it cost our GM around 1k/year to run the website/Vent.
I had no idea that forums and a site were that expensive, considering you can get a 50 person Vent server for $120 a year from typefrag, and my experiences with them over the past few years were outstanding.
50 person vent would barely hold a raid and backups in pre TBC vent. We also have a lot of people hanging out there that don't play anymore. At any given time there's ~10 people who don't even play WoW anymore on the Vent. She kept the same vent size in TBC...probably around 200 which runs significantly more expensive.
edit:
That's still 20 bucks cheaper a year (at 50 peeps) than the place I think she's using. I'll pass along the information thanks for the info.
Man, if I had a beta key, I'd be in there twenty-four hours a day testing the pants off of this game. I'd even test them back on and off again in case there's a bug there. I could accept other people getting into beta instead of me because, really, anyone can follow a basic testing regimen and apply it to any content. But when I hear about people not only not testing, but not even logging in?
50 person vent would barely hold a raid and backups in pre TBC vent. We also have a lot of people hanging out there that don't play anymore. At any given time there's ~10 people who don't even play WoW anymore on the Vent. She kept the same vent size in TBC...probably around 200 which runs significantly more expensive.
Even with the 40 person raids, we only capped out a 50 person server a handful of times with a (as I recall) 150+ account guild. It depends on how many people utilize the server during raids for other things and how many guests you typically have on, but it really wasn't an issue.
With a 25 person raid cap, it haven't been an issue for the past year and a half, coming from another 125-150ish account guild (usually 30-40 people online for raids, including casual members, currently 114 accounts to be exact). Unless you regularly had 50+ people online and on vent regularly (or large numbers of people running PuG instances and inviting the others onto your server) it probably shouldn't be an issue.
Of course, YMMV depending on guild size and activity, I'm just trying to put in some perspective. There's a guild on my server that's pushing like 1000 members or something insane (god knows how many actual accounts, but I don't think it's purely alts), but a crew that big might need bigger.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Man, if I had a beta key, I'd be in there twenty-four hours a day testing the pants off of this game. I'd even test them back on and off again in case there's a bug there. I could accept other people getting into beta instead of me because, really, anyone can follow a basic testing regimen and apply it to any content. But when I hear about people not only not testing, but not even logging in?
That's a potent incarnation of concentrated lame.
It enrages me as well. Especially folks representing the guild, as I would have loved to have had more control over who does that at first. Sure, we're not all going to be hardcore on launch, nor will there be mandated participation for anyone (except those who want support for more structure - our elite crew). But throwing away an opportunity to sink your teeth in, show off what the Mouths can do early on, and test the hell out of the game? Irritating.
Here's an almost 8 minute video of gameplay from Games Day. Not the best quality (okay, pretty terrible quality video wise and the background noise is pretty bad... although the "shut up you're ruining the video" is amusing) but it features the Marauder in action so it got automatic points in my book.
I saw that yesterday, the commentary is the best part. The other video from that guy is more impressive it actually includes some RvR. There is a 40 minute FAQ video too, it was pretty interesting actually, not a whole lot of new information but if gives you a good feel for what the developers are going for. The biggest pieces of info were that your character won't look different if you level. They said earlier that they wanted Orcs to look bigger, Dwarves beards to get more impressive/larger and Elves to look...gayer I guess. Unfortunately it won't be in for launch.
Also realm caps will be in, enforcing balanced sides. If Order currently has 2500 players on and Destruction has 1500 no more Order players will be able to log on until it balances out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJeXeWkv7LQ
Hrm, as much as I like accounts being limited to one faction per server, this could prove to be problematic, depending on how things balance out.
Thats what I thought too, I like the idea of limiting accounts being created on the server. They could filter out inactive accounts and once one side gets too high don't allow any more account to start characters on that server. The only downside would be friends not being able to play with friends but that could be fixed with friend invites. Still better than not being able to play at all.
Hrm, as much as I like accounts being limited to one faction per server, this could prove to be problematic, depending on how things balance out.
