Originally posted by Pheace

Damn, seriously, I bought Wotlk on a midnight sale with a friend and I'm 72 ... you got to 80 in a week, lol, take it easy! :p

 

Granted I 've been playing a lot of other stuff at the moment and am a serious altoholic anyway :p

 

As for WAR, the biggest problems I'm hearing right now is the "Max people on screen" clipping range that bigger fights seem to have which means you won't see people till they'r epractically on top of you, and the fact that the servers crash when too many people gather in one place.

 

They really need to fix that stuff or this game will be writhing on the floor gurgling to it's death.

This is strange.  WAR has a lot of issues, and I've kept up on the boards with nearly all of them, but the ones you mention I've never encountered myself nor have I heard of anyone else encountering them.

Originally posted by Starbear

Honestly I'm rather excited about WiS, personaly not having a centeral avatar has kept me from commiting to EVE long term but with it on the horizon I've decided to give it another go. Personaly EVE has a very tought learning curve but so did StarQuest Online and I love that game. What makes me excited is the social aspects of WiS, the truth is I consider myself an RPer and I always had a lot of trouble finding ways and people to RP with in EVE since in reality all you were was a ship, but WiS will change that (I hope).

I would think that a true RPer would be able to RP a pilot in a ship.  I mean if you can't expand your imagination far enough to imagine you're in the ship you're seeing, are you really a true RPer? 

True RPers only need a pencil and paper, and sometimes not even that much.

Originally posted by hater88

tired of the online thing, gonna take a break, any suggestions?!

what others have said.  Fallout 3 or Mass Effect if you haven't played that yet.

And if you like shooters with rpg elements i.e. upgrading weapons, health, etc. I would say Dead Space is amazing too.

Originally posted by lorndarken

Originally posted by medafor

If Warhhammer sucks so bad then...

why do you naysayers and haters spend so much time in the warhammer forums? just wondering what are you trying to prove? please answer since 50% of the post here are anti warhammer? Is your life really that boring where all you want to do is talk about how much a game sucks. Wouldn't it be better to go to a forum discussing a game you like and talk about  positive things you like about that game?

 

ill answer your question and then with a follow up question .

1st , we hate what mythic did to the game,  we were hoping for a great rvr game that they were promising us

2nd we wanted to lose ourselfs while playing the game ,but instead we got 10 min pillow fight grinds with the addition of the scenarios, which is something borrow from wow,  why could mythic  borrow more from its on game instead of others ?

and now my question to you

if warhammer is so great, why are you even on the  forums ? , i mean you love this game so much, why are you not playing it right now ? instead you are defending a product that has failed.

and how it failed is because the rvr in this game is not even that complexed , the rvr is and has yet to see the glory days of what daoc use to dish out, i mean c'mon, if it  is so great  why is it that no one is playing it for the rvr and instead people scenario grind all day instead ?

Just thought you should know that the battlegrounds idea was originally in DAoC and also called "Battlegrounds" and they were instanced fights with level brackets. 

So the Scenarios are actually built on what DAoC had.  I just think they didn't realize how many people would do them.  They probably thought that they would be something that people would ignore and that the players needed more incentive to do scenarios than Open World RvR.  Turns out that the players need more incentives to do Open World RvR. 

With those incentives seemingly being put into place, I think the scenarios and Open world Rvr will balance out in the future.

Also, to declare this game as a Failure a month and a half out of the gate is very premature.  Even if the game does worse than Mythic expected and has around 250-300k subs, it's still not a failure.

I lol'd at this:

"there are no customization options (besides armor and trophies) to your char after creation"

Soooo you're saying "There are no customization options besides these customization options...."

Does putting them in parentheses make them disappear? (you can't see this)

Originally posted by Azrile

I found this article funny.  Apparently Jacobs didn't.  He is fuming over on another forum.. and has vowed to take the 'gloves off' when talking about WOW.

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/10/16/world-of-warcraft-game-director-on-warhammer-online

Apparently the offending part of the article was when the WOW developer questioned why a game would keep up an NDA until the launch of the game.  In my opinion, this is a very valid question.    You see this decision playing out on Warhammer since every city seige that has happened so far has been bugged and exploited.  When beta testers are 'hushed' there is no bully pulpit to get get glaring exploits fixed.

I also found it amusing that the WOW dev experienced a lot of what the rest of us did.   Very little RvR and the majority of the game is spent grinding scenarios.

