Mythic Shutting Down 63 Warhammer Servers

Gamasutra reports that Mythic Entertainment is consolidating a number of their Warhammer Online servers to keep population levels within an acceptable range. 43 servers are set to close in North America and Oceania, and 20 more in Europe. Mythic posted details of the character transfers at the game's website. CEO Mark Jacobs also made a "State of the Game" post, highlighting the live expansion that's currently underway, as well as the changes and updates they have planned for the near future.

Comments

OUCH

[SupremoMan]

That has to hurt. The game was well executed, it was no Age of Conan that's for sure. I guess good question would be how many servers did they start with?

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[dtml-try MyNick]

Way to many. That was their mistake.

Their goal was the smoothest launch ever, in which they actually succeeded.
To accomplish this they opened up loads and loads of servers to ensure players wouldn't end up in queue's when logging on to the game.

The problems started when after a few weeks the biggest hype was over and players started looking at their real lives again. After that the active server population declined rapidly.
I think this move to close servers was unavoidable, it's nearly impossible to keep as many active players as right after the launch period.

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[RuBLed]

The problems started when after a few weeks the biggest hype was over and players started going back to WOW.

Fixed it for ya. This is what I had seen in our guild.

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[chonglibloodsport]

I played Warhammer for a month and change after to released. I admired the amazing artwork and character designs, definitely top notch. However, the game itself was sorely lacking.

The entire game seemed to be designed like an amusement park combined with an assembly line. Your character is basically funneled through a series of increasingly difficult areas along a linear path that left nothing to the imagination. Exploration was pointless because you knew where you came from and where you were going.

Aside from the character stats and shiny purple magic items, this game could hardly be called an RPG at all. Interaction was kept to a bare minimum, both with NPCs and other players. The only real interactions you have are taking on 1000s of mundane fetch quests from NPCs or PvPing with players.

Speaking of PvP, the system is supposed to be the central crowning jewel of the game. Problem is, there are no consequences for it: death and failure are meaningless, you do not lose items on death and the loss a fortress or even an entire territory are barely noticed. Within a short period of time, these assets can be recaptured at no expense. The entire exercise quickly begins to feel repetitive and boring. You have no personal stake in anything in the war and therefore no real incentive to help.

In terms of gameplay, it is a major step back from the old days of UO 1997-1999. A real shame. It seems most of this industry is too caught up in trying to copy WoW rather than pushing the envelope with new paradigms for interactivity and gameplay.

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[Decado]

I think they did the right thing, they started with a lot of surplus capacity and now are scaling back to what they are actually using. Unless (by some miracle) they could guess exactly what capacity would be needed then they have two options, provide too much or provide too little. From a customer service standpoint it is certainly much better to err on the side of providing too much.

I feel a bit bad for Mythic in that this will probably be spun as some sort of death knell for the game when in fact it is simply the logical outcome of the company doing the right thing at launch.

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[AuMatar]

Except that people hate server merges. Especially if a server needs to be split and partially merged with multiple servers. They would have been better off renting capacity but keeping it dark, and lighting it up as needed instead.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really enjoying Darkfall at the moment. It seems that if you want investment you have to clone WoW. Darkfall, being produced by an independent developer, is being plagued by launch pains, and could have used a bit more polish. But even with what it is missing it's been the most engaging online experience I've had in an MMO since Shadowbane ( I wasn't in UO ).

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[AuMatar]

Personally, I had more fun in War PvP than any other MMO, because of the very same reasons you hate it. Death *shouldn't* have consequences. A game is about having fun. The point of a PvP game is to kill, you shouldn't be afraid to die because it will cost you hours of time.

As for reason to help- two major reasons. One its fun. If you don't enjoy PvP, why did you buy a PvP game? Two- pride. I play to win, always. So I always try my best to further the objectives of the game, in this case its trying to move the battle forward to eventually siege the enemies city. If we do that, I win. That in and of itself is fun, there is no other reason needed.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is two-fold. First of all, they somewhat overestimated their required capacity for launch. Second, people have been leaving Warhammer after the initial period (quitting, returning to other games, etc.) and the population has likely stabilized quite a bit by now. In other words, they were using quite a bit of the capacity they had, but their needs are smaller now. I doubt that they'll split and merge servers with such a high number of removals - just straight merges of two or more servers.

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[Tridus]

According to what I've found, there's 16 servers left in North America, where I believe 40 of the 63 being shutdown are.

Just another Age of Conan, they massively overhyped to get a ton of initial box sales, and wound up with 2/3 of those people leaving in a couple of months.

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[sortius_nod]

I didn't go back to WoW... there are other games out there you know.

I actually think it was only second to AoC for the dodgiest game releases of late. It looked terrible and played like old people fuck - jittery and awkward.

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[Anonymous Coward]

No, their mistake was to make a game that couldn't take more than a handful of players per server.

I mean, WoW has pretty small population per server, but Warhammer is just way low. And that's with a game designed to be no fun unless you have a lot of players around. In practice you end up running around trying to find someone to kill and/or someone to group with for PQs. Alone, the game is crap.

Talk about Epic Game Design Fail. Warhammer would be infinitely more fun if a single server could take 20000 players or something...

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[Hubbell]

Without consequences to death or losing your city, what's the point other than the game being a persistant version of CS? That's just silly. Consequences, aka item loss, bring excitement to the PVP, both for the winner and the loser. I haven't had the adrenaline rush from fighting 1v4 in a game since Asheron's Call in 01-05, and even then I only lost a few items on death and none were ever of value compared to losing *everything* on my character aside from my starter knife/staff when dieing in Darkfall. The flip side of course is that if I win, and the person isn't naked, I get a nice helping of loot myself.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Its not really stated but a LOT of those servers look like reserves as I don't ever recall that many as being fully active on launch.

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[A beautiful mind]

My experience is the opposite, to the point I don't understand who, apart from the most hardcore PVP players, could like this game.

Whoever says Warhammer had a smooth is at best not aware of what really happened. Many people started out at launch and many of them including me left without paying a single subscription cycle, because the game is lacking on so many levels. Let's start with the performance/visual problems. I have high-end, but mainstream hardware and I've been getting absolutely awful framerates and graphical glitches.

The visual engine was full of bugs and design mistakes. The UI was a joke from a design perspective. The game logic suffered dozens of irritating bugs.

Content was thrown together, lacking polish. I don't even have the patience to list all the irritating things, the list just goes on. Now, this was 6 months ago and I absolutely won't pay for another month to the company that cheated me once to find out what improved, but the real problem is that while there were lots of bugs that can be fixed and hopefully they did, there were also lots of design mistakes in how the game is put together from a technical perspective that I don't think they could fix even in years.

Apart from releasing an alpha quality game, they also had server problems and horrid queueing for the first month. It is true that they introduced more servers shortly afterwards, but it wasn't at launch and that ment that while some servers were crowded because their characters were on it, others were empty. Only a few people switched to "cloned" servers.

All in all, I'm trying to forget about my experience with WAR and I'm betting this is why people are going back to WOW and LOTRO. WAR is another AOC.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Lord of the Rings Online had a much smoother launch. I played both from beta through Launch. Still play (and enjoy) LOTRO, but Warhammer's game engine slowed to a crawl at launch, but LOTRO's didn't. Turbine wins.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't go back to WoW

The point was a holistic generalization, for which you obviously don't fit. For the majority, most likely went back to WoW given the new expansions release shortly after WAR.

I actually think it was only second to AoC for the dodgiest game releases of late.

Hmm... dodgiest? Hardly. Fury was head and shoulders above it. And Shadowbane was even worse. And I'm just talking about PvP games. Star Wars Galaxies was a terrible release as well, worse than WAR IMHO.

WAR did have a relatively smooth release, but had a terrible product at release. I tried every race to try every starting zone and tried a wide variety of classes. I saw some of the worst balancing issues between classes as well as horrible bugs for quests that where only 5-10 quests into the game.

I could not get an NPC I "saved" to the quest NPC because they would just stop in the middle of a field and now follow me or get hung up on terrain objects.

Some starting areas were far and away better than others with a clear distinction in details vs a rushed nature. And on top of that, the animation was absolutely terrible (not even getting into the positional attack bug and rubber banding pets). For as much as WoW's "cartoonish" graphics get old, the style and animation is excellent.

So, basically, I'm saying I agree with you on the fact that I think the game was a rushed piece of garbage, but I disagree that it had a dodgy "release". I had relatively no problems logging on or playing the game. I just thought the game wasn't very good. It had a few diamonds in the rough, but nothing to keep me playing.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please what bullshit. I checked this out the other day. Someone complains on the forum about anything is instantly called a carebare.

