Tag Archives: war

Warhammer Online: The Lost Factions.

As per my previous post on the lost classes of Warhammer, my spy at Mythic has given me an exclusive low-down on some of the factional pairings that were considered for the game but removed after early trials:

My Little Pony vs Carebears: In an unexpected twist the fighting was exceptionally vicious between the two factions; after both sides were accused of numerous war crimes including torture of civilians and mass extermination of prisoners of war an amendment was made to the Geneva Conventions to prevent the two groups from ever bearing arms again.

Coffee Drinkers vs Drunks: The coffee drinkers complained that the targeting system was rubbish because it was always shaking all over the place, and the drunks complained that the coffee drinker always outnumbered them by six to one, even in a one-on-one fight.

Bloggers vs Press: The battle never really got off the ground because the bloggers refused to accept the blatantly obvious fact that they were a separate faction.

Glamour Models vs Teenage Schoolboys: The glamour models complained that since their tank class – the Kleenexer – had been removed due to time constraints, they had no defence against the ranged bombardment of the schoolboys. The developers agreed that the whole thing was a real mess. The schoolboys were apparently too tired to comment.

Goth vs Grunge: A pairing which accurately reflected the social impact of war, but was so depressing that the servers kept trying to throw themselves out of the rack.

Fallout 2 Fanboys vs Planscape Torment Fanboys: In the consideration of the all time greatest ever game of all time ever, of all time, there can be only war. Unfortunately keeping the war inside the game proved utterly unenforceable. Several real life fatalities caused the developers to reconsider, although normal people everywhere urged them to continue their excellent work in the name of Darwin.

Transvestites vs Ladyboys: Far too much willy waving and not enough fighting.

Snails vs Sloths: Nobody knows whether this one would work, because as far as anyone can tell the two sides are still trying to mobilise their respective armies.

Marmite lovers vs Marmite haters: Never really got started, because who doesn’t love Marmite? Nobody of consequence, that’s who, because it’s bloody delicious. Want to fight about it? Wait, maybe this one could work.

Erasers vs Pencils: Totally unbalanced, with the erasers regularly wiping out the pencils.

I level you long time.

For clan Melmoth this past weekend was spent away visiting with relatives, so very little WAR happened, unless you take into consideration Melmoth facing off against his two younger brothers as to who gets the last sugared doughnut to go with their coffee at breakfast, in which case World War 3 happened. All in a loving siblingy way, you understand; although I’m still picking bits of doughnut out of my ear even as I write this.

It brought to mind (the ‘not being able to play WAR this weekend’, that is, not the ‘doughnut in the ear’), however, an element of the forthcoming Issue 13 of City of Spandex. I’m now using “City of Spandex”, because I’m tired of writing “City of Heroes and, possibly or, Villains. Maybe one, or the other, or both”. Here’s what they have to say in the pre-release notes:

Levelling Pact
A new innovation to MMOs, this system allows you and a friend to create new characters and have your XP permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your friend plays ten times more often than you do! It’s sort of like ‘Extreme Sidekicking.’

It’s a great idea on first examination because it would have been perfect for the situation that occurred this weekend, with myself away and therefore not playing at all, Zoso could have continued levelling away in Warhammer Online like a mad thing and at the same time my character would have kept up, such that when I came back late on Sunday evening I would have found myself a level or two higher, but importantly still within range of Zoso’s character in order to carry on questing together.

However, on closer inspection it might not be all that it’s cracked up to be; don’t get me wrong, I think it will work fantastically well for City of Spandex, but that’s because the game is well established and lends itself to this sort of system. With respect to having this system in another game such as WAR or WoW, there are a couple of issues that I can see from a first glance:

