The Center Crumbles

If you couldn't tell, I haven't been logging on to WAR much in the past week or two.  There's a few reasons for it, some pertaining to real life -- Syp Jr. is almost here and we are undergoing a flurry of preparations and baby showers, my semester is just a couple weeks until finals and projects are due -- and some pertaining to the game itself.  Like most folks, I was pretty jazzed about the new classes, and I still enjoy Wotworks, the suicidal dwarf.  He's refreshingly simple to play, and the other night when I hopped past a Chosen to take out no less than two Shamans before I got whacked made me chuckle.  But Wotworks is still in T1, trying to get the final half bar of influence for the rewards before being shoved into T2, and I'm having a hard time logging in just to wait at the warcamp until the BOs open up.

Syp's hit the wall at 40, and I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with her now.  I'm just not into T4 oRvR, no matter what the incentives, and her quest to get all of the Bestiary unlocks has driven me to near insanity with how vague or frustrating some of the unlocks are to get.  In short, I'm feeling a lack of purpose with her, and she may very well be in drydock until Land of the Dead comes out (aka "The NEW new End Game").

It doesn't help that after the general excitement leading up to 1.2 and all that, it seems as though the community has fallen into a malaise of sorts.  Posts like this are starting to crop up more and more, and I don't fully blame them.  I generally try to be positive, even in critical evaluations, about Warhammer, because I believe that once you start going down the road of naked hostility toward a game, there's really no coming back.  But I'm not blind or so much of a fanboy to completely ignore that WAR's got some major issues right now, from enthusiasm to a few semi-game breaking bugs to performance issues that plague the game worse than the actual plague in the Empire lands.  I think that merging servers was the right thing to do, that there was no shame in it, but it wasn't exactly a pick-me-upper for the image of Warhammer either.

All of this doesn't change the fact that Warhammer is still quite fun to play, offers a lot that the competition does not, and I'll be swinging my axe and firing my rifle for some time yet to come.  But this may signal a period where I'll be slowing down a bit, logging on less frequently to reduce frustrations, perhaps even blogging less so that I don't feel pressured to have to get something up every day even if I have nothing great to say.

I hold on to hope that there are many good days ahead for WAR, and history tends to bear that out for most MMORPGs -- unless they tank outright, the games do get better, more polished, more enjoyable.  I sense that a lot of people WANT to like Warhammer, want to come back, but there are still severe obstacles for Mythic to deal with before they do.  We shall see.