No, I’m not going to answer that question, I’m too lazy. Keen from Warhammer Vault however, in his latest Keen’s Korner article has done the hard work. He writes about what quests should be and what he believes WAR to be like.

It’s a nice thought piece, and definitely something very important to consider. When I do a quest I want to feel like I’m doing something that a remedial task that any 10 year old with too much time on their hands.

Read the article @ Warhammer Vault

IGN would have to be my favorite of the large video gaming websites, so gives me great joy when they talk about my beloved Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The article goes through how Warhammer Online is progressing and is a good read if you’re not in the beta and want to understand where the game is at.

Read the full article @ IGN.com

It’s been a quiet week in terms of WAR news, so I was happy to see a new entry from Paul Barnett’s blog pop up in Google Reader. Whilst it’s a very short entry it brings good news.

So I arrive in London, visa work on monday and then lots of press on Tuesday. Should be a lot of fun. More news when I have it.

[ Source: Paul Barnett’s Blog ]

Warhammer Alliance’s new “WHA Waaagh” is up, this time being an opinion piece on what Paul Barnett’s effect on the WAR community is.

Hype - it’s the high-powered caffeine drink, the Red Bull that drives game sales, obsessive fanboyism, and sadly, many of the flame-fests you tend to see when it comes to game releases these days. A massive dose of hype is enough to either create a freight train of excitement for a game or cause that same train to derail off the tracks into a terribly awful (and very visible) explosion.

[ Find the article @ Warhammer Alliance ]

I’m going to assume you want to make a good guild website. Having a proper (top-level) domain name instantly gives you more credibility than guild with a domain such as lame.free.somefreehost.com/guildname - also, you can get a .com domain name for under $9, so there is no excuse to not get one if you plan to promote your guild.

There are  literally hundreds of places to register domain names, but to make this easier on everyone (and myself) I’m going to say use namecheap.com, this is where I have my main domain names as their control panel is very easy to use and registering domains is very quick.

The process is fairly simple. Make an account at namecheap.com, add funds to your account (there are plenty of payment methods - PayPal, credit cards, Google checkout…) and then enter the domain name you want. If the domain name you want is available you just follow the wizard, if not then keep searching! I’m not going to go into those specifics as that’s what their help/support section is for.

Some tips…

• Keep it simple. If possible just register YOURGUILDNAME.com to make remembering your guild website easier. Avoid using numbers, hyphens and exta letters that aren’t relevant to your guild’s name.
• Register the .com if you can. If not, try to register the domain specific to your country (eg, if you have a UK guild then .co.uk would be a good choice).
• Avoid hyphens in your domain name if possible as it opens up more room for error when people try to find your site.
• Use coupons! Search in Google for “namecheap + CURRENT MONTH + CURRENT YEAR”, this should give you a bunch of results for valid coupons (there is a different one each month). You only save like a dollar, but for typing in a single word it’s worth it.

Domain registration length

If you’d like to increase your rank in Google for search terms (such as “Warhammer Online Guild”) then consider registering your domain name for 10 years (the maximum registration time allowed). It is believed that Google looks at these sites as more likely to be reliable as spammers would rarely register a domain for more than a year. There is also the added benefit of not having to worry about renewing your domain name for the next 10 years.

If you don’t want to pay…

There is no rule that you need a top-level domain name, but if you’re going to get a free sub-domain name at least get one that is respectable. Consider registering a blog at Wordpress.com so your URL will be “guildname.wordpress.com” - it’s always best to have your guild name at the start of the URL as it will help people remember it and in my opinion looks much better.

It’s an amazing day outside, the sun is shining, I’ve been cranking out some Jack Johnson, Pete Murray, and Matt Costa (on my awesome Logitech Z-10 speakers), and I’m feeling good. So what do I do? Well I try to solve a mystery, that’s what I do.

Ever since the new design went live for the Warhammer Online and WAR Herald website there’s been that mysterious "Coming Soon" button. Once this button popped up people assumed "Oh, it must be the special login area for the open beta", but alas, it’s not! I’ve not completely cracked the code but I’m about 95% sure of what this button will lead to, but I’ll walk you through the process of finding my findings.

