just found you. Cant tell you how refreshing it is to see authentic criticism of Blizzard. I love WoW too. I really enjoy much about the game, esp the artwork, how the models move, the texturing and some of the mechanics. But some of the meta designing has been clumsy at best while Blizzards devs act like gods.
Ive been playing WAR. OMG is it FUN! Two things keep me from dumping WoW and never looking back, first: I have over 4 years invested in WoW. All my family & friends, my guild are playing WoW, that’s alot to give up. Second, WAR’s artwork & their models are not superior to WoW. But if friends & family move, so will I.
If Blizzard could incorporate public quests and some of the RvR in the WoW world; simplify that draconian rep system in outland; WoW would be a lot more fun too.
I’ve been doing a lot of research for the last couple of months on WAR. I have to say, your blog is one of the best sources of information that I’ve found on the meta-issues (dev direction/responsiveness, game experience, etc…). Thanks for your insightful commentary.
My friends and I jumped into WoW about 3 years ago. By chance I was driving to work with the morning radio show playing. The morning guys were talking about the infamous Serenity Now Funeral Raid. My friends and I were amused and amazed by the idea of a huge, open-world pvp event (none of us had played an MMO before) so we went out that day and bought the game. Obviously the RVR/PVP elements that we thought we were buying into were not there, but WoW had other charms that kept us enthralled for a few years. WAR has always interested me because on its face it appears to deliver on the promise of huge, open PVP with real consequences. I’ve read this blog and others trying to understand if WAR is really going to live up to my expectations.
After reading your “Accessible to you means trivial to me” post I should probably confess that I’m at the trivial end of the spectrum. Family and work eat into my precious gaming time. By the end of my WoW career I was lucky to spend 8 hours a week in-game. That’s not to say that I wanted Bliz to make the game easier for a casual guy like me. Just the opposite…I loved the fact that there was content I’d never have an opportunity to see. Crazy eh?
GD…I’m longwinded….here’s the reason I’m writing. The things I love about MMO’s are:
1. The sense of community
2. The opportunity to progress
3. The hugeness of the game…something you can play for a long time w/o getting stale
The things I hated about WoW:
1. The need to schedule time
1a. That most sessions were 3+ hours at a minimum.
2. The sitting around and waiting for people to log in
3. The task of finding like-minded people and having to rely on them to progress
So the rub was always that I loved the community, but trying to manage 25 schedules was tough…especially when your guild is comprised of adults with careers and families…aka real life distractions. My hope for Warhammer was that it would offer both the sense of community and progression, but it could be jumped into at a moments notice and jumped out of just as easily. Nothing worse than being the MT of a guild and having to leave because of a sick kid or work the next day. I’d like to play a game that doesn’t come with that kind of social pressure.
Can you take this long winded post and comment on whether you think Warhammer would be a good game for a guy in my situation?
If you like PvP in an MMO, WAR has that in spades, and it’s very easy to jump into a warband (raid for RvR basically) and hang out for however long you have. People are in and out all the time.
The community is still developing. If you are in a good guild, you are all set. Server-wide stuff will happen, but being a new MMO, it’s not quite there yet (at least on Monolith)
I play with my gf 1-2 hours a night, and we are currently rank 33. We have done basically everything, quests, PQs, RvR, scenarios. Time has rarely ever been an issue.
Great answer. I appreciate the feedback. I’m likely going to jump in sometime in Q1 of 2009. It’s my hope that the devs will have worked out the kinks and the early adopter douchebags will have washed out. I’ll keep visiting for updates and look forward to hearing more about your play experience.
I’m Maria from Star Pirates, and I have been an ardent reader of your blog.
At, StarPirates.net, we provide a free space based MMO game that you can play from anywhere.
We always check your blog to stay “connected” to the industry.
We are offering a freebie, and it works like this –
One in every ten members who signs up from your blog gets thousand Star Pirates Points to build their ship.
It would be super cool if you could actually post in your blog about this freebie as this would benefit your readers immensely and would also help us a lot!
I know that you get a lot of people requesting you to post about their products on your blog, and I understand that you may not want all of them, so please treat this as a no obligation request.
Nevertheless, we’d love it if you posted about this Free Membership + Thousand Points on your blog!
I understand that you’re probably hard pressed for time and might not in most probability have the time to sit down and type a post for us, so we decided that we could give you a copy of a blog post format about the offer which has been written by our writers.
You could put that up if you want to after editing it and reviewing it, otherwise if you’d like it, even a fresh new version posted by you would be cool!