  • Missed content: This can be a big or small issue depending on a few of the player’s circumstances. If it’s the player’s first character, and if the game is very much about the journey rather than the destination, then having a friend increase your character’s level multiple times while you are away from the game would force you to miss out on the joy of questing and exploring the content. In WoW, for example, you could potentially miss out on a whole zone if your friend was a bit of a levelling machine. You could leave your character one evening somewhere in Westfall and come back a few days later to find yourself ready to start questing in Lakeshire, and hence missing out on all the fantastic quests in and around Duskwood (one of my favourite locations in WoW). Having said that, if we wished to look on the bright side, you could log out one evening in Booty Bay, and come back a few weeks later to find that your friend has levelled you past all the content in Stranglethorn Vale, although if you did that on purpose you’d probably find yourself less one friend at the end of it too.
  • Services: Probably the biggest downside to the whole thing, this would effectively enable a ‘no holds barred’ service industry around the power-levelling of characters if ported to a game such as World of Warcraft. Such services already exist of course, but the Levelling Pact would essentially streamline the system, removing a lot of the risk of giving some strange fellow half way across the world the username and password to your game account. Unlike City of Spandex, there is a very strong end-game culture to World of Warcraft, and a lot of the levelling is now seen as an obstacle to getting there. In City of Spandex, the game seems to be much more about creating characters and levelling them with friends, and therefore abuse of a buddy system such as the one that is to be introduced in issue thirteen will, in all likelihood, be fairly limited. And delight of delights, as with the selling of gold, to get your service into the collective consciousness of the player base you have to advertise, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is through the medium of spam, more power-levelling services mean more spam. Spam, spam and spam. Spam, eggs, spam, spam, spam, spam and spam.

It’s a shame because as a concept it’s brilliant, it would have solved the problem that I had this weekend perfectly, but it opens itself perhaps a little too much to abuse, unless the chaps at NCSoft have come up with some particularly genius way to prevent such abuse, rather than simply relying on the fact that the player base in City of Spandex is now suitably mature (as in ‘length of time played’, not as in ‘has forums free from trolls and frothing, ranting elitist gits’) and therefore dedicated enough that any abuse is not going to affect NCSoft’s bottom line. This is, incidentally, probably the best bottom line of all MMOs due to it being covered in figure-hugging spandex.

All of the above is, alas, hypothetical, because I am actually still in the insidious grip of altitus with respect to Warhammer Online, and nowhere near Zoso’s character in level at the moment. I think actually, for me, MMOs are about rolling alts rather than actually playing the game. Every player has something that they get out of an MMO, for the Power-levellers it’s all about getting to the level cap faster than anyone else; for the Completionistas it’s about fleshing out their character to the fullest by getting every unlock and award that they possibly can; the Socialisers just want to spend time adventuring with other people, making new friends and experiencing new communities; the Explorers want to find everything the virtual world has to offer, no matter how far out of the way they have to travel. And then there’re those people who roll new characters after getting half way to the level cap because beard option A actually looks so much better than beard option B. We shall call them the Idiots, because although I say ‘them’ it is, in all probability, the singleton subset of MMO players whose sole element is me.

‘Of the day’ness.

A couple of cogitations, ruminations and general tips that have forced their way into my brain from playing Warhammer Online and are now stuck there, unwanted, but are nevertheless a potentially useful lesson for the unwary. Like a door-to-door salesman who you’ve nailed to the front of your porch.

Thought for the day:
Every class comes equipped to perform their role in PvE and PvP straight out of the box except the tanks. At least, this is my experience with the dwarf Ironbreaker, because they don’t get their taunt until level seven. Admittedly they get Grudging Blow at level one, which is supposed to make monsters hate the Ironbreaker more, but in my experience it is not effective enough to hold aggro from, say, the healing aggro of a Runepriest. It’s not a huge issue because those first seven levels fly past like a greased pig out of a howitzer, but I find it a curious design decision, especially when the first public quest can be undertaken well before level seven, and has a final boss who really needs to be tanked unless you happen to have some A-grade kiters around at the time. I understand that Oath Friend is a core mechanic of the class, but it is not terribly useful in the early levels; it helps to build extra grudge but that’s not hard to do anyway in most early level fights, and its second benefit, where some of your skills help your Oath Friend as well, is not terribly useful because you have so few skills that would actually help them. Personally, therefore, I think it would have been more useful to have Taunt from first level, and then drop Oath Friend in at level seven or eight when you start to build a really useful set of skills that compliment it. It’s not a game breaker in any way, shape or form, but I just find it funny to be running around the Chapter One public quest, watching the healers heal and DPSers doing whatever it is that they do, whilst I am unable to tank.