Double that with the fact that there are so many hacks for the game it's a game and community I wouldn't want to join.

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[zwei2stein]

While in reality it makes people quit. Idea of PvP with consequences being good idea is just form of self flattery (gamer expects to be in winning side there, forgetting that each PvP encounter also produces one loser. Stress becomes issue because it makes not playing the game more enjoyable than playing).

See: http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/02/19/the-mordred-problem/

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[Anonymous Coward]

i went back to wow!

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[Hubbell]

Stress is only an issue if items are far more valuable than they need to be. I've died dozens of times since Darkfall's release, losing full suits of armor all the way up to banded (2 steps down from the best) and don't really care. I just slap on a suit of leather or cloth armor, and go out hunting for gold/mats to get more. This doesn't even count for all the kills I've gotten where I've looted tons of stuff. Going into a game knowing that it's full loot, you could lose everything on you whenever you go out, is exciting and fun for those who can actually handle it. Sadly, aventurine has been getting dos'ed by the hundreds of thousands of people trying to get the game since it released.

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[Frosty Piss]

Death *shouldn't* have consequences. ...you shouldn't be afraid to die because it will cost you hours of time

I'm sorry, what?

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[Tridus]

It does both.

Some people actually like that sort of thing. For them, it's exciting, and it keeps them playing.

For the majority of the market, it just drives them away.

If you're aiming the game at that specific market and don't want to try and compete with WoW, it's a good way to be successful.

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[nobodylocalhost]

It's not surprising. PVP is horribly one sided, and waiting for an RVR instance is an exercise in itself due to everyone and their dog plays destruction on most servers. numbers don't match up, skill levels don't match up, so what you are end up with, is a constant exercise in futility. The chicken thing is amusing at first but quickly turned annoying as well. Basically you have three races per faction, but in order to do the quests in other races of the same faction, you risk of accidentally turning chicken constantly and getting one shotted by some newbie. The client itself is horrible, the game crashes a lot, for no reason. It got so bad that they introduced a patch to scale back graphics just for stability. Of course that didn't help much at all. Crash happens just the same. switch between zones lag badly. and some towns sit right at the switch line, causing all sorts of problems. Apparently their programmers are not competent enough to write threaded zone proximity loading with lower priority threads. This game is absolute junk and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone.

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[Clandestine_Blaze]

The visual engine was full of bugs and design mistakes. The UI was a joke from a design perspective. The game logic suffered dozens of irritating bugs.

Well, you have just described WoW and pretty much EVERY MMORPG at launch. I don't really think it's fair to compare a game that was just launched (WAR) with a game that has been out for five years (WoW) and bemoan how it lacks polish or has bad quality compared to the other game.

At launch, WoW had horrible balance problems for Warriors, really awful pet pathing for hunters, and glitches that would cause a monster to regain full health or become unhittable. If you want to compare WAR to WoW, you're going to have to give it a few years. WoW was absolutely abysmal for a while after launch until they polished everything up and now it's pretty much a perfect game.

All in all, I'm trying to forget about my experience with WAR and I'm betting this is why people are going back to WOW and LOTRO. WAR is another AOC.

That's the problem Mythic is going to have to deal with. People were patient with WoW and sat through all of bugs and through really bad queue times. After five years of a really polished WoW, people expect every game afterward to have the same polish and same "perfection", which really sucks for Mythic. People are not willing to be as patient with other MMOs as they were with WoW.

It's cool that you tried the game though. My biggest complaint about WAR is the fact that it requires a fairly decent computer to run, and many people don't want to upgrade their card, mobo, etc. I've limited my time playing it until I can afford to upgrade my system.

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[brkello]

That's only fun for the minority of people. WoW proved if you want subscription numbers, you cater to the majority (for better or worse). I like WoW better than WAR mostly because I am more interested in PvE which WAR sorely lacked. I enjoyed the PvP, but eventually it just felt like I was paying a monthly fee to play a fantasy TF2 game that was less fun than TF2.

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[Hubbell]

It's fine if you like pve etc, but we've all (pvpers) have been waiting for the PVP mmo that will bring us all together from UO, AC:DT, and SB. Darkfall currently is that game for many of us, and even with the lack of real quests and the like at the moment, noone I know has even thought about quitting. We're willing to sit through long queue times when they happen, numerous and sometimes unannounced downtimes to hotfix and perform server maintenance, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The bugs and the like that have plagued games like AOC and WAR simply aren't there.

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[varcher]

Exactly. By all measures, LOTRO is a succesful game. You do not need to be a "WoW Killer" to be a succesful game, nor even to have millions of subscribers. If you are growing (and if you didn't invest so much you do need in fact 10 times your potential subscriber bases to recoup your costs), then you are successful.
 
The failure of the most recents MMO isn't that they didn't reach WoW numbers. It's that they failed out of the door.
 
And the lesson, as painful as it is, starts to enter the producers' brains: You live and die by your launch. You botch your launch, you die.

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[Krater76]

This game is absolute junk and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone.

I think a lot of people would say that 'absolute junk' is an extreme overstatement. It's flawed but definitely does some things correctly.

The PvP is done right, although there were balancing issues. I don't know how this panned out at the level cap because I never made it. I wanted to play a healer and tried a Zealot but the leveling was bad - just like leveling a priest was in WoW in the beginning.

The idea and implementation of the public quest was great, and the open parties were awesome too. These are things you will probably see in every MMO from here on out. The siege mechanics were light-years better than the Wintergrasp crap that Blizzard is trying to throw into WoW.

Obviously a lot of people went back to WoW and I was one of them. I actually think Blizzard could learn from Mythic and shut down a bunch of their low-pop servers but they are making too much money forcing people to transfer for $25 a pop.

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[AuMatar]

No, some pvper have been waiting for this game. There's definitely a subset of them who like consequences. The majority don't. consequences are annoying an drive people away. I have life, I have better things to do than waste hours of my time regearing after each death. Its just not fun.

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[Fross]

Since the free trials started, it's brought loads of people in from WoW, but also a lot of people who had subscriptions but then cancelled.

The response from the latter has been very strong indeed, a lot of people much happier with the state of the game, and saying they'll resubscribe.

Certainly had a bunch of problems in the beginning, but it's picking up now. The server consolidation is harsh (though they had WAY too many to begin with), but its real purpose is to ensure everyone plays on a med-high population server, which is where the game really shines.

Well, when the servers stay up. But that's been improving too ;)

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[darkwing_bmf]

Without consequences to death or losing your city, what's the point other than the game being a persistant version of CS?

You realize Counter-Strike was one of the most popular games ever created right?

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[JonStewartMill]

From what I've heard, quite a few went back to Dark Age of Camelot. I have no firsthand knowledge though, as I quit gaming altogether about 6 months ago.

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[hemlock00]

From a user perspective, if I log in and have to wait for 5 minutes it tells me the game is popular and full of players. If I see a server merge response, as a long time MMO player, as many of you know, server merge = death. With little exception. It sends the wrong messages to subscribers and why waste time on your character if it's going to be unplayable soon? Which partially explains why WoW is surviving so long, because you have faith that the time you sink into it, will be there for a long time.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Given that you never posted a single specific in your entire rant, I'm going to assume that you're just another WoW troll who's never played WAR -- or any other MMO, most likely.

All I hear is the same tired bleatings from the same tired Blizzard fanboys who come out to troll whenever any other MMO is mentioned.

WoW is the most popular MMO? Congrats, that puts it up their with Windows, American Idol, and Britney Spears. I guess what's most popular is always best, right?

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[nobodylocalhost]

No, The PvP is done wrong, very very wrong. There's something wrong when you have to wait over 2 hours for instance based PvP. Balancing issue is an extreme understatement. Why? Because when you lock down an account to play only order or destro, you better make sure there are even numbers of order vs. destro on the server, and even so it still can be uneven due to the fact not everybody plays PvP.
The classes are far from balanced, so what you can do tons of damage, if you die in 3 hits, your attack power means nothing. And how convenient for the melees that almost every one of them got a ranged attack that can slow people down.
The RvR level is a good concept, but they implemented in such a bad way that made RvR level totally pointless. In games such as Go or Chess, you go up or down in level by your win/lose ratio. PvP level should be done in the same way since just because you have a lv 40 character doesn't mean you are a lv 40 player. So what really should happen is:
1) Allow RvR level to go up or down base on kill/death ratio.
2) RvR scenarios should group people with similar RvR rating together.
3) Have level cap in each and every RvR zone as opposed of turning people into chicken.
4) in 1vs1 situations, the chance of winning should be 50% if the players have the same RvR level rating.
The siege mechanics are horrible in warhammer, i don't know what you are talking about. First, it is a matter of money. The team with more money buying engine/weapon have advantage. Second, offense is a nightmare, without 18+ people you aren't going to do anything and the keep lord will slaughter your team. Third, with public parties, what you end up with are an unorganized band of noobs that are really unfit to go for keeps/castles. There are way too many Leeroy Jenkins wannabes. Fourth, people should be barred from siege 3 am in the morning where noone is on to defend.
I am not saying Blizzard is doing any better, but Mythic simply are not up to par and what you said are baseless and invalid.

