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A Look At the Warhammer Community
Gamasutra is running a story examining the development of the Warhammer Online community since its recent launch. The author explains how the gameplay and rules tend to affect social interaction. GamerDNA has a related piece looking at numbers for actual players involved with Warhammer's launch, and how it's affecting populations in other MMOs.
"Getting on the computer to play WAR apparently reminded the WAR fanatics that they had a computer, because overall, their gameplay went up as a whole. They logged in more often to titles like COD4, Oblivion, and even AOC. But the MMO bug bit hard, and logins to LOTRO and EVE more than doubled after the launch of WAR."
It does not sound like it. WoW did not take a hit and WAR appears to be off to a nice start. More like two different games for two different kinds of people.
Maybe yes, maybe no. If you think about it, it would probably take several months before you'd see any sort of decline in WoW (if that were to happen). WoW players would not be so quick to turn off their accounts - it could be they want to give WAR a few months to see if they want to permanently move over.
The safe bet is that WAR ends up being a relatively niche (albeit successful) also-ran, while WoW continues it's reign as online juggernaut, but who knows? I remember back when Everquest was king. It's not like the title can't change hand. But I just don't see WAR having the mass appeal that WoW has. No, I think it will be a different game that eventually dethrones WoW - probably one that no one is predicting.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The game is full of "why didn't someone think of this before" ideas
Indeed. The public quests and open parties, for example (at least they are new to me) make *very* easy to jump onto a group and start playing (not that you can't play solo, mind you).
Of course it also has a couple of "who the heck came up with this crap?" ideas. The cultivation profession, for example. Whoever thought of that one needs to be taken out back and flogged. In fact, the whole crafting system seems underdone. They could have left it out and brought in when complete in a future patch or expansion.
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People *will* go back to WoW even if it's only to check out what's new.
Yup.
Another thing to consider is that most of us who make up the rank and file of paying customers are NOT looking for another game. Blizzard has gone a long ways to cater to folks like me who have somewhat limited entertainment time in a week AND they have the consideration to give top support for Mac so I can play games on a Unix-based computer.
I got my wife involved recently (level 29 Fury spec Warrior, the last 9 levels without my help w00t!) and she loves it, including the battlegrounds.
Warhammer looks like it has impressed a number of people, but does it really need to be a WoW killer to be a success? I don't think so. Years of an Intel/Microsoft monopoly in the consumer computer market I think have dulled people's memories to what it was like when there was true competition. By the way, it's fascinating reading how Roger Bannister first broke a 4-minute mile. He used two "rabbits" as competition to keep him on pace. Competition is a Good Thing.
MMOs are fascinating. I hope they keep improving.
Even on various messageboards, there have been threads popping up regularly stating the fact that this may be the most antisocial MMO ever. People have been complaining left and right about the fact that nobody speaks. I think it's actaully due to a simple factor:
The chat interface is archaic, and terrible.
One of the major problems is that a zone is series of subzones, and each subzone has it's own channel. These subzones are TINY. You can walk 20 feet and you'll be in a new chat channel. Every single time. A lot of people have been crying for a zone-wide chat channel on the threads.
The lack of global channels was such a problem, that on my server (Volkmar) people have designated a common custom channel ("Order Warfront") and have been touting it to facilitate better rvr by alerting everybody in the channel where the fights are taking place. While this is a popular solution, one MAJOR problem is that the game client does NOT save the channel settings when you log off. Yeap. Everytime you log on you gotta remember to "/joinchannel Order Warfront." Some people have even set this as a macro. There are even addons that have a workaround for this, but for everybody else that's not about to install mods for the game, they either forget, or just are not aware. Very not friendly.
Another thing is that the chat input text field does not remember your last input settings for which channel - a recent patch they've updated the client to remember who you've last sent a /tell to, but it doesn't remember any of the channel messages. This is really annoying too, and is not conducive to a steady conversation.
Considering that they have created a series of new social mechanics which work to great effect, particularly the Public Quests and the Open Party, if there was an easier mechanic to ease the player into it further, that would really give a nice boost to the community.
One of my gripes with the UI is that the open party notification system time is extremely short - when you enter a new zone, you have a 3 second window to look at the list of open parties, how many people are in the party, and to remember the name of the party leader in order to /join the party (if people are even aware of that command). A better interface would be a simple button interface that pops up somewhere, maybe even have one of the existing chat tabs to start blinking to notify the user that open parties are availabe. This would be very handy and help promote participation - although regarding open parties there really hasn't been an issue, it could be tweaked a bit more.