Tips of the Day:
You can shift-right-click on bodies to loot them and it will automatically Loot All, so you don’t have to keep clicking on that annoying button.

Runepriests will often give you a buff when you’re in their group; it’s not just a buff though: the icon for it can be clicked to trigger an effect! Mouse-over the icon to see what effect will be triggered, often they deal out a small amount of damage, but some will give you a modest heal or some other effect. Triggering the effect does not remove the buff, it just puts a sixty second cooldown timer on using the buff’s triggered effect again. This is one of my favourite mechanics in WAR, and I hope other MMOs pick up on it and incorporate it, because buffs just got a whole lot more, uh, buff. Seriously though, rather than just granting you a passive ability boost, these runes, in addition, give you extra abilities. And what do extra abilities mean? Flexibility and options! And maybe prizes.

Spinning your character around when you’re on the character selection screen makes them perform a stunned/dizzy/unnerving-panting-weirdness animation. It’s one of those dangerous Easter eggs in a game, which is kind of fun, but is more likely going to have your player base asking why, if you had time to code that in, didn’t you have time to fix the broken /special animation on their character, or the strange clipping between certain headpieces and hair, or the fact that Destruction are totally overpowered against Order in the early Empire/Chaos scenarios because Chaos has tanks/DPS/healers and Empire has DPS and hybrid healers only. You know, those other minor niggles.

If you have trouble with truncated, missing or delayed text in your chat windows, turn off timestamps if you happen to have turned them on. I like timestamps, they tell me how long it was since I missed someone asking me to join a group, or to heal them, or what have you; however, last time I checked, timestamps hideously broke the chat window. It might be fixed by now, but I haven’t gone back to check. Still, at least my character does a funny animation when I spin him around on the character select screen!

It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.

One thing that Warhammer Online has managed to do, perhaps more successfully than others, is to make other people the content. This came to light recently when discussing the number of new arrivals in the guild and how the first ten levels or so are fairly fast in coming, but then things start to slow somewhat after that, such that it was highly likely that these newcomers would, in all likelihood, be able to catch-up with the current wave of existing members and in short order join with them on the battlefield. It’s a bit like a motorway traffic jam, where the faster traffic at the back catches up quite quickly with the slowed traffic at the front and everything concertinas up, only with less swearing, horn tooting and smashing of GPS units against the dashboard.

The point was that despite the motorway-congestion-based levelling curve we do have several levelling machines within the guild, the sort who seem to have strapped their arms, via a complex set of hinged rods and springs, to some Victorian clockwork contraption that ticks and whirrs away in the background, thrusting the mouse hand around and chik-chakking the fingers on the keyboard hand like a strange cross between a hyperactive spider and an H.R. Giger biomechanical mass, presumably allowing them to continue playing even as they sleep. They are the steampunk Terminators of the MMO world: they will not stop levelling ever. Or so it used to be. Now, however, several of these guild members are talking about rolling alts and trying new classes whilst they wait for the rest of the server to catch them up, because they’re finding very little to do at their current level. That’s not to say that there isn’t any content, that’s not the case at all, it’s just that what they want to do is fight in RvR; the game makes RvR so pervasive and easy to partake in that it becomes the focus of a player’s levelling experience, these speed levellers therefore want other players on their side to join with, and they want players on the other side to fight against, because it’s slowly becoming clear that, if done well, PvP is a far more compelling game-play experience than an AI-controlled PvE one can ever be.

Which is something EVE Online and its proponents have been trying to tell us for years.

General PvE and the more focussed public quests are fine, but what WAR is showing us is that PvP can also be fun, even for Carebears such as myself. Take, for example, a scenario run last night where Order were facing off against the forces of Destruction in the tier two scenario Stone Troll Crossing. I say ‘facing off’ but of course what I mean by that is ‘getting obliterated in the typical fashion of an undermanned force fighting against an overpopulated realm of hardcore PvPers’. Such is the way of Order, such is the way of the Alliance, such is the way of Good in the universe it seems. But let’s not get all melancholy and dwell on it as though we were an Eliot in the waste land, because our valiant underdogs pushed-on, hounding the enemy as best they could and at one point, in a brief moment of nugatory success, had the enemy fleeing before them, like foxes before the hunt, doggedly pushing them all the way back to their starting area.