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[Max Threshold]

Or even going back to Mythic's earlier title, Dark Age of Camelot. Warhammer was designed to combine WoW's questing and broadly-appealing side-games with DAoC's large-scale world PvP, and it failed on both counts.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm sick of waiting for HOURS just for a PvP scenario to have enough people queued. Also I'm sick of being blind-invited to PQ groups just because I'm the only player currently in the area who's NOT in the group (because, there's only 6 players in the area). I really won't mind if Mythic helps me rescue my character(s) onto a busier server so I can focus on PvP and leave the PvE to people who have NOT played 10000 RPGs already and are interested in the quest stories.

The situation doesn't make much sense currently, WAR has one (1) server that typically gets a waiting queue. All other servers struggle to get up to medium populations even at peak times.

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[Krater76]

No, The PvP is done wrong, very very wrong. There's something wrong when you have to wait over 2 hours for instance based PvP.

You are describing WoW before they did cross-server battlegrounds, and even since those have been in it can be a very long wait on battlegroups that are heavy for one side or another.

Balancing issue is an extreme understatement. Why? Because when you lock down an account to play only order or destro, you better make sure there are even numbers of order vs. destro on the server, and even so it still can be uneven due to the fact not everybody plays PvP.

I said population can be a problem, that was one of the issues on the server I was on. Eventually people switch sides and it balances out. Once again, in WoW almost all the servers were heavy Alliance when the game launched.

The classes are far from balanced, so what you can do tons of damage, if you die in 3 hits, your attack power means nothing. And how convenient for the melees that almost every one of them got a ranged attack that can slow people down.

I can't really discuss how balanced the game is at the level cap because I didn't get there. However, I didn't enjoy when Order got their knockback about 10 levels before Destruction. That made many of the scenarios heavily favored for Order until things balanced out. When I left, at level 26, ranged casters (Bright Wizards/Sorceress') were doing far too much damage and 3 shotting melee before they got in range. But Balancing issues are somewhat par for the course in MMOs. Everyone talks as though WoW was perfectly balanced since launch, which obviously isn't true.

The RvR level is a good concept, but they implemented in such a bad way that made RvR level totally pointless. ...

Good god, you're probably happy with the abortion that is WoW's new arena ranking system. Plain fact is that MMOs aren't as simple as a ranking system for Chess or Go. In those games there isn't one type of player that can move a knight differently, move more pieces at once, etc. So some people would match up better than others. In those cases if you get unlucky and meet a a player around your ranking that you don't match up against and you lose you'll go down - and you might not be able to win no matter what you do. There's no simple or even complex math that would probably work to deal with all the combinations of races, classes, and talents. Welcome to class based games.

I am not saying Blizzard is doing any better, but Mythic simply are not up to par and what you said are baseless and invalid.

So because I don't agree that the game is 'absolute junk' all my comments are 'baseless and invalid'. Great job. So you are saying that PQs and public parties suck? I totally disagree, they are revolutionary. As for the seige mechanics, they are better. Busting down the door to a keep takes more than just a mindless zerg (that's how Wintergrasp works).

WoW's Wintergrasp is the joke. The defending team can't win and the attacking team can't lose. Now that's a great PvP system. /sarcasm

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[Quikah]

If it doesn't really matter when you lose items then what is the point of it? From your description losing items in Darkfall is merely a timesink.

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[lactose99]

get a life dude, WoW is the best game ever

Oxymoron of the day

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[Hubbell]

Items do matter, such that 1on1 a naked guy with a starter weapon and a guy in full plate with a high rank sword the geared up player will more than likely win, although if the naked guy is damn good and the geared guy is damn bad then the geared guy might lose, highly unlikely though. Weapons and armor in darkfall do provide benefits, and to an extent are almost necessary in PVE and PVP, but instead of providing immense protections, damage, and buffs, they merely provide a small, but noticeable and meaningful, edge to the player in terms of defense/damage.

There are no OMGUBER weapons/armor, as items are not supposed to be the be all and end all when it comes to your abilities, your characters skill in various skills as well as your own personal skill are the most important part of the equation and items are there to compliment it instead of being the most important factor.

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[pwylltwiceborn]

From what I saw from other players, and their reactions in-game...it was just to hard for the normal WoW player - gear did not matter as much as skill or tactics in PvP.

You could tell the WoW players but the constant jumping and running around you in circles.

In WAR, you stand still and beat them down ( your character auto looks at thier target...) while they miss while jumping ( jumping disrupts abilities )

Soo many of them left cos there great WoW skills were so useless.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Ignore the forums for Darkfall. I completely agree with you; the forums are full of idiots. The forums actually remind me a lot of the forums on EVE, really...The in-game community feels much better. At least, with my clan and the alliance it's in, it does. And in my week of playing, despite all of these hacks I've heard about, I haven't even seen, let alone fought, a single player that was using any of them. And my clan certainly does fight a bit. I'm having a damn good time with Darkfall, actually.

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[Quikah]

I wasn't questioning the usefulness of the items, but rather the loss of the items on death. If you just need to grind to replace your items what is the point of having loss on death in the first place? It just becomes another annoying timesink.

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[Unoti]

I agreed with most of what you said, and thought it was spot on. But this one part really caught my eye:

The team with more money buying engine/weapon have advantage. Second, offense is a nightmare, without 18+ people you aren't going to do anything and the keep lord will slaughter your team.

In my experience, siege weapons don't really matter much one way or the other. Quite the opposite: it's really just about who has more people. So it's not skill or levels or equipment so much as who's zerg is bigger.

And regarding needing 18+ people to take a keep. I've taken keeps many times with 5 people (yes, in Tier 4). Once we took a keep with 5 people, against 2 player defenders.

But to me both these issues come down to "death by zerg." You really need to run in a big group to do well. The bigger the group, the better you'll do. Each side keeps bringing bigger zergs, which discourages the other side from operating in anything less than a big zerg. Zergs begat zergs. And personally running around in a massive group where anything I do doesn't really impact the outcome isn't very fun for me. So it ends up being a whole lotta suck.

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[Psychochild]

I'm an MMO developer with quite a bit of history in the industry. A few comments stand out to me:

It seems most of this industry is too caught up in trying to copy WoW rather than pushing the envelope with new paradigms for interactivity and gameplay.

That would be because WoW makes a metric fuckton of cash. For some reason, companies like making money.

Mythic's previous game, Dark Age of Camelot, was a souped-up version of the top game (EverQuest) at the time. Most of the people who talked about DAoC called it "EverQuest without the suck". While DAoC never quite beat EQ, it did very well for the company for many years. It's not really surprising that they tried to copy WoW; I'm more surprised they decided to license an IP this time around. Perhaps after their unsuccessful internal project, original properties leave a bad taste in their mouth.

[T]his game could hardly be called an RPG at all. Interaction was kept to a bare minimum, both with NPCs and other players. The only real interactions you have are taking on 1000s of mundane fetch quests from NPCs or PvPing with players.

Which is funny, because these are the elements a lot of people ascribe to WoW's success. The big win for WoW, according to many pundits, was the fact that you could play solo or with friends as you wanted. The quests were fairly simple, but they let you level faster than just grinding as previous games often required. Even these days I've noticed most people can't be bothered to read quest text in WoW, they just follow QuestHelper or yell for directions on zone chat. Your old-school definition of RPG doesn't apply to most MMORPGs.

I guess the people saying this were thinking too simply. Or, perhaps, that magic is only useful once and is now useless after WoW.

Some things to consider.

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[Cowmonaut]

I actually think it was only second to AoC for the dodgiest game releases of late. It looked terrible and played like old people fuck - jittery and awkward.