Thats what I thought too, I like the idea of limiting accounts being created on the server. They could filter out inactive accounts and once one side gets too high don't allow any more account to start characters on that server. The only downside would be friends not being able to play with friends but that could be fixed with friend invites. Still better than not being able to play at all.
Another option would be this: In the event your character is locked out due to faction overpopulation, you should be then offered the choice to log onto another server. You'd just get a tag, like 'Cryogen - Servername'. Otherwise i can imagine people will be pretty pissed that the character they've sunk tons of hours into cant even be played at all.
They didnt say it wouldn't be in for launch 100%, they said they still hope to do it, but right now its a lofty goal that is probably out of reach.
Based on what I've seen from concept art, your armor will look cooler as you advance from 1-40 though. Which is good and cool. I think WoW tried to do this, and hopefully WAR will succeed where WoW has had mixed success.
They didnt say it wouldn't be in for launch 100%, they said they still hope to do it, but right now its a lofty goal that is probably out of reach.
Based on what I've seen from concept art, your armor will look cooler as you advance from 1-40 though. Which is good and cool. I think WoW tried to do this, and hopefully WAR will succeed where WoW has had mixed success.
WoW did a pretty bad job unless you got epic gear, some of the coolest looking items I had were random greens from my 20s and 30s.
They didnt say it wouldn't be in for launch 100%, they said they still hope to do it, but right now its a lofty goal that is probably out of reach.
Based on what I've seen from concept art, your armor will look cooler as you advance from 1-40 though. Which is good and cool. I think WoW tried to do this, and hopefully WAR will succeed where WoW has had mixed success.
WoW did a pretty bad job unless you got epic gear, some of the coolest looking items I had were random greens from my 20s and 30s.
I think they changed their art team about 1/2 way through, which explains why there's such a strange difference in item appearance.
I'm actually very curious about how WAR is handling armor looks. I'm admittedly a bit superficial about how my character looks in games. It's really one of my driving goals in MMOs, to make a character who just looks flat out scary. The nice thing about WoW is they succeeded in this, it's just 1/2 the time you were 'clown-scary,' and not really 'spiky-death-machine-scary.'
All the concept art and screenshots with regards to gear in WAR so far makes me confident that looking awesome won't be a difficult task.
My bigger concern is people of the same class looking too much the same. I absolutely HATE it when I'm in the bank in WoW on my hunter with my pvp gear on and look across to see a half dozen other chracters who appart from race are wearing the exact same collection of items. Hopefully some of the armour customisation they've mentioned a few times will counter this somewhat.
All the concept art and screenshots with regards to gear in WAR so far makes me confident that looking awesome won't be a difficult task.
My bigger concern is people of the same class looking too much the same. I absolutely HATE it when I'm in the bank in WoW on my hunter with my pvp gear on and look across to see a half dozen other chracters who appart from race are wearing the exact same collection of items. Hopefully some of the armour customisation they've mentioned a few times will counter this somewhat.
That's a good point, and it makes me wonder if itemization in WAR will be as formulaic as it was in WoW. What I mean is that every class knows what the BEST stats are for them, and they know what the BEST gear to get is, so that everyone does end up looking the same and going for the same items. Maybe it's something that's unavoidable, but it would be nice if different gear gave different stats but they were all useful to their respective classes. Or better yet, if item graphics could end up being different looking even if it's the same item stat-wise.
One cool thing though is the trophy system I saw a video about a few months ago showed that you can really customize how your character looks with your own trophies, which could end up being pretty fun.
I think they have said there will be a dye system like DAoC had. So at the very least you'll be able to dye your armor a different color. Though DAoC ended up with everyone having black armor...
They didnt say it wouldn't be in for launch 100%, they said they still hope to do it, but right now its a lofty goal that is probably out of reach.
Based on what I've seen from concept art, your armor will look cooler as you advance from 1-40 though. Which is good and cool. I think WoW tried to do this, and hopefully WAR will succeed where WoW has had mixed success.
