Welcome to the Warhammer Online Grab Bag, where your friendly neighborhood community manager will answer the most popular, and most interesting, questions in a new regular feature. Many things aren't yet certain, so try to be patient with us. Trust me - we're as eager as you are to see the features finalized, so that we can hear what you've got to say.
A: There aren't "rules," exactly. For one thing, I happen to believe that if I am not paying your hosting bills, then I can't really tell you how to run your website.
However, I also don't want to send players to your site and have them smacked in the face by the wet fish of gold farming. The rotten, nay, putrescent fish that it is.
So, it depends. I will give interviews to anyone, though as the good people at Ten Ton Hammer (link: http://warhammer.tentonhammer.com/) know, I can be… slow. I will invite any site to play my reindeer games, like the scavenger hunt awhile back. I don't do Official Links on the Herald, because it's too much of a pain to keep track of every site and everything they do*, but I do try to do shoutouts to sites doing stuff that's cool or unusual. For instance, the good people at Only War (link: http://only-war.com/), mods and members, appear to have made infiltrating Mythic HQ into their favorite hobby.
The official newsletter links to sites that 1) weren't born yesterday, meaning several months of history, 2) have active readerships of some size, 3) update regularly, and 4) don't have major gold farmer subsidies in terms of advertising or ownership. That means banner ads, silent partnerships, "sponsored editorials," flash movies, and anything else people may think up. For the time being, we're letting Google ads slide – but one of my editor friends says it is possible to filter out ads you don't want, so we may change our minds about that in the future.
(*Also, it's a pain keeping track of the million small sites that start up, allow their registrations to lapse, and turn into porn sites when I'm not looking. Irate email from parents isn't my favorite way to start a morning.)
A: No.
A: Our Steve Marvin, whose business card says "Lead Designer," died a little inside when I hit him with this very popular category of questions. See, we're still doing design work on the Chaos army. There's a lot of row left to hoe before we know much for certain here. But I've seen a lot of wild speculation on the boards and in my email, and wanted to let you guys in our thought process. As Steve puts it:
"We are planning at present to have some mutations, but they will be specific to the careers that use them, and will likely be temporary, not permanent and encroaching." And of course, even our plans at this stage can't be set in stone, because they are entirely "still subject to art constraints and tech."
Basically, I want you guys to rein in the expectations a little and wait and see what we actually do. We've got to try and design mutations/chaos that isn't as… shall we say, "overwhelmingly devastating" as it is in that nifty game trailer. Because that's fun to watch, and fun to play, but maybe not so fun to play *against* day in and day out. At the same time, we're going to make it all cool and true to the Warhammer world.
Steve again: "There will be no specific called-out forms of these magic systems; they will instead be part and parcel of the abilities available to each career, as appropriate."
A: We're doing server worlds (just like Camelot), for lots of technical reasons that translate into "fun" and "stability." But the answer to your first question remains undecided. We have a lot more options as part of EA, and we need to take a good look at everything. EA Mythic is responsible for keeping all the servers in good order, wherever they may be found. Currently our servers are in a bunker deep beneath the earth. In the event of nuclear war, the only survivors will be the cockroaches and our server farm.
No, really, that's not a joke.
General announcement: Rumors are afoot that many guilds have already received invitations into the beta test next spring. The only guild with an invitation at this time is b.e.W.A.R.e, and come on – they showed up to an event with guys in full Orc costume. It was cool, and their invitation was very spur of the moment. The guild beta will be made up of all kinds of guilds – small, large, established, new, uber, casual. We need all kinds of people to help us determine the fun and appeal of WAR.
See you guys next time here in the newsletter.
