*Uncovered* The Mystery of the "Coming Soon" button (and why I’m the next Sherlock Holmes)
Posted by Dave under Dave's Thoughts
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…
26th April , 08
April 26th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
[…] Soon” navigation button over at Warhammer Online, you should take a look at this interesting theory by Dave of Warhammer Gamers. He did some investigating that validates my original […]
April 26th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Nice sleuthing, Gumshoe!