WAR (Warhammer Online)

Originally posted by Khrymson

DL_Arkane....you're not the same Arkane that was with Acolytes are ya!?  Followed you're XFire tag and there is a new Darklore guild with the exact same guild layout as Acolytes.  What did you guys have a massive fight and split or something!?  ....and formed a new guild!    So what happened?

Basically so everyone can see is that both guilds would be better off as two separate guilds rather than 1 multi game guild. There are certain rules they play by in Age of Conan that we would not follow for WAR. We are playing on two different server types, have completely different people in leadership for each branch and a lack of communication between the two. In the end it was better for us to do the move and be our own guild now before launch got here and some issues became worse while staying with them. It worked out though as just about all of the 71 or so members we had are not back up and running on our new forums ^^. Basically it wasn't a fight or anything just a decision that the WAR side felt was better for the both of us in the long term. If there are any other questions anyone is free to send me a pm here.

Fall ends on Dec 21st or 22nd.

www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/planets/earth/Seasons.shtml

Hopefully it will be soon...

From this week there will be two beta`s running side by side, the guild beta which will test thing that have already been tested but not on a massive scale and the focus test beta that will let the currant beta tester log on to a new server that has major content that has not been tested up to now.

There will be two servers and you will need to download the new focus test client. Guild beta tester will not be able to log on to the new server. This will open up more spaces on the currant server because the original tester will be able to log into the focus test server.

Watch this space...

Originally posted by Satarious

Fall ends on Dec 21st or 22nd.

www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/planets/earth/Seasons.shtml

Yes but as you can see below to Mythic when they say fall they mean September, October, or November:

http://vnboards.ign.com/Message.aspx?topic=107247679&brd=22997&start=107250790

11th post down or if you trust me it reads:

Ulstan posted:

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Frankly I consider 'fall' to be Sept/oct/nov

If it's later than that they should call it winter 2008

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Well that is good news. Thanks for the update.

Originally posted by Jaga-TAO

We're getting a bit off-topic here, but it seems like somewhat valuable discourse.

I find a month to be an extremely short period of time in which to conduct a full phase of testing. You have to:

1) Get new people the client/registered/logged in
2) Wait 1-2 weeks while those people form guilds, get acquainted with the game, and test features
3) Wait another few days for a sizable amount of reliable bug reports to filter in
4) Process those bug reports and try to duplicate/verify them
5) Have the dev team analyze the bugs and propose fixes
6) Implement the fixes and ask testers to re-test (or validate yourself)

So you see the rather large laundry-list of things to do in QA, and that's really an abbreviated list compared to the real thing (done it before at work). To say they can get all of that done for a multitude of bugs and for dozens of new testers stomping on new systems in-game in just one month... it's really pushing the envelope.

Granted, they can if they want to, as they are in control. But when you crunch really hard, inevitably things get missed and rear their ugly heads after launch.

While I may play the pessimist with regards to the launch date, I'm as hopeful as anyone else they hit their target.

I can't really say much beyond that what do you think has been tested so far? You don't need a guild to really test out anything in the Beta. IMO GB is more like a promotional thing then really a bug finding mission. There will obviously be some feedback but bugs are not their main purpose.  Mythic has also said that they did not want to do guild beta until the game was fairly polished.  Remember that guild beta may only last for 1 month, or a bit more, but those guilds aren't going to be tossed out of beta. They can continue testing until the end of beta.

2 months is a good long time for testing something that at this point should be fairly polished. Not to mention that we have the in house builds that the public has not seen yet! They may also pull a blizzard move and leave out certain additional pieces of content or bugs that won't be encountered until endgame and leave those to fix for last so that the starting content is polished at launch then patch the other bugs to finish off polish ASAP.

Last thing I can really say is just wait for NDA drop and you will have your answer.

Originally posted by Distaste

I can't really say much beyond that what do you think has been tested so far? You don't need a guild to really test out anything in the Beta.

Depends on what the Guild Beta will be testing for. If there are specific mechanisms developed for the Guilds (could be the guild management soft or something related to RvR, or both) then these should be tested both for bugs and gameplay issues. They will probably have a rough estimate on how long this might take, but depending on their findings, it might extend (like if they find a game breaking "feature").

Originally posted by Distaste

They may also pull a blizzard move and leave out certain additional pieces of content or bugs that won't be encountered until endgame and leave those to fix for last so that the starting content is polished at launch then patch the other bugs to finish off polish ASAP.

LotrO also did the same thing, but underestimated the speed at which people went through the content. In the beginning the game suffered from lack of content in the mid-thirties as well as endgame (there was absolutely nothing to do upon reaching lvl 50). That had a cost in subs, if Mythic does something of the same sort, I hope its more like "get these things first, endgame can wait for 2-3 weeks" than something like "polish the launch, we will look into the endgame in a couple of months"

All I know is it better be a month or two AFTER spore launches :D. OMFG I am SO going to lose sleep and be amazingly less productive at work when Spore launches... even less productive once warhammer pre-order betas are given out .

Best advice I can give, be patient.