I think the state of Warhammer is pretty apparent when the first 'state of the game' speech will come the day before first renewals and will amount to  'please don't quit'.   Maybe the second 'state of the game' speech will have a mop in the background and you can sing Baby come back..

 

The NDA was lifted well before release.  The beta testers did test the top tier content.  I have a friend who did, and told me that he loved it, and that it needed some tweaking.

I went into the game knowing exactly what to expect because they beta testers did test this content.

Originally posted by Azrile

By the way. Jacobs is a pretty smart guy.. he is going to have this huge ' state of the game' announcement hype right before the resub day which will promise a lot of fixes.   It's this type of deceptiveness that caused a lot of hate toward Funcom.   I think I'm going to do a video of it with the song "please don't go" playing in the background.

Deceptiveness??? Really?

Hasn't mythic already made changes based on the player base?  Haven't they already asked for player feedback?

Haven't they already done all the things that Funcom hasn't?

Why now are they still considered deceptive?

They haven't once said "We're going to put this in" and then weeks later it's still not in.

The empty promises thing doesn't really work with Mythic so far.

And to bodypass.  What exactly did Mythic market that was thin air?  So far I've seen everything they marketted in the game.

Even the mice that occasionally come out of chaos players when they're hit.

Originally posted by aubry

Originally posted by Newhopes

The drop off in population has only just started no matter what people tell you they will be fairly large drop off in the number off players in the next week or two as there free month runs out.

 

The drop this week was likely due to the release of WoW's new patch and a lot going back to check that out.  There will be a drop when the free month runs out like you said.  And there will be a big drop in 4 weeks when the WoW expansion is released.  However, a couple of months after that release, I would expect to see people starting to trickle back to WAR (as they get tired of the expansion).

You mean to go "try to log into WoW"?

I've heard from a lot of people that after that patch they couldn't even log in for 24 hours. lol

And to be on topic.  I have noticed no queues as often on volkmar, but I think that's due to people calming down their playtime, not people quitting the game.  Could just be wishful thinking though.  Either way I'm still able to find plenty of groups and things to do in-game on Volkmar.

Originally posted by ethion

I think a lot of what you suggest will occur now.

The biggest problem with war's community was a lack of the physical tools like a regional chat in game that worked.  So most of what you suggest wasn't possible until the patch yesterday.  Now that we have some regional chats that work we should see a lot more community development.

One think I gotta say about mythic is they do seem to do a nice job listening and steadily fixing things without making them worse each patch.  I think the Mythic people have their act together!

That's a lot of the reason why I didn't make any post about it until now.  The tools are available and it's time to stop saying that there isn't community and to start actually making the community ourselves. :)

Originally posted by bodypass

http://www.xfire.com/games/who/Warhammer_Online_Age_of_Reckoning/
 

One picture ... a 1000 words.

Beta numbers (Sep 16th).

Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

1. Yesterday was a patch day and the servers were also brought down a second time after the patch, so of course play time is low.

2. September 16th was when Standard Edition Head Start started, not Open Beta.....

Originally posted by bodypass

Originally posted by woody1974

 

Your post is full of false facts and "I love WOW rants" I read the entire thing and it was quite obvious that you either never played the game, played the game for 5 levels or just love WOW so much that your worried because a game that beats WOW in many ways is alive and doing well.

 

http://www.xfire.com/games/who/Warhammer_Online_Age_of_Reckoning/

Doing well in its free play period?

I very much doubt this. It has now reached a status where the same number of people play as in .... open Beta.

Final xfire response, and then I'll be on topic again.  If you take those xfire numbers to be relevant and you compare them to WoW's numbers, WAR has roughly 1/9th of WoW's xfire users.

4.5 mil WoW customers in NA and Europe.

500k subs isn't a bad thing at all, and is much more than what was in Open Beta.  So I'm not sure what you're trying to prove?

To be on topic...

The OP made some good points, but I think they're slightly skewed, since the appearance isn't necessarily all there is.

For instance, he states that the world is a theme park and there's no reason to go back to previous tiers. 

As others have stated, there are reasons to go back, and people are going back.  Just yesterday I had someone who was level 21 help me with a level 16 quest, just because I asked for some help in Region chat.  Whenever any of my fellow guild members make an alt, I go back and level with them for fun, because I enjoy the content.  There are high level things to discover in the early tiers, people just haven't done them yet.

And like I attempted to start a discussion about in a topic, the community hasn't been developed yet, and it needs the players to develop it.  This will be seen in the coming months as more people start chatting and grouping, and figuring out the game.

Interesting.  Now I know not to make a topic for discussion on the General Discussion boards.

