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Warhammer Online private server (Return of Reckoning)

TedNugent

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2013
Messages
6,334
As you know, EA terminated Warhammer Online.



As you may not know, some enterprising fucks have rebuilt the game on a private server in the UK.

The game is currently in alpha. Max Rank is 26. Max renown rank is 40. Some renown abilities do not function. Nearly all class and mastery abilities do function up to rank 26.



RvR is functional up to Tier 2, including Greenskin vs Dwarves and Elf zones as well as Mandred's Keep. They just added Highpass Cemetery. Scenarios work. Most of the PvE is nonfunctional because who gives a shit. Scenarios are fun.

The core of the game is almost completely functional. I've played for dozens of hours and I can confirm that it is dope as fuck. Grindy though and UK server has lag issues, esp for US clients. The server has gotten so popular that it's been DDOS'd several times. They are actually delaying the release of Tier 3 until they resolve lag issues.

If you've ever wanted to play WAR, or you were butthurt that EA shut down the servers, this is not a bad (free) option.

http://www.returnofreckoning.com/
 
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Space Satan

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WAR was famous for devs abandoning class balance completely. Up to a server shutting down. Their only method of balance was to counter one imbalance with another. This plus non-functional economy. If brits gonna recreate it as it was, there's not much use in going back to the same shit that finished original WAR.
Yet RVR was really fun back then.
 

TedNugent

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WAR was famous for devs abandoning class balance completely. Up to a server shutting down. Their only method of balance was to counter one imbalance with another. This plus non-functional economy. If brits gonna recreate it as it was, there's not much use in going back to the same shit that finished original WAR.
Yet RVR was really fun back then.
Can you give more context for people who didn't play live WAR?

The good news is that EA/Mythic isn't working on RoR. I can speak to the state of things in RoR - White Lions can pounce continuously, sorcs and Bright Wizards have scaling crits that smoke tanks - some classes are definitely imbalanced at present. Some people identify Marauders as being out of line for melee.

RoR is still a work in progress and fortunately the devs aren't idiots, and they appear to be genuinely committed to first structuring the game and then going back and making necessary balance tweaks. We'll see if their level of commitment holds up, but considering that they're literally building half the game from scratch (they said ~80% of the code was missing), and the popularity of the server, it could end up in a better spot than live.

I thought live was treading water from the beginning just because of the MMO market. I think enthusiasts/modders tend to do a better job on the balancing front because they actually play the game. Even WoW has schizophrenic balance updates, and they're on a multi billion dollar budget. 10%-50% swings in ability usefulness are not uncommon. One great example was when Gladiator shipped in WoD with the dispel on shield slam glyph, which was promptly removed, turning the spec into shit-tier once arena season 1 started. They really fucked me over with that one.
 

Metro

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Never tried this but if I remember right it crashed and burned in under five years?
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
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I'll give it a go one of these days, if for no other reason than nostalgia. Glad to hear it's been improved upon since the early days I heard about the server. Now if only Vanguard private server was making the same progress.

WAR was famous for devs abandoning class balance completely. Up to a server shutting down. Their only method of balance was to counter one imbalance with another. This plus non-functional economy. If brits gonna recreate it as it was, there's not much use in going back to the same shit that finished original WAR.
Yet RVR was really fun back then.

I think the problem was Mythic really had no idea where to go with the game and having the budget pulled from under their feet certainly didn't help when it turned out game wasn't a WoW killer EA desperately wanted. How many times did they rework RvR, fiddled with fortress conquest up to straight up simplifying zone pairing flipping, tweaked PvE end-game because it depended on actually getting access to the capital through combined efforts, etc? Them relying on FotM balance really wasn't that surprising all things considered.
 

Mangoose

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It should have three factions and destructible walls. In other words it should have completely RvR from DAOC. And/or be like what GW2 is.

Besides that the game was fine and mechanically fun.

(There were definitely issues with balance, but those weren't why I stopped playing.)
 