That sounds like your computer. The game looks great to me. A lot of detail on the player models and they kept the tabletop's style. Gameplay was smooth except in huge RvR fights, which they fixed within weeks of release.

If I A) had more time and B) all my friends hadn't stopped playing due to school (only two went back to WoW and only because they don't have to pay for it) and work eating up large portions of their time I'd probably still be playing it. Like any other MMO, its no fun alone. On the bright side, your Guild only needs to be half a dozen people if you play at the same times.

I'll never stop griping about how all these people from other MMOs have to have huge guilds with hundreds of people when the whole point to the game is to let you have a whole bunch of small-mid size guilds and form alliances. I mean, its not like you can do a full guild RvR fight unless its open field.

Re:OUCH

[hesaigo999ca]

Of course all those who hate WoW can troll me down all you want, it still does not change the fact that WoW is still the only cool online game that make a billion dollars a year, and hasn't closed its servers down because of the economy, last I heard they were still adding...!

Re:OUCH

[nobodylocalhost]

"I said population can be a problem, that was one of the issues on the server I was on. Eventually people switch sides and it balances out. Once again, in WoW almost all the servers were heavy Alliance when the game launched."

You obviously never played warhammer to any depth, once you set yourself to order, you are stuck with it on that sever, YOU CANNOT SWITCH TO DESTRO SO YOUR BALANCE THEORY DOESN'T WORK... The same goes for destro players, they cannot change to order on the very same server. Your comments are getting more and more ignorant.

"I can't really discuss how balanced the game is at the level cap because I didn't get there. However, I didn't enjoy when Order got their knockback about 10 levels before Destruction. That made many of the scenarios heavily favored for Order until things balanced out. When I left, at level 26, ranged casters (Bright Wizards/Sorceress') were doing far too much damage and 3 shotting melee before they got in range. But Balancing issues are somewhat par for the course in MMOs. Everyone talks as though WoW was perfectly balanced since launch, which obviously isn't true."

I have never said WoW was perfectly balanced, but compare to warhammer, it was much more polished in that department. warhammer is simply lacking and you can pretty much tell by the level of effort they put in to balancing the game. You did make a good point class based game is very different from go or chess, 10 men melee team works very different than a 10 men wizard team. and frankly, in some cases you will end up with no viable strategies. That was the point i was trying to get across.

"Good god, you're probably happy with the abortion that is WoW's new arena ranking system. Plain fact is that MMOs aren't as simple as a ranking system for Chess or Go. In those games there isn't one type of player that can move a knight differently, move more pieces at once, etc. So some people would match up better than others. In those cases if you get unlucky and meet a a player around your ranking that you don't match up against and you lose you'll go down - and you might not be able to win no matter what you do. There's no simple or even complex math that would probably work to deal with all the combinations of races, classes, and talents. Welcome to class based games."

What you are saying only applies to random team ups. In prebuilt team vs. team, the ranking system works as it should because people are performing as expected. Now what you are pretty much saying is there aren't always viable strategies in random match up, but wouldn't that pretty much be a design and balance issue?

"So because I don't agree that the game is 'absolute junk' all my comments are 'baseless and invalid'. Great job. So you are saying that PQs and public parties suck? I totally disagree, they are revolutionary. As for the seige mechanics, they are better. Busting down the door to a keep takes more than just a mindless zerg (that's how Wintergrasp works)."

Well, no. I am saying your comments were baseless and invalid because you didn't have any examples to back yourself up, you just spew out

"The idea and implementation of the public quest was great, and the open parties were awesome too. These are things you will probably see in every MMO from here on out. The siege mechanics were light-years better than the Wintergrasp crap that Blizzard is trying to throw into WoW."

without telling us why. I am simply stating warhammer siege isn't light-years ahead of WoW, nor is it that good. Further more, i backed up my claims with examples and points that are real issues in warhammer.

"So you are saying that PQs and public parties suck?"

Nowhere in my post said PQs suck, don't make up things and tag them onto what i said. As for public parties, yes, they suck, for obvious reasons. Siege too, the problem is siege requires you not to zerg, but public party group dynamics are so bad that zerg is your only option, and that is _NOT_ a viable strategy. Separately and in theory they look great; but when put together in practice... they work against each other.

Re:OUCH

[Anonymous Coward]

Just another Age of Conan, they massively overhyped to get a ton of initial box sales, and wound up with 2/3 of those people leaving in a couple of months.

totally disagree.

yea, they have ambitions beyond their current player base, but the community is strong... it just happens to be spread too thin.

patch 1.2 brought quite a few of ppl back to the game and i only see that trend continuing with the MAJOR improvements they have made since launch. i went back to WoW after launch and i've since returned and will surely be taking advantage of their recruit-a-friend program.

it's jut gonna take some time for this one to get rolling. no, it will never top WoW's current subscription base, but will it be considered "good" and "successful"? most definitely.

Re:OUCH

[MoriaOrc]

Doing a little replacement game...

Speaking of Counterstrike, the multi-player is supposed to be the central crowning jewel of the game. Problem is, there are no consequences for it: death and failure are meaningless, you do not lose money on death and the loss of a round or even an entire match are barely noticed. Within a short period of time, any weapon or equipment can be reaquired. The entire exercise quickly begins to feel repetitive and boring. You have no personal stake in saving the hostage/disarming the bomb and therefore no real incentive to help.

Makes me wonder...

[Narnie]

...just how many MMOs are going to shutdown in the coming years. All that time and money invested into digital character that goes away with a CEO signature and never seen again.

Guess the good news is this MMO isn't shutting down anytime soon.

Re:Makes me wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

...just how many MMOs are going to shutdown in the coming years. All that time and money invested into digital character that goes away with a CEO signature and never seen again.

Guess the good news is this MMO isn't shutting down anytime soon.

WHICH MMO isn't shutting down anytime soon.

5/5 captcha's failed. I guess I am not human.

Re:Makes me wonder...

[sortius_nod]

LOTRO, Eve, probably WoW, there's quite a few out there that have been around for a while (or even not that long) and have a strong community with strong backing from the devs.

It's only when a game lacks massively (Tabula Rasa, AoC, WAR) that things start to go pear shaped.

Unfortunately Mythic made the biggest mistake MMOs seem to be making of late - emulating WoW, poorly.

If people wanted to play WoW, they'd have a subscription. I don't, anymore, but I do have a sub for Eve and I do have a lifetime membership for LOTRO. If another MMO comes along and people like it then we'll see more added to the list of survivable MMOs.

Look at the Asian market, they have MMOs that have been around for ages and aren't shutting down servers. In fact, a lot of MMOs that ARE surviving are ADDING servers.

Taking away servers is akin to saying "look, we're going to shut down soon, so you had better look elsewhere". By doing this, and by not planning the release better, they have pretty much signed their own death certificate.

This is aside from the fact WAR is a terrible game.

Re:Makes me wonder...

[malf-uk]

Saying that it's emulating WoW poorly is a bit harsh, considering that the large scale PvP or RvR side of it is more emulating their previous MMO more than WoW. Which is what attracted me (and still does) to this game as I personally find WoW dull in this respect.

I do personally prefer DAoC's RvR though.

Re:Makes me wonder...

[Andy Dodd]

I miss DAoC's RvR too, which is why I was initially looking forward to WAR.

Sadly, DAoC's biggest problem with RvR (realm balance) was completely botched in WAR.

Re:Makes me wonder...

[Dragoness Eclectic]

Well, you could come back to DAOC. Some of us are still there, keeping the lights on.

It is actually much better now

[Anonymous Coward]

This problem also plagued the EU version launch: there were too many servers and the population was spreaded too thin, meaning that you would log in and find no one else but you on a certain zone.

With the new patch and the server transfers everything is much fine now: cities are quite populated and there is massive outdoors PvP going on every night :)

Cursed.

[drik00]

As soon as I heard it being referred to as the "wow-killer" during development, the writing was on the wall, and it was doomed. I've come and go on WoW since launch, and every time someone talks about a "wow-killer," its like giving a college quarterback the Heisman Trophy, its a curse. ...and yes, I just used a sports reference on /.

J

Re:Cursed.

[fractoid]

I have a saying, one that I've used since Guild Wars became the first game to be touted as a 'WoW killer'. That saying is "they'll come crawling back!" So far it's held true for Guild Wars, Hellgate: London (although that's not directly competing with WoW I guess), AoC, WAR... every time, if people are still playing one MMO after moving to the new game, they'll be playing WoW. :P It was funniest for the original Guild Wars launch because people were posting "so long, suckers" and "lol kiddies, im gonna go play a real game now", and 2 months later it's "lfm heroics". :P

Re:Cursed.

