Shh... my wife's asleep!

So I guess it's okay to log onto the internet during vacation, y'know, just this once.  See what e-mail I've gotten (I need to enlarge my spleen why?).  Check up on the news (I think there was a presidential election or something, either Pinky or the Brain won).  Google Reader?  Hmm... 675 new posts...

/glance at wife, who is currently hogging all seven pillows in our hotel room.  Yeah, I guess I have time.

Read read read scan scan scan.

Reminded once again that Book of Grudges has hung up its hat, and I feel tremendously sad.  Happy, indeed, for what they gave to the community and that the reason they're leaving is to play more WAR, not to abandon it.  If you haven't paid your respects yet, now's a good a time as any.  I remember when they started blogging in these 5-times-a-day microposts, and since developed into a WAR blog powerhouse.

Read read read your blog, read it down the stream...

Guess there's nothing else major to... oh, wait, apparently contribution is a total sham.  And Santa Claus is actually your mom and dad.  And the tooth fairy is your creepy Uncle Ernie.  If this is false, Mythic needs NEEDS to prove so and reassure us with healthy numbers that our contribution is anything but a random number generator.  If it's true, well, Mythic needs NEEDS to own up to the fact and fix it, ASAP.  Like, before 1.06.  If they stay silent, they've just lost a huge chunk of respect from their customers.  I'll check back in on this when I return home.

Oh, and I guess there was a little matter of State of the Game II: The Quickening, which everyone's already dissected, and it's a little too late in the day for me to start doing so myself.

However.

If I may.

Since this is a pretty bold proclamation that Mythic's evaluated their strengths and weaknesses and is throwing the bulk of their chips into Open RvR as their primary priority, then I will quietly mourn the malnourished PvE content and ask for the following as PvE consolation prizes:

One: PQs are still a great idea -- you just need to make them more playable once more.  Make all of them as simple to max out the INF bar as it was in the first chapter (c'mon, the influence loot isn't that awesome anyway).  Give people incentive to "catch them all!" by rewarding players who complete all of the stages of all of the PQs in their pairing, and then all of the PQs in all three pairings.  And fix contribution, if it indeed be borked.

Two: Reduce mob strength, hit points and XP earned from killing them -- and vastly increase their numbers.  Populate your world and make me feel like a hero by wading through dozens of mobs, hacking through them left and right, without wasting time pulling them one by one, slowly watching a HP bar go down.

Three: Speed up leveling.  Seriously.  I know some people claim that WAR is silly fast to level, but that's not my experience, and I don't see a lot of that around me, either.  Leveling in beta was fun because it was quick and it encouraged you to try out all sorts of alts.  As it stands, I don't want to make an alt in WAR, ever, because of the hefty time commitment it takes to getting one to 40.  Ranking up to 40 should be quick -- get me in the end game!  Encourage me to try out one of the other many careers you've designed!

Four: Unveil at least the majority of the Tome unlocks so that I can be better informed as to fun goals I want to set and achieve in PvE.  Make the Tome work more for me, not against me.

Five: Give me a good reason -- give me lots of good reasons -- why I should want to bind in a capital city and actually use it on a daily basis, instead as a tourist attraction.

Six: Evaluate and uptweak crafting in a big way.  Realize that in trying to protect your game's economy from gold sellers you've become an overprotective parent who never lets their kid have any fun at all.  Give us ways to attain or make stuff worth buying and selling on the AH.

And although this isn't a PvE thing so much as a game-wide thing, I have to agree with Heartless here -- for the love of all that is holy, your number one priority should be fixing the hitching, lag, stuttering and generally poor graphical performance of massive combat.  For some reason, Reikland factory has been a near-slideshow for me, which apparently hits some players and not others (it could be a NVidia card problem, I dunno).  My card and computer can handle maxed-out settings on Fallout 3 with no problem.  I shouldn't have to learn to live with this, and we should be hearing more about what Mythic's doing to fix these severe issues instead of vague "game client running more smoothly" nonsense that we get in patch notes.

But, yeah, there's some good stuff to be excited about in this new state of the game, and I'm cool with Mythic choosing oRvR to be their primary game focus.  It's what can really set them apart (already does, to some extent) and provide unlimited end game combat that has insane variety and replayability.  This news isn't going anywhere, so when I get back we'll have a fireside chat or something and we'll see what this will do to WAR at large.

Until then, I need to get to bed.  I have to fight to get a pillow back, and that's a scenario that I'm already behind in.