Levi's 2 Plat: Warhammer Online Public Quests – A Good Idea Gone Bad

Warhammer Online PQs – A good idea gone bad

An author’s note: Why am I writing about Warhammer, particularly about something that largely took place during its early days? Because I am truly passionate about the mechanics and systems within MMOs – How developers approach various aspects of their games and how different those mechanics turn out to be compared to another games. Where one fails (or succeeds) another will often pick it up and improve upon it. Hopefully this is a simple start; a review and critique of why one great idea turned into a major disappointment.

I was very excited for the release of Warhammer Online. First and foremost, because it was made by Mythic Entertainment, and it was only natural for me to think they might have learned from their mistakes and time with DAoC. Of course I was dead wrong, but Warhammer did launch with some new and exciting features largely unseen to the MMO world. I want to discuss one in particular that seemed to have so much potential, yet ended up so bad: Public Quests.

I remember watching a Podcast with Paul Barnett where he described one or two of the Public Quests (PQs) from I believe the dwarf and greenskin starting areas. It sounded amazing! You were going to have to get this big giant drunk in order to convince him to chuck a bomb at the dwarven stronghold and watch hilarity ensue. What a fabulous idea, I thought, why haven’t other MMOs come up with this idea yet?! Then we got into the reward system and it sounded awesome too! If you won an item, it would always be something you could use and there were great rewards, all based on contribution so that the slackers couldn’t just AFK and ninja what you worked so hard for. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out to be quite that rosy. After getting past the first half of Tier 1, I started to notice some massive problems with the PQs.

1. Too darn many! – You would think that having a lot of these would be a good idea, but even during the initial Warhammer craze, when there were tons and tons of players, the farther you got into the game the less chance you had of actually running into an active PQ that you could join in. There were about three PQs per zone, but unfortunately, there were at least 3 zones (one for each race on your faction) that corresponded  with your level. So you had 9 public quests, and as soon as you moved into the next zone of that tier you had another 3 zones and 9 quests. So what you had is about 18 PQs per tier (much more at T4), if you just count the regular ones. This is where they stopped being exciting, rare adventures and instead became waste of map space as there were fewer and fewer players spread over larger areas.

2. Copied and bland – While I have fond memories of the first few PQs, they ended up being incredibly bland, as just the same recycled garbage over and over. I’d venture to guess that 90% of them followed this sort of process:

Stage 1: Kill a ton of easy stuff.

Stage 2: Kill about 1/10th of what you just did, but these are harder.

Stage 3: Kill a boring boss.

Really? Maybe the fun ones were only fun because I was trying to compete with the other players to rake in the most contribution.

3. Contribution – First I will briefly mention (only because of its ridiculousness) that for quite a long time after release, contribution for Keep takes was based on a random number that was hidden and generated for your character when you entered the zone. This was easily testable by the numerous accounts from people running into a keep at the last second and scoring first place. That was eventually fixed, and that aside, we move on to the real problem with the contribution system.

During a PQ, you built up contribution based on things we would expect, like damage output and healing, etc. This number ranged from 0-500 at the end of the PQ. Okay, the problem was that then every player had a random roll of 1-1000. Is the problem apparent to you? It wasn’t to Mythic EA. This sort of system took most of the power away from the player, and placed it in a random number generator. Don’t be mistaken, having that random roll in there is actually a very good idea to keep things from being static or for preventing let’s say a twinked character from winning over and over. The problem was that the end score leaned too much on the random number and too little on the contribution. If you reverse their roles, let’s say 0-1000 on the contribution and 1-500 on the roll, then it is much more likely that your contribution will actually land you where you would expect to be. If I get #1 contribution, I don’t expect to be last place, but with their system it wasn’t that uncommon to get all your work destroyed by a flopped roll.

4. The Loot – So let’s say you worked hard for your contribution (or just rolled lucky) and you managed to get some loot, which ironically, could be the same for the player that scored #1 and #6. This was because the highest rewards were often just a string of green bags. What I refer to as “green” bags is the lowest form of an item with some sort of bonus. This is typical of several games but just keep in mind that a green reward would just be above something with absolutely no stats at all. We were promised great rewards and items that our characters could always actually use. Great rewards? Not really. Once in a blue moon, I might have gotten something “great,” but all those other times it was just poorly itemized crap. Speaking of such crap, you got the same thing (for each rarity) every time you did that PQ. So what happened? You’d manage to get enough friends to do a PQ, three of you would get a green most of the time, and you’d realize the green sucked and there was almost no reason to do that PQ again because you’d most likely just get <gasp> the same green. They didn’t lie when they said it would always be an item your character could use (they really meant equip) but  they definitely left out that little tidbit.

I think you can see why I was disappointed with PQs at this point. I could hardly find other random players to do them with, when I did, they turned out to be fairly bland and un-imaginative, if I worked hard the chance at an item was still mostly out of my hands, and if I managed to overcome those odds I was stuck more often than not with a crappy green that while equip-able, almost always wasn’t an improvement.

As far as I have been able to ask around and research, there have been no improvements to the Warhammer Online PQ system regarding what I have covered except (as I indicated) that the keep contribution is no longer bugged, and  that was fixed quite a long time ago. There are still way too many PQs (with even less players now), they are still incredibly bland, and they do not offer tangible rewards to those luckily enough to roll well.

Overall, a good idea, but implemented very poorly.