WoW did a pretty bad job unless you got epic gear, some of the coolest looking items I had were random greens from my 20s and 30s.
I think they changed their art team about 1/2 way through, which explains why there's such a strange difference in item appearance.
I'm actually very curious about how WAR is handling armor looks. I'm admittedly a bit superficial about how my character looks in games. It's really one of my driving goals in MMOs, to make a character who just looks flat out scary. The nice thing about WoW is they succeeded in this, it's just 1/2 the time you were 'clown-scary,' and not really 'spiky-death-machine-scary.'
The problem is always there when each piece of armor effects how you look. So, unless your wearing a set, you look like your wearing a clownish hodge-podge from 12 different types of armor because ..... you ARE wearing a clownish hodge-podge from 12 different types of armor.
All the concept art and screenshots with regards to gear in WAR so far makes me confident that looking awesome won't be a difficult task.
My bigger concern is people of the same class looking too much the same. I absolutely HATE it when I'm in the bank in WoW on my hunter with my pvp gear on and look across to see a half dozen other chracters who appart from race are wearing the exact same collection of items. Hopefully some of the armour customisation they've mentioned a few times will counter this somewhat.
There's a system of some sort to do this. I can't remember what it's called now though. Trinkets or something? It's basically little additions you can add to your armor in various places.
The problem is always there when each piece of armor effects how you look. So, unless your wearing a set, you look like your wearing a clownish hodge-podge from 12 different types of armor because ..... you ARE wearing a clownish hodge-podge from 12 different types of armor.
This is true, but I think the main problem is the colour difference. Pink boots, green hat, purple, cape, etc. A dye system will go a long way into making this more bearable.
There's a system of some sort to do this. I can't remember what it's called now though. Trinkets or something? It's basically little additions you can add to your armor in various places.
Yeah I mentioned this a few posts up, I think they called it trophies, and they do, indeed, sound awesome.
The problem is always there when each piece of armor effects how you look. So, unless your wearing a set, you look like your wearing a clownish hodge-podge from 12 different types of armor because ..... you ARE wearing a clownish hodge-podge from 12 different types of armor.
Well CHO is doing something t combat this. They let you make your costume at the beginning and when you pick up a gear you can choose what it looks like, and if nothing fits you can choose to have it not be visible, but still add your stats. Since WAR won't have costumes or anything, maybe there could be an option for setting one piece of armor to show as the whole set of it. Although...I guess that brings up complications of its own.
One thing that will be different about Warhammer is that each class has their own sets of armor that carry throughout the game (I don't know if this has been mentioned anywhere yet, but they talked about it at Games Day so you'll be able to hear it whenever a video comes up).
Similar to World of Warcraft with Tier 1, 2, whatever, each class has that. Except every item you are able to use is a part of one of those tiers, from level 1 to level 40, and is specifically designed to "work" with your class. You aren't going to end up wearing a clown hat and pink parachute pants be cause they don't exist. You'll end up wearing pants that have flames embroidered into them if you are a Bright Wizard, and feathered pants if you are a Zealot.
All the concept art and screenshots with regards to gear in WAR so far makes me confident that looking awesome won't be a difficult task.
My bigger concern is people of the same class looking too much the same. I absolutely HATE it when I'm in the bank in WoW on my hunter with my pvp gear on and look across to see a half dozen other chracters who appart from race are wearing the exact same collection of items. Hopefully some of the armour customisation they've mentioned a few times will counter this somewhat.
That's a good point, and it makes me wonder if itemization in WAR will be as formulaic as it was in WoW. What I mean is that every class knows what the BEST stats are for them, and they know what the BEST gear to get is, so that everyone does end up looking the same and going for the same items. Maybe it's something that's unavoidable, but it would be nice if different gear gave different stats but they were all useful to their respective classes. Or better yet, if item graphics could end up being different looking even if it's the same item stat-wise.