Space Satan

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There were such apalling balance shit that rendered PVP completely useless. Bright wizards could tank damage dealers without problems, warrior priests with near-immunity to anything. Check youtube for vids with stuff like Chosen using only base axe-throw attack to kill damage dealer in range.
 

Mangoose

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There were such apalling balance shit that rendered PVP completely useless. Bright wizards could tank damage dealers without problems, warrior priests with near-immunity to anything. Check youtube for vids with stuff like Chosen using only base axe-throw attack to kill damage dealer in range.
I agree wholeheartedly.

Still, for me, that was stuff to gripe about, but the foundation of how RvR was setup (such as not having 3 factions) was the main reason I quit. The lack of balance is gripe-worthy, but to me wasn't terrible enough to make me quit the game. Bad RvR mechanic implementation, however, simply did not motivate me to continue.

For example, the way keeps were set up - with no destructible walls, and two entrances, made a siege way too linear. I really think this was more the issue of making PVP not fun than simply classes being unbalanced. Now, I will agree with you if you're talking about non-RvR PVP arenas.

However do note that I subjectively prefer the more tactical/lulzy aspect of PVP. For example using knockbacks with a Squig Herder, especially knocking people off cliffs. Which is much more effective than straight damage. And also very very very lulzy.

And really, I wanted this to be DAOC v.2. DAOC with a complete graphics overhaul. Unfortunately that's not going to happen. I did play GW2 but it seemed a little meh in the RvR setup but I may give it a try again, as it's not terrible either.
 

markec

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What started to destroy the game was faction balance or lack of it. When you have a PvP focused game with only 2 factions worst thing that can happen is having a poor faction balance. Pretty much every server had almost 50% more Destruction players making RvR pretty much one sided. So players started to leave the game, devs responded by balancing classes to buff Order like making Priest of Sigmar who at one point could tank several enemies without breaking a sweat while dealing loads of damage.
This meant Destruction players would be raped in scenarios so they too got angry at game. All this started and chaotic circle where devs kept pushing rebalances in order to make everyone happy and failing miserably.

Not to mention that the game launched without many promised features missing like it was planned for all races to have a capitol city, and very little of actual content added post launch.
 

Echo Mirage

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I never played WAR. But I do recall people talking about Bright Wizards being massively overpowered to the point that people quit the game before any sort of balance pass, if any, was made on them.
 

Space Satan

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Well, tried it. No public quests working fro Chaos so far, this, plus lack of players and lots of bug. I suppose it could be well after devs will polish alpha and will recreate all existing features but for the time being it's not worth investing time into it, unless you want to polish your beta tester skills of want a bit of nostalgia.
 

TedNugent

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Dec 16, 2013
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Public quests don't work. At all. Just level up to level 5 or something and start doing Tier 1 RvR/scens.

That way you can get your renown rating up for the ass grind that is tier 2 and the 22-26 bracket.

Edit: screens from primetime. Barak Varr RvR / Mandreds Keep


Got shit on by their sally when taking screenshots XD
 
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Mangoose

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity
What started to destroy the game was faction balance or lack of it. When you have a PvP focused game with only 2 factions worst thing that can happen is having a poor faction balance. Pretty much every server had almost 50% more Destruction players making RvR pretty much one sided. So players started to leave the game, devs responded by balancing classes to buff Order like making Priest of Sigmar who at one point could tank several enemies without breaking a sweat while dealing loads of damage.
This meant Destruction players would be raped in scenarios so they too got angry at game. All this started and chaotic circle where devs kept pushing rebalances in order to make everyone happy and failing miserably.

Not to mention that the game launched without many promised features missing like it was planned for all races to have a capitol city, and very little of actual content added post launch.
IMO it's impossible to have RvR faction balance without 3 factions (or odd #).
 

TedNugent

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faction.php

Order has advantage in numbers presently

It's not currently as bad imba because there's only one server, so no shuffling for faction stacks (this is bad in WoW live).
 

