Firstwatch, WoW Forever, and SoH lore

The week in the Scars of Honor Discord had a funny rhythm: official posts kept the lore machine humming, while the community immediately sprinted off into the weeds about testing, class design, and whatever other MMO was currently stealing the oxygen. The biggest confirmed news was the Firstwatch selection update — the first 50 applicants are in, and the team says more invites will come later from a waiting list of more than 200 people.

That announcement landed in the middle of a chat that was equal parts hopeful and impatient. Some players were already treating Firstwatch like a sacred pilgrimage; others were refreshing inboxes with the kind of desperation usually reserved for concert tickets and GPU drops. In between, the server wandered into WoW Forever beta chatter, Undead Paladin jokes, and a surprisingly persistent argument about whether basic attacks should be doing more of the heavy lifting in SoH’s combat.

Firstwatch Finally Gets Its First 50

The clearest official update this week was the Firstwatch Selection Update on September 17. The team confirmed that the first 50 members have been selected, and that chosen applicants will be contacted individually through Discord DMs starting next week. Everyone else isn’t out of the running: the post says more than 200 applicants are already on the waiting list, and that the team will keep inviting more people in the coming weeks and months as the program grows.

That was enough to set the chat buzzing. Players who had applied were checking DMs, email, and the void itself for signs of life. One person joked that they’d lost hope and then immediately regained it on learning there was still another week where a message might land. Another described the whole thing like a little MMO fever dream: the announcement tab goes bold, your heart leaps, and then — lore. Just lore. Again.

The mood around the selection was mostly understanding, even from people who thought 50 was a very small first batch. A few argued that being selective makes sense at this stage, especially if the goal is to find testers who can give useful feedback rather than just show up for a sightseeing tour. Others compared it to tabletop groups: too many people, and nobody gets enough time to actually test anything properly.

“For testing it’s enough,” one player argued, “they’ll put more people after.”

There was also the usual Discord-side comedy. People were asking whether Firstwatch had started, whether emails had gone out, whether anyone had been pinged, and whether the silence meant they’d been rejected. The answer, repeatedly, was no: the team said the first wave was selected, but the DMs would come later. That didn’t stop the inbox vigil.

Lore Keeps Marching On

While the community was busy staring at their notifications, the official account kept feeding the worldbuilding beast. On September 14, Whispers of Aragon #13 arrived with a moody little teaser about siegecraft, old records, and a mysterious abandoned commission. The post framed it as a piece of lore from the Sacred Order, describing craftsmen who built the engines used to defend walls and smash them, then hinting at one larger, secret project that was dismantled before completion and erased from the records.

The post did what good lore posts do: it asked a question and then walked away, leaving the Discord to do the rest. Players immediately started treating it like a puzzle box, even if the answer is probably buried somewhere in a future reveal rather than in the thread itself. The official prompt was simple enough — what were they building? — but the fun is in the speculation, and this community is never short on that.

A few days later, on September 15, the team posted a Bearan-themed image, all healing factor and rage, with the kind of playful caption that says the studio knows exactly which mascot energy it’s leaning into. Then on September 19 came a seasonal greeting tied to Bavarian celebrations, with the Dwarves, an Infernal Demon, and a missing Bearan all getting name-checked in the same breath. The tone was light, cheeky, and very much in the studio’s “we know you know this is a bit” lane.

The lore posts didn’t move the needle on gameplay news, but they did keep the world feeling alive. And in a week where the community was otherwise chewing on test access and class theory, that mattered more than it might sound.

The Great Basic Attack Debate

If there was one thread that kept resurfacing in chat, it was the question of whether Scars of Honor should lean harder into its basic attacks. In the suggestions channel, one player made a detailed case that the game’s combat might be more interesting if what used to be called subclasses were instead built around three distinct basic attacks per class.

Their argument was pretty straightforward: in the current alpha-era setup, classes seemed to have two main orientations, often tied to their basic attacks. A Ranger could shoot energy balls or arrows; a Paladin could swing physically or lean into heavy sacred damage; a Mage could cast elemental beams or fight in melee while building shields. Since many skills sit on long cooldowns, the player argued that basic attacks end up occupying most of the moment-to-moment combat anyway. If that’s the case, why not make them the real center of class identity?

That idea got some traction in chat, even if not everyone agreed with the framing. The broader conversation around class design kept circling back to the same point: if the game is asking players to spend most of their time on basic attacks, then those attacks need to feel like more than filler. A fire-based Paladin basic, a slowing short-range Ranger basic, a cooldown-shaving Mage basic — those are the kinds of tweaks players were imagining.