It was a pyrrhic victory of course because we lost the match by some abysmal margin, but in our hearts we had won the greater battle, that being the self-imposed struggle against moral degradation and debasement at the hands of a superior force. We were the Spartans at Thermopylae; the Sikhs at Saragarhi; the Jacobites at Culloden.

Who knows, maybe one day we will be the English at Agincourt.

The fact of the matter is that being the underdog can be fun, oh for certain we don’t get to sit around bragging all day about how we own an entire server and could some of you pitiable peons please come and play Order on our server so we can unleash our fearsome skills on you, but when we do get a victory it feels like we earned it, that we fought tooth and nail for it and that it wasn’t some sort of boring statistical tick in the box, another soulless token victory by our superior force. Seeing that the game positively encourages you to get involved in the war effort with both renown and experience being rewarded for PvP, why wouldn’t you take the WAR supermarket’s special two-for-one offer? You’d be crazy not to, and at the low low price of a bit of a drubbing by the forces of Destruction every now and again. Bargain!

Other blogs have stated that public quests don’t work as well as people had originally thought, but I think they’re off target slightly: public quests do work, very well, they would be an absolute revolution in World of Warcraft for example. The reason that they’re not so popular in WAR is that the PvP scenarios and open RvR work even better. Why spend time grinding PvE mobs, and maybe experiencing the odd (albeit excellent) scripted event for a few items of gear in a public quest, when you can jump into PvP, face-off against real opponents who can produce more bizarre and unexpected tactics in one fight than the bastard offspring of IBM’s Deep Blue and a slot machine ever could, and earn yourself experience and renown to boot. And what does renown mean? Phat lewts!

Public quests were, alas, a major revolution set against the backdrop of a global war, and they inevitably and unfortunately became background noise to the main event.

So what we have is a game where the PvE content is the side order of coleslaw to the half pound cheeseburger of PvP, it’s nice to have something to dip into every now and again when the burger gets a little too much, but it’s nothing but a brief diversion on the path to chronic indigestion. Other players are the meaty main course in this game, and in the end isn’t that what massively multiplayer games should all be about?

Mmmmmm, meeeeeeeat.

Brewmaster.

Sorry but I can’t stop to chat, I’m busy with the frantic rolling of alts to try out all the Warhammer Online Collector’s Edition heads. For the two of you out there who don’t already know, one of the bonus items for the Collector’s Edition of the game is a new headpiece to customise the head of your character, that’s your arse if you’re of the Destruction persuasion. Ha, ha, burn on you, you people of viridescent epidermis. This can be applied to existing characters too, simply grab the bonus item from an in-game mailbox and take it to any merchant that can dye armour. In the dye armour window is an additional box that you can drop your item into and see how it looks on your character; if you like the new style, simply click apply to keep it.

The High Elves have a fairly nifty Illidan blindfold, as you can see here on Hudson’s post.

But I had to roll a dwarf, because as readers will know I have a deeply unhealthy attraction to the race of dwarfs, and they get, well they get… oh crikey, I think I’m getting all over-excited in the trouser department again.

A beer barrel in a beard.

Beer barrel in a beard!

A BEER BARREL IN A DWARF BEARD! YES! YES OH GOD YES! YEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSS.

Ahem. Oh my. Please excuse me for a few moments.

Send three and fourpence.

Just how big is the Warhamer Online Collector’s Edition box?

No seriously, that’s not rhetorical, how big is it? It’s just that it turned up this morning, I decided to circumnavigate around it and I’m still going; I think I’m somewhere in East Asia because there are orangutans hanging from the trees over there.

Just in case people think I’m exagerating that it’s big (ok, I am exagerating for effect; I’m allowed, it’s what I do) here’s a comparison with a Wii and a 47″ LCD TV:

Thought for the day.

