I’ve decided not to continue my subscription to Warhammer Online. Or, to put it more accurately, I’ve decided not to subscribe at all, since GOA were not resourceful enough to demand my credit card details from the outset, and thus I never actually had any semblance of a subscription plan in the first place.

Now, all those fanlings out there who take joy at frothing and foaming at any slight to their game, no matter how small and no matter how irrelevant the instigator, can feel free to fire-up their email clients and compose stern letters in poorly spelled words of no more than two syllables telling me just how wrong I am. Rest assured I will print out every email and give each one the intimate attention it deserves; even if it means I have to wipe my bottom raw, I will make sure I cover each and every point you make.

So why am I not subscribing? I’m not having fun; this much is as irrefutable as the gravity on this beloved planet of ours. Why am I not having fun? If I could only tell you the reason, I would, but then I would also be able to tell Mr Jacobs, preferably on a contract salary with many, many zeros at the end of it, and to be brutally honest I’d much rather do that because, regardless of the monetary recompense, I wouldn’t have to wipe my bum sore on all the ranty opinionated drivel that was sent my way.

I simply don’t know why.

To put things in to context a little, then: I’ve tried numerous classes, on Order and Destruction, and have found nothing really wanting with them, they are all excellent takes on the classical classes, with unique twists and attempts to involve the player more; some work better than others, but they all work. I’ve played alongside some fabulous people in a guild that is both populous and active, and therefore have not simply tired of soloing a game that was never meant to be played solo other than by the hardcore grinder. I’ve probably had as many victories as I have had defeats in PvP, such that I have not been put off by the game’s heavy PvP bias; in fact, I’ve found that upon cracking open my sugar-coated carebear shell there was a soft, delicious chocolaty PVP centre within me. Warhamer Online has, if nothing else, opened my eyes to how good PvP can be. Guild Wars showed us that an MMO with a PvP focus could endure and remain fresh in the public consciousness, much like Everquest showed us that MMORPGs could work in an online world of FPSs and RTSs; and much as World of Warcraft brought MMORPGs to the masses, I believe Warhammer Online brings large scale PvP to the same. Make no mistake, World of Warcraft had the mass-market PvP first, but Warhammer made it compelling beyond a mere treadmill-like league of grinding phat loots, instead making it integral to the whole game experience, tying it inexorably to your character’s fundamental reason for being.

Still the question stands: why am I not having fun? There must be something tangible to grab on to, some tiny annoying loose thread that mars an otherwise immaculate dinner jacket of a game. Perhaps it’s not that I cannot find the thread, but that I fear to pull on it lest my entire view of MMOs unravels before my eyes, and I’m left wearing the rather tatty and dishevelled waistcoat of MMO disillusionment. Can we just accept that for some reason the game does not work for me on a basic primal level, and leave it at that? Look, I like Shakespeare’s works; I love to visit the Globe and be a groundling for an evening, or in times passed watch the RSC at the Barbican before they decided to turn into some sort of travelling troupe. Yet I know many, many people who don’t get it. They don’t enjoy it in any way shape or form, even if it’s cast in a Baz Luhrmann too-hip-to-be-cool mould. I never ask them as to why, though, for what sort of answer could one expect? It’s boring. It’s inaccessible. It’s outdated, maybe? To me these seem like crazy reasons, but that’s not because these people aren’t right, it’s just that they can’t really put their finger on why they don’t like it. They. Just. Don’t. I can’t argue with them for not liking it, you can’t say to someone “Well, if you just read all around the topic and studied it for a few years. Perhaps take to quoting sonnets until your brain can only form sentences structured in iambic pentameter. Then you’d probably enjoy it”, that’s not an argument for the joy to be found in Shakespeare, it’s an argument that says “You’re at fault and you should work hard to correct that”. No, no and thrice no. Enjoyment of pastimes is not a chore, it is a pleasure from the start or it is nothing at all. Yes you often have to work at an interest to experience all the enjoyment that it has to offer, but there has to be that base interest in the first place, that foundation of pleasure and enthusiasm to build upon, else you’re building something that will not stand even the lightest of pushes against it.

If pressed, if truly harangued by the torch-bearing, pitch-fork wielding horde of fanatical fans of the game, smashing at the doors of the KiaSA windmill while I stand above them on a balcony, cursing them for their lack of understanding and their heathen ways, I would perhaps offer a few vagaries in the hope that they would pause for a moment in contemplation and then leave me in peace. These would be thus:

The so good:

• The character and world design is fantastic. Grittier than World of Warcraft and eschewing shoulder pads that rival the wingspan of 747 airliners and weapons that could be used to span the English channel and support multi-lane highway access to the continent, Warhammer’s characters are closer to the tabletop miniatures, they still have their comedy moments, but it is the refined surreal comedy of the Mighty Boosh as opposed to the gaudy over-the-top comedy of South Park.
• The war. War is indeed good. We’re still not sure what it’s good for (huh), but we can agree that Mythic has certainly delivered on its promise to develop realm pride and to allow that pride to be represented (yo) on the field of battle.
• The game is at least trying to do some things differently. Many of these things work and work well, others are great in concept but have lacked a little in their realisation.