Here is a copy of what our content writer wrote:
We got a mail from the owners of StarPirates, a free space-based MMO-type game that you can run in your browser from your office or house.
They’ve offered our readers a freebie if they sign up:
If you click on this link here :http://www.starpirates.net/register.php?referer=-552
You’ll be entered into a draw automatically after setting up your character. One player in 10 who signs up from here will get 1000 StarPirates points to set up their Pirate. They’ll hold the draws in late January.
They apparently have a pretty steady community with lots of talk, and you can set up fleets – so if someone wants to setup a fleet for us then drop us a line and we’ll post the details up. That way other readers can join up if they want to.
Do you have a contact email address? I’d like to talk to you about an MMO blog community idea. If you wouldn’t mind, could you drop me an email at the address included along with this comment?
Like Muckbeast, I was wondering about contact info? Your blog has some good info but I don’t want to flood your comments with questions (unless that’s preferable). That, or is there a forum you frequent where people can PM you?
Anyway, I’m looking for an MMO and you have some info on the elusive “Darkfall.” Was just looking for some info on that thing
Comments on blog posts really is the best way, as whatever questions people do post, it’s likely others have thought about as well, and I certainly don’t mind answering what I can. Much prefer that over going back and forth in email tbh, so feel free to ask away in whatever post raised the question, I get all comments send as emails so I don’t miss anything.
Would love to see your assessment about that group of gamer ages 32-40. Young enough to still like great pvp, unfortunately limited to irl commitments, and trying to fit the two opposing constraints in their day to day life.
My first MMO – AC – Loved it. Was fullbore carebear the entire way. Tried Darktide server and got to about lvl 35.
COH/COV – still active account. Great for when I want to pop in for about an hour and mindnumbingly pound some keys.
Eve – May /03 to Sept/07. Beta Tester as well. Hated this game on occassion. Big sandbox, low-mid dev intervention. Great guild leads to good game experiene – found that to be key. You could be the crappiest pvp’er in the world, but the corp would help to buffer the negative. Great pvp(I thought), and reasonable death penalty should you forget to buy or update clone
WoW – 7 Mos. One Character to 70. I primarily BG’ed the the last few lvls. Played ally, and horribly infuriating game on occassion. Never did big raid. Left, and have never regretted doing so.
AoC – Ugh – only lasted 1 mos. Game just did not appeal to me at all.
Warhammer – Not bad. The sc’s are rather fun still for me. Balancing is ridiculous atm.
Point of all this is I feel an underlying current there is a huge demographic out there in this age range, wanting the same type of interesting PVP, some sandbox system, and appropriate risk/reward. Not handed to us on a silver platter, but at the same time allowing us to grab the ring given our irl obligations.
Pardon the ramble, but would love to see your thoughts on it.
your name sounds familiar, is the picture up top from AC?
Anyways from one “Hardcore Casual” player to another, I wanted to gather some thoughts from you.
All through highschool and college I was able to play “hardcore” in Asheron’s Call, then towards the end when college got busy I found that it was harder and harder to dedicate the time to play Darktide, although by that time, darktide was not as competitive as it used to be so it was easy to simply PvP “casually” as there were few people left on the server, making it easy to be “well equiped/leveled”.
I find myself now wanting to play a “true” PvP game, but without the time to dedicate to it, I’ve recently suscribed to DarkFall, which looks very promising but feels like darktide pre-2000, by that i mean everything is quite tedious, simple, low amount of content, which in a way I find very cool. Reminds me of darktide before atlans, hollows, weepings and greater shadow armor, not that I didn’t like those things, but it was just so exciting that the game evolved around you. Alot of people I find don’t understand this and just get frustrated because it doesn’t look like a massive o.0fest.
However, my main problem is that it’s not very “casual” friendly at all. Just like darktide back in the day, Darkfall requires hours of macroing. (i’m very pro macro, done correctly in a PvP game it can work very well, like in AC when the world was very populated and there were not very many hunting locations, macroing was actually good for the game, in the way that you had to defend XP/hunting spots)And due to low amount of hunting spawns, there’s a high chance of getting PKed whenever your out hunting and it can take forever to run back (so u gotta find the out of the way hunting spots, just like DT ). Don’t get me wrong, this is what makes a PvP game good. However it makes the game very harsh and tedious to play.
I’m not saying that I don’t like this fact, that’s an important part of a real PvP game IMO, but the tradeoff is that it’s very difficult to get anywhere being a “casual” gamer, things move very slowly.