With the complaints about server queue times building-up around the blogosphere, I’m left wondering what the problem is when every server that I can see has a low to medium Order population. Ah yes, that’s right, it’s because the majority of people are playing Destruction. Now considering the numerous petty and snide remarks that I’ve read about all the lesser MMO players rolling ‘pretty’ characters on the side of Order and it therefore being analogous to World of Warcraft’s Alliance, I think it time that those people take a look at the server populations again and perhaps readjust the saddle on those awfully high horses they ride, lest they fall off and are then lost in amongst the veritable ocean of Destruction players.

Destruction is the new Alliance.

The Chosen is the new Paladin.

How to get ahead in reckoning.

I reported my initial joyful experiences with Warhammer Online, specifically the giant arse-mongering debacle that was open beta, and so it was with some trepidation that I wandered back to WAR dash Europe dot com and prepared myself to do battle once more against the forces of foobarness, as I have come to lovingly refer to the GOA technical team. Once again they were waiting until the day of launch to allow registration of head-start codes, and once again they were using their Rube Goldberg powered website. Yes you read that correctly, it isn’t powered by some Rube Goldberg device, but by the re-animated corpse of the man himself; chained to a web server in a basement near Paris and fed on the brains of water voles that inhabit the Seine, he pecks away at a keyboard with his grey-green fingers until they fall off, at which point the site is taken down for maintenance as a crew of elite seamstresses sew his decayed digits back on.

Or so it seemed, the first time I visited the site.

This time around it was apparent that they had upgraded their back-end server by grafting extra limbs onto the Goldberg corpse, and in a somewhat ironic state of affairs, had created a Rube Goldberg device that pushed and pulled, yanked and cranked and generally cajoled the various appendages into being a lean mean application processing machine. They Rube Goldberged Rube Goldberg, and in doing so managed what can only be described as a startlingly unexpected successful head-start.

Which leaves very little to rant or froth about, and as the old saying goes: all joy and no rant makes Jack a plain blogger. Or is it ‘sane blogger’? I always get that one confused.

Well, what is there to say? I entered my head-start codes early on Sunday morning and I got an email back within five minutes saying that they had been accepted. So I twiddled my thumbs for a bit, looked at the now redundant pile of emergency head-start registration rations, which included several bottles of one hundred-degree proof spirits; a five kilogram bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk; a catheter and associated bag; a top hat; a bottle of paracetamol; a pair of sunglasses; a bottle of antacid; a copy of the infamous Foranomicon containing all the dark arts on how to summon the most vitriolic forum flames from the very depths of Hell; and my teddy bear, Professor Snookums. Really though, it was quite the anti-climax, but luckily for me the emergency head-start registration rations also conveniently double as the emergency ‘everything went well and I’m now bored and have nothing to do’ rations.

So with registration completed successfully and without trauma, other than a mild reflux which was probably something to do with five kilograms of chocolate and a bottle of Jim Beam, I then awaited the inevitable disappointment that would be the head-start proper, when the servers opened for play and were quickly closed again when they immediately imploded under the tidal pressure of a WAR fanatic tsunami.

The grand time of opening arrived and I hopped online to witness the carnage first-hand, only to find that the only carnage was in the starter RvR areas because everyone was already logged-in and playing, the servers having opened slightly before schedule and still running fine. Really, how is a blogger supposed to rant against such competence? I mean, I don’t doubt that there were still players out there who suffered issues, and the launch wasn’t flawless, but from my own personal experience it was about as flawless as one could possibly expect in a fundamentally flawed universe. Well done to GOA for turning things around and making amends for their previous gaffe.

In the end I spent a joyous afternoon playing my Warrior Priest, meeting various members of the guild and generally having a jolly good time, with excellent server stability and a surprising lack of lag or slowdown in any but the most insanely overpopulated areas.

Which all makes for a somewhat dull report. I did, however, experience the joys of PvPing with a melee character in an area with a serious lack of support characters, and have thus been seriously tempted to roll a Rune Priest and switch to that as my main, which is the topic for another slightly more spirited post perhaps.