[Barny]

Its like that for everyone's first MMO, and lets face it, WoW has been a lot of noobs... err, I mean peoples first MMO.

I still reactivate EQ1 every now and again and putz around for a month or 2.

Re:Cursed.

[polle404]

well, in all fairness, all new MMO's are being called 'the WOW-killer' by the gaming-media.
Mythic was fairly quick to say that they didn't see it as that,
but being no. 2 would be fine.

Re:Cursed.

[Tridus]

Their fanboys didn't go along with that. There was MONTHS of this nonsense on the WoW forums about how Warhammer would destroy WoW, people playing WoW are noobs, and so on.

So a lot of WoW players take special enjoyment in watching those fanboys now backtracking, if not coming back to WoW entirely (which happened quite a lot).

You can't know their position and momentum?

[Rix]

I don't get it.

Re:You can't know their position and momentum?

[sabt-pestnu]

No, no, that's the Heisenberg Trophy. We keep giving that one to people, and they put it on a shelf, and can never find it again.

Gee, what a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets make an MMO that looks like and plays something like Wow, and expect it to do wonders! Nevermind that we're going up against the single most profitable game ever made, and one that has had 4 years to refine it's gameplay. Surely we shall succeed despite all odds!

No, Warhammer Online isn't dying.

[Anonymous Coward]

At launch, they had *far* too many servers, they had wayyyy more servers than WoW had at launch.

Their launch went extremely smoothly, but the game population was spread so thin that people were having a hard time finding other people.

They should have done this 2 weeks after launch, not 6 months.

That said, this isn't indicative of Warhammer's impending demise, nor of a lack of players, they really did just have way too many servers and should have fixed the problem months ago.

Oh well, I'm still having fun with the game :D

(also, anyone thinking this was a WoW killer was delusional, it was never intended to be such, it's a very PvP centric game and attracts a similar, but different crowd)

Re:No, Warhammer Online isn't dying.

[Ultra64]

Too many servers at launch? What warhammer are you talking about?

For the first month there were queues every time I tried to login.

Re:No, Warhammer Online isn't dying.

[Tridus]

That's just a side effect of a hype driven launch.

Most companies don't try to build MMO populations over time. They treat them like console games: sell a million copies the first week and hope those people stick around.

Of course, more then half of them didn't. So you have 750k people in Month 1, and 300k three months later. That gives you both queues in the first month, and deserted wastelands today.

Re:No, Warhammer Online isn't dying.

[Krater76]

At launch, they had *far* too many servers, they had wayyyy more servers than WoW had at launch.

The pre-sale numbers, which I think were reported as the best for any MMO ever, dictated that they'd need that many servers. WoW had way too few servers at launch only because they underestimated. They were forced to stop selling the game for 3 or 4 months so that their infrastructure could catch up. They weren't ready for success and it nearly crushed them.

With WoW, I purchased one of the last boxes of the game which I called around to every store in the area I was living just over 2 months after launch. This was late January. I know some of my friends couldn't get a copy of the game for at least another couple of months, and even then you were on a waiting list somewhere.

None of those games are remotely like WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

Guild Wars is a fully instanced, PvP-oriented game with some MMO elements (I don't know anyone who's played it that considers it a true MMO).
Hellgate: London was a fully instanced hack-and-slash game.
Age of Conan was (originally advertised) as a PvP MMO. Now it's just a pile of fail.
WAR is a PvP MMO.

Of course they aren't WoW-killers: They're nothing like WoW!
To be a WoW-killer you have to be a mostly non-instanced, PvE oriented MMORPG... which none of the aforementioned games are.

Re:None of those games are remotely like WoW

[fractoid]

You're 100% right - none of them are direct competition for a PvE open-world MMO (although say 70% of PvE and 90%+ of PvP in WoW these days occurs inside instances, but that's another story). That said, all of the titles I mentioned were touted by rabid fanboys on the WoW forums as "WoW killers" for months or years before their release. And all of them have failed to grab any appreciable share of the 'fantasy based rpg-style online game' supergenre off WoW .

Re:None of those games are remotely like WoW

[MBGMorden]

Of course - when you can't beat the competition you simply redefine the category.

Kinda like in football statistics when they just HAVE to break some record every game "John, if he makes it this will be the longest field goal EVER kicked into an easterly wind in Chicago during a playoff game in the month of November in a year ending in an odd digit!"

The simple fact is that in overall categories, most people don't separate game generes to that degree. If you play online, with other people, and name a char that levels, then it's an MMORPG. And within that category, WoW has dominated everything since it originally came out. Pointing to a few minor differences and claiming a whole different genre is pointless. If they were exactly the same then nobody would switch from the already established WoW format.

And personally, I think WoW's killer will be another Blizzard game. They have their stuff together. They make for a polished experience. I certainly wouldn't mind something outside of swords and sorcery for a while though. A Starcraft MMORPG would be the perfect change of pace for me.

Re:None of those games are remotely like WoW

[joshtheitguy]

And personally, I think WoW's killer will be another Blizzard game.

Diablo 3 is in the works and if anything is going to cause a major reduction in WoW subscriptions longer then 1-2 months this will be it.

Granted it isn't going to make WoW go away but I know if the multiplayer is as fun as Diablo 2 was it just might cause a good chunk of WoW Subscriptions to be canceled for longer then WAR or AoC ever could have made.

Re:None of those games are remotely like WoW

[drsquare]

Guild Wars is a fully instanced, PvP-oriented game with some MMO elements (I don't know anyone who's played it that considers it a true MMO).

Most of the dungeons in WoW are instanced, and you never really interact with anyone outside your group or guild anyway so what's the difference?

Re:None of those games are remotely like WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

That with Guild Wars, you're not suckered into paying $15 a month?

Re:None of those games are remotely like WoW

[mapsjanhere]

If Blizzard is really creating it's own competition with Diablo 3, how long until they will follow SOE's lead and offer an "all games pass" that allows you to play all their online offerings? Buy Diablo Online for %10 a month, or just add $2 to your WoW subscription for both.

Re:None of those games are remotely like WoW

[MBGMorden]

IIRC, due to the (vastly) lower server load that Diablo III will entail compared to WoW, Blizzard will be looking at a very low monthly fee (if any) for playing D3 online. I've heard several ideas punted about. The most popular one (though it's all just guesses at this point) is something along the lines of $15 per YEAR or free if you have an active WoW subscription.

I could certainly see for something more demanding though, like Universe of Starcraft if it ever comes to pass, implementing a heavy discount if you buy both. $15 for 1 or $20 monthly to play both.

Re:None of those games are remotely like WoW

[bigstrat2003]

Infinite time, because Diablo 3 is going to be free to play online.

Re:None of those games are remotely like WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only going to be free if you have a WoW subscription. There will be a small fee if you don't.

WAR REQUIRES high population levels

[Anonymous Coward]

WAR is unlike any other MMO currently on the market in its focus on PVP. Much of the game content really requires other players - I know because I play late at night. Populations have to be high, and balanced on both factions so there's plenty of chances for PVP. There's great "solo" content in that you can do so without a scheduled group, but most content is best with a high population of players. More scenarios popping, more RVR in lakes, and so forth. WAR is absolutely doing the right thing so that players aren't sitting around wondering why there's nobody to play with or against.

If you haven't given it a try yet, definitely join WAR for a least a month or two. They're constantly improving it

Re:WAR REQUIRES high population levels

[Hubbell]

Warhammer is the bastard child of UO and AC combined with WOW: FFA PVP with no consequences. PVP should be meaningful, you need to lose or gain something for it to be exciting. This is why I loved AC, for it's fast and fluid combat as well as dropping items on death, and now LOVE Darkfall. Dieing and losing everything, or killing someone else and losing everything, makes the pvp that much more exciting.

And I also can't wait for siege hammers/battlespikes (craftable siege weapons) to get their damage upped so i can go raid the fucking frenchies north of my city!

Re:WAR REQUIRES high population levels

[MistrBlank]

WoW is the first game to "do it right" with Wintergrasp.

It's a territory that constantly flip flops. The winner of it gives players of that faction a bonus for the next 2 to 3 hours. There are daily quests to be done there to entice people to at least show up once a day. It requires the defending team to actually attack to win.

