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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.
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?
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 :)
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
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
I don't get it.
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)
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.
Stop segmenting your playing population into multiple independent copies of the universe.
Instead, segment your universe.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
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.
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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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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.