Suffice it to say that playing as Empire is a little rough in the early RvR scenarios because Chaos has tanks, dedicated healers in the Zealot class, and several DPS classes, whereas Empire has no tank and no dedicated healer. I didn’t sign-up with the Warrior Priesthood to stand at the back and heal, which is what I’ve felt compelled to do so far through my own need to keep people around me alive, I wanted to experience the joy of melee healing, something which works very well in my limited PvE experience, but is so far underwhelming and in fact nigh-on impossible in these early RvR levels. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind standing at the back and healing if it’s useful to our side and I feel that I am contributing my weight to the war effort, I’m definitely a supporting character sort of fellow, but if I’m going to do that I should really be playing a class that was designed with that in mind. And yes, I could just move my Warrior Priest to one of the areas that has an abundance of healers and tanks, such as the dwarf zone, but that somehow feels as though I’m abandoning my duties as a member of the grand ‘We Don’t Tank or Heal’ Empire.

Perhaps given a few more levels, and as the guild starts to focus on one area or another for RvR and thus brings the whole shebang of Order classes to focus on the enemy, I may find my place in RvR with the Warrior Priest, but right at this moment in time the little Jedi dwarf with the runic power is calling out my name.

Scratch ‘n’ sniff.

Over on Waaagh!, Syp asks us to fill in the blanks on the phrase “Warhammer is to Warcraft as <blank> is to <blank>” and gives us a few examples to get us started, like “as Zeplin is to the Beatles”.

I thought:

Warhammer is to Warcraft as an itchy scrotum is to a large male silverback gorilla.

But with all the fanatics around, maybe that’s just a little too ballsy.

Beta blocker.

Now, this is a story all about how,
My life got flipped, turned upside down.
And I’d like to take a minute,
Just sit right there,
I’ll tell you how the WAR beta made me lose all my hair.

Our story begins, as these stories often do, with an old and cynical MMO player.

I’m not sure that I can be bothered with the traditional wall-of-text rant here[1] and, ironically, I’m also having trouble expressing this farcical comedy of errors in any sort of comedic way.

So here’s an outline, please feel free to add your own canned laughter track.

I woke up on Sunday morning and found an email from Zoso waiting for me, informing me that the registration for the Warhammer Online Open Beta was to start at 8:30am. It being just after nine, I hopped on to the WAR website and tried to log in. It failed. At this point I was entirely unsurprised, because despite GOA’s assurances to the contrary, everyone and his pet mushroom knew that the registration process would fail initially, this is The Way when it comes to MMO registration. Especially those registrations that don’t open until the day the servers are supposed to come online.

I seem to recall that I went and made some breakfast, read through my RSS feeds and pondered the meaning of life, the standard Sunday morning fare, and at some point I found out that the registration required a new website account and could not be applied to an existing account; as such, there was a shortcut to the registration page provided, and of course the registration process was totally bogged down, such that you could get most of the way through registering, and then it would fail to provide the captcha image that was required to validate one’s state of human beingness and you could proceed no further.

After a few attempts at this I resigned myself to the fact that this was not going to work any time soon and so I went and did something less boring instead. In this case, housework. After a few hours of chores, I popped my head back in to the website, saw that it was still not working, and then had a quick look at the Warhammer Alliance forums and quickly left when I saw that they were all glowing green and causing Geiger counters to explode due to high readings. After a brief decontamination session, I took the family off to see relatives and came back late that evening. A quick check again confirmed that still nothing was working, and the forum status had been upgraded from Nuclear Bikini Alpha to White Dwarf Super Nova.

I played City of Villains for a bit and then went to bed.

Monday was much the same as Sunday, really. I had the day off of work because Mrs Melmoth was otherwise engaged, and I was to look after mini-Melmoth, so the odd check of the Warhammer website and forums was possible every now and again, but after the first few tries I realised that we were in for the long haul of Open Beta cock-ups. The various ‘official’ unofficial forums had generally been locked at this point, mainly due to load issues I imagine, but also because it appeared that new forms of life had bred in the nuclear wasteland of the previous day, and the rage and bile spewing forth from these entities was actually starting to melt the LCDs of innocent forum posters as they stumbled into the midst of the chaos whilst looking for help on the situation.

Whether the rumours are true that the White House had to be evacuated and the president moved to Air Force One after a presidential aide accidentally browsed to the EU Warhammer forums rather than the US ones, I can’t tell you.