The not so good:

• The XP curve. Fixes have already begun to filter through for this, and if there’s anything most MMO players can cope with it’s a tedious repetitive grind, so I don’t imagine that this will be a problem for long.
• There is still too often a tangible disconnect between what I do with the interface and what my character appears to do on the display. The effects work – the healing is delivered, the enemy is smote with damage – but my character appears to be doing something entirely different a lot of the time, playing the banjo or crafting origami badgers, it doesn’t matter, the fact is that I cannot easily tell if what I did had the desired effect without parsing the combat log or upgrading the floating combat numbers with an AddOn and then spending my entire time staring at text on the screen. Which I could do playing MUD1.
• Huge parts of the game already feel like WoW’s 1-60 content: empty, abandoned and unused. I have visited so many public quests and out of the way areas and found nobody else around. On odd occasions I’ve found another lone soul and we’ve teamed-up in order to try to accomplish something, but mainly we just end-up standing and quietly holding one another, a forlorn attempt to affirm our connection to a world where one steps into a void as soon as one leaves the grind-filled ruts of the common levelling path.
• Scenarios break public quests. Simply put, public quests should have been available on a queue system like scenarios are, or scenarios should not have been on a queue system but accessed from specific locations around the world map, with those locations preferably being close to public quests (which would have been rubbish, because instant fix PvP is one of the excellent design decisions Mythic made). Mythic came up with two excellent game systems that unfortunately aren’t terribly compatible in their current state. With scenarios having the greatest XP-per-effort/time ratio, they won out, as has been discussed by m’colleague and numerous others already.

There’s nothing game-breaking or truly awful in the above, they are just a few areas that help contribute to my lack of desire to play the game. They are not the reason for my lack of desire, however, this I wish to make abundantly clear; the game doesn’t work for me at a fundamental level, but it works for a vast number of others and I’m deeply happy for, and somewhat envious of, them. And if none of that helps to pacify the lynch mob, or at least confuse them long enough that I can make my escape by the back door, then I shall just have to play the Boris Karloff part to Zoso’s Frankenstein, lift him up before the crowds and present him as the sensible one, the brains of the operation, the one who is still playing WAR and enjoying it, and to entreat them not to destroy us with their flames just because they perceive me as a monster.

The default dwarf mount is the gyrocopter, a bizarre half helicopter, half microlight steampunk affair which is nevertheless only able to move along at ground level, with the ensconced dwarf’s feet dangling a few inches above the world as they burble and clank along.

In terms of the game world, gyrocopters are actually capable of full flight, as evidenced by the travel system between zones, where characters are strapped into one of these unconventional contraptions and the player is then subjected to a short cut scene of said character launching off into the distance, an undignified affair for any robe wearers (which is a good three quarters of all Order classes) it must be said, as they gyrate overhead, legs akimbo, underpants on show for all the world below to see.

However, it would be slightly biased towards the diminutive race of hearty eccentro-engineers if their mounts could launch them across maps in all three dimensions of space, so they are restricted in the game to only being allowed to hover a few inches off the ground, and one has to wonder why the designers didn’t just remove the main rotor and stick some wheels on the thing instead. Still, that’s the least of anyone’s concerns, because as you ‘fly’ around Altdorf you very quickly come to realise that, as such a short race, hovering a few inches off the ground for a dwarf means that the main rotor of the gyrocopter is perfectly placed at throat height for the somewhat taller races of elf and man…

I can only imagine the bloody carnage that I leave in my wake as I barrel around the city streets at break-neck speeds; peasants, nobles and merchants alike all have to leap out of the way of my thrumming and grinding decapitating mechanical monstrosity as it hurtles past in a cloud of smoke and churned-up leaf litter. All those poor children forced to live on the streets because their parents were mown down by a dwarf trying to get to the ale house before it closed, while they themselves were spared due to their short stature. Not to mention the number of cats that have been sucked-up into the rotor and flung out into the harbour or diced into skaven feed, or had their tails caught up in the gearing mechanism and then been flung out of the exhaust pipe like some sort of feline cannon shot. Many a dog has been seen scampering down the street, tongue lolling out, barking after a gyrocopter, only to be found later missing an eye and a leg and howling from the roof of a town house where it has been stuck for several hours.

