Wednesday, September 26, 2012

1.4.7 Update

Version 1.4.7 of Warhammer Online is on its way.  Developer Keaven Freeman took to the forums yesterday with a status update.  In it, he also tried to address some players concerns over the crowd control changes being implemented.  I hope we see more regular updates like these.  Keaven also responded to the thread a few times, I appended that at the end of the post.

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The Wild Hunt will be ending tomorrow (9/26), and so will the anniversary XP/RP bonuses.

Hardware issues have slowed the deployment of 1.4.7, but it looks like we’ll have things ready by next week.

There are still some community concerns with the upcoming CC changes I would like to address (note: these are summaries of the 15 pages of comments, and may not be an exact word-for-word quote from anyone in particular):
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The knockdowns duration seems to long, since it is longer than the current time-to-die.

Not all knockdowns affected by this change will see an increase in their duration.

1vs1s will see too large a benefit with the new knockdown duration.

None of the careers were designed for any long-term one-on-one survivability against every other career. WAR is a group-combat game, and it would be a mistake to judge the worth of any given change from solely a 1v1-fight comparison.

The new duration of stagger seems to low to bother with it.

I imagine any change to abilities would require some players to reevaluate their current ability-rotation and mastery specs. The effective worth of “removing” an enemy from the fight for any amount of time is variable based on that combatant’s role, but I would argue any amount of time advantage given to your team is still exactly that: an advantage.

Standardized CC requires other considerations in order to work.

This is true, which is why we made shallow but wide reaching changes first. Additional changes, such as tank vs. DPS, or melee vs. ranged, will require a deeper level of work; this is something we do want to address, and felt the current changes were a necessary first step in that direction.
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I feel it’s important to reiterate that our goal with these changes was to take CC and make it more of a road-bump in the fight, rather than something that makes or breaks the fight. We want fights to be more dynamic and organic, and it will take us a few steps to get there, but we strongly feel this was a necessary first step in that direction.

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Also from the thread:

There will be a new line up, yes. I'll see if i can that posted for you tomorrow. The city portals will be moved to the Warcamps.

and

Identifying the game as a group-oriented combat game is not an excuse, nor is it a blindfold - it's the reality of the game design. In order to make each career totally viable and effective against every other career in a 1v1 situation, the entire game would have to be reworked from the ground up. I'm not saying that's a bad idea, i'm just saying it's not something we're prepared to do at this time.