Originally posted by maddbomber83

WotWK killed WAR??????

Try this...

They put a lot of effort into a PvE expansion to a RvR game!!! (and to thier credit, I like the added content)

RvR has 2 sides in this game.  Only 1 side can enjoy the PvE content at a time.  So while one side is enjoying that content, the other side has NO ONE TO FIGHT!!!!  The only thing to do is to take RvR objectives (against the compter with no opposition from the other realm because they are all in thier exclusive content).  We call this RvE and there is a lot of it now. (I edit to add the exception of Fortress and City takes.  There always seems to be defenders for those but man it is very hard to take a fort prime time.  They need to adjust the # of defenders vs attackers to make it hard, not impossible)

 

Before the expansion the game had problems.  Rather than work hard to fix the RvR aspects of the game (the selling point, if I wanted PvE I would play EQ2 or LotRO), they added a PvE expansion that made the RvR worse.

Luckily, they have done a lot of server merges so the game is not dead dead.  But if they don't do something soon, they won't be able to keep those of us holding out much longer.  This game will go the way of Shadowbane.

The servers can't handle big scaled RVR - Even the keep rooms can't handle RVR.  Mythic did right in trying to prevent 200 ppl from watching lag for 20 mins until servers died.  Or... Mythic did well in preventing 50-80% of the players to be teleported away from the RVR content just when it mattered most.

I do agree with you tho - that there are ways to make keep battles more intresting.  One of it would be to make it a permadeath zone - so if you die you will not be able to enter it again in next 10 mins.  That goes for resurected players to.    This would actually lead to more fun endfights and reduce the lag alot.

Permadeath zones is the only way to make keep battles something other than lag fests.  Secondly - I think that holding other objectives in the area should lead to the boss in the keep beeing easier to kill - meaning that even when you die in the keep - you still have a role to play - as an attacker OR a defender.

Originally posted by Frobner

The servers can't handle big scaled RVR - Even the keep rooms can't handle RVR.  Mythic did right in trying to prevent 200 ppl from watching lag for 20 mins until servers died.  Or... Mythic did well in preventing 50-80% of the players to be teleported away from the RVR content just when it mattered most.

I should clarify.  I think the TOTAL number of players should be the maximum the game can hold w/o mass crashes.  If it is where its at that is fine.

My intention was to point out that the RATIO between Attackers and Defenders needs to be tweaked to make fort takes hard, but not impossible during prime time.

Originally posted by Frobner

I do agree with you tho - that there are ways to make keep battles more intresting.  One of it would be to make it a permadeath zone - so if you die you will not be able to enter it again in next 10 mins.  That goes for resurected players to.    This would actually lead to more fun endfights and reduce the lag alot.

Permadeath zones is the only way to make keep battles something other than lag fests.  Secondly - I think that holding other objectives in the area should lead to the boss in the keep beeing easier to kill - meaning that even when you die in the keep - you still have a role to play - as an attacker OR a defender.

Couple points to consider.

Permadeath buff sounds awesome and I would support that. But...

Don't apply it to Rez.  Instead make Rez a 2 minute timer in a fort take and make it so if the Lord is Agroed (you can't rez anyway) there is no timer, you just respawn.

Second, you need a chance at loot if you participate in any way.  That includes the people that died and are in camp, and includes the people taking and defending objectives.

300k subscribers is still leaps and heads more successful than the average MMO.. WAR is a decent game... If you like PVD (player vs door)... The PVE is a joke... The community is abysmal unless you open RVR all the time.. Scenarios well they can be fun if you bring friends but anymore its just people joining scenarios and then dropping to flip zones in the high end of the game so you cant even run them half the time.

Originally posted by cybertrucker

300k subscribers is still leaps and heads more successful than the average MMO.. WAR is a decent game... If you like PVD (player vs door)... The PVE is a joke... The community is abysmal unless you open RVR all the time.. Scenarios well they can be fun if you bring friends but anymore its just people joining scenarios and then dropping to flip zones in the high end of the game so you cant even run them half the time.