Asheron's Call's combat system sucked for most of its thriving life. It was dominated by the ability to cast Drain Health at instant speed and quickly apply healing kits to yourself. You also needed to master "strafe casting" which was a bug in the game engine that allowed you to cast while moving. And there was no reason to pvp other than to pvp someone and harass them, that is lame. Losing everything wasn't terribly exciting either because everything usually amounted to people only using gear that they could easily afford to lose and stack money notes and other high value items that didn't matter if you lost.

Re:WAR REQUIRES high population levels

[Hubbell]

Being able to move while casting/healing/etc was what made AC's combat what it was. It was actually driven by personal skill and not just 2 mages standing in place trading volleys hoping you resist first. Drain 1 was pretty gay for quite a while, but those were some of the best times in AC and most people didn't even whore drain 1 except at the spots where you could bug it and machinegun out 20 in a single shot. Reasons to PVP were mainly land control as well, aka holding dungeons so other guilds couldn't use them.
Most of AC's bugs that lasted through it's life are ones that the players and devs themselves embraced because they saw that even though they were bugs, they made the game infinitely better. Being able to cycle your stamina/mana, moving while performing actions like casting and healing, breaking spellcasting animation, all made AC's pvp the great thing that it was.

Re:WAR REQUIRES high population levels

[Vohar]

That's not an accurate description of WAR at all. It's not total FFA--It's two sides against each other in a war. You talk about meaningful PVP, but your other game examples are just anyone kills anyone anywhere with no real motivation other than urge to kill. What meaning is there in that? That's not war, that's murder.

People looking for murder simulators will love Darkfall, I guess. As for me, I like to have a reason to fight--And WAR did a great job of providing that, thanks to the background material.

Re:WAR REQUIRES high population levels

[Hubbell]

Darkfall has a goal, territory control and conquest. Sieging player cities and the like, as well as complete freedom to be a crafter, a pker, a mage, an explorer, you name it you can do it. AC had territory control created by the players in the form of dungeon control. I was mistaken and thought WAR was FFA, and the fact that it isn't is just laughable to anyone looking for a real PVP MMO.

Re:WAR REQUIRES high population levels

[darkwing_bmf]

Don't be a hater. There's plenty of room for different styles of PvP. There are real team based PvP games where nobody loses anything permanent and they're fun as hell. Like Unreal or Team Fortress. WAR is the MMO version of those. If you like FFA PK or the "I love having the chance to lose 3 months worth of effort" style, don't play WAR.

Re:WAR REQUIRES high population levels

[Vohar]

Yeah, these 'hardcore' PVP players all seem to have the attitude that their way is the only way. This immature elitist way of treating others is the main reason I have no intention of even trying Darkfall. Reading their forums, this is pretty much the main subset of gamer that is flocking to it, guaranteeing I would have a miserable time in that world being surrounded by them.

MMOs are games. 'Hardcore' players take it waaaay too seriously, and treat pvp as an ideal to be pushed on everyone else.

Someone at Mythic must be biting his own tongue...

[acid06]

About 6 months ago, during this interview, Mythic VP and lead Warhammer Online designer Mark Jacobs said some interesting things regarding MMO development, including their own game. In particular:

According to Jacobs, another way to measure success is to look at the number of servers a game has added in a six-month period. "The corollary to that is if you've seen a game consolidate servers, you know it's in deep, deep trouble -- that's not a healthy sign for an MMO," he said, citing Sony's January-released "Pirates of the Burning Sea" as a recent example. "It will be the same for 'Warhammer.' Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we're not adding servers, we're not doing well."

Looks like they're not doing that well - according to their own standards.

Heres an idea

[Rockoon]

Stop segmenting your playing population into multiple independent copies of the universe.

Instead, segment your universe.

Re:Heres an idea

[Firkragg14]

Check out eve online thats been doing the one universe thing for years. The universe isnt seamless since its split into a number of seperate systems but the entire population exists and plays within the same universe.

Re:Heres an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

... which is all well and good until everyone in your universe decide they need to be in the same place at the same time.

Players tend to congregate around social hubs, usually near the more rewarding/popular game PVE encounters. If you've got a single universe, then you need to find some way of dissuading them from this natural tendency and keeping them spread out.

Re:Heres an idea

[Tridus]

That'll work really well when a new WoW raid comes out and a million players are all milling around outside using the summoning stones and dueling.

Hell, Naxx's entrance is crowded on most nights right now, and that's with hundreds of servers. It'd be unplayable to put them all together.

This single universe thing doesn't scale beyond a certain point when the players all have a reason to be in the same place.

Re:Heres an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

It is true that EVE does this, but it does cause some big problems. The system Jita (which is pretty much the "center of the universe") has all kinds of lag issues because of this. In fact this last expansion caused it to be inaccessible for the last few days.

Re:Heres an idea

[WuphonsReach]

Check out eve online thats been doing the one universe thing for years. The universe isnt seamless since its split into a number of seperate systems but the entire population exists and plays within the same universe.

That only works for universes where one part of the game world is identical to nearly every other location in the game. Which, except for Jita CNAP 4-4, pretty much covers much of EVE's universe. It also helps that star systems in EVE Online are vast, so you could conceivably split a single star system across multiple hardware on the server side. The downside is that it makes the EVE universe feel bland and generic.

In fantasy MMOs, where locations are unique and different, you're going to end up with huge population concentrations. Lag is already bad enough when there are 50+ people sitting around the Ironforge Auction House or Naxx entry portal in WoW. Now, imagine that it's Saturday evening, and there are 500 or 5000 people in those locations. Your poor video card would pretty much melt into a pile of slag.

Re:Heres an idea

[cthulu_mt]

Just spawn those giant demon-golems from BC. I loved those things.

Re:Heres an idea

[Hubbell]

There have been numerous 200+ person fights since release for Darkfall, and almost noone suffered any lag other than graphical. I'm on east coast USA, on a shitty dsl line, the game servers are in germany, and I get a 90-130 ping almost always, once in a while a spike to 200,b ut that's about it

Re:Heres an idea

[Cloud K]

If you do segment your universe then please, please adjust it accordingly when it quietens down again.

In Everquest they did both. And they made the world so bloody HUGE (with a capital HUGE) that no matter how many server merges they do, it feels utterly empty. Half the problem of course is that they neglected the older 'segments' and left them to rot, despite actually being fairly important to the universe they've created.

Server merges are easy enough, but what do you do when your universe is too big? Close bits of it and anger players who had quests there?

Re:Heres an idea

[Remus Shepherd]

So do what Asheron's Call did. When the city of Arwic became the de facto center of their world, and a huge, laggy population settled there...the devs blew it up. Blew up the whole town. Nothing left but a crater. And IIRC they created a few new towns to give the players more options. But the message was clear -- don't cluster together, or the enemy will find you.

Re:Heres an idea

[brkello]

Advantages: everyone on one shard (no need to figure out which ones your friends play on and how they are spread out), large scale battles, bragging rights that you have one shard.

Disadvantages: you can't help that people want to be together - the server can't handle too many people in one place, creates a hard cap on the number of people that can be on your shard since just adding more space doesn't really mean people will go there, dev cheating and hacking damages the whole game.

The only thing compelling about one shard is the ability to know if your friend plays the game, you will be on the same server. The disadvantages far outweigh the advantages. Any single sharded game will never be a WoW. It can only handle maybe 50,000 people realistically. It will keep games like Eve a niche game.

Re:Heres an idea

[SatanicPuppy]

In AO it was a common tactic in PvP to send all your people to the zone to crash it, if you couldn't actually win the fight. Segmenting your universe only works if all your people can't mob a single area.

Re:Heres an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking idiot.

Re:Heres an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember correctly, EVE Online dynamically allocates blades as locations come into use or become disused. Since each starsystem or group of starsystems uses much less data and processing power compared to, say, a WoW server with 3000 players, it can be shuffled to and fro without much fuss.

Re:Heres an idea

[DerekLyons]

Stop segmenting your playing population into multiple independent copies of the universe.

Instead, segment your universe.

I don't think that word means what you think it means. I know of no games (whose internals I know/have heard anything about) that can handle their entire player facing universe on a single machine, even if they do hand off the background processing. Being able to do so means you either have a very small playerbase or a very small/simple game.
 
Even games that segment their universes (CoX, UO) still tend to have multiple universes. (Eve Online, like WoW, is the exception - not the rule.) Even if you segment the universe, you still run into the problems of some areas (Peregrine Island, Britain) being crowded and laggy while others (Galaxy City, Ilshenar) are virtually empty. Not all areas of a game are going to equally desirable.