There’s a whole section in the slums of Altdorf that is a crumbled ruin which burns day and night, it used to be one of the more affluent areas of the city. Until the gyrocopters came.

Ever wondered why you never see children with skipping ropes in the streets of Altdorf? After the Great Gyrocopter Garrotting of 2508, skipping ropes were banned in all major public areas.

It’s fun to be a dwarf.

A picture is worth a thousand words; that well known saying made famous at the battle of Bordygaim where the Puritan Scrabbliers faced off against the Royalist Pictionariheads is as true today as it was back then, when men fought tooth and nail to spell flanking on a triple word score whilst their enemy desperately tried to draw a convincing image of a pincer movement

“What the hell is that supposed to be?!”

“Damnit, man, it’s a crab! See?! And that’s its pincer!”

“Look, just underlining the drawing ten times doesn’t make it any bloody clearer you… grahghhhh, ‘bayonet’… in a single play… on a double word score. Tell Mary… that I love her… urk”

“You love her what? ”

“No, no, tell her that ‘I love her’. Full stop. Then ‘urk’, as in the sound of my death throe”.

“Oh. No wonder we always lose these battles”.

Don’t know what that was all about, sorry. So yes, picture, thousand words, the worthiness thereof; as such a picture of some words must be worth a lot in word currency! So here is one:

.

So what does it mean? Because in all its thousand word descriptiveness, it may still not be clear. Allow me to elucidate.

A small band of valiant guild members had banded together in order (Meh! Order! Because we play on the side of Ord… never mind) to participate in a few scenarios for the evening. In this instance (Meh! Instance! Because it’s an ins… never mind), we were playing Phoenix Gate, a capture the flag affair, with the forces of Order and Destruction locked together in a combat spiral of death and carnage as they desperately try to grab the opposition’s flag and run it back to their own flag. And then touch them together. I can only assume that it’s some sort of bizarre pseudo-sexual ritual, a deflowering of the enemy’s flag-based chastity. Yes folks, as we all know, ‘touching flags’ is an even more devastating war crime than slaughtering village stores, pillaging innocent villagers and molesting their livestock; at least that’s the way it’s done here at kiasa.org, because we like to mix things up a bit: it keeps the enemy on their toes, and gives them something to talk about on those long dark nights as they try to console their cattle.

It was a close battle, the forces of Order had made a quick dash and grab of the enemy’s flag, and they had done likewise, and as is often the way in these battles it seemed as though never the twain would meet, as a few defenders hung around with the flag carrier and the rest of the forces slugged it out in one war camp or the other or somewhere in-between. However, your intrepid reporter, clad in the traditional combat correspondent’s outfit of full plate armour and a large two-handed axe, made his way into the enemy camp and, without bothering to fight, spent time being pummelled by the enemy as he scouted around the place in order to ascertain where the dastardly Khun (a portmanteau of Khainites and Hun, although it does come but a nice cup of Earl Grey away from being an even better description) had hidden their flag carrier. As you can see from the screenshot, I found the fellow, and snuck around the back of the hill he was hiding upon, crept up to him and attacked! Alas, he had company hidden in the nearby trees who I hadn’t spotted, and I was rapidly sent back to the makeshift hospital tent in our own war camp.

I was not finished, however. For I am dwarf. Hear me roar! A quick patch-up by the doctors and I was back at the enemy camp, but this time I had a plan. A plan that involved more than charging in and flailing around with my axe. A plan so cunning that you could put a robe on it and call it a wizard. Ironbreakers have an infamous ability called “Away With Ye!”, it’s a massive knock-back on a fairly long cool-down which costs thirty Grudge. For those who don’t know, Ironbreakers principally build Grudge by being hit, or their Oath Friend (someone who they’ve chosen to protect) being hit. There are other methods for generating Grudge, but that’s the basic one, it’s very similar to a Warrior’s Rage in World of Warcraft. So being fresh back to the enemy’s war camp, I was also fresh out of Grudge, and not wanting to alert the enemy to my presence, I needed a way to build Grudge stealthily. Here’s where the joy of the Oath Friend comes in, because I can select an Order player who is some distance away, say, a tough tank in the middle of combat with the enemy, and as they are hit while fighting, I get to build Grudge.

So suitable Oath Friend selected, I again snuck around the back of the enemy hill and made my way to the top, checked my Grudge was now high enough to power “Away With Ye!” and charged the enemy’s flag carrier. The first mistake he’d made was in standing on the edge of the hill and watching the battle that raged below between the bulk of the Destruction and Order forces. The second mistake he’d made was in thinking that the dwarf charging towards him was going to fall for the old “friends hiding in the trees” trick again.

