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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.
There's speculation in one of TFAs that WAR grew the market for MMOs by drawing people back in who were bored with everything.
In what, 2 or 3 weeks? Isn't that a bit premature?
In an ironic twist of events, WAR became sentient, logged on to world of warcraft, created a forsaken rogue, killed a player named "wow", and then used cannibalism on its corpse.
The resulting paradox crashed the server.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I'll throw my opinion on the table--it's better than WoW. The game is full of "why didn't someone think of this before" ideas, which was the same impression WoW used to give. There's always something to do, which is really nice. However, if you are really into the EverQuest formula of raiding for gear, it is not for you. It's a large-scale PvP game.
More importantly, there's no Arena. This makes class balancing easier because the PvP is designed for group play, and you rarely come across people alone. There's also no downtime as you wait in a queue. Scenarios have queues, but you can enter those queues anywhere, so you just quest and do other things until a queue pops up. All of these things are giving you experience and renown, so you don't feel like you're wasting your time.
The Arena is Blizzard's attempt to turn WoW into Starcraft and get on Korean television. It's really affected the game in drastic ways. The criticisms have been listed countless times before, and there's no need for me to recite them. This thread on the official forums, which reached its post limit, sums it up well: Goblin In The Tuxedo (and here is a second thread that continued the discussion).
Keen and Graev have been describing their Warhammer experience as their guild hits the tier 4 content.
One hit that WoW took was a drop in Arena players. Whether due to leaving for other games or due to increased ratings requirements on gear, the bottom dropped out in Arena's ranked system as people decided to just grind for the available battleground honor gear. Blizzard is now going to put Arena requirements on that gear, too, so you will be forced to do the Arena even if you don't like it just to fill out the ranks of the Arena, which depends on those lower-ranked players.
It should be noted that Blizzard stated earlier this year that they did lose players to Age of Conan. Those players, however, returned when they found out Age of Conan wasn't finished. Thankfully, Warhammer's endgame content is in the game.
I haven't seen this argument since 2001, and it's just as wrong now as it was then. First, the market is not saturated by any means.
Second, looking at WoW's numbers as a benchmark is lunacy. The average subscription-based MMO has between 100,000 and 300,000 subscribers, not the flat millions that WoW does. An MMO can survive with a player base in the tens of thousands, handily.
Third, MMO subscriptions are not utilities-- there is nothing stopping anyone from subscribing to multiple games simultaneously, and many players do so. Even with the economy tanking, two $15 subscriptions is a better deal than going to the movies a few times a month, and it's discretionary expenses like movies (or going out to dinner, or what have you) that usually get cut before quietly repeating ones like cable bills or MMO subs get canceled.
WoW is a prodigy. Treating it as competition is foolish-- it's too big to notice the smaller games, and its sheer popularity has secured the whole goddamn industry a space in the pop culture landscape. It hasn't cannibalized other games, it's singlehandedly expanded the whole damn hobby by orders of magnitude, and continues to draw in people who wouldn't have touched Asheron's Call, WAR, City of Heroes or anything else.
For one, MMO's take time as well as money, and there's only so much of that too.
Secondly, personally, I'm much more likely to cancel a second MMO than I am to skip going out to the movies because going out to the movies is a different form of entertainment.
I only have the room in my time/money budget for one MMO, and I don't think I'm alone.
True, this probably isn't the case for single folks with no lives, or whose entire social network plays the game with them, but those people aren't the bread and butter of what makes WoW what it is. Most of the difference between WoW and everyone else is that WoW works for the people who wouldn't play anything else.
Those are the people that the company that's going to finance/publish your MMO want, because they want that gigantic pot of money. Creating a new MMO that'll appeal to a couple of hundred thousand people world wide and pay for itself is fairly easy, even Sony can do it, but that's not what the publishers want.
If nothing competes with WoW the MMO industry will languish because why bother, there are plenty of ways to make money with less risk, and less up-front cost. Everyone will play WoW(or WoW 2) and nothing will ever change.
The industry needs a WoW killer, because the industry needs to feel that they have a chance at some of that money.
Based on what they charge folks in the western world, Blizzard has got to be pulling in over 150 million dollars a month in subscription fees, that's more than a billion dollars a year, most of which, realistically, is pure profit. Everyone wants a piece of that, and despite your "$15 isn't an awful lot of money to pay twice" almost no one is getting it. There's some folks out there who will subscribe to multiple MMO's, and there's another 9-10 million who won't.
Sure, if your reading comprehension skills are really bad, that might be your conclusion. If not, you might have picked up on the words "won't get you very far", "take forever to level your RR" and "very small amount".
No, my correction is that you won't be able to level your RR that way. I thought that was pretty clear from my post.
Renown rank goes to 80 (twice the character's maximum rank), and the amount needed to raise one rank increases with each rank. So basically after RR2 or so, you need to do RvR scenarios and open RvR to increase your RR.
Which means your plan won't work, which in turn means your criticism doesn't either.
Do yourself a favour and pick one of the many real problems with the game if you still feel a need to criticize it. Scenario exploits, pet problems, ability problems, crafting; there's any number of real problems to discuss without needing to resort to made-up ones.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley