If a tree falls in a forest....

The interweb has been ablaze with tales on the looting of Altdorf for a 2nd time.
I don't see the point in midnight raids. To quote the governator himself
What is best in life? "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women"
What this so elegantly express is that in any war between two factions the only real victory is archived when your enemies feel their defeat.
So then what is a point in a triumph when you never even see your enemies.I'm not taking anything away from the people who pulled this off. Its not Retribution's fault they were organized and committed and the defenders were not. what the game need to do is to offer incentives for attack to be made at busy times & for the to be incentives for players to defend.When all is said & done WaR is about beating other players, not about beating the game.

No Capes!

The incredibles had a point
As i mentioned before i'm not a fan of mythics decision to give us all whiter that white cloaks at early levels. The obvious answer to this was 'just hide the damn thing then!' which although a fine idea in principle is destroyed by a bug which resets your cloak & head settings whenever you zone in.
Thankfully help it is at hand, i came across stickygearsettings
while browsing curses selection of addons for WaR.
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The WaR addon community is very much still in it infancy mythic made a smart move by using the same LUA programming language as wow does for it addons allowing 'relatviely' easy ports of many of the most popular WoW addons such as greyhoof's Scrolling Combat Text.
The problem this has produced is that alot of the addons deal with issues which were a problem in WoW but that the default UI deals with well in WaR, while at the same time alot of WaRs biggest Ui problems are seeing very little attention.
with that in mind pop pickers heres my:

Top 5 most wanted addons:

5: HuD Display
just a nice simple curved HuD with a combo point(action point, waarg, balance ect) measure. There are a few HuD addons already available but quite frankly even the best of the (a conversion of wow's metahud) are all Fugly as hell. WaR ui allthough similar to WoWs lacks much of its chunkyness, so a Nive Hud with perhaps a theme for every race would be golden. I know working with a HuD helped me alot while playing pvp while playing pvp in wow since your eyes stay centered on whats happening. This is especially important in war with the lack of casting bar for your opponents.

4:Threat Meter
Yes this is mainly a RvR game but it is not EXCLUSIVELY a rvr game, my experiences in the dungeons so far have been pretty brutal, & its equally relevant when dealing with something like a keep lord. It doesn't need to be even 1/10th the complexity of something like omen, just a % of threat.

3:Target-of-target display
When doing the dungeon elements of WaR often it is very difficult to tell who a tank it hitting. I assume this is not in the default UI to try & avoid assist trains of casters in open RvR but that doesn't make it anymore less of a nuisance.

2:Cooldown Timers
The addon Cooldowntimers2 was perhaps my no1 PvP addon in wow, there is nothing worse than having to watch your action bars constantly.

1:Chat window replacement
The Default Chat window in WaR is to me by far the worst part of the default UI. Its crimes are numerous. The worst of them being not able to click select a name & send a tell directly to them, which to me is almost criminal in what is a very social game.

Paint it.... White?

One of the minor annoyances of the early level of WaR is the fact that just about any cloak you pick up is going to be white. Now while white may be perfect for a high elf or warrior priest it feels distinctly out of place on any of the destruction classes.
Mythic have offered a partial solution by allowing players to dye cloaks the problem is not all cloaks allow you to. It only seems to be Renown reward cloaks which you can be customize, the rest of us have to wait until our guilds reach the lofty heights of rank 14 and we slap the guild design on there (this is the moment which will no doubt come back & haunt many ill advised selections of guild colour schemes as after the Xth 1000th hour of looking at pink & illuminious green creation a player is forced to tear his own eyes out).
My personal solution was when finding i couldnt dye my cloak, was to instead dye everything else white.
Not all areas are changeable through the NPC dying system, but nearly all are through dropped & player made dyes. Thus is quite possible that dyes will be high value but very volitile trade at lvl 40.

Full Scale War

Most of the Reviews of Warhammer Age of Reckoning (or WaR as it shall forever be known thanks to some clever marketer with a gift for acronyms) have focused on its public quest system & the RvR.
But to me the game differentiates itself most starkly from its peers is the way its environments start big & get bigger. From the very 1st step your character takes its clear that you are contributing & actively taking part in something larger than yourself.
In the Dark Elf starting area the 1st thing you are greeted by is the looming bulk of one of the Black Ark's ( a city sized ship)

From The Architecture of WaR

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As the into music fades the sights & sounds of conflict surround you. The attitude of not treating its players as helpless children in need of a glorified creche as a starting area is something which should be praised, it permeates every aspect of the starting zones everything from the quests, the music, and both the regularity and speed at which new skills are earned. The game doesn’t hold back on the good stuff unlike many other mmo’s only a few minutes of starting the game you can use a siege weapon(to take pot shots at invading elf's) something which has taken WoW 80 levels.
The early Dark elf levels mainly consist of the former glories of the High Elf empire which have fallen into disuse or have been destroyed by their centuries old civil war so the 1st real 'ZOMG ITS GAWD DARN MUTHER FRIKKIN UGE!' moment has to wait a few more levels until the Griffon & Unicorn Gates of Ellyrion comes into sight.

From The Architecture of WaR

The entire Elven campaign is littered with similarly immense structures ‘you can never have enough spires’ and ‘make it taller’ seem to have been the order of the day when the high elf planning committee met with. The city of Tor Elyr, is the epitome of this philosophy.

From The Architecture of WaR

I reckon this city is perhaps the roughly same size as the entirety of Silvermoon in WoW, and although the two share some architectural styling (note to WoW fanbois: the classic GW high elf look has been around since 1992) Tor Elyr somehow feels the more ‘solid’ of the two. I’m at a loss to explain quite how it does this, as its is basically a quest area where your main interaction with the NPC’s if through the sharp end of a sword & the buildings are almost all non accessible. Perhaps indeed it is because it is the kind of area where interaction is not expected that this feels correct (of course all high elf doors are going to be locked to a dark elf).
For me a true test of a games immersion is whether or not it triggers my vertigo, Half life 2 did this with the railway bridge section & again at the citadel, but never in my time playing wow did any of various structures I scaled (or flew to the top of) did that feeling reemerge, so although i'm not sure sure I exactly was thrilled to find that the White Tower of Hoeth brought the same reaction to me, its still noteworthy it did produce a reaction.

From The Architecture of WaR

I can only find myself looking forward to seeing what the higher lvls of the game offer up.

Redsign = Done

Finally i think I've got something which isn't too shameful a start, and look nice while remaining readable and I must admit being quite happy with the way the banner turned out.
My one gripe is not being able to center my picture in the side bar using the automated controls. No doubt it can be done but all that html is looking scary atm so it will do for a while.

Started adding all the relevant blog i read regularly, though i'm unsure of blogging etiquette as far as whether i should tell them before i link to them as a courtesy, or if its fine if your a fan of someones work to just slap a link down on your site.

I think at 1st im gonna just concentrate on writing some stuff worth reading & once im happy i have ill get around to the demonic business of actually getting some people to read this.

Got a few subjects in mind for the '1st real post' which ill probably do this evening or tomorrow lunchtime.

Restart

For a long while i basically used this blog as just a place for putting a few Screenshots online as a kinda mini diary of one of my characters in Warcraft.
Since then i have decided to use this blog as outlet for my thoughts on the games i play & to help brush up some of my web design skills (fancy banners ect inc).