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FTA:
"I have gotten this same error, I believe the system may have done this to everyone who is currently playing that is using credit cards to pay... My fees were 13 charges of 6 month subscriptions, 77.94 X 13 = 1013.12 I didn't have this much money in my account, costing me any money that Icould possibly have to live off of..."

Wow... just wow. Having $1,000 suddenly deducted from your bank account would hurt almost any gamer

Warhammer Online requires a credit card on file:
"This game requires a monthly fee to play. The first 30 days of this fee are included in the purchase price of this package. You must provide a valid credit card to register and play."

So all those smart people saying "use automatic bill pay" are wrong, you can't with Warhammer Online. This is so much fail on so many levels I don't know what to say.

What may happen is that most of the people who used credit (not debit) cards demand a chargeback from their bank, EA gets hit with thousands of chargeback fees, and EA's merchant bank kicks them into a higher cost credit card category for excessive chargebacks.

There are Visa procedures for this. This is a chargeback code 82 - "Duplicate Processing". Likely cause: "Electronically submitted the same batch of transactions to the merchant bank more than once". See "The Chargeback Life Cycle", page 71, for an overview.

Generally, if chargebacks exceed 100 chargebacks and 1% of transactions, the chargeback penalty provisions kick in. Thereafter, the merchant is charged $100 per chargeback by the merchant's bank. The merchant is forced into Visa's "High Risk Chargeback Monitoring Program", a $5000 "review fee" is charged to the merchant for the first month, and even higher fees are charged if the problem continues.

Even big merchants have to pay. The banks have to deal individually with each customer to straighten out the mess. They charge the merchant for that.

Incidentally, "No Chargeback" sales receipts are prohibited by Visa rules and will not be enforced by banks.

EA is telling their customers to contact their financial institution before calling EA. It would probably be cheaper for EA if EA dealt with the problems themselves, but their call center may be too small.

Some users are complaining that EA charged them partway through the billing cycle, when they didn't owe EA a payment.

Anyway, EA will be getting a big bill from their bank.

Dark Age of Camelot (the game that put Mythic on the map) players were affected too. Unfortunately, DAoC players don't have the luxury of prepaid game cards, and MUST use a CC/Debit card to pay for their account.

I'm not sure why people are surprised, this isn't the first time there's been a billing issue: See here

Considering one subscriber in the linked discussion thread got charged 13 times for his ~$77.94 6-month subscription (which wasn't even up for renewal for another five months), for a total of $1,013.22 in charges—yeah, this sort of thing will fly under everybody's radar.

Many players probably use debit cards tied to their personal checking accounts; I'm sure they'd notice multiple charges. Even more so if they live paycheck to paycheck.

Even though EA/Mythic are allegedly working with their payment processing vendor(s) to reverse all the extraneous charges, they're still putting the onus on the customer to check with their respective financial institutions to ensure that any fees incurred are voided or reversed. I'm sure that is going to give said customers the warm fuzzies about continuing their patronage.

Total clusterfuck on the part of EA/Mythic. Heads should roll, and liberally.

You could play this http://www.warhammeronline.com/mac/ instead. It was a little laggy for me but has a lot of nice features. You can't use http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/ as it is not working, perhaps due to game guard?

Perhaps they expect the Mac community to jump on with the new OsX version, and free trial. http://www.warhammeronline.com/mac/

"LucasArts is hoping to snipe some of the World of Warcraft customer base. "

Ya, good luck with that.

That of course depends on their timing, but WoW is several years old now-- it will be older yet when The Old Republic comes out-- and has expanded the MMO market dramatically. Any game that wants to succeed wants to poach WoW players, and that's a very reasonable goal.

Now if they'd said, "We want to be the next World of Warcraft"-- that might be a little overambitious, especially this early. But to say that they want WoW players to give them a shot? Totally reasonable.

Very true, but they just changed that to two tiers lower. So a tier 2 player can go back into a tier 1 zone now. The reasoning was that many people complained that they didn't have enough time to explore the zones.

I know this holds true for the Open RvR server ruleset. I'm not sure if this affects the core server ruleset.

Server List Update

Open RvR Ruleset

The Open RvR servers feature RvR flagging everywhere except for the Tier 1 Chapter area and the surrounding PvE content. Once players leave this area, they will be flagged for RvR anywhere in the game. Open RvR servers are perfect for those who want to add an extra challenge to their gaming experience. Players must constantly watch their backs or risk attack by enemies everywhere they go! Only members of opposing realms may attack each other; the Open RvR server still focuses on Order versus Destruction.

Rules:

  - Players are always RvR flagged from the moment they log in
  - Chapter 1 hubs and capital cities are safe
  - There is no bolster buff in RvR lakes
  - Players will be chickened when entering an area that is two tiers below their level (ex. A Tier 3 player entering a Tier 1 area.)