Re:Heres an idea

[mapsjanhere]

Rotting content is everywhere. Run through any of the low level WoW zones, and it's not different from visiting Kunark. No one there but a few twinks grinding out progression. WoW went so far as letting the new DK class start at level 58 in full blue gear (after a 2-4 h intro)as to not repopulate those areas.
The only way you could get around that is semi-instanced content, where the mob is automatically adjusted in level to your toon. What in turn would eliminate farming in lower level zones for easy tradeskill items etc. You lose either way.

Re:Heres an idea

[thesandtiger]

There are ways to deal with this kind of thing and to make the game a bit more interesting at the same time. Make it so that players can do quests to get keys that will poof them directly into an instance so they don't have to hang out in front - like attunement but that actually gives you a benefit beyond just letting you inside.

For quests in general, make more instanced versions of quests. I *really* hate having to wait for one mob that's on a 5 minute timer that is being camped by 100 other players looking to do that same quest. Yes, I *could* group up with some of those players, but that's still 20ish groups and the hassle of trying to get a team for something you don't need a team for. So, just have the house/hut/yurt where Goblin Leader Guy spawns be a tiny instance - you run to it, go in, kill the guy and get out.

Additionally, supplement the standard quests with grinding quests. If a player just wants to grind, rather than forcing them to grind in a place where people who want to go for quests are, give them something like a bulletin board - "There are a bunch of bears that have taken over this cave/campsite/graveyard! Go wipe 'em out! (Pays X gold, Y xp)" Yes, people would still grind on mobs outside of these quests, but it would make it possible to avoid overcrowding if you wanted to.

I would *love* to see WoW turned into 4 servers instead of however many they have right now. Rp+PVE, Normal PVE, Rp+PVP, Normal PVP. Maybe 1 other - a "hardcore" server (you die, that's it) with a ladder, ala Diablo II.

Re:Heres an idea

[brkello]

And you must play Eve. I can tell by your stunning personality :)

Re:Heres an idea

[sabt-pestnu]

There are games that take both strategies, such as City of Heroes. Zones can "become full", causing a new instance of that zone to be created, presumably handled by a different piece of hardware. But also, City of Heroes has several entirely different servers.

Even WoW evolved a compromise: instances. And part of why the newer "cities" in WoW don't have auction houses is to spread the pain a bit. (I'm on a low-pop server, and I cringe to think what Dalaran is like on a high-pop server...)

In the same way, EVE has worked a bit to encourage people to spread out. Regional economics, and having a huge F-ing universe to play in, for instance.

But sharded or not sharded, if you don't have a fallback plan, you will fail. You might recall the episode in the Star Wars Galaxies MMO, where as a protest action, a large number of the players went to a single location, and the server repeatedly crashed because of it until the GMs intervened with (effectively) riot gear?

Re:Heres an idea

[Rockoon]

But if you are the devs then you get to decide what 'desirable' things stay and what 'desirable' things go.

If you take away some significant reward bonus from the people who hang out in one area, then most people will travel.

Re:Heres an idea

[DerekLyons]

Yep, people will travel - and a new area becomes laggy while the old becomes a ghost town.

It's also worth pointing out that some areas are crowded because they are central hubs or traditional meeting areas. Something the Devs can do very little about.

WoW didn't have that problem

[Moraelin]

I think this move to close servers was unavoidable, it's nearly impossible to keep as many active players as right after the launch period.

Funny. WoW didn't have that problem.

Re:WoW didn't have that problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Exceptions are not the rule.

Re:WoW didn't have that problem

[Moraelin]

Exceptions are not the rule.

Well, then neither did Everquest, City Of Heroes, or almost any other game, SWG included. Virtually any game's curve on MMOG Charts keeps going up for months or even years before it peaks and starts going back down. You have to fuck up pretty hard if your population curve peaks at the end of the free month.

So I don't think you can argue that the vast majority of games are the exception, and a couple of fuck-ups whose only merit was massive launch hype are the rule.

Re:WoW didn't have that problem

[Anonymous Coward]

No, WoW went the other route and did not provide enough servers and the ones they did provide were buggy as hell for the first 6 months. Not sure it's that much better...

Then why split servers?

[Moraelin]

I also was on the EU servers at launch and they were splitting servers (i.e., adding new ones) like crazy for the first month. So if their problem was too few people per server, I have to wonder wtf were they _thinking_? Didn't they have a feedback loop there? You know, "how many people are average and max on this server? Do we really need to split it?"

Re:Then why split servers?

[PotatoFarmer]

They were thinking server stability. The basic problem is that their servers were not capable of dealing with large subsets of the population localized in one area. Over the few months that I played, I don't think a single Tier 4 fortress was successfully captured, because every time one was attempted the server crashed.

There are a lot of good ideas in WAR, but the technology just doesn't back them up.

Re:Then why split servers?

[Moraelin]

So basically they had to over-invest in way too many servers because their code sucked?

Re:Someone at Mythic must be biting his own tongue

[Cheesy Fool]

Wow. Great find. I wonder what spin he would put on it, if someone reminded him of that quote now.

Bye Bye Warhammer

[MistrBlank]

Been so nice to know you, and glad you proved me right when all those people who left WoW told me Warhammer was the next "it" game.

Sorry, but Blizzard announcing opening of servers, not closing them. You need to be moving in that direction if you expect to beat them.

Re:Someone at Mythic must be biting his own tongue

[elrous0]

LOL, reminds me of an old Robot Chicken episode from a couple of years back. It features a "flashback" skit where we see Ang Lee being interviewed before "The Hulk" came out. At the interview, he says something along the lines of "The movie will be like a pretty flower. Surely it won't be a complete flop that destroys my career. Surely."

So did WoW back then

[Moraelin]

Lets make an MMO that looks like and plays something like Wow, and expect it to do wonders! Nevermind that we're going up against the single most profitable game ever made, and one that has had 4 years to refine it's gameplay. Surely we shall succeed despite all odds!

Surely you realize that the same could be said -- and back then it _had_ been said -- about WoW and EQ. They too were going against the single most profitable game ever made, who had had years to refine its gameplay, bla, bla, bla.

Re:So did WoW back then

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard essentially invented the MMO.

    I know I certainly never heard of them before I started WoW. I did see that EverQuest 2 later, but that was just a bad copy of WoW. I hope they get sued for it.

Re:So did WoW back then

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you talking about! Anarchy online was around years before WoW came on the scene and even back before the Shadowlands expansion was launched it had waaaaaay more skill customisation, crafting and twinking capabilities than most of todays "Highly polished" mmos.

This is actually a good thing

[Meowfaceman]

A few other people here have noted that Warhammer's population is spread very thin. A game like WoW will suffer from a low population server. However, it is not its undoing. A WoW server can thrive despite its low population. You can do raids on a low population server. For Warhammer, low population ruins the game, and I'm not entirely positive that they realized this in the beginning. Everything in the game depends on there being a constant avalanche of people doing things. This way you have people constantly sieging keeps, constantly in scenarios (PvP arenas), constantly doing public quests, and you're constantly fighting. The game (as I'm sure many of you know) is very PvP centric. A large population ensures that you can log into the game, find the latest war zone, and then go start busting heads. The game was designed this way, and now they're actually encouraging this. I'm hoping this makes the game more like it was envisioned. If they can keep server populations high they'll do well.

I feel a little ripped off

[SendBot]

I paid the $50 for the game (a few weeks after it had come out) and while there are a lot of good things to say about it, I felt really disappointed. Compared to wow, the performance is a lot crappier for graphics that are just not as nice to look at. And the game takes 1gig instead of wow's 512M (approximate), and probably because of that on my 2Gram machine, it would take FOREVER to alt-tab in and out of the game.

Then, there were never enough people on my server to make it fun. Completing the public quests was always a hopeless fantasy.

I also couldn't understand my profession, and missed one of the flight paths early on. It's not that hard, wow set some kind of standard for usability and they mimic enough of wow EXCEPT for making the interface as useful.

The pvp combat is a lot more fun, but that's the only advantage I could see over wow. Oh, and you don't have to keep ammo in your inventory. Great.

Re:I feel a little ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another WoW player who mistake themselves for an MMO player.

You "couldn't understand your profession?" Sounds like a failure on your part. God forbid something is not 100% just like WoW.

I don't even know why you tried WAR in the first place, clearly a PvP game is not for you. You'd just get killed left and right.

Re:I feel a little ripped off

[mapsjanhere]

You forgot to call him a carebear!

