So I am now sitting here looking at the screen " Warhammer Subscription successfully cancelled". To be honest 1 year ago I never thought i would have to look at this screen.

Cast your mind back to around this time last year, we were all giddy little schoolgirls and beta was looming. We were told massive/epic battles would rage across the Warhammer world. Desperate pushes for power would ebb and flow on all fronts. Territory would be fought over and (wait for it..!) "WAR would be everywhere". It all failed miserably....ALL of it. Never since SWG have I seen such a great IP go to waste. My mind boggles and I have in all honesty become quite angry at how in the name of Christ can you get it THAT wrong. I mean you would actually have to REALLY try!

I apologise for ranting but the main problems I always had with the game were as follows

- The world just felt soulless, no one talked on chat channels, mobs seemed like an after thought, NPC were crap.

-The whole game felt like one big scenario. IE get to warcamp, wait for RvR to happen (yeah right...) zerg keep, rinse wash and repeat. there was no time to stop and smell the roses. As an RPr I was rightly buggered as no one seemed to socialise in one place, or chill out and have a chat in the local tavern. IC was a joke.

-RVR was meaningless. RVR lakes were a shotgun blast to the face in terms of exciting dynamic gameplay. Where were the open fields of battle that was promised?  If keeps were needed... fair enough, at least make it meaningful when they were captured/taken. We should of lost or gained territory or something to that effect. it should of felt that the enemy was on your door, and you needed to fight to reclaim it back.  How was this not seen fit to be put in as a feature?

-3rd faction...I'm not even going to explain why this should of been put in.

-Some sort of emphasis on PvE, please dont give me this was meant to be a PvP game. If it was pure PvP you would never of seen lost vale etc. PvE also help define a story arc as well.

All in all, I am soo dissapointed. This was meant to be my next "baby". i had planned on levelling my sorceress and taking her to the field of battle, where she would melt people faces. Instead all I got was me levelling my sorceress, going to the field of battle...finding the faces that needed melting were in scenarios..or looking at a "your Warhammer subscription has been cancelled" screen"

Expectations vs. Available content. Always a dilemma if the first is greater than the second.

I don't share your oppinion but I think you made the right decision to stop playing. Subscriptions are ridiculously cheap but no-one should keep paying for stuff they don't feel they get anything out of.

In my view it would seem like you're mostly a PnP roleplayer and that you expect other players to play your way or failing that, have Mythic force them to play like you want. Demands for talk on the channels and being In-Character only appeals to a very small minority compared to game mechanics, class balance, and gameworld layout.

In my view the greatest problem in WAR is that it hinges on players acting like a team not just on your side but on the other side as well. If this does not occur, the game becomes dull. If you are a social person and you are good at networking in the game you can do a lot of difference, especially if you have a few (3-4) very tight friends that can help with defining the strategy and later on implement the tactics as laid out. Too often this is not the case which breaks the game. I have no idea how Mythic can solve that particular problem since they can't choose their customers, especially not now with the subscriber numbers failing.

its simple, they cloned WoW instead of Daoc.

Originally posted by Honeymoon69

its simple, they cloned WoW instead of Daoc.

 

Indeed. The farming for loot through PvP was pathetic. The bugs at start killed it for me though.. It all just one big grind for better loot like WoW. If it was more like DAoC where you made template once then go out and protect your realm. The 48classes and many ways to level up gave pvers enough todo without raising level cap. Sigh I just wish DAoC classes were balance by 1v1(if it balance 1v1 it'll be balance by any scale aswell other then AoE effects) and not realm vs realm too many gimp classes or gimp specs to make the game fun for me to still play.

Originally posted by Honeymoon69

its simple, they cloned WoW instead of Daoc.

 

This.  OK, they didn't really clone WOW, but they sure took more concepts from it rather than DAOC which was the deal breaker for me.  

They should have started the core design centered around the open world RVR zone, but from what I understand the scenarios were the core focus and the open world RVR came later (some say, only after the early beta testers revolted)

All modern MMO's suffer from a lack of player interaction and community, and you don't have to be a PnP roleplayer to understand what has been lost in terms of fun in an MMORPG because of it.

You don't "force" players into community, you design the game so that player socialization is natural and part of the total experience. 

If you never played DAOC back in the first 2 or 3 years then you might not understand what I mean.

Its a good way to put it though, WAR has no soul, and its bleeding subs because of it. (well, along with poor performance, balancing issues and bugs I suppose).

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Originally posted by DeadlyByDez

Never since SWG have I seen such a great IP go to waste.

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SWG is more successful than WAR, so this isn't true. SWG was pretty good in the beginning, they just messed it up later on.

WAR was never any good to begin with to get messed up later on.

Originally posted by Honeymoon69

its simple, they cloned WoW instead of Daoc.

 

It not that simple at all. If they HAD just cloned WoW they'd probably have a couple of million players by now and a very healthy game seeing as the Warhammer name is just as loved as the Warcraft IP.

The problem is they didn't make a 'world' to live and level in, the entire game, as the OP stated, just felt bland and faceless with tiny claustrophobic zones - it felt like a forced theme park instead of an open living world.

By not giving us a three realm war.

what ended  was EA saying hurry the hell up. instead of delaying it and putting what they wanted and should have been in it.  it could have been great but it failed i tryed to give it hope many times by going back but i cant. maybe THQ warhammer 40k online will be much much much better

Even though I did buy this game and fell for the hype, I had had a sneaking suspicion that EA would be incapable of making a well-polished PvP game...they don't have enough patience for all types of games the way an MMO needs.

DAoC was a different time tbh.

In the beginning there was RvR and it was GOOD.

I'm talking in the real beginning, before realm ranks were even added to DAoC. You went out to defend your realm because it was YOUR realm. Honestly in DAoC keeps had no real purpose either at the games start. You got nothing for taking them or holding them (Bragging rites if your guild claimed) .. they were just there.

We went out to fight over them because it was a mortal insult to our realm to log on and see a red or blue keep (I played Hib initially) in our green lands. There was no "reason" for it. The Dev's did'ent reward us for it, pure realm pride motivated us (and the desire to kill some mids/albs!)

Sure later on they added realm ranks, they added XP bonuses around keeps and all that good stuff.

In the beginning though ... there was just RvR and it was GOOD.

These days, players want a reward for doing anything. Hell some want a reward for just logging in. Thats why WAR failed. There was no motivating pride in your side for the most part. Sure there were some old school DAoC players running around looking for the "good old days" but the vast majority were the "new breed" of MMO players. The loot-whores. The I-wants. The "Oh shiney!"

Trying to motivate that type to do anything was a pure waste of effort. We'd yell that keeps were under attack and get responces of "So?" and "let them have it .. we'll take it back later and get some gold bags" .. UGH.

DAoC eventually fell to the "reward me now" players too. There are still some motivated folks playing but most (Yer I went back to DAoC for abit after WAR) are just in it for the realm points or whatever.

As I said to start .. It was a different time. Gamers back then had a different attitude. We played for fun. We got invested in out characters and thier purpose. We had a sense of pride and community. Most of that is gone now .. just the shiney loot remains.