Even though the title of this article might lead you to think otherwise, Warhammer Online’s latest patch(1.2.1) is actually wonderful. It’s yet another great step in the right direction for EA Mythic, and a good sign of things to come. So why the title? Well, it’s french – I like it. Plus, when the patch went live, it claimed to fix a lot of things it really didn’t. Additionally, it caused a ton of problems in the game for mostly every player. Some players experienced inhumane lag, many more were being randomly kicked off to the character selection screen, fewer were just simply crashed to the desktop. For a few days after the patch released, there was a lot of anger from the community. Needless to say EA Myhic reacted quickly and was able to solve most of the issues players were experiencing on a large scale. I’ve fallen victim to being kicked to the character selection screen every once in a while since then, but not as bad as when the patch first launched.
So what did they do with this patch?
They’ve been working on addressing some of the issues caused by having too many people in one area(sieges, mainly). As all of those who have been playing know, the servers were brought to their knees when too many people started sieging cities and fortresses. There’s still a limit on how many people can participate, but rather than crashing the whole damn server, people will now start being teleported out to another area. It still sucks that there’s a limit on how many people can participate in sieges, but teleporting people out is better than having the entire zone crash.
One of the more note-worthy changes, perhaps for the lower tiers(as they are now made slightly more interesting) is the addition of several other benefits for capturing a zone. Anyone who plays Warhammer Online knows how zone locking works. Basically you get points for doing certain things in a zone: winning scenarios, completing quests, killing people in the RvR lakes, taking objectives, and you also get some points toward zone control from the previous tier. Once a zone was locked, every player in the area, whether or not they participated in locking said zone would receive a decently-sized RP bonus.
Now, the system’s been changed slightly. Zone control still operates in the same way, however, you will now receive INF and XP depending on your participation in locking the zone. For example, let’s say I join a warband and we take every keep and BO in the pairing. If we have enough points in zone control from other things(PvE/Scenarios/etc), then the zone will lock, and I will receive a huge amount of influence, XP, and renown. Now, if I only help in taking one keep, or one BO, my INF/XP/Renown bonus will be much, much less. Additionally, based on your participation you will receive a certain number of bonus medallions.
What are medallions? Medallions are part of the new token system put into place to make obtaining set items “easier.” I say “easier,” because some pieces of the set items used to cost mere gold, and wouldn’t be really hard to get. By comparison, those same pieces cost roughly 50-65 tokens now. To help put things into perspective, you get 1 token for taking a keep. If you didn’t win a bag, you get an additional token for your participation. If you do get a bag, you can choose to pull out Entangled Medallions which will convert into two medallions. So, at most, you can get 3 medallions from a keep siege. If there’s a lot of keep swapping, zone lock swapping going on, you can build up medallions really fast. Unfortunately, if there’s no action going on, you no longer have the option of fetching yourself a few pieces of gold and just buying the set item from the vendor.
Overall, the changes are pleasant. Despite the few issues when the patch originally launched, it’s brought nothing but positive changes. Although I’m a bit angry about not being able to buy set pieces for gold anymore, it evens out; I can now buy gold bag loot for tokens, if I happen to not get lucky for enough keep sieges that I manage to build up 125 tokens to trade for it.