 

300 k was back in December. The game is slightly above 100k now.

Man, if only they had set this game in space... We could have had, like, Space Marines and Legion of Chaos! Man I would LOVE to have played them, and Tyranids and all those other COOL races!!! We could even maybe have awesome jetpacks! And anti-gravity battles! Yeah awesome! pew pew.

Is there a WoW game set in space? No? Man, they could have totally capitalised and monopolise that theme. No competition!!! People wanna play fantasy, they play WoW. People wanna play hardcore Space Marines, then they have to play WAR cause there's no other game like it out there....

Man, that idea alone was worth all their developers high paid salaries.

All they had to do was copy an idea and they failed at that. I say fire the lot of them and hire me.

I wouldnt say that the Lich King wasnt a major factor, but more by its absence than its release.

You see, virtually all players I have met in WAR that had switched from WoW to WAR at its release werent really done with WoW: They just were done with Burning Crusade, and the Easy-Mode Patch just before WARs release, and looked for a few months of fun before their "main" MMO started again.

These people would never even have looked at WAR if the Lich King had released earlier, or there hadnt been this prolonged dry spell of interesting things to do in WoW.

Most of these players always were on a timer. They inflated box sales, server numbers and preliminary cries of victory, but they were never going to stick around anyway. So, when the Lich King released, it didnt really have to "convince" a lot of genuine WAR players, it just drew back those who were in a holding pattern anyway. Of the 800k or so, I guess an easy 200k were never intending to play WAR beyond the two big expansion releases that fall, Lich King and Mines of Moria. If you can, check the forums of these weeks to see almost half the fanbase active there having tried WAR for a short change of pace, but with firm intentions to be back when a "real" MMO kicks in again.

In a way, WAR has been hurt badly by these players, because had Mythic realized or known they would lose so many no matter what, a lot could have been avoided.

And also, I cant help but get the impression that these players formed a lot of the "I dont care, leave me alone, I just care for my own fun, I need gear gear gear" mindset so prevalent early in WAR, which has really influenced the way the game was played ever since the first days of Serpents Passage farming.

WAR has put itself in a position where it tries to compete with several far far superior games for the same audience. WoW, AOC and soon Aion are direct competitors, and all three are currently in better shape, 2 of them also far and away bigger and larger in scope.

The bottom line is that if you do not make a good game nobody is going to continue to play. Only the diehard Mythic fans are left.

Neither Blizzard or EA killed Warhammer.  Bad design concepts and a pathetic game engine killed Warhammer.

Good read, thanks for sharing the article.

Definitely interesting to hear things from an insider perspective.

I enjoyed the read, but it had almost nothing to do with the "fall of WAR". The article's actual title was more appropriate as it truly was just his story of his time working at EA Mythic. The only thing he mentioned was Wrath of the Lich King, and that was in an offhand manner.

Anyway, as others have said, poor design decisions killed WAR. The ambition and the dream was sound, but the implementation was off. An antiquated engine, battles that required a massive population density that did not exist, etc. The whole game only works if you have dozens, if not hundreds, of players competing and doing PQs together, but that requires a population the servers cannot handle, which is the ultimate catch 22.

It is a shame, too, because it verged on greatness in so many ways, which goes to show that the difference between something great and something bad is not much.

Originally posted by comerb

Neither Blizzard or EA killed Warhammer.  Bad design concepts and a pathetic game engine killed Warhammer.

TRUTH,  I didn't come from playing WOW and I had no intention of going to WOW regardless of what I thought of Warhammer.  Wars biggest problem is WAR, its that simple.  The RVR isnt' really RVR and we all know this.  You fight keep lords and and other pve enemies that have strange aggro patterns and aren't really fun to fight to begin with.  The world PVP I found was really mostly on the weekends and during the week I would log in and look for a war party and the higher I went the less of these I found.  The pve is horrible in War and even if it was decent thats not what I think most War players showed up for really.  I came for PVP that gave experience and world battles over territory.  I got tired of the instances by lvl 20 and after that I just couldn't stomach the wait for the RVR the higher I went.  

