Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning - Mythic Entertainment
Working on Warhammer Online was a fantastic learning experience for me when I first started out as a game designer. Many of the developers at Mythic had been in the business since the first days of online gaming and working with the Warhammer Fantasy IP from Games Workshop was a dream come true. Early on my work was mainly focused on content implementation, using my technical background to optimize workflows to increase velocity by designing data templates that could propagate changes without manually editing each record for things like NPC spawn locations and equipment sets. After supporting the game through its initial release I moved onto the RvR team, and focused more on designing improvements to keep sieges and city battles to address player feedback, leading to increased satisfaction and improved strategic depth to encounters.
One of the biggest points of frustration for players after Warhammer Online launched was how difficult it was to progress the Tier 4 RvR campaign to the enemy faction’s city. City battles were the climax of the RvR campaign, and the only way to earn the highest tiers of rewards.
Initially the campaign included contributions for all 4 level based Tiers participating in PvP, so that players of every level were contributing to the victory point total needed to move the campaign forward on a push-pull meter toward unlocking the enemy city. This was a problem as it turned out, because high level players were dependent on low level players to contribute to ‘buckets’ of points that couldn’t be earned in any other way and were necessary to move the campaign forward.
It was important to remove this requirement, in order to allow PvP in Tier 4 to control the progress of the Tier 4 campaign. This made it much easier for city battles to become unlocked, and didn’t seem to negatively affect sentiment of lower Tier players, whose main motivation was progressing to Tier 4 without much concern for the campaign state until then when they could start earning the rewards from it.