I guess i should have titled it "WAR ROXORS AND ANYONE WHO THINKS OTHERWISE IS A NOOB!!!!"

or "I H8 DIS GAME!!!"

Oh well.  Bumping this for intelligent discussion on developing community in a month old game. :(

Originally posted by bodypass

Originally posted by checkthis500

Originally posted by bodypass

Originally posted by VultureSkull

What all this obsession with number of subs and xfire?

The game will have as many subs as it will have, if it requires server mergers than that will happen.

End of story

 

 

I was just pointing out that if you want to do a "hamburgerwise" MMORPG you need to have "hambergerwise" subs.

Now I am the FIRST one to dislike these "food" to MMO talk, but it was in answer to Professor Columbo above.

If you want to do something popular and the massive reaction of "millions" is not attained (read Mark Jacobs own words - 2 to 3 million over 2 years time), than that means the stuff just wasn't good enough for the mass market.

People are mostly more intelligent than game developpers think they are.

 

I think it's a bit early to talk about success, failure, and whether this game will be accepted by the masses to reach a 2 million mark in two years.
 

The game is obviously going to go through changes and iterations until it starts looking like they originally intended.  Some ideas take tweaking once you see that people are using those ideas as intended by the developers.

750,000 in 2 weeks, even if it drops to 500,000 or below after the first month is a good starting point for hitting a 2 million mark by two years.  Especially if they add in the cut classes, add in the cut cities, add content, continue refining the game, etc.  the game "could" be successful.

But again it's too early to say whether any of those things will happen, so it's still too early to tell.

 

Problem is that there are 20% (and I am moderate here) LESS players now than in the launching week, DESPITE an extra 250 K of "accounts created".

You may always hope of course, but sales are down and even 250 K extra players wasn't enough to hold on to the number of people playing.

Enter next week's subcription requirements and Nov 13th.

Those still dreaming of millions should asap wake up.
 

That's actually  not very accurate.  That drop of 20% in players is according to Xfire numbers.  Those extra 250k accounts were probably from your average person that goes to the store, sees it, and buys it. 
 

That person is more than likely not going to be using Xfire.

And again, millions at the end of 2 years is what people are dreaming about.  It's been 1 month.....  I hope you have some idea of how much can change in an MMO in 2 years.

Just thought I'd share some insight, since I"ve used the in-game petition thing and noticed some things.

If you enter a bug using the bug functionality, it says in your chat window "A CSR probably won't talk to you about this" so if you entered something as a bug then you're not going to hear from them.

If you enter an "appeal" using one of the appeal categories, depending on which one you choose you might get the same response in chat that you get for the bug.  i.e. "A CSR isn't going to contact you."

From what I've seen I think this works with Any kind of reporting of other players.  Because if you open an appeal (like I did about an item) then when you bring it back up there's a "view/append" to appeal button with a chat window.  Now I haven't used it, but I'm assuming that anything you put there, the CSRs would see as well. 

This is just what I've noticed.  I haven't had any issues other than that one item issue, and it was resolved within a day so I was pleased.

Originally posted by bodypass

Originally posted by VultureSkull

What all this obsession with number of subs and xfire?

The game will have as many subs as it will have, if it requires server mergers than that will happen.

End of story

 

 

I was just pointing out that if you want to do a "hamburgerwise" MMORPG you need to have "hambergerwise" subs.

Now I am the FIRST one to dislike these "food" to MMO talk, but it was in answer to Professor Columbo above.

If you want to do something popular and the massive reaction of "millions" is not attained (read Mark Jacobs own words - 2 to 3 million over 2 years time), than that means the stuff just wasn't good enough for the mass market.

People are mostly more intelligent than game developpers think they are.

 

I think it's a bit early to talk about success, failure, and whether this game will be accepted by the masses to reach a 2 million mark in two years.
 

The game is obviously going to go through changes and iterations until it starts looking like they originally intended.  Some ideas take tweaking once you see that people are using those ideas as intended by the developers.

750,000 in 2 weeks, even if it drops to 500,000 or below after the first month is a good starting point for hitting a 2 million mark by two years.  Especially if they add in the cut classes, add in the cut cities, add content, continue refining the game, etc.  the game "could" be successful.

But again it's too early to say whether any of those things will happen, so it's still too early to tell.

I never make new topics, but I was thinking about this the other day. 

I think this game has been out long enough that we can all stop complaining about what it "doesn't" have, accept it for what it is, and figure out how to make the best of what we got. (And believe it or not, we got a lot.)