What's interesting is that this was announced around the same time EA Mythic announces their Warhammer Online launch. Also, reports of their open beta progrem is set to begin August 15.

I think what's going on here is that Acti-lizzard is trying to cork up any potential bleeding that they see in the coming months by grabbing as many remaining players that haven't started an MMO as they can before there is an exodus to Warhammer Online. With the November-December holiday shopping time-frame approaching, they want to make sure they not only retain the top spot, but also have the other MMOs buried to obscurity.

Since you want to compare Warhammer Online with World of Warcraft so badly...

They are launching a fraction of the content they were intending to have. Significant content too. Its like Blizzard shipping WoW with just Stormwind and the Undercity as capital cities.

They cut four character classes and are still shipping with 20 classes. How many character classes does WoW have right now? 20 classes is a lot to ship an MMO with in the beginning. They felt that those four classes that were cut were just not up to par with their expectations, and they may never see the light.

The capital city cuts were pretty bad, but it would have been worse had they shipped with six half-assed cities. They did discuss the fact that those cut cities will be reinserted into the game and will not charge for it.

They address this information about class and city cuts here.

People are content with WoW, especially with a new expansion releasing in 3-4 months. They don't feel like levelling up a new character in a MMO which is redone DAoC content.

Speak for yourself - not all people are content with WoW. If you read through some of the Warhammer Online forums, you'll see plenty of people who are getting sick of WoW and cannot stand the daily grind and the static classes. I am quitting WoW as soon as WAR is released. Even if WAR sucks, I'm not going back to WoW. The quests are too redundant, there is absolutely ZERO reward for exploration of the map, your in-game actions have no impact on the environment, and the classes are just too static.

If you want to be successful in dungeons and raiding, you have to follow the same path as anyone else. You almost cannot be versatile in how you play. I'm not sure how it is now in WoW as I haven't played in a few months, but at one point, if you want to be a warrior and play end-game content, you cannot be fury. BM hunters were avoided. Combat rogues were ignored. And so on. Even if you did end up in a decent group as an arcane mage or survival hunter, you couldn't contribute. There was always just one recipe to success and that was what killed the game for me.

And there are plenty of people who feel that WAR is not their cup of tea. That's perfectly fine. WAR was never intended to compete with WoW. WoW has its bright spots that WAR will never touch.

No PvE endgame in WAR. Endgame just like DAoC, a game made over five years ago.

They already discussed endgame content - remember, this is NOT a PvE game. End game content is there, but not completely finished. Many games do not ship out with complete end game content. WoW barely had any in the first year, and Age of Conan has a somewhat broken end-game system.

The bottom line is that you really cannot compare the two games. They seek to cater to two different groups of people - people who want an on-going raid in a realm vs. realm environment with public quests (WAR), and those that want highly polished end-game content with battlegrounds tacked on. (WoW)

To do this, an army must invade and take control of the opposition's homeland. Deciding battles take place on objective-based battlefields and in instanced scenarios - point-balanced battles that make use of NPC mercenaries known as Dogs of War. http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/gameInfo/gameOverview/

Take Warhammer Online http://www.warhammeronline.com/. That looks like the first MMO that'll actually be fun to play IMO. PVP with some clear cut goals and accomplishments. But really, it's about time someone said this, the MMO genre is really boring right now.

Blizzard is constantly building a better WoW themselves.

Unfortunately, there are some problems that they will never be able to fix. For example, PvP balance is broken at the higher levels because the population balance is skewed. Across the entire game, there's 3 high-level Alliance players for every 2 high-level Horde (see here). On older servers, it's even worse, 3 Alliance for every 1 Horde (for example my old server, here). Even with the cross-realm battleground queues, Alliance players have to wait longer for games than Horde players. Once the Alliance players get a game though, they tend to win more games than the Horde because a larger population has more opportunities to run endgame content and acquire endgame epics, which in turn leads to a more powerful character.

The only way to truly eradicate that problem would be to do away with one of the core elements of the design, namely the whole concept of Alliance vs. Horde. Obviously that's something that just wouldn't make sense to do, it runs completely contrary to the flavor of the entire Warcraft series. I mean, the first game was called "Orcs and Humans," and not because they were drinking buddies. The only truly permanent way to get rid of this problem is to do away with the idea of player factions on a single server. That's what Fury, an upcoming PvP-centric MMO is doing. From their FAQ:

Are there going to be queues like WoW Battlegrounds?

No. Our realm architecture is very different to WoW and avoids queues or long waits.

In some games (like WoW) you fight within a realm where the total number of opponents is quite limited leading to long wait times. In other games (like Guild Wars) you fight in a single universe where the fights are random and social opportunities are scarce because you can't tell your friends from your enemies.