For me, I’m very impatient, if I was more patient perhaps I’d be content with moving along slowly. At first it almost seems like it’s not worth playing a more hardcore game.
However, I’ve been there done that with regard to other MMOs like WOW and WAR, but it’s just gay, i find it being a waste of time, I don’t get the excitment like I did in AC.
And so far after about 20 hours invested in Darkfall, I’ve killed about 5 people and been killed about 10 times, in those instances I’ve had more excitement than I had in all my hours of playing WAR and WOW put together. So if I could justify wasting time on WAR and WOW, surely Darkfall is worth playing. But finding myself with less than 6 hours a week to play Darkfall is very frustrating, especially when guild taxes take like 2 hours a week to farm.
Anyways, what is your take on how to enjoy yourself casually in a hardcore mindset/game (feel free to draw comparisons from AC and talk about it, as I am very passionate and nostalgic about AC and would love to hear/talk about anytime)?
if anyone here plays the game and no the hunters tell them that orangehunter cant play any more because for some reason his atlantica is acting up on him contact clematis or hexsongs or ariakus
It’s nice to finally read some honest quality MMORPG information. I decided to pick up Darkfall after reading your posts about it and I love it! It has restored my interest in the MMORPG genre. Thank you and keep the good posts coming!
August 27, 2008 at 8:15 am |
Hows it going?
September 11, 2008 at 7:43 pm |
send me a email , i’ll help with the tech issues
done this for 10 years , hard to pinpoint hardware issues .. and well i can do loops around windows with my eyes closed
mybee if you live in the states i can even help you by phone..
I live for this , love it , and new contacts is never a bad thing.. shoot me a line
September 19, 2008 at 2:48 pm |
Great blog name. I started using the term “hardcore casual” after I quit WoW raiding. Great minds think alike
September 19, 2008 at 2:49 pm |
Do you post on the VN boards? I saw someone using the name of this blog there, found it kind of odd.
November 6, 2008 at 6:29 pm |
just found you. Cant tell you how refreshing it is to see authentic criticism of Blizzard. I love WoW too. I really enjoy much about the game, esp the artwork, how the models move, the texturing and some of the mechanics. But some of the meta designing has been clumsy at best while Blizzards devs act like gods.
Ive been playing WAR. OMG is it FUN! Two things keep me from dumping WoW and never looking back, first: I have over 4 years invested in WoW. All my family & friends, my guild are playing WoW, that’s alot to give up. Second, WAR’s artwork & their models are not superior to WoW. But if friends & family move, so will I.
If Blizzard could incorporate public quests and some of the RvR in the WoW world; simplify that draconian rep system in outland; WoW would be a lot more fun too.
thanks for the Blog.
December 18, 2008 at 8:49 pm |
I’ve been doing a lot of research for the last couple of months on WAR. I have to say, your blog is one of the best sources of information that I’ve found on the meta-issues (dev direction/responsiveness, game experience, etc…). Thanks for your insightful commentary.
My friends and I jumped into WoW about 3 years ago. By chance I was driving to work with the morning radio show playing. The morning guys were talking about the infamous Serenity Now Funeral Raid. My friends and I were amused and amazed by the idea of a huge, open-world pvp event (none of us had played an MMO before) so we went out that day and bought the game. Obviously the RVR/PVP elements that we thought we were buying into were not there, but WoW had other charms that kept us enthralled for a few years. WAR has always interested me because on its face it appears to deliver on the promise of huge, open PVP with real consequences. I’ve read this blog and others trying to understand if WAR is really going to live up to my expectations.
After reading your “Accessible to you means trivial to me” post I should probably confess that I’m at the trivial end of the spectrum. Family and work eat into my precious gaming time. By the end of my WoW career I was lucky to spend 8 hours a week in-game. That’s not to say that I wanted Bliz to make the game easier for a casual guy like me. Just the opposite…I loved the fact that there was content I’d never have an opportunity to see. Crazy eh?
GD…I’m longwinded….here’s the reason I’m writing. The things I love about MMO’s are:
1. The sense of community
2. The opportunity to progress
3. The hugeness of the game…something you can play for a long time w/o getting stale
The things I hated about WoW:
1. The need to schedule time
1a. That most sessions were 3+ hours at a minimum.