There seem to be so many topics about the community in this game lacking, and about people not doing PQs, and not doing RvR, etc. so I decided to make this topic for people to read and then discuss.

First the Community.  I think a lot of people came to this game expecting a community to be in place.  This simply isn't the case.  The game is far too new for any community to have been established, and with the abysmal choices for chat channels, this makes things even worse.  This is where we come in, the community.  We have to develop the community ourselves.  With the addition of the Region Chat channel, there is now a very easy opportunity for all of us, yes us, to start up this community that the game needs. 

So read on, and feel free to add your own ideas for how this community can get going, given what we have.  Try not to complain about what the developers could add to create a community.  Focus on what we can do with what we already have to create the community ourselves.  It's not up to the developers to make us play together.

1. Help.  If you have a simple question about something, ask it in Region Chat.  While there probably should be a Help channel, you have to make do with what you have, and the use of the Region Chat channel for Help purposes would probably draw the developer's eye to this.  Also, in responses to people asking for help, be helpful.  This is a new game, we're all n00bs, and we all will have questions about something even though some of us are max level and the game's only been out a month.

2. LFG.  Regardless of how many open groups there are, there is still a great need for LFG.  If you haven't noticed, Open Groups either say PQ, PvE, or RvR, and this has nothing to do with what you're "actually" doing, so it's not very helpful.  Use the Region Chat, and RvR - Region Chat, and sending tells, to find out what people are up to, or to let people know what you're doing.  If you need help with a BO, then ask for it.  If you want to form up a Keep Siege, then let people know.  If you want to do PQs for a certain chapter then let people know.  Yes you'll have to do the leg work in most cases, but it will develop a sense of community and working together that is much needed in this fledgling game.

3. RvR.  Using the above suggestion of finding RvR warbands through Regional Chat, the Open Group system and also through plan ol' Sending Tells and seeing if people would be interested, get some Open World RvR going.  If there isn't anyone out in the RvR areas, take back any Battlefield Objectives you can, and if there's a keep that the opposing realm owns, just go up and attack the guards if you don't have a big enough warband to take the keep.  This will alert the other realm via the map (which more people check than you think) that the keep is under attack, and believe it or not, they'll come to defend it pretty quick.

So now I'm going to leave this thread open to other suggestions for how to develop community, how to work with others, and how to really get the RvR and Public Quests going, since we all know by now how population dependent the game is.

Please don't use this thread (or at least minimally) to complain about a lack of community or to bitch and moan about other things.  If you really feel that way, then start chatting up some people in-game, not on the forum.  This thread is intended to get people talking about how we, the community, can help to develop it even further and hopefully get something in place so that newcomers don't see what we've seen with a desolate community where it's hard to find groups.

While the OP is well-written and thought out, I'm going to have to disagree on all three points actually.  And in doing so post my experiences, since they seem to contradict.

1. While I agree the "chapter" theme gives the game a straight-forward, linear, themepark feel to it, there are actually several reasons to explore that I feel are overlooked by some.  Lairs, high level encounters hidden in each zone, are one reason.  I found one of these in Nordland and it was filled with rank 40 HERO mobs.  Which means it's designed as end-game content, yet it was in the starter zone.  ToK unlocks, and City Quests.  I picked up a couple City Quests in the Inevitable City that had me traveling to several zones, thus not on the path of the chapters.

My ideas to improve this are also pretty simple.  Lead people to the City Dungeons for one.  Just have a quest or several that requires people kill something in the City Dungeons that rewards them with a trophy or something else.  Most people don't realize that there's a City Dungeon available at Rank 9.

2. Open RvR.  I think this is honestly just a play style, and I think since most people come from WoW, they look at the Scenarios, and think that they are what Mythic intended RvR to be, not knowing about the importance and fun of Open World RvR.  This is all about presentation.  They've already made a change that ups the xp for player kills in Open RvR zones.  I think further tweaks would bring this inline with their original goal of Open RvR everywhere.

3. At rank 16 I've already run across several quests as a healer that I needed a group for.  The lack of communication is due to no community YET.  I say yet because a lot of people have come into this game expecting a community to be waiting for them like in other games that have been out. 

The bottom line is, YOU are the community that will be waiting for other people.  You're the ones that have to build it.  I've already seen community start to form with the addition of Region Chat.  There has already been people asking questions in Region Chat and getting helpful answers on my server.  Not to mention I was using it to form up groups for RvR.

