‘ZOMG EXPANSION!’ Hysteria

So May 18th patch 1.3.5 came out with the phrase “the Red Plague had come” as reasoning for moving all the NPCs around in Altdorf and the career trainers in the PvE lakes. At the end of June we had our lovely June Producer’s Letter and the comment “we want to shout it from the rooftops…but not just yet” . This of course set off waves of gleeful emotion as people read into this as ‘expansion’ and quickly began to post their theories and wishes. Mythic is being pressured by its gaming community intensely for an expansion – every other game seems to be getting eye candy, wheres ours?

Most people have cited, in my opinion erroneously, that WAR has not yet had an expansion and thus we enter murky waters. You ask developers and producers and they’ll tell you that an expansion is new content that wasn’t available at release. From that we are told that the Heavy Metal event ushering in the Knight of the Blazing Sun and the Black Guard, Bitter Rivals ushering in Slayers and Choppas as part one of the Call to Arms, and finally the Beyond the Sands and Rise of the Tomb Kings installations of the Call to Arms ushering in Land of the Dead were all expansions. Most people will discredit the first two stating that they were in the beta and taken out as marketing ploys, in any case there is no argument that Land of the Dead was not an expansion.

However, in a game focused around RvR LotD was not the expansion everyone envisioned. It was marketed as a PvP lake with constant purging and a mad struggle over domination, which it was for the first two weeks. In fact the regular RvR zones in t4 were almost always empty of the opposing faction leading to the undesirable effect that while Order was ‘purging’ Destruction in LotD, Destruction was left to RvE t4 and once they flipped two zones and purged Order from LotD, Order was left to RvE two zones and get LotD back. It was a vicious cycle of who could RvE zones faster. After LotD lost its shine it became another PvE lake where you were conveniently flagged for combat so your experience gain was higher – a fact which quickly turned it into Land of the Grind-fest. Did Warhammer get an expansion? Yes. Was it the expansion the players wanted? Prior to launch everyone was raging for it, after it came out it was voted floppiest fish on the market.

The question remains from the carrot that Mythic constantly is dangling in front of our faces… when will the expansion come and what will it be. They have been teasing us for months now with words suggesting an expansion raising our hopes, but this pot of excitement is boiling over. There is also the fear of a repeat of LotD – another PvE injection into a RvR game. How far away is this mythical expansion and what shall it be…? In the next few posts I’ll explore the realm of possible expansions and weigh their pros and cons.

Introductions, Introductions!

Thus enters ekas-lime into the world of Blogging… It seems fitting that my first post is an introduction.

The purpose of this blog is to follow along with the happenings in the Warhammer Online world and my humble views and opinions of it. As far as my gaming history goes I’ve always played strategy games (both turn based and RT) but never online – I am the slow methodical type of player who always aims for the perfect town/army and that method doesn’t work online where all people do is base rush by memorizing hotkeys like B for barracks and 2 for infantry and make the spawn point in the middle of your town. I’d always be like “what the heck I’m still trying to figure out where to put my barracks and you’re already sending waves of trash at me??” My online experience didn’t take off until I was introduced to the world of first person shooters where I would take my slow and steady approach to the role of sniper. My name in every FPS I played was always ekaslime because it is my name broken up into parts: its suppose to be read e-kas-lime but most people call me eka or ekas (I always hated being called slime so when I started WAR I highly contemplated getting rid of the ‘s’ but I figured I’d stick to pride and carry the name with me.) So for many years I roamed the FPS lands as a sniper, finding a hiding spot and killing whatever moved. December ’08 I was given Warhammer for me to ‘expand’ my horizons and I was hesitant to start and MMO because WoW players quite frankly scared me. Anyway Dec 27th 2008 ekaslime the Shadow Warrior was born on Gorfang…

I hope with this blog to cast a critical eye on Warhammer and mayhaps to catch the eye of a developer and change something. I love Warhammer and want to see it succeed so although I may sound critical of it, my criticism is aimed at Bioware-Mythic, not at the world of Warhammer and GW. If we do not shout, they will not hear.