One cool thing though is the trophy system I saw a video about a few months ago showed that you can really customize how your character looks with your own trophies, which could end up being pretty fun.
I suspect the most logical solution is to have a lot of different gear that have largely the same stats. You're right that the similar gear issue is created by a bunch of stat min-maxers who know what the best gear is, and I don't think you're going to see people stop min-maxing. The min-maxers will always be with us, but being able to have some aesthetic choice independent of statistical benefits would take care of some of the "sameness." On customization,
1. I agree that trophies will add some cool customization, although I hope that there's a limit to the numbeer of trophies and talismans you can add at any one time. If there are six trophies, and you can pick any three, that's like 20 different custom trophy combinations you can choose to display. If there are six trophies, and you can display all of them, then there will be a lot of people eventually who wear every trophy in the game just for the WAR street cred.
2. ARMOR DYES. Painting your armies is an important part of the table-top Warhammer game and helps the players create a sense of individualism specific to their armies. I hope WAR captures this by allowing the player some robust options for painting or dying their armor.
**
Re: faction caps on servers--annoying. I seem to recall that they used to do this in WW2 online, and I hated it. Not only had I invested hours into fighting with the Brits to capture the town I was now basically forced to take back for the Germans, but I didn't have access to the same level of vehicles or weapons.
1. I agree that trophies will add some cool customization, although I hope that there's a limit to the numbeer of trophies and talismans you can add at any one time. If there are six trophies, and you can pick any three, that's like 20 different custom trophy combinations you can choose to display. If there are six trophies, and you can display all of them, then there will be a lot of people eventually who wear every trophy in the game just for the WAR street cred.
The video I saw of trophies showed them as items you literally equip via your character screen, and there were something like 4-6 slots for trophies (some on your front, and some on your back), and I remember hearing there are going to be dozens, if not hundreds of trophies available for you to mix and match. I don't know if they offer stat bonuses or are just for looks though.
2. ARMOR DYES. Painting your armies is an important part of the table-top Warhammer game and helps the players create a sense of individualism specific to their armies. I hope WAR captures this by allowing the player some robust options for painting or dying their armor.
Yeah dyes will be pretty important, I hope they're fairly customizable as well, as in you can choose your main colour, your trim, detailing colour, etc. The only problem with this is having to load up dozens (or more) character colour schemes when getting involved with big pvp battles could slow things down.
On a tangent, I hope that guilds are able to choose guild colours, and allow players to have a toggle between personal colours and guild colours (just like personal costume and supergroup costumes in City of Heroes). Like you mentioned SammyF, an important part of the warhammer tabletop is having armies who follow a colour scheme, so it would be awesome if they emulate that in WAR.
Re: faction caps on servers--annoying. I seem to recall that they used to do this in WW2 online, and I hated it. Not only had I invested hours into fighting with the Brits to capture the town I was now basically forced to take back for the Germans, but I didn't have access to the same level of vehicles or weapons.
WW2O was a single server right? That won't happen in WAR since you can only play one faction per server.
I doubt that they'll lock out active characters anyway. The cap will probably be on creating new characters on the overpopulated faction to prevent massive population differences in the first place.
1. I agree that trophies will add some cool customization, although I hope that there's a limit to the numbeer of trophies and talismans you can add at any one time. If there are six trophies, and you can pick any three, that's like 20 different custom trophy combinations you can choose to display. If there are six trophies, and you can display all of them, then there will be a lot of people eventually who wear every trophy in the game just for the WAR street cred.
The video I saw of trophies showed them as items you literally equip via your character screen, and there were something like 4-6 slots for trophies (some on your front, and some on your back), and I remember hearing there are going to be dozens, if not hundreds of trophies available for you to mix and match. I don't know if they offer stat bonuses or are just for looks though.
There's a video on Youtube that shows an internal meeting where they talk about trophies. As I recall, you can have 4-6 (or however many) attached to your character at a time, however, part of the idea was that there were tons of points that you could attach them to, designated by your class, so some of the Greenskin classes that are prone to wearing armour with big spikey shoulders might have several points there, where they could attach trophies like they'd spiked 'em onto their gear, or maybe around their waist, or across their chest. You don't just get to place trophies, but you get to choose where you put them.