So with this wall of text my point is mainly that the tools to do everything you desire are there, you just have to discover them.  If you want to explore, there are reasons.  There are quests off the beaten path.  There are hidden quests that have no quest giver (I've already found one or two of these).  There are lairs.

If you want Open RvR, just start typing in Regional chat that you're forming up a warband for Open RvR.  Back when it was Chapter Chat, I physically ran to all the chapters and recruited people.  It took me about 10 minutes to have a full warband sieging a keep.  The tools are now even easier with Region chat.  But YOU the budding community have to do the leg work.  You have to start recruiting people and inviting them.

And with quests.  While all are pretty much soloable, and PQs are some times desolate.  Again, just use the functionality that's there.  It's easy to form a group for PQs.  Really easy.  Most people will come down from higher chapters and group up with you to help you run through them.  And they're a blast when you get a group together doing them.  Just make an Open Group and broadcast in region chat what you're doing, and see if you don't get responses.

I hope this offers a different perspective, and maybe some ideas for bettering people's playing experience.

Originally posted by blissever

 ??

Does Warhammer have an official forum, I cant seem to find it on their website.

Bliss

There's a link on the Herald that says "Forums and Fansites" under Community.

The devs frequent all of those forums.  (I hope) Even though they don't post it would seem that some of the most recent changes had a lot of voice from the customers in them, and other than in-game and Hearld feedback, the forums would be where they got this feedback.

Originally posted by bodypass

Originally posted by checkthis500

Here's something fun to think about:

If xfire players is a good sample of the population.  That's a big IF, but we're going to assume Orionman is correct.

WoW's current numbers are around 90k.  WAR's current numbers are around 12k.  So roughly 1/8th of the numbers.

Also someone mention that Xfire is available in Europe and North America.  So going by MMOGchart numbers.  Europe and North America combined has WoW sitting at 8 million accounts.

Now if we're to say that WAR has 1/8th of the accounts WoW has going by the numbers on xfire for users, we can say that WAR has 1 million accounts.  And if this is failing, then I don't know what failing is.

If we however use another projection.  90k is 8 million * .01125.  So if we take 12k and divide it by .01125 we get 1.06 million accounts.

And if we're going to assume that Orionman is accurate with his xfire numbers.  Then WAR has over a million accounts.

So I'd just like to say thank you to Orionman for letting us know how successful WAR is. :)

 

One Problem in your enthousiastic reasoning....

Wow has 4.5 million subscriptions in US/EU, not 8. As not all will be playing now before the expansion of Wow, while WAR is new you should roughly take 4 million

So divided by 8 .... would mean : 500 K users for WAR only.

Now enters the best part: Mythic said 750 K "accounts created"  - whatever that means - on Oct 10th (and 500K on the first 24/48 hours).

So that means already 33% of WAR are no longer playing even before the free play time runs out.

It IS intersting to read that there are LESS players playing War (Xfire wise) than on the launching date and weekend. .... but ...

after 3 weeks their number of players has incresed with 50% according to Mythic.

..... This can only mean .... 250 K are no longer playing.

But yes a rating of about 40/50 K on Xfire could mean about 500 K active players (not subscribers but active players), as AoC also had 400 K subscribers at that period they had 40/50 K Xfire players (end of June).

So the number IS 500K not 1 M like you deducted.

 

Ouch, you got me.  It is 500k.  Bah.  Like I said before quick math could be wrong. :p

Asia != Europe :p

Europe + NA = 4.5 million from mmogchart.com.  I'll edit my original post and put it here as well.

562000 is the right number. :p

Which makes more sense, since new MMOs have a drop off. 

Yarg.  Oh well, my point still somewhat stands.  500k subs isn't that bad 3.5 weeks after launch.

Thanks for pointing that out.  My goal wasn't misinformation. :)

Originally posted by gestalt11

Scenario play is currently much to rewarding and is definitely cutting into RvR.

 

Also Order is vastly out numbered and getting hosed by a large number of extremely inhibiting bugs and imbalances in T4.   If the game is not 75% destruction soon I will be surprised. 

 

Lastly populations are completely screwed and the amount of RvR can vary wildly depennding on population and the character of the guilds on the server.

 

Don't play this game for RvR yet.  Seriously.  Its a disaster.  It might recover but a lot of damage has been done and is continuing to be done.  And 2/3 of the active playerbase is hellbent on making it worse.

It seems like several of those bugs in Tier 4 have been fixed as of today.

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsOverview.war

It notes the postern door fixes as well as other fixes.

Judging by the speed at which they're addressing these problems I think we'll be fine.