Firstly, I right clicked on the main page of the website and clicked "View Source". I found the HTML code for the "Coming Soon" button which is:

<li id="rlm"><a href="#" title="Coming Soon">Coming Soon</a></li>

As you can see, thebutton has been given a style ID . I feel pretty ignorant now for not knowing what rlm (the style applied to this mysterious button) could mean until I looked into the global style sheet which controls the main elements of the global site design (it can be accessed at this link). If you go to the properties of rlm it’s just positioning the background images for the buttons, the breakthrough came from a bit higher up in the file. Providing the actual background image of the "Coming Soon" button is the code "body#realm ul#nav", and therefore I’ve deduced, my good sir, that rlm stands for Realm.

What can we get from this?

It certainly, in this detectives opinion, defunks the idea that this button has anything to do with the Open beta. It’s far more likely to eventually direct visitors to a list of all the different servers (or "realms") and then navigate through them to find the guild statistics, character statistics and all that other statistical stuff which has been confirmed by multiple developers at EA Mythic to be coming to the site.

Maybe you already knew this…

I was fairly sure it’d be something like this (I just didn’t think a link to the open beta details would be in such a prominent and permanent position within the design) but I feel this practically guarantees what the button will leading too. Hopefully I don’t look too stupid if everyone already knew this and I just missed the boat on it, but I feel smart so feel free to praise me unconditionally.

If you have your own theory about what this "Realm" button is then feel free to email the site, leave a comment, or post it on your own blog. I love speculation.

In other news, the official Warhammer Gamers Detective Agency will be launching early next week…

Warhammer Online still has a good 5-6 months before it’s meant to be released (that sounds worse every time I say it). What can we do until that time comes? Sure, do all that socialising, real-world stuff, but during the times when you just want to sit back and relax, the thought of waiting so long for a game we know seemingly little about can be quite irritating to say the least. We’re all waiting on Warhammer, so lets figure out how to pass the time.

continue reading »

Members of Warhammer Alliance were wondering if you could get banned for having multiple WAR accounts per household. Mark Jacobs swooped in and set the record straight:

Folks,

Boy, I thought I was pretty clear about this point but hey, I’ll make it even clearer.

1) Having multiple accounts per household is just fine and dandy, kosher, A-OK, two thumbs up dude! and is not a bannable offense under our EUALA.

2) Script control of a toon is a not allowed, verboten, prohibited, a no-no and is a bannable offense under our EUALA.

Hopefully that clears everything up?

Mark

Problem solved.

[ Source: Warhammer Alliance ]

I’m constantly brainstorming new feature and article ideas (and all that good stuff) to make Warhammer Gamers stand out, and get a larger reader base. Seeing as guilds are such a huge aspect of WAR, plenty of people will be wanting to make their own guild websites, so I thought, why not make a tutorial series on how to build your own guild website?

I won’t just be going through "how to do HTML", that’ll just be one, or maybe a couple of articles. I’ll be focusing on all the aspects of website creation such as getting a domain name, hosting your website, what you should include on it, creating an application form - all that good stuff. I want it to be THE guide people go to when building a website for their guild.

There is no doubt similar guides are out there on the web but I think I can offer a different take on the process, and hopefully specialize some aspects in terms of WAR (such as making an guild application form that is relevant to WAR’s game play).

I’ll get to work on writing the series in a couple of hours and will try to have one up on the site every 2-3 of days for the next couple of weeks or so (I’ll continue writing related articles after that but it’ll just be a little slower).

A few days ago I posted a link to Ten Ton Hammer’s Release & Beta FAQ. At the bottom of the article there was a note saying there had been rumors that WAR could come to the 360.

Just a few moments ago an article popped up in Google Reader via Google News that was from GameSpot. It speaks of Stray Bullet Games developing an MMO for consoles, but that’s irrelevant for this article. What interested me was the line “Warhammer Online’s Gamebryo Engine is compatible with the [Nintendo Wii] console”. This particular compatibility is still fairly new, but it has been compatible with the likes of the 360 for quite some years, having powered the infamous Oblivion.

I may be just shooting in the dark here, but putting MMO’s within the evergrowing console market is becoming a trend amongst developers to reach a much wider audience, namely with the multi-platform nature of Age of Conan. I don’t want to stir up rumors of WAR on consoles (but seriously, I do, as that’s a great marketing tactic), but if WAR is a success I don’t see why EA wouldn’t try to milk all the cash they can out of it, especially with their past history of taking all they can out of a game. Then again, rumors for WoW on consoles continually fall flat.