It's a small detail, but it's that level of customization that I like.
Also, I think it was in a podcast that they mentioned that they wouldn't be putting stats on trophies, as they wanted people to use ones they liked for sentimental reasons (maybe use ones that they spent a lot of time or effort getting) or because they looked cool, not because it was 'the uber set/choice'. (which I really really like)
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
All the concept art and screenshots with regards to gear in WAR so far makes me confident that looking awesome won't be a difficult task.
My bigger concern is people of the same class looking too much the same. I absolutely HATE it when I'm in the bank in WoW on my hunter with my pvp gear on and look across to see a half dozen other chracters who appart from race are wearing the exact same collection of items. Hopefully some of the armour customisation they've mentioned a few times will counter this somewhat.
That's a good point, and it makes me wonder if itemization in WAR will be as formulaic as it was in WoW. What I mean is that every class knows what the BEST stats are for them, and they know what the BEST gear to get is, so that everyone does end up looking the same and going for the same items. Maybe it's something that's unavoidable, but it would be nice if different gear gave different stats but they were all useful to their respective classes. Or better yet, if item graphics could end up being different looking even if it's the same item stat-wise.
One cool thing though is the trophy system I saw a video about a few months ago showed that you can really customize how your character looks with your own trophies, which could end up being pretty fun.
I suspect the most logical solution is to have a lot of different gear that have largely the same stats. You're right that the similar gear issue is created by a bunch of stat min-maxers who know what the best gear is, and I don't think you're going to see people stop min-maxing. The min-maxers will always be with us, but being able to have some aesthetic choice independent of statistical benefits would take care of some of the "sameness."
The other option is to mostly de-link your visual armor (ie - what you look like) from your upgrade-armor (ie - what makes you better).
So basically you have armor that changes how you look, and then the stuff you slot in that upgrades your abilities/stats/etc doesn't change how you look. And maybe you restrict armor based on level or something, so better/bad-assier looking armor can only be worn by high level characters.
On a tangent, I hope that guilds are able to choose guild colours, and allow players to have a toggle between personal colours and guild colours (just like personal costume and supergroup costumes in City of Heroes). Like you mentioned SammyF, an important part of the warhammer tabletop is having armies who follow a colour scheme, so it would be awesome if they emulate that in WAR.
That would be awesome. Whether they include it or not, I expect a lot of order guilds to have rules and guidelines about what colors you should dye your armor (and a lot of chaos guilds to have no guidelines about color schemes, except perhaps to actively encourage individualism and contrast. It is, after all, chaos).
edit: Forar: thanks for the info. Can you find a link? Shryke: that's a fucking awesome idea. I don't know why I've never seen anyone do that before, but it makes so much sense. It's like the visual armor is an athletic jersey, but the physical armor is the padding underneath.
Posts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWLNy6hPkvw
my question is not in the first part.
Something ain't right here.
50 person vent would barely hold a raid and backups in pre TBC vent. We also have a lot of people hanging out there that don't play anymore. At any given time there's ~10 people who don't even play WoW anymore on the Vent. She kept the same vent size in TBC...probably around 200 which runs significantly more expensive.
edit:
That's still 20 bucks cheaper a year (at 50 peeps) than the place I think she's using. I'll pass along the information
That's a potent incarnation of concentrated lame.
Even with the 40 person raids, we only capped out a 50 person server a handful of times with a (as I recall) 150+ account guild. It depends on how many people utilize the server during raids for other things and how many guests you typically have on, but it really wasn't an issue.
With a 25 person raid cap, it haven't been an issue for the past year and a half, coming from another 125-150ish account guild (usually 30-40 people online for raids, including casual members, currently 114 accounts to be exact). Unless you regularly had 50+ people online and on vent regularly (or large numbers of people running PuG instances and inviting the others onto your server) it probably shouldn't be an issue.