At 15:00hrs on Monday evening an emergency asynchronous activation webpage (also known in the industry as the “it’s all gone to shit in a handbag” page) was provided such that players could submit their account details, whereupon a million small monkeys with hammers would hit Fisher Price keyboards until they either managed to validate some of the seventy thousand applications that flooded in or they managed to finish replicating the complete works of Chaucer. Either one was as likely as the other. This process was only available to people with registered accounts, because the account registration process was buggered and nobody was able to register. The GOA CMs pointed out that they were gob-smacked that anyone thought that they’d need a new account, because they hadn’t stated such a thing. The fact that they hadn’t posted anything at all until the entire cluster-fuck had become a steamy writhing mass of rabid forum-based rumour, speculation and misinformation may have contributed to this somewhat, however.

Anyway, at 16:00hrs on Monday I submitted my Open Beta key, and after a few failed attempts where the page just sat there looking gormlessly at me like a bucktoothed yokel who’s just peed himself and is hoping you haven’t noticed the puddle on the floor, I finally managed to submit some details. Current estimation of a reply email – which would either tell you that your key had been validated; perhaps tell you that you’d got your password wrong and that you’d therefore have to go through the whole process again; or possibly just say “Thise olde gentil Britouns in hir dayes. Ook Ook! Ook! Of diverse aventures maden layes Oook!” – was one to two hours. Now, this estimate was given by GOA CMs, so a slight amount of pessimism was probably in order based on their performance up to this point.

It was some twenty seven hours later, late Tuesday evening when I finally got an email from the registration system.

The forum speculation had continued apace, and after Zoso had had success Tuesday morning with the forum theory of the moment, that spamming the authentication system over and over with ten or twenty applications in quick succession was the way to go, I succumbed to the hysteria somewhat and had a minor spamming session myself when I got back from work, and indeed, a few hours after that an email arrived. Well, three arrived at the same time.

Each email said the same thing in the subject: “Registration issue”. Upon reading each one I was told that my beta key had not been validated and that I should click on the provided link to see why. Fuelled by nothing more than weary curiosity at this point, I clicked the link. The message was simple: “Your account has not been verified, please check your inbox”. So the account that I applied with, the account that I have had since July 5th, the account which I have used to access your site repeatedly since that time, this account, the one that has worked for two months, has, apparently, not been validated?

I’ve said that I’ve boggled at things before, but really it was just artistic license. This was the first time that I have truly boggled.

I sighed.

I checked the game patcher one more time, since now the latest and greatest forum theory was that even if you hadn’t received a confirmation email you could generally log in after a few hours of submitting your application. No dice. So I went and read a good book for the evening; Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge, incidentally, and it’s very enjoyable so far.

At about 9pm, just as I was going up to bed to finish my reading for the evening there, I decided on impulse, tugged by that somewhat pathetic hope that if you catch a beta unawares it might forget to not let you in, I checked my email of which there were no new messages, and attempted to log in and run the game patcher.

And it started patching.

After patching the game I managed to play for an hour, but generally just wobbled around like a drunken partygoer on a cocaine high, all Captain Jack Sparrow, staring at the pretty pictures in boss-eyed confusion and wonder, unable to fully appreciate that I was really there in the game. I logged on to the guild’s Teamspeak server, but was afraid to open my mouth lest all that came out of my microphone was “Heeaaaahhahaeeeeeerrrrrrruuggggghhhhhhaahhhh” followed by a minute or two of unrestrained sobbing. So I failed to introduce myself entirely.

Hopefully this evening I can take some time to actually appreciate the game, get to grips with it and give it a decent test drive; you know, clear that new game smell out and replace it with the stale musty smell of regular use, fill the glove box with tissues, scraps of paper with directions on and partially melted boiled sweets, and stick a humorous sticker in the back window that says “Gamer onboard”.

This morning my inbox was full with the replies to the other ten or so applications I made last night, each one saying that I had failed to register.

I still haven’t had an email telling me that I’m officially a part of the beta; the way things have gone, I’m not sure I ever want that association in writing.

[1] Having now finished the post, this was clearly a lie. Never underestimate the power of rant.