neither will open and you’ll be trapped, but, assuming one opens in, one opens out, and other conditions are met, then that second door definitely opens. Or you’re going through an airlock! That’s a better example. Forget the string, as one door of the airlock closes, the other opens. Well, slightly after, once the pressure has equalised and everything. So long as HAL can’t lip read. Anyway! New guild is looking good, and busier, with a bit of luck we might be able to revisit the halcyon days of a full guild warband tromping around and smiting Destruction.

Speaking of Destruction, I guess they decided to hold a Last Day Of 1.1 party, as logging in last night for a quick auction check before bed found Dragonwake under heavy attack, Destruction locking the zone not long after I got there; for some reason, the carefully honed Order tactics of “rush out from the warcamp into overwhelming numbers of the enemy” failed to prevent zone capture (in fact they were probably instrumental in giving Destruction the final few VPs they needed), but it was rather fun. Racing back to Eataine we all piled into a keep and mounted some magnificently spirited resistance, though they broke the doors down our tank wall held firm, Bright Wizard AoE spells being particularly effective in the confined spaces. All rather enjoyable and boding well for some Bitter Rivalry in today’s (or tomorrow’s, presuming we’re following the usual day-after-the-US timing) Bitter Rivals event.

Warhammer Online events seem to be following something of a sine wave of grind. The first, Witching Night, was towards the grind-y peak, needing a fair bit of farming to fill the influence bar up. The second, Heavy Metal, involved minimal grind, a few rounds of the Reikland Factory scenario being sufficient for most of its tasks, then we ramped back up to max-o-grind for Keg End, which involved some fun /boast-ing and /toast-ing, but also vast swathes of event-mob-slaughtering if you wanted to fill the bar right up. The current event, Night of Murder, plunges back towards the “yes, we have no grind” end of the scale; within the space of a couple of scenarios and some light open-RvR I’d filled two-thirds of the influence bar. A couple of the tasks are going to be slightly problematic, though, primarily killing ten Keep Lords. Ten? I like a keep siege now and again, but either it’s a bloody war of attrition in the face of enemy heavy weapons and tank walls, in which case it’s really quite time consuming and there’s no guarantee you’ll succeed, or a pretty tedious affair if the enemy aren’t defending (attack door, attack door, attack door, run through door, attack door, attack door, attack door, run through door, attack keep lord, ???, profit!) Either way, it’s not really something I’m desperate to do several times a night. Still, another round or two of the “kill five marked players” quest should be enough to round out the influence bar for the jewellery reward, so I’ll only need to finish off the keep lords for the “Master Assassin” title.

Speaking of rewards, their usefulness is fortunately out of phase with the grind wave; final influence reward for Witching Night: a stat-less mask. Heavy Metal: a stat-ful cloak, that also looks pretty spiffy (plus Knight/Blackguard early unlock). Keg End: a tankard, with a limited number of uses to teleport to a pub in Altdorf (teleporting to a pub’s always good, but it’s a similar effect to a 30 copper guild recall scroll). Night of Murder: a stat-ful piece of jewellery in a choice of four flavours (though I’m slightly annoyed, as two of the pieces give a 5% gold bonus that isn’t much use, what with their being very little to actually spend gold on, and two give a 5% renown boost that would be quite nice; as a Bright Wizard I’m trying to stack +Int for extra damage, and the only gem with +Int is one of the gold-boosting ones. Hrm. Guess I’ll just pick one of the others, as plenty of other stuff boosts Int.)

I believe the next event is due to be “Bitter Rivals”, building up to the introduction of the Slayer and Choppa, and if my theory holds and the Wave of Grind maintains its shape we’re heading for Grindcon Alpha. Still, assuming one of the final rewards is the early unlock of the new classes, at least that might spread the forthcoming transformation of 74.96% of the population of WAR into melee DPS over a couple of weeks instead of it happening overnight…

When I was growing up I loved Commando comics and other similar Boy’s Own tales of military derring-do. From these, I learnt the average soldier’s day consisted of rushing around, killing Germans by the score (frequently with accompanying witticisms, often food based; “hey, sausage munchers, try these pineapples” a grenade hurling Tommy might exclaim), then home in time for tea and medals. I started to get an inkling these stories might be ever so slightly romanticised (possibly not the right word, god forbid any of our lantern jawed heroes should take time out from butchering Nazis, especially for anything so unpleasant as kissing girls, ugh) when, slightly older, I started reading real soldiers’ memoirs. The most surprising thing from my battle-hungry perspective was the tiny amount of time actually spent shooting Germans compared to training, marching around, digging holes, being shelled and the other day to day activities of the average soldier.

Now, in games, there’s a similar sort of effect. Most games give the Commando comic version of war, constant fighting, never ending waves of enemy for you to shoot, and a good thing too. Medal of Honour: Trudge Around For Several Days Then Get Blown Up By A Mortar Shell Without Even Seeing An Enemy Soldier, not really an appealing prospect. Another way you can tell that a World War II FPS isn’t the height of realism is a quick bit of arithmetic. Over the course of Call of Duty 1, 2 and expansion packs, I’ve been personally responsible for wiping out approximately two and a half Axis infantry divisions, four armoured regiments and a few squadrons of dive bombers in the bits where you get hold of an anti-aircraft gun. By these measures, the invasion and liberation of continental Europe would have required a total Allied force of twenty three people, and seven of those just to fill in when others had to go AFK for their tea.