Of course, YMMV depending on guild size and activity, I'm just trying to put in some perspective. There's a guild on my server that's pushing like 1000 members or something insane (god knows how many actual accounts, but I don't think it's purely alts), but a crew that big might need bigger.
It enrages me as well. Especially folks representing the guild, as I would have loved to have had more control over who does that at first. Sure, we're not all going to be hardcore on launch, nor will there be mandated participation for anyone (except those who want support for more structure - our elite crew). But throwing away an opportunity to sink your teeth in, show off what the Mouths can do early on, and test the hell out of the game? Irritating.
What are you playing these days, Wren?
conan
not camelot
Marauder
EDIT: And here's a site with two Games Day videos from our friends, the French. No sound though, it seems.
WAR-France
Also realm caps will be in, enforcing balanced sides. If Order currently has 2500 players on and Destruction has 1500 no more Order players will be able to log on until it balances out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJeXeWkv7LQ
Another option would be this: In the event your character is locked out due to faction overpopulation, you should be then offered the choice to log onto another server. You'd just get a tag, like 'Cryogen - Servername'. Otherwise i can imagine people will be pretty pissed that the character they've sunk tons of hours into cant even be played at all.
Based on what I've seen from concept art, your armor will look cooler as you advance from 1-40 though. Which is good and cool. I think WoW tried to do this, and hopefully WAR will succeed where WoW has had mixed success.
I think they changed their art team about 1/2 way through, which explains why there's such a strange difference in item appearance.
I'm actually very curious about how WAR is handling armor looks. I'm admittedly a bit superficial about how my character looks in games. It's really one of my driving goals in MMOs, to make a character who just looks flat out scary. The nice thing about WoW is they succeeded in this, it's just 1/2 the time you were 'clown-scary,' and not really 'spiky-death-machine-scary.'
My bigger concern is people of the same class looking too much the same. I absolutely HATE it when I'm in the bank in WoW on my hunter with my pvp gear on and look across to see a half dozen other chracters who appart from race are wearing the exact same collection of items. Hopefully some of the armour customisation they've mentioned a few times will counter this somewhat.
That's a good point, and it makes me wonder if itemization in WAR will be as formulaic as it was in WoW. What I mean is that every class knows what the BEST stats are for them, and they know what the BEST gear to get is, so that everyone does end up looking the same and going for the same items. Maybe it's something that's unavoidable, but it would be nice if different gear gave different stats but they were all useful to their respective classes. Or better yet, if item graphics could end up being different looking even if it's the same item stat-wise.
One cool thing though is the trophy system I saw a video about a few months ago showed that you can really customize how your character looks with your own trophies, which could end up being pretty fun.
i want to hear myself speak!
The problem is always there when each piece of armor effects how you look. So, unless your wearing a set, you look like your wearing a clownish hodge-podge from 12 different types of armor because ..... you ARE wearing a clownish hodge-podge from 12 different types of armor.
There's a system of some sort to do this. I can't remember what it's called now though. Trinkets or something? It's basically little additions you can add to your armor in various places.
This is true, but I think the main problem is the colour difference. Pink boots, green hat, purple, cape, etc. A dye system will go a long way into making this more bearable.
Yeah I mentioned this a few posts up, I think they called it trophies, and they do, indeed, sound awesome.
Well CHO is doing something t combat this. They let you make your costume at the beginning and when you pick up a gear you can choose what it looks like, and if nothing fits you can choose to have it not be visible, but still add your stats. Since WAR won't have costumes or anything, maybe there could be an option for setting one piece of armor to show as the whole set of it. Although...I guess that brings up complications of its own.
Similar to World of Warcraft with Tier 1, 2, whatever, each class has that. Except every item you are able to use is a part of one of those tiers, from level 1 to level 40, and is specifically designed to "work" with your class. You aren't going to end up wearing a clown hat and pink parachute pants be cause they don't exist. You'll end up wearing pants that have flames embroidered into them if you are a Bright Wizard, and feathered pants if you are a Zealot.