2. The sitting around and waiting for people to log in
3. The task of finding like-minded people and having to rely on them to progress
So the rub was always that I loved the community, but trying to manage 25 schedules was tough…especially when your guild is comprised of adults with careers and families…aka real life distractions. My hope for Warhammer was that it would offer both the sense of community and progression, but it could be jumped into at a moments notice and jumped out of just as easily. Nothing worse than being the MT of a guild and having to leave because of a sick kid or work the next day. I’d like to play a game that doesn’t come with that kind of social pressure.
Can you take this long winded post and comment on whether you think Warhammer would be a good game for a guy in my situation?
Thanks.
December 19, 2008 at 7:49 pm |
Short answer, yes Jutah.
If you like PvP in an MMO, WAR has that in spades, and it’s very easy to jump into a warband (raid for RvR basically) and hang out for however long you have. People are in and out all the time.
The community is still developing. If you are in a good guild, you are all set. Server-wide stuff will happen, but being a new MMO, it’s not quite there yet (at least on Monolith)
I play with my gf 1-2 hours a night, and we are currently rank 33. We have done basically everything, quests, PQs, RvR, scenarios. Time has rarely ever been an issue.
December 19, 2008 at 8:26 pm |
Great answer. I appreciate the feedback. I’m likely going to jump in sometime in Q1 of 2009. It’s my hope that the devs will have worked out the kinks and the early adopter douchebags will have washed out. I’ll keep visiting for updates and look forward to hearing more about your play experience.
-Juts
January 7, 2009 at 5:28 am |
Hey there,
I’m Maria from Star Pirates, and I have been an ardent reader of your blog.
At, StarPirates.net, we provide a free space based MMO game that you can play from anywhere.
We always check your blog to stay “connected” to the industry.
We are offering a freebie, and it works like this –
One in every ten members who signs up from your blog gets thousand Star Pirates Points to build their ship.
It would be super cool if you could actually post in your blog about this freebie as this would benefit your readers immensely and would also help us a lot!
I know that you get a lot of people requesting you to post about their products on your blog, and I understand that you may not want all of them, so please treat this as a no obligation request.
Nevertheless, we’d love it if you posted about this Free Membership + Thousand Points on your blog!
I understand that you’re probably hard pressed for time and might not in most probability have the time to sit down and type a post for us, so we decided that we could give you a copy of a blog post format about the offer which has been written by our writers.
You could put that up if you want to after editing it and reviewing it, otherwise if you’d like it, even a fresh new version posted by you would be cool!
Here is a copy of what our content writer wrote:
We got a mail from the owners of StarPirates, a free space-based MMO-type game that you can run in your browser from your office or house.
They’ve offered our readers a freebie if they sign up:
If you click on this link here :http://www.starpirates.net/register.php?referer=-552
You’ll be entered into a draw automatically after setting up your character. One player in 10 who signs up from here will get 1000 StarPirates points to set up their Pirate. They’ll hold the draws in late January.
They apparently have a pretty steady community with lots of talk, and you can set up fleets – so if someone wants to setup a fleet for us then drop us a line and we’ll post the details up. That way other readers can join up if they want to.
Did I mention it’s free to play? Have Fun!
Thanks a ton!
Maria
March 4, 2009 at 5:56 am |
syncaine:
Do you have a contact email address? I’d like to talk to you about an MMO blog community idea. If you wouldn’t mind, could you drop me an email at the address included along with this comment?
Thanks!
March 11, 2009 at 2:16 pm |
Like Muckbeast, I was wondering about contact info? Your blog has some good info but I don’t want to flood your comments with questions (unless that’s preferable). That, or is there a forum you frequent where people can PM you?
Anyway, I’m looking for an MMO and you have some info on the elusive “Darkfall.” Was just looking for some info on that thing
March 11, 2009 at 2:24 pm |
Comments on blog posts really is the best way, as whatever questions people do post, it’s likely others have thought about as well, and I certainly don’t mind answering what I can. Much prefer that over going back and forth in email tbh, so feel free to ask away in whatever post raised the question, I get all comments send as emails so I don’t miss anything.
April 6, 2009 at 10:41 am |
Hey, really good posts.
Would love to see your assessment about that group of gamer ages 32-40. Young enough to still like great pvp, unfortunately limited to irl commitments, and trying to fit the two opposing constraints in their day to day life.
My first MMO – AC – Loved it. Was fullbore carebear the entire way. Tried Darktide server and got to about lvl 35.
COH/COV – still active account. Great for when I want to pop in for about an hour and mindnumbingly pound some keys.