Stepping up from FPSs to a more strategic level, you get a different sort of unreality in command and control, again obviously quite intentionally; especially in the pre-radio era, if you were commanding an army you’d draft an order based on what you could make of the battlefield from observation and sketchy reports, give it to a rider, hope he found the unit you intended to give the order to without getting lost or killed on the way, and that the commander of that unit interpreted the order the way you intended, at the right time, and wasn’t in a huff with the brother-in-law he was supposed to be supporting. Though I understand a few games for real grognards do take this into account, for the most part in something like the Total War games, you order your cavalry to charge and they do, in the direction you intended.

I am struggling towards a point other than the frankly shocking revelation that computer games designed for entertainment aren’t highly accurate simulators of the horrific nature of war, honest. It’s about the other WAR: Warhammer Online. In the way the Warhammer campaign works, PvP-centric, capturing zones in order to attack fortresses and ultimately the enemy capital, it’s slightly more reminiscent of an actual war (only very slightly, of course, I’m already trivialising things in a quite disrespectful enough way as is). You need to work together, in relatively large numbers, to capture zones. If there’s more than token opposition you need organisation, people defending keeps and objectives, responding to threats as they arise, and as a grunt that can be a little dull if you’re standing around somewhere the enemy don’t attack. I’ve just spent half an hour travelling across Dragonwake, then sitting, defending a battlefield objective (making a few notes for this very post in fact, but don’t worry, having the second screen back with the new graphics card meant I was keeping an eye on the game); when Destruction did turn up there were hundreds of the buggers, and we got steamrollered in short order (“short order” – that’ll be Dwarfs, I guess). That seems to be a fairly representative sample of open RvR recently, travelling, waiting, and if you’re lucky a fight at the end of it; something like a “proper” war. There are command and control issues as well; on the plus side, to co-ordinate your attacks, there’s instant, guaranteed communication between players with /tells and custom channels, but against that… there’s instant, guaranteed communication between all players, in the form of region wide channels. Without a hierarchical structure, dictatorial leadership styles seldom going down terribly well, so you get all the associated fun debate around that. I’m not so dedicated, or indeed masochistic, to try and get involved in organisation, though, so I’m happy enough to go where I’m told by our warband leader, and have a web browser up on the second screen so I’m not too tempted to read the regional channels during downtime.

Ultimately, this could all be a bit of an issue for me in WAR. While on the “players controlling their destiny” scale it’s not up in EVE’s “holy crap, there goes the universe” league, it does need a fairly significant investment in time to really get involved, and you’re at the mercy of the number of players online for either side and what they’re up to. This weekend, cooped up with the heating on to avoid the sub-zero wilderness outside, I’ve had plenty of spare time, but with an odd hour here and there in the course of a week the PvE side of things isn’t terribly compelling, and scenarios can only keep me interested so long. I’ll have to see how things go; maybe switching to an alt to play along with a forthcoming wave of Slayers might keep things fresh until the Land of the Dead later on, or maybe I’ll take a break. Just now there’s Murder Night to be getting on with as well, more on that later.

I believe I have proved conclusively that we’re going to be seeing trousers for horses in the very near future in WAR, but let’s be honest, that alone wouldn’t be a very impressive patch would it? Warhammer, Age of Clothed Mounts. What else might be coming in this big announcement from January 29th? Well Snafzg has also received a mysterious package: a Predator DVD, and a direction to “go to 1:16:06”. At this point of the film, The Governator makes the suggestion “get to the chopper!”; using some extremely abstract reasoning, you could somehow connect this to the missing Greenskin melee class of WAR, the Choppa, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch. No, we have to take these clues much more literally. “Get to the chopper” obviously means, as in the film, go to a helicopter. But why? Well, the note says “go to 1:16:06”. Minutes and seconds may be used in some esoteric areas like “time”, but more naturally they’re a measurement of latitude and longitude. With only a single reference, this has to be both the lat. and long., and plugging those values into our favourite online mapping application reveals… it’s a point in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Ghana. I think we can see why the helicopter is needed now.

What might you find in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ghana? Well that’s an easy one, the wreck of HMS Majestic (official records won’t show this, there was a cover-up to hide the fact that she got lost on the way back from the Battle of the Nile), a 74-gun ship of the line. Another term for ship of the line is “man of war”, and I hardly need remind anyone of Games Workshop’s naval war game in the Warhammer world, Man O’ War. So there we have it. The January 29th announcement is going to be massive naval battles in Warhammer Online (after all, there are plenty of ships already dotted around the various coasts of the game, and we all know how easy it is to take a static model of a ship and produce an entire massively complex element of gameplay around it). And horse trousers.

M’colleague, liking Slayers as he does, is excited by the prospect of their arrival in WAR. I must urge caution, though; what information do we have to go on? Orange hair dye, and hair clippers. The conclusion a Warhammer aficionado must draw? The iconic orange mohawk of the Slayer. Paul Barnett is English, though, and I’ll wager that means he watched 3-2-1, particularly the objects and clues that represented prizes. These clues were a little obscure, so I think we need to ponder these items rather more deeply.

If you dye your hair, you change the colour, but you can also change your clothes. The dye is orange – famously, nothing rhymes with orange, and many people believe the same applies to “purple”. However, the word “curple” does rhyme, and means “the hind-quarters or rump of a horse”. Now, the hair clippers are used to shave the head; “A Close Shave” was the third Wallace And Gromit, following “The Wrong Trousers”, thus, trousers. Changing clothes, trousers, the hind-quarters of a horse? I think we can all now see what’s going to be included in Warhammer’s January 29th announcement, and not before time. Clothing for mounts, starting with horse trousers!