I suspect the most logical solution is to have a lot of different gear that have largely the same stats. You're right that the similar gear issue is created by a bunch of stat min-maxers who know what the best gear is, and I don't think you're going to see people stop min-maxing. The min-maxers will always be with us, but being able to have some aesthetic choice independent of statistical benefits would take care of some of the "sameness." On customization,
1. I agree that trophies will add some cool customization, although I hope that there's a limit to the numbeer of trophies and talismans you can add at any one time. If there are six trophies, and you can pick any three, that's like 20 different custom trophy combinations you can choose to display. If there are six trophies, and you can display all of them, then there will be a lot of people eventually who wear every trophy in the game just for the WAR street cred.
2. ARMOR DYES. Painting your armies is an important part of the table-top Warhammer game and helps the players create a sense of individualism specific to their armies. I hope WAR captures this by allowing the player some robust options for painting or dying their armor.
**
Re: faction caps on servers--annoying. I seem to recall that they used to do this in WW2 online, and I hated it. Not only had I invested hours into fighting with the Brits to capture the town I was now basically forced to take back for the Germans, but I didn't have access to the same level of vehicles or weapons.
The video I saw of trophies showed them as items you literally equip via your character screen, and there were something like 4-6 slots for trophies (some on your front, and some on your back), and I remember hearing there are going to be dozens, if not hundreds of trophies available for you to mix and match. I don't know if they offer stat bonuses or are just for looks though.
Yeah dyes will be pretty important, I hope they're fairly customizable as well, as in you can choose your main colour, your trim, detailing colour, etc. The only problem with this is having to load up dozens (or more) character colour schemes when getting involved with big pvp battles could slow things down.
On a tangent, I hope that guilds are able to choose guild colours, and allow players to have a toggle between personal colours and guild colours (just like personal costume and supergroup costumes in City of Heroes). Like you mentioned SammyF, an important part of the warhammer tabletop is having armies who follow a colour scheme, so it would be awesome if they emulate that in WAR.
WW2O was a single server right? That won't happen in WAR since you can only play one faction per server.
I doubt that they'll lock out active characters anyway. The cap will probably be on creating new characters on the overpopulated faction to prevent massive population differences in the first place.
There's a video on Youtube that shows an internal meeting where they talk about trophies. As I recall, you can have 4-6 (or however many) attached to your character at a time, however, part of the idea was that there were tons of points that you could attach them to, designated by your class, so some of the Greenskin classes that are prone to wearing armour with big spikey shoulders might have several points there, where they could attach trophies like they'd spiked 'em onto their gear, or maybe around their waist, or across their chest. You don't just get to place trophies, but you get to choose where you put them.
It's a small detail, but it's that level of customization that I like.
Also, I think it was in a podcast that they mentioned that they wouldn't be putting stats on trophies, as they wanted people to use ones they liked for sentimental reasons (maybe use ones that they spent a lot of time or effort getting) or because they looked cool, not because it was 'the uber set/choice'. (which I really really like)
The other option is to mostly de-link your visual armor (ie - what you look like) from your upgrade-armor (ie - what makes you better).
So basically you have armor that changes how you look, and then the stuff you slot in that upgrades your abilities/stats/etc doesn't change how you look. And maybe you restrict armor based on level or something, so better/bad-assier looking armor can only be worn by high level characters.
That would be awesome. Whether they include it or not, I expect a lot of order guilds to have rules and guidelines about what colors you should dye your armor (and a lot of chaos guilds to have no guidelines about color schemes, except perhaps to actively encourage individualism and contrast. It is, after all, chaos).
edit: Forar: thanks for the info. Can you find a link? Shryke: that's a fucking awesome idea. I don't know why I've never seen anyone do that before, but it makes so much sense. It's like the visual armor is an athletic jersey, but the physical armor is the padding underneath.