Re:I feel a little ripped off

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you may have started playing WOW after they made vast improvements to it. WOW, frankly, sucked at launch. The only reason it succeeded was that Sony's EQ2 was so egotistical and cruddy it drove everyone away. Also, Blizzard had a million Diablo fanboys ready to try out WOW, along with a lot of Warcraft ones.

WOW had horrid mechanics on launch, the questing mechanics were pretty good, but have undergone so many improvements I doubt you'd recognize them. Flight paths sucked, and were frankly missing in so many places. You also couldn't move forward more than one hop during a flight, requiring you to sit at your comp and remount at each hop. Also, class questing was horribly broken for many classes, for example, requiring Alliance Warlocks to run through level 35+ mobs to complete their level 20 quests or Alliance Warriors to do them same at level 30 and fight a mob that was really too tough until he was nerfed later (had to bribe a friend to come along, or bring plenty of potions).

Their honor system launched without a single battleground. Their first battleground was changed so many times that no one even knows what it used to look like anymore. The rewards from said BG had to be nerfed multiple times. Raid instances crashed constantly and were so moronically set up that very few could progress (I'm all for hard, but one try on Vael per week was pretty stupid considering his difficulty). They had no caps on what are now known as 5 mans, leading to people not even playing them right, then capped them at 10, but disallowing quest completion if your party was over 5. Later they capped them at 5.

Set pieces were unevenly distributed, leading to stuff like Warlocks having to beg a group to kill a boss that no one did, and no one wanted to do, or even knew how to do to get their shoulders, or Warriors having to complete a very difficult 5 man quest to be able to summon the boss that dropped their boots.

Warrior gear was reitemized twice within months, t1 gear had Agi removed and replaced with +def. Then they realized they'd overdone the +def and nerfed every item in the game by 33%. Only one tanking class actually worked for in raids for 3 years, out of 3 supposed tanks.

Early players were strung along with the idea of hero conversion for their class for years. This never happened, they just stuck in another class and called it a "hero." It's a flipping class!

I haven't even mentioned the server stability issues, but just to name a few: blue bar, server crash, instance crash, login servers down, but not world servers, leading to impossible raids as your whole guild couldn't get on...

I don't know what you mean about a missed flight path in WAR, you don't have to unlock them, unless you enter a higher rank zone early (usually there is no reason to do this). You unlock all t1 flight paths at character creation, all t2 at rank 10 and so on.

I don't know what to say about misunderstanding your prof. You don't say which one it is, there's a pretty good description of each prof's special mechanic on the character creation page as well as a Archetype categorisation in large, bold letters. Even if you were still confused, it's pretty easy to reroll, once you learn where everything is, rank 8 takes less than 4 hours.

I can assure you with a decent computer the graphics are way better than WOW's, hands down. This is not really open to debate. If you have everything turned down, maybe not, don't know. My comp runs on 2 gigs of ram as well, try a decent vid card and cpu.

Re:Someone at Mythic must be biting his own tongue

[Clomer]

It's an interesting contrast when compared to WoW. WoW has over 100 realms in North America alone, and they are still adding more. Maybe not on the same pace as when it first launched, but there have been 4 new realms opened just since the beginning of the year. Source

I'm reminded of a comment I saw a few months ago by a Blizzard exec (I don't have the source and don't feel sufficiently motivated to look it up) that basically said that most of the people that had canceled their WoW account indicating that they were moving on to Warhammer have since reactivated their WoW account.

I think that's pretty telling.

Got bored quickly

[EvilToiletPaper]

Although not the worst MMO I've ever played, I tired of WAR pretty quickly. Kept my subscription going for 1 month after the free one and found that I logged in only twice that month. I think I just got burned out on MMO's, went from WoW in 2004 to LoTRO, to EVE, to AOC and finally to WAR.

What killed the game for me were a few factors:
1) Everyone who came into the game came with at least a couple of friends/family, who then proceeded to grind quests and mobs at lightning pace all the while ignoring my attempts to join their group. A rude, flat answer I often got was: "This is a closed group". These people wouldn't even join a Public group if I started one and begged everyone on that PQ to join.

2) Pathetic communication, the chat system sucked pretty bad. Dunno if they have redone it but it was really bad compared to WoW's functionality and ease of use.

3) Major slowdown in experience at around level 13. Unable to find any open groups, I was forced to level solo in most areas and when I hit level 13 it slowed down to a crawl.

4) The influence grind, when I played WAR influence was the best way to get blue weapons and armor. The worst part about it was that every influence mob from level 1 to 40 gave 100 inf. on a kill but the influence requirements in each zone increased with level drastically. The infl. reward should have scaled with the requirement.

5) Near zero PvP outside scenarios. As someone stated earlier, open world RvR has objectives spread out over a large area and it does work cyclically. Order takes 1, destruction moves to 2.. rinse repeat. Anytime an encounter happened it was invariably skewed in numbers to favor one side. An exception was the Festenplatz thingie.. humans and chaos clashing. I had a lot of fun with the constant action, push backs, chases etc. there. That area had a very close spawn point for both parties and objectives were not too far, the rest of Open RvR should have been more like this one.

6) Fortress elite mobs can pretty much one shot you over weird angles that too. I managed to join two different attack groups but both ended pretty much the same way, somehow the mobs get drawn to the lip of the stairwell(they never come downstairs) and aoe the crap out of any group. Plus the lag, even with graphics turned down

7) Some classes are near invincible at certain levels. Tanks and healers, tanks especially take an insane amount of time to die and worse off they can finish you in 4-5 blows. I've held off a group of 6-7 order folks for a solid 10 mins at Ekrund as a black orc with a tiny shaman hiding and healing.

All in all, I couldn't really connect with the game at all, it got boring really fast.

It's...

[Anonymous Coward]

Doomed.

If DAoC is so great why is 100k playing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

If DAoC is so great why is 100k playing it? and the game never had more than 200,000 players compared to WAR which had 800k at release. That is the question i have, in my WAR guild people complained all the time about how DAoC was such a great game but i asked them when they last played it. Their reply was couple years ago :p. DAoC is good game but was niche game that mainly focused on 100,000 so players who were into PvP. As a result Mythic decided to incorporate some of features from WoW when they made WAR made the game more casual friendly granted they made many mistake doing it (Poor crafting, linear Pve experience, Scens).

Re:Someone at Mythic must be biting his own tongue

[Alexpkeaton1010]

They should have seen this coming. 1 month after launch I'm hitting an attack, seeing a number on the screen, and then watching the animation 2 seconds later. What is this 1998? Bye.

Re:Someone at Mythic must be biting his own tongue

[GammaKitsune]

http://www.lifelounge.com/content/detail.aspx?id=1261&comments=true

Warhammer, the problem with the game

[Zoozie]

Many players that left Warhammer did indeed play it for 3-6 months before leaving. If they had fun during that time, I disagree with them calling Warhammer a failure. Most non-MMORPG will not keep people entertained this long. There are just some exceptations that every new MMORPG will be a failure unless they can keep most players for years. I am gonna tell you that this is probably not going to happen ever again for a MMORPG. Today there is simply so many MMORPG out there and some very specialized and many players have already found their favorite game. When new games come they will try it, but after a while go back to their old MMORPG. Comparing to Age of Conan most players left in 1-3 months and did not even reach maximum level, I would call that a failure. Those that stayed then left when they experienced the end-game of course. MMORPG releases are very hyped because most MMORPG gamers want to try it. So initial sales will be very high, but ubscribers will drop drastically in a few months. The question is wether it is 10% or 50% and if it can attract new players. The current problem with Warhammer is also the end-game. It was announced as a RvR/PvP game and since Mythic previously had made DAOC, which is one of the best RvR MMORPG, the expectations where high. I am really impressed by the PvE content of Warhammer actually, it is much better that I imagined, but that was not why I started playing. It is the RvR. And this is the problem. The goal of the game is to capture the other realms main city and fortresss and this part of the game is not working at all, which was a huge disappointment for the players that worked hard to get so far. It is badly bugged, too laggy to be playable and it is also 'instantiated'. The instantiated removes the feeling that you are a realm that are attacking the enemy city. This is not massive RvR, this is just a scenario/arena kind of thing. And the end-gear which is what people are playing to get comes in two flavours. You can get it from PvE or RvR and the different sets are about equal in power wetherr you get it from PvE or RvR. The problem is that is insanly hard to get the gear from RvR because end-game is not working. So everyone simply just farm dungeons over and over, since this is the only way to get it. And this dungeon grinding are exactly what most people that came to Warhammer was trying to avoid.