Wednesday, October 13, 2010

An Apology, a Rant, and a Lesson Learned

First off, sorry about being late to my own PTS event on Tuesday. My cable modem went dead on me, so I had to drop by my ISP on the way home to pick up a new one. I took off work 2 hours early so that I could make it back in time. For those of you also in Nashvegas, the traffic on the loop around the city was just horrible. There were accidents left and right. I got home at 8:00PM EDT, 30 minutes later than I wanted.

There weren't enough people online for a warband as organized as I liked anyway. It was disappointing. At the first test there were plenty of people who showed up. I think many of them just wanted to see what it looked like and not actually test stuff. Well, that's flawed in my opinion. I spent the night in a warband with Mike Wyatt, James Casey, and Carrie running around and having fun testing stuff. It was the perfect opportunity to chat with the developers about what they were making and tell them directly what I thought and felt in the moment it was happening. I don't know any other development team that would let the general public have that kind of access to them. It's really an opportunity you shouldn't miss if you like WAR and want to see it thrive.

The lesson learned from this is that most people really don't want to go through the trouble of being hyper-organized for a game. The core culture of this game is more about just going out to the lakes/scenarios, smashing some faces for a little bit, and then log out and do something else. My fear is that the system may become so favorable to the highly organized squads (like the crew I run with) that the core audience may be alienated. I hope that doesn't happen. I think this is the main reason there's 2 months of testing for this. Mythic has to get the balance right on this. They can only do so with our help.

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