Interesting how the guy seem to blame everything but the game itself for losing so many subscribers. "Oh it was Lich King" "It was the cheaters and gold farmers" "It was the reccession".

No it wasnt, the game was as shallow as a children pool and had a broken end game. That was why it lost so many subscribers.

Also the game was advertised as an RvR game, which led people to believe there would be alot of PvP, yet most of the world PvP was about avoiding the other side and do PvE. Pathetic really.

Originally posted by Loke666

And the dumbest thing they did was that they didn't play Warhammer. The game was not made so the original millions of Warhammer fans would feel at home, instead they tried to make Wow players feel at home. It failed of course.

Warhammer is one of the best fantasy worlds ever made. If they had checked out the brilliant Warhammer fantasy roleplaying game they would have seen that everything was already mapped out, the game have a system that would have translated into a great levelless MMO. But no, they tried to make a mix between Wow and Daoc  and that upsetted Mythics fans and the Wow fans still play Wow.

This is spot on. Instead of creating a Warhammer game they created a WoW clone with some DAoC features and with a Warhammer skin, satisfying nor the WoW rejects (who went back to WoW), DAoC fans (who wanted the RvR to be like DAoC) or the Warhammer fans (who wanted to play a Warhammer game and not just a game with Warhammer skin).

The game is an epic fail in my book and whoever made those decisions should never be allowed to work with an MMORPG again.

Having 300K subscribers is definetively NOT failure. Nothing can compare to WoW and I think not even Blizzard will be ever able with any other game to have such success.

But I agree there is share of problems with War .... even little problems that never get fixed ... but furtunately majority is. Game is much more stable and better than at start.

So Warhammer had this huge budget.... where did all that money go?  Advertising?  Paul Barnett's mouth?

Because it sure as hell wasn't put into the game.

It still boggles my mind how this company created DAoC for a fraction of what they spent on WAR, but failed to recapture the spirit or quality of their original game.

Sad, really.  Obviously the minds behind DAoC have long since left Mythic.

I just hope that Mythic doesn't taint Bioware.  Now that they're under the same umbrella.

While I'm not a fan of the overly love-letter poetic tone of this article, it is intriguing for one reason: It shows how friggin clueless Mythic is.

If they seriously have the attitude of, 'oh it's WoW and gold sellers fault', that their game didn't live up to the hype, then I feel sorry for anyone still subbing.

With that kind of logic they really don't have much hope of addressing the many obvious issues with the game.

War tried to take on Wow..by hoping some gimmick PvP content would pull over that player base..it was wrong and it badly implemented this anyway...WoW like the game it copied EQ is a PvE game..and warhammer Pve is better not spoken about.

In the end Warhammer could have been amazing I was a big warhammer fan as a kid as many people im sure are..Warhammer has its own brillant RPG system for over 20 years using a selection of jobs and classes and a intutirive level up system..it would easily have transported into a new type of MMO..but instead they made warhammer more like a Wow version of fantasy battle..instead of the RPG deep world it might have been and ..im sorry but even playing War for the first hour of gameplay you realise its a 2004 game by producition standards..its shoddy buggy and badly designed.

Wheras i feel sorry for some games that fall by the wayside that..might have been...warhammer deserves what it gets.

Most of you people haven't played in months and still you state things about the game like they are facts? Many of the problems you bring up about the game are still true, but much has improved the last few months.

The servers I play on have pretty good population, one of them are totally packed during evenings...I have a hell of a time there every night.

And Lich Kings had a impact on WAR, and now I see some of my guildmates returning from WoW to try WAR again.

Originally posted by pre_mar

Having 300K subscribers is definetively NOT failure. Nothing can compare to WoW and I think not even Blizzard will be ever able with any other game to have such success.

But I agree there is share of problems with War .... even little problems that never get fixed ... but furtunately majority is. Game is much more stable and better than at start.

Warhammer does not have 300k subs.

Half that maybe.