Eve – May /03 to Sept/07. Beta Tester as well. Hated this game on occassion. Big sandbox, low-mid dev intervention. Great guild leads to good game experiene – found that to be key. You could be the crappiest pvp’er in the world, but the corp would help to buffer the negative. Great pvp(I thought), and reasonable death penalty should you forget to buy or update clone
WoW – 7 Mos. One Character to 70. I primarily BG’ed the the last few lvls. Played ally, and horribly infuriating game on occassion. Never did big raid. Left, and have never regretted doing so.
AoC – Ugh – only lasted 1 mos. Game just did not appeal to me at all.
Warhammer – Not bad. The sc’s are rather fun still for me. Balancing is ridiculous atm.
Point of all this is I feel an underlying current there is a huge demographic out there in this age range, wanting the same type of interesting PVP, some sandbox system, and appropriate risk/reward. Not handed to us on a silver platter, but at the same time allowing us to grab the ring given our irl obligations.
Pardon the ramble, but would love to see your thoughts on it.
CJ
April 8, 2009 at 5:11 pm |
Hey CJ, busy right now with RL, but I’ll get that post up when I get a chance, its a good topic. Thanks!
May 25, 2009 at 7:22 pm |
Hey Syncaine, do you have any contact email I may contact you for some questions?
June 12, 2009 at 10:16 am |
did you play darktide?
June 12, 2009 at 11:46 am |
@Maxx: Yes, using the same name.
July 1, 2009 at 9:42 pm |
your name sounds familiar, is the picture up top from AC?
Anyways from one “Hardcore Casual” player to another, I wanted to gather some thoughts from you.
All through highschool and college I was able to play “hardcore” in Asheron’s Call, then towards the end when college got busy I found that it was harder and harder to dedicate the time to play Darktide, although by that time, darktide was not as competitive as it used to be so it was easy to simply PvP “casually” as there were few people left on the server, making it easy to be “well equiped/leveled”.
I find myself now wanting to play a “true” PvP game, but without the time to dedicate to it, I’ve recently suscribed to DarkFall, which looks very promising but feels like darktide pre-2000, by that i mean everything is quite tedious, simple, low amount of content, which in a way I find very cool. Reminds me of darktide before atlans, hollows, weepings and greater shadow armor, not that I didn’t like those things, but it was just so exciting that the game evolved around you. Alot of people I find don’t understand this and just get frustrated because it doesn’t look like a massive o.0fest.
However, my main problem is that it’s not very “casual” friendly at all. Just like darktide back in the day, Darkfall requires hours of macroing. (i’m very pro macro, done correctly in a PvP game it can work very well, like in AC when the world was very populated and there were not very many hunting locations, macroing was actually good for the game, in the way that you had to defend XP/hunting spots)And due to low amount of hunting spawns, there’s a high chance of getting PKed whenever your out hunting and it can take forever to run back (so u gotta find the out of the way hunting spots, just like DT
). Don’t get me wrong, this is what makes a PvP game good. However it makes the game very harsh and tedious to play.
I’m not saying that I don’t like this fact, that’s an important part of a real PvP game IMO, but the tradeoff is that it’s very difficult to get anywhere being a “casual” gamer, things move very slowly.
For me, I’m very impatient, if I was more patient perhaps I’d be content with moving along slowly. At first it almost seems like it’s not worth playing a more hardcore game.
However, I’ve been there done that with regard to other MMOs like WOW and WAR, but it’s just gay, i find it being a waste of time, I don’t get the excitment like I did in AC.
And so far after about 20 hours invested in Darkfall, I’ve killed about 5 people and been killed about 10 times, in those instances I’ve had more excitement than I had in all my hours of playing WAR and WOW put together. So if I could justify wasting time on WAR and WOW, surely Darkfall is worth playing. But finding myself with less than 6 hours a week to play Darkfall is very frustrating, especially when guild taxes take like 2 hours a week to farm.
Anyways, what is your take on how to enjoy yourself casually in a hardcore mindset/game (feel free to draw comparisons from AC and talk about it, as I am very passionate and nostalgic about AC and would love to hear/talk about anytime)?
August 8, 2009 at 8:32 am |
How long ago was this website made
August 10, 2009 at 2:11 pm |
if anyone here plays the game and no the hunters tell them that orangehunter cant play any more because for some reason his atlantica is acting up on him contact clematis or hexsongs or ariakus
August 28, 2009 at 11:16 am |
It’s nice to finally read some honest quality MMORPG information. I decided to pick up Darkfall after reading your posts about it and I love it! It has restored my interest in the MMORPG genre. Thank you and keep the good posts coming!