This WAR announcement is real

While I was making fun of Mythic with my fake "WAR light" announcement, Mark Jacobs posted the State of the Game, with some real improvements. It's long, so I limit my discussion to three central points:

"In December, the Black Guard and the Knight of the Blazing Sun will officially be part of WAR". Good! I'm not going overboard with praise here, because removing a feature just before release, and then delivering it later shouldn't earn you extra credit (Blizzard likes to do the same thing). But adding the two missing tank classes to the game is important. Some content, e.g. public quests, has been designed with tanks in mind, and Empire and Dark Elves not having any of those was sometimes a bother. Yes, you can fly to other zones, but that didn't happen often enough to solve the tank shortage for those races. Now things should slowly balance out.

"We will continue to enhance WAR’s mail system until it is one of the best mail systems found in any MMORPG." Translation: "We'll improve the mail system until it isn't any more the worst part of WAR, and isn't totally sub par to anything else found on the market any more." Mail improvements are sorely needed, and of course Mark has to put a positive spin on it. But before it becomes "one of the best mqil systems found in any MMORPG", the WAR mail needs several years of work.

"We will also be giving players more incentive to engage in open RvR by improving the rewards for both assaulting and defending in RvR." Good, but could we get the same improvement of rewards for public quests, please? This is an important first step to get people away from instanced scenarios and into the open world, but I wouldn't limit the incentives to just RvR.

So the announced WAR patch 1.1 promises some good improvements, very well targeted to combat the current weaknesses of the game. Kudos to Mythic for knowing what to focus on. In comparison, while I did like WoW patch 3.0.2, the WoW patch felt like a huge bag of goodies with something for everyone, and very little focus. But hey, of course WoW is at a very different step in its life cycle, and the differences are understandable.