WAR is live! Hurry up and wait.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning servers went live yesterday. I dutifully went to 2 different GameStops to pick up my pre-ordered full-game boxes.

Begin snark: there are two GameStops within 1 mile of each other near me (one in a strip-mall, one in a 'real' mall). I had to buy the pre-order box at two different ones because there was only one left at my regular GameStop. You'd think that because it was all one company, I could pick up BOTH of my game boxes at one store, right? Silly me. I forgot how retail works. Each store gets it's allotment, and does not share with other stores. End snark.

During the Open-Beta of WAR, I observed a few issues, mostly having to do with where mobs rendered vs where I was attacking them. I also observed a few NPC's running thru town while seated, and one "Unconscious Miner" running out of the mine.

Being a QA Person, (ie I point out other people's mistakes for a living)(but in a nice way, I am a team player) I know that you can't possibly fix all the bugs before shipping a product, or you'd never ship the product. Trade-off decisions have to be made about what problems are important enough to delay the product, and what you can put off fixing until later. And most of what I observed really could be considered minor in the grand scheme of what they accomplished in the game so far.

Most of the game play in the Live edition went as expected. A group of friends and I 'met' in the evening to play after spending some time on our own leveling our characters up to between levels 6 and 9, which we considered far enough to have figured out what our chosen character could do, and start familiarizing ourselves with how to get around and where to find important things like trainers and Rally Masters. I know choosing the first night that the game was fully live was probably not super-smart, but we're Gamers. We wanted to Game and we wanted to Game as soon as possible! We all managed to get on to the server without running into any wait times, but once we got on we ran into a few small snags. The /whisper system didn't seem to be working, although the /invite system worked, so we could group up and then chat amongst ourselves. And there was a LOT of lag. I noticed it the most moving between areas and zones, and often during battles as well. Alt-tabbing out of the game to load up Skype (or Ventrillo) was not a smooth operation, the game often would not re-draw correctly, forcing you to quit the game and restart it anyway. I solved this by running the game in Windowed mode, sized as large as possible.

Some things I hope Mythic is already working on to patch A.S.A.P:

• The White Lion's pet that freezes or just fades away for no apparent reason. Several times during extended killing sessions in a Public Quest, the hot bar for my pet disappeared, so I could not change the War Lion's stance from Passive to Defensive, but the hot key for attack (left-shift + C) still worked so I could keep going until there was a big enough pause in the action to dismiss then re-call my pet.
  
• Kaine's Embrace RvR. I got stuck in the battleground with a group of friends last night during our first foray together. I participated in this battleground quiet a few times during Open-Beta, and did not experience near the problems our group did during the first night of live play. Time to respawn was overly long, sometimes a full minute or more beyond the count-down timer shown. Action points did not regenerate at the regular rate, if at all. And the session is supposed to last 15 minutes or first team to 500 points, whichever comes first. We got to 15 minutes and were tired of watching our corpses on the ground waiting for those overly long respawns and wanted to leave. No such luck. The RvR session did not end until someone made it to 500 finally and we were all kicked out. As this is one of the first major RvR's that players in the Elves vs Elves area would encounter, I'd think they'd want to make sure it presented the best gaming experience possible for players. Perhaps the server was over taxed and couldn't keep up, but they should have expected that and compensated for it.
• Shattered Beach Public Quest. We saw lots of mobs flashed across the fields, even after we started hitting them, and we couldn't find the area to participate in the second objective at all. Perhaps this last one was 'player error,' so I won't point too big a finger just yet.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not totally negative about playing the game. But some of these things are disruptive enough to take me out of the gaming experience that I so enjoy. Overall, I enjoyed my evening of play, and will probably be playing again this evening. My son, who's 10 next week, even asked if he could create a character in the game and I said "sure, but do it on Daddy's account, because I use my account" and he answered "yeah, a LOT." What do you think he's trying to say??