Ten Unhappy Facts of WAR

I just made myself a Black Cow. That's a root beer float with chocolate ice cream (at least according to Baby's).

So, I'm relaxed, I'm well rested from my little four day hiatus. Let's do this.

1. WAR is going to be Grindy at times
   
   Massive gamers hate few things more than grinding. Fortunately that hate isn't wasted, as only one game genre really has grinding, and that's massive games.
   
   Massive games are always going to have a lot of repetition for two reasons. First, it's expensive to create content, and without repetition all MMORPG's would either be 150 hours long or cost (literally) like a billion dollars to create.
   
   Secondly, and much more importantly, too much content keeps people from playing together. Everybody wants 100 5-mans instead of 10, but good luck filling up your group, or finding anyone who's done the instance before.
   
   Now obviously some massive games are less "grindy" than others. And that's great. But it's impossible to make a massive game that never ever feels like a grind.
   
   
2. (I'm pretty sure) There Will Be Gear Advancement
   
   Many are hoping that WAR will save them from the WoW gear grind, but I doubt that WAR will do so. Gear advancement is great for a lot of reasons, but mostly for one enormous reason:
   
   If it's an RPG, people expect to become more powerful the more they play. If they quit becoming more powerful, they quit period. Without gear advancement WAR will not be able to hang on to players.
   
   Yeah, I know you all loved DAoC which didn't have much gear advancement. Didn't quite have ten million subscribers though, did it?
   
   
3. Waiting is Not Going To Be Easy
   
   I've formally decided I do not care when WAR is released. My 360 is back and I'm going to pick up some new XBLA games and ride out the storm.
   
   
4. Playing Road To War is Not Going To Make Waiting Any Easier
   
   Although I could multiply my traffic by a factor of ten by putting a fake head on my blog ...
   
   
5. There's Going To Be Downtime
   
   If MMORPG players hate anything more than grinding, it's downtime. Downtime is the bane of the online gamers existence.
   
   Except that, as much as gamers talk about hating downtime, they actually need it. People do not enjoy playing games with no downtime, they need rest.
   
   
6. It's (probably) not going to be easy to find scenario groups
   
   Mythic has announced neither cross-server scenarios nor dogs of war. Which means that it's going to be hard to find enough people to play a lot of the time, especially if you are ahead or behind the leveling bulge at launch. I expect long queues.
   
   
7. There will not be horizontal expansions
   
   I know this is a favorite of Syp and the other Chaos Cast guys, but I don't see it happening.
   
   Most players are not going to level a second character to max, ever. Why would Mythic release an expansion where 80% of the content will never be seen by 60% of the players?
   
   And why play a new expansion unless there is better gear, or there are better dungeons or better cities? And if you are making new stuff better than old stuff, what is that called? Oh yeah, vertical expansion.
   
   So either you make this lame expansion that people can literally skip, or you have a vertical expansion and call it a horizontal expansion. Or you just have vertical expansion and everybody gets new skills and goes to the new areas and everything comes up roses.
   
   
8. Open Servers will ruin Public Quests
   
   Public quests are one of the great innovations of WAR. So why roll on a PvP server where you'll never finish a PvE PQ without getting ganked, and furthermore stand the chance of just never finishing many PvE PQ's because the ganking causes you to run out of time? What about when one of your realm guys has buddies from the other realm ganking everyone but him so he can maximize his contribution and influence?
   
   PvP servers in WoW are not really harder, they're just slower. You end up avoiding a lot of content which is why I think PvP servers are stupid, although they aren't the reason I truly hate PvP servers.
   
   (The reason I truly hate PvP servers is that I had a 70 demo lock in TBC and I never died 1v1 to gankers. When I was 60 or leveling and dying to gankers I thought, "well, if I won it would be cool". But then I learned the truth : winning also sucks because it still wastes your time.)
   
   I think public quests are great, and I think people who roll on open servers are going to find that they're missing out.
   
   
9. Large Guilds are still going to have an enormous advantage
   
   Mythic has made much of some measures they've taken to improve the experience for small guilds as opposed to large guilds.
   
   But, if the end game is capturing and holding keeps, how can small guilds compete? Having a large guild does not mean you'll be able to capture and hold a keep, but being bigger is always going to help, and being smaller is always going to hurt.
   
   
10. Hardcore RvR is going to be even more obnoxious than Hardcore Raiding
    
    At least with WoW's (terrible) scheduled raiding you had some idea of what the end-time would be.
    
    Not with RvR. In RvR your guild is going to be this close to capturing a keep right when you're supposed to go to bed. And then, finally, about an hour or two after bedtime, you'll finally capture the keep.
    
    Cool. Now it's time to hold the keep. How long can you hold it? How little can you sleep and not wreck on the way to work?
    
    

I still can't wait to play WAR.