The third mistake he made was in not realising that the dwarf had rotated his weapon in his hands such that it was the big, flat face of the axe that was facing towards him, and not the edge of the blade.

As he turned to face me with that mocking look on his face, and his friends again dashed out from their hiding places amongst the trees, I swung my axe for all I was worth and hollered “Away With Ye!” The flat face of the axe smote him full-bore in the chest and with my momentum behind the swing I flung him in the most mathematically beautiful parabola ever seen by man, elf or dwarf. He arced through the air with all the grace of stone from a trebuchet and landed smack-bang in the middle of the forces of Order.

Suffice it to say, he wasn’t looking smug for very long after that, or at least it was hard to tell, what with the various parts of his anatomy being spread out over such a large area.

Order promptly capped the flag and were ultimately victorious. And if I never win another scenario again I’ll die a happy dwarf, because I’ll always, always have that moment, the split second after launch, when the enemy realised that I wasn’t trying to defeat him myself, I was, like any good Ironbreaker, merely there to enable my team to do so, by any means necessary.

I am dwarf. Hear me roar!

Progress in Warhammer Online continues apace, the game is certainly fairly stable as far as MMOs go, and free enough from coarseness that one can play quite happily without feeling the need to write a stern forum post explaining just how much of an insult the game is to your family, and that the developers might as well come around to your house, poo in the middle of your lounge and attempt to sexually molest your cat, because it would be less offensive to you than trying to play their game. Believe me, such posts have been written in the past and will be written again in the future; I did not write them, but I have witnessed them in all their glory, and like a drunken hobo performing a striptease on the buffet table at a Michelin-starred restaurant, you can feel the awkward silence and embarrassed tension building to a crescendo, even in such a wasteland of emotional expression as a text-based forum.

Of all the minor inevitable niggles that are prominent in my day-to-day gaming, there is one that particularly grates with me. Its importance in the grand scheme of things is so minute that it wouldn’t bother me at all, except for the fact that it exists, and in existing it should not be, because how on earth do you implement such a minor vanity thing and then not have it work? The mind boggles.

“Oh but my dear, dear, dear, dear, dear Lord Melmoth”, I hear you cry, “with it being such a minor vanity item the developers obviously had more important things to fix before release”. A fair point, to which I would feel compelled to respond “But my right honourable, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely darlings, why put the thing in at all when it simply doesn’t work, why not just leave it out?”. And I imagine you would then say “Oh Melmoth, run away with me and let us find a small quiet village in the highlands where we can settle down, start a family together, grow alfalfa and raise rabbits”. Maybe.

A slight derailing of the thought train there. Um… niggles! Right. So this niggle is quite simple, doesn’t affect anything important in the game unless you’re me, in which case it’s more important than working out whether using blocks of cheese as dipping items for a cheese fondue is considered bad form. Simply put: turning the display of your helmet on and off doesn’t work.

No wait, come back, this is important! We’ll do the cheese fondue thing next, I promise!

Look, it may just be me (no ‘may’ about it — Ed.), but why put something like this in to the game when it’s fundamentally broken? Yes, you can turn the display of your helmet off – this is important for me because I find the bald spot on my dwarf to be an excellent reflective surface off of which I can bounce sunlight into the eyes of my foes – but it is reset, well, in every situation imaginable. Going into a scenario? Helmet resets and is displaying again once you’ve entered. Coming out of a scenario? Helmet resets. Going into an instanced building? Reset. Coming out the building. Reset. Standing around scratching your bum? Reset. Setting your helmet to not be displayed? Reset.

Ok, probably not the last one, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s not the fact that it’s broken, so much, as the fact that someone went to all the trouble of writing the code to get this to do something close to what it was meant to do, and then, what? I mean, they must have seen that the state reverts between world instances, was that really such a terribly time-constrained problem to solve considering they’d had the time to invest in implementing the basic feature in the first place?

“Well Stan, I’ve stuck in the code to turn off the display of helmets, but it doesn’t work in any but the most specific and useless cases, unfortunately they keep re-appearing.”

“Great! Call it a feature! We’ll call them Magic Appearing Helmets. Of Greatness. Plus One. In fact, get marketing to stick it in as a unique item for the Collector’s Edition.”

“Uh, but it’ll happen for everyone.”

“No problem, we’ll just say that we’ve decided to be generous and give magic hats to all. The peasants will love us!”

“The CEO said we weren’t to call them peasants any more, Stan.”

“Oh ok, the plebs.”

“No.”

“Peons?”

“NO.”

“Skinner box rats with a line of credit?”

“Jesus, Stan, I’m out of here.”

“What about the magic helmets?”

“Forget it. I think I’ll go and half-implement the mail box system or something”.