Nael

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I think the balance in WAR hit a sweet spot about a year after release. The main issue at this point was server stability during full scale RvR raids on keeps. This was then fixed but at around the same time they introduced two new classes "Knight of the Blazing Sun" (Order) and "Black Guard" (Chaos). I rolled a Black Guard when it was released and it was a lot of fun and was serviceable in PvP as a kind of melee crowd control class and properly tuned up and played could absolutely wreck caster classes. You know what they couldn't wreck? Knights of the Blazing Sun. Fucking no class could.

KotBS was blatantly OP. I mean stupid OP. So OP that if it was a single player game it would break a single player campaign and this was a class built for an MMO that revolved almost entirely around RvR PvP. Game breaking is a phrase that doesn't even do the reality justice. On top of this even more buffs were given to Order classes and nerfs were handed out to Chaos classes as time went on. Sometimes justifiable but in many cases the changes were inexplicable. A few years after the servers were brought down it was revealed in an interview with one of the developers that these changes were cynically decided upon in order to boost Order character creation because everyone wanted to play as a sexy dark elf. But instead of more people rolling as Order classes Chaos players began unsubscribing in droves.

In the end it was just teams comprised entirely of KotBS rolling over the armies of Chaos. It was one big damn joke and everyone knew it. Sad because the potential was so great. RvR wasn't that fun since Dark Ages of Camelot. I'd be interested to see what era the emulator is set for. It could be great or it could be another dumpster fire.
 

Ninjerk

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Jul 10, 2013
Messages
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I think I have a character on it. Whatever server was responsible for handling quests was down half the time, and I think there was supposed to be another ship-on-the-shoreline perfect server in development that would take all its population away (I've seen this on two different WoW private servers with regards to CoreCraft and one DAoC private server but I don't remember the name of either one).
 

Sjukob

Arcane
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Jul 3, 2015
Messages
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I played it on official servers , leveled 2 characters to 26 ( current maximum ) here . I like the game , but lack of content and little amount of players kills me , in my online time it's never more than 350 people playing . I will stick with vanilla WoW for now , but I will switch here once they get the stuff done .
 

Hobo Elf

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Platypus Planet
There were such apalling balance shit that rendered PVP completely useless. Bright wizards could tank damage dealers without problems, warrior priests with near-immunity to anything. Check youtube for vids with stuff like Chosen using only base axe-throw attack to kill damage dealer in range.

Let's not forget how much ass Maguses sucked as well. You'd stack some 5 or so DoTs that you had on all the whole enemy team and the enemy Archmage would outheal all DoTs with a single HoT. T-thanks. Magus: King of #1 most Damage Dealt with 0 Kills in any given Scenario. And this brings up my other issue. FFS not only did they reduce the all powerful Archmage into a healbot, the Goblin Shaman had better racial spells than the Elven Archmage.

WAR had a lot of problems. A lot. BUT! I think the biggest issue with the game waas the playerbase. I played WAR in beta and on release, and the game was just as fun as any other PvP MMO like DAoC during beta. Mostly because people didn't give a fuck about scenario and level grind. Peeps just wanted to do open world PvP and have fun. Then when the game was released everyone was concentrated on level grind and this made the whole experience very tepid. Sure, the game was worse than DAoC in every way possible, but it wasn't outright horrible either. I think the players made it worse with the dumbass neo-MMO mentality of trying to rush to the end ASAP rather than having fun.
 
Self-Ejected

Ulminati

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Best time in WAR was during the beta in the Orcs vs D0rfs public quest with the catapults and the wall. Both sides competing to murder NPCs and players alike faster than the other side. It was a glorious clusterfuck.

Once you got past the 10-20 zone (and especially once you reaced the 30+ zones) the world was barren and empty.
 

Space Satan

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Destruction usually was stomped by chars so overpowered that it was an achievement when your team managed to kill one char. White Lions, warrior priests, blazings, all this shit happened for YEARS, completely ignored and then "How could this happen? Everything was going so great!?"
 

Hobo Elf

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Order never won a single Scenario on the server I played. Everyone who was horrible played Order and everyone who wasn't shit played Destruction. Got to Tier 2 during live before switching sides from Order to Destruction. It was just unbearable.
 

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