In Fury you live in a realm of friends and fight against other realms. This increases the number of your opponents and increases the social opportunities. Our matchmaking limits your maximum wait to a few minutes.

To think that WoW has a lock on the one true best design for an MMO is simply foolish. WoW has a pretty good model for 1-59 PvE leveling, but there are many ways to put these games together. I would argue that WoW's endgame is pretty boring, and the PvP model is clearly a half-assed afterthought. As such, I see plenty of potential for a well-designed PvP-centric MMO in the near future. It might be Fury, it might be Warhammer Online, or it might be something I haven't even heard of. But eventually someone's going to come along with a vastly superior PvP design compared to WoW, and combine it with equivalent production values. Whoever that developer is, I think they stand a good chance to take 10-20% of WoW's player base, which would put them well into profitability.

http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/home/index. php

Warhammer Online is out next year. It may just be able to topple WoW....

WoW is a horrible game.

The vast majority of endgame play revolves around endless rep farming, honor farming in BGs, and doing yet another instance run.

So many PVPers played WOW, only to find out how bad the PVP system really is. Risk free pvp. Nothing remotely comparable to UO during the tank mage era. Instead, overgeared dimwits burning cooldowns. != skill. This led to a huge PVPer exodus from WoW.

Soon, there will be a huge exodus of the sheep out of WoW, I'm not sure to which game yet though.

Promising candidates include:
http://www.darkfallonline.com/
http://www.vanguardsoh.com/
http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/home/index. php

Here's the site

I find it strange that they found the RTS awe-inspiring as opposed to the amazing MMO being made by the *soon to form* EA Mythic. I can't imagine the guys at GW not *more* behind the up-and-comming MMO, especially with some crazy guy promoting it from his phone, and the fact that they had issues with the previous developer and could use all the confidence re-building behind this new game.

After EA's recent acquisition of WAR, It's nice to see some non-WoW MMORPGS getting some attention. There may yet be hope for those of us trapped in Azeroth...

But after the addiction that was zork, logging onto a MUD and playing effectively a zork game MULTIPLAYER was a huge "omfg" moment for me, and of course my first player kill ^_^

Whats this WoW game people keep talking of? Oh, thats right, its the game that got all the noobs of the world interested enough in online play to play http://warhammeronline.com/ ^_^

This is one of those obvious can't lose licenses (unless the game sucks) like Warhammer. Take elves, orcs and magic and add automatic weapons, fast cars, robots and the matrix, oh yeah and lets not forget badass american indian shamen. Talk about your geek imagination overload. With a world controlled by Megacorps that are constantly hiring rogue mercenary groups for various jobs, its perfect for open-ended GTA style questing. Please make this an MMO or and huge ass oblivion sytle RPG (with a coop mode). *whew* I need to sit down....

Ves

How about an MMORPG which takes place in the world created by the company, Games Workshop, which Blizzard stole all of their Warcraft *and* Starcraft style from?

http://www.warhammeronline.com/

It's a shame Warhammer Online never got finished. The screenshots etc they released looked very close to my image of the world.

I know, all of us here in Slashdot, would find it difficult to believe, but the majority of people who buys games, are playing them off-line. Blizzard for example, who sells millions of units per game, has stated repeatly that only a small fraction of it's player base ever goes online with their games. Although that fraction turns out to be a couple of hundred-thousand players, it's still a small portion of the over-all pie.

With the recent series of MMORPG cancellations, like Ultima X: Odyssey, Warhammer Online, Mythica, and several others, it is no secret that companies are re-evaluating what kind of profit an online game can generate. It is not the easy cash cow that developement houses came to believe it to be.

Lol, you may be right. I guess I was mixing Middleearth stuff with Warhammer again....
btw, this looks cool, doesn't it?

Basically it boils down to: Yes, if you want to play the latest 3D-Games you better get a new machine.

I don't see why this is bad? I personally dislike 3D Games since they all look alike. If you want you can still play great games with older Hardware, the whole simulation, build-up scene for instance. And most likely your system could even handle games such as DarkAge of Camelot or Everquest, wich are games with a focus on gameplay and not grafics. I agree, there are a lot of crappy games out there with really stunning grafic fx, but i don't care about them (anymore). I let my friends play them and when one diamond among them is found i consider wether it's worth the hardware upgrade. The last game i did this for was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Had to upgrade for 20$ and get a TNT2 to play it at decent fps. Now i wonder what doom3 brings. Is it worth the upgrade to Radeon/GeForceFx? I don't know. Maybe I will keep waiting for WarhammerOnline until I upgrade. But someone will betatest for me and then i can still stick with my XentorTNT2/32MB and keep playing Anno1503 or DarkAges.