Elsewhere in the week, the class talk got much sillier, much faster. People were joking about Undead Paladin combinations, Orc class restrictions in other games, and whether SoH’s class lineup was secretly inspiring other MMOs before SoH itself has even fully arrived. The chat’s verdict on one of those comparisons was basically: if another game does it, it’s copying; if SoH does it, it’s visionary. That’s fandom for you.

Testing Hype, Testing Patience

The Firstwatch announcement didn’t just trigger excitement — it also reopened the eternal MMO-testing argument about how much access is too much access. Some players thought 50 testers was too few. Others said that for an early, selective pass, it’s exactly the right number. A few pointed out that if you invite too many people too early, you risk creating the wrong expectations, especially if the build is still rough around the edges.

That concern was echoed in the general chat, where players kept comparing SoH’s playtests to other projects they’d tried. One person said the bones of the game felt fantastic, even if they’d run into fixable issues like lighting, hit registration, and asset pop-in. Another said SoH’s playtests had gone better than some other MMO tests they’d been in, which is the sort of compliment that sounds faint until you realize how many projects are currently tripping over their own shoelaces.

There was also a lot of speculation about timing. Some players hoped the game might release by the end of the year; others were far more skeptical and tossed out 2028 as a more realistic guess. A few asked about mobile testing and got the expected answer from the community: not a priority, and the main platform is PC. That didn’t stop the mobile question from reappearing later, because no Discord thread ever truly dies — it just respawns with a different username.

The same impatience showed up around support packs. One player asked whether they’d open again, and the answer from chat was a flat no news. That’s the kind of sentence that can drain the air out of a room, but it also tells you where the community is emotionally: they want to help, they want to test, and they want some sign that the next step is actually coming.

Meanwhile, Everyone Was Playing a Different MMO

If the SoH chat felt like it was constantly being interrupted by another game, that’s because it was. A huge chunk of the week’s general conversation drifted toward WoW Forever, especially once its beta chatter started heating up. People compared server types, class choices, legacy systems, launch timing, and the usual beta-launch chaos of queues, disconnects, and launcher shenanigans.

The funniest part was how quickly the conversation turned into a live commentary on hype management. Players were talking about preloading, server crashes, authenticator prompts, queue times, and getting kicked out after finally logging in. One person said they’d gotten in only to be disconnected immediately; another said they were on their third queue. Someone else joked that socializing had been the wrong call entirely, because the beta was clearly the real event.

There were also a lot of class and race jokes: Undead Paladin fans, gnome dreamers, blue elf experiments, and people planning to use the beta to poke at starting zones they wouldn’t main at launch. The chat even wandered into the weeds of naming systems and family names, because apparently every MMO beta eventually becomes a spreadsheet of alt identities and “Ben Afflock” jokes.

For SoH specifically, the WoW Forever chatter mattered less as competition and more as context. It showed how hungry MMO players are for something new, or at least something that feels new enough to justify the ritual of downloading, queueing, and complaining. That hunger is the backdrop SoH is trying to step into.

The Community Still Has a Sense of Humor

For all the testing talk and feature speculation, the Discord never lost its taste for nonsense. There were jokes about toilet emojis on announcements, people accidentally pinging the wrong roles, and one particularly memorable moment where someone was ribbed for having a GUID-like username that looked suspiciously bot-ish.

The Bearan also got its share of attention. Players fixated on gloves, claws, and whether the bear’s look was more “badass fingerless gloves” or “hollowed-out claws.” Another thread spun out of a dwarf holding what looked like a sword, then a dagger, then maybe a letter opener, because no Discord can resist turning a single visual into a three-page bit.

The moderation jokes were equally on-brand. People kept tagging moderators, asking for bans, or pretending to summon the server guard like it was a dungeon mechanic. One player even complained that moderator powers didn’t work on mobile Discord, which is the kind of sentence that sounds like a bug report until you realize it’s just a joke with a straight face.

That’s the thing about this server: even when the big news is sparse, the community keeps generating its own weather.

The Week’s Real Story

The official side of the week was simple: Firstwatch is moving forward, the first 50 have been selected, and the team is still feeding the lore machine with Whispers of Aragon and seasonal flavor posts. The community side was messier, louder, and arguably more revealing. Players are hungry for access, hungry for clearer combat identity, and hungry for any sign that Scars of Honor is inching from “interesting project” toward “game we can actually play.”

That’s the real takeaway. The Discord isn’t just waiting for news; it’s stress-testing the game’s identity in public, one class joke and one testing debate at a time. And honestly, that’s a healthy kind of chaos. If a community can argue about basic attacks, lore engines, and beta access in the same breath, it means people are paying attention. For an MMO still building itself in the dark, that’s half the battle.