I think as far as zones/outposts it is probably even.  There are a bunch of zones in the 10-40 level on the Eastern Cont that are entirely alliance.

If I were in your shoes, I'd level alliance  just so I'd see all the zones that have no horde content at all.  There are other zones that are completely different for alliance also.    Zones like Tanaris are similar for horde or alliance, but zones like Feralas and Dustwallow are completely different.

Originally posted by ethion

Lots of people talk about the cost of development and investors getting their money back.  You do know that investors don't get any money back.  Investors get some ownership in the company.  If the company succeeds that value goes up if it fails the value goes down.  Almost never are investments made that are paid back.  That is called a loan not an investment... 

AoC needs to only be profitable and grow their business.  Investors are looking at the long term and the stock price is the measure of the value of their investment.  This isn't to say that funcom might not have some debt it just isn't to likely that a small company without a solid profit statement or a lot of assets is going to be able to get a lot of loans.

So if funcom can generate a $1M a month in cash to pay operating expenses they should be ok to run an office with 50-100 employees.  Course this does depend on what the game operating costs are.  Thats something that is really hard to say.  Did they buy servers, lease them, are they in a data center where they rent space or in a dedicated facility, how much bw does aoc use and how much does it cost.  How much disk space is consumed by servers and what is the growth rates...  etc

So if funcom has 100k subs they should be doing quite well.

If they have 100k subs.. the company is treading water.   100k subs is enough to maintain the servers and pay for customer service.  It is not enough to pay for devs or a QA team.   If you want proof of this, look at the last 5 patches.  There is barely anything in them, and they are bugged.  Forget about what they are promising (pvp).. look at what they have done in the past two months.  Absolutely nothing.    AoC is on life support.

Now lets look at Funcom as a company.  Their stock today broke below $20 per share.  That means nobody has made any money by holding this company.  The 3 year low is $18.    Most people who bought this stock are now at a loss.

Funcom has had negative cash-flow for about 2 years now, they are in debt, they have a bad reputation with their customers and with their stockholders.   Where are they going to get the money to make another game.  Normal companies have two choices.... cash flow and stock offerings.    Funcom has 'survived' this long by stock offerings and making people think they would be rewarded when AOC launched. That didn't happen.    There is no brokerage that would support ANOTHER stock offering in Funcom.

When you go that long without positive cash flow, build up that much debt, and then lose money for your investors.. you are not left with any options.

Originally posted by fuzzylojik

Originally posted by Azrile

You keep saying Warhammer pvp is good and it has decent pve?  You get all that from a closed beta?  PvP is difficult to fine tune and balance is everything. 

You also keep saying WOW is 'declining' when just two months ago, they announced they have reached 10.9 million subscribers.  Not only that, but Vanilla WOW, The expansion AND the battle chest all are on the top 10 PC sales non-stop.  Those are new players buying the game.  WOW is still growing it's subscriber base.

You also make an assumption that pvp is bad in WOW.  Again, play WOW and queue for the Arena or the battlegrounds.  On every server there are 100's of players doing both at any given time.    Right now, not even at endgame, I can queue for AV and get into a 40v40 game within 10 minutes.  There are a lot of people who enjoy pvp in WOW.

And just because a game is new, doesn't mean it will 'improve' the features of an older game.  Funcom did many of the same things that WOW did, but they didn't improve on anything except graphics.

 

The proposed PvP content is in WAR is good.  Whether it succeeds or not depends on how good they follow through, good gameplay and stable servers. 

WoW's endgame PvP content is limited to 4 BGs and arena.  It is limited, instanced, item centric, repetitive and lacks purposeful world PvP.  Many people who PvP in WoW do it because there are lack of options out there now.  I know many who quit because they did not like the PvP content.  It's missing the "massive" in MMO PvP. 

WoW missed out on the whole Horde vs. Alliance possiblities of large scale world battles which mattered for any reason other than item farming.  There is really no point to capture an enemies main city in WoW or even attack it other than fun.  There is no PvP progression or point to world PvP since the best gear is obtained through instancing.

You're in the middle of a large scale all out bloody war between the horde and alliance battling for the survival with allies forced to band together because of the mutual threat.  This could have been such a good PvP game with epic battles.  Instead, it became an instanced item grindfest with people only caring about gear and not about any progression of their side.

WARs PvP ideas are good, core PvP-centric balancing, PvP levelling and progression, PvP quests, capturable and claimable keeps and cities, PvE and PvP contributing to the RvR effort, many more scenarios (BGs) than WoW on release, more objective based endgame world PvP.

The ideas are good, which is what most people are saying.  The implementation of the idea and the quality of gameplay will ultimatle determine the success of the game.

WARs task is easy....

1) provide more PvP content than 4BGs and arena.

2) any form of endgame purposeful world PvP objectives

3) quality gameplay + stable servers

WAR has a good chance if they do all these things right.  On paper, it's PvP is already far superior to WoWs.

But at the same time,  probably 75% of WOW players just want to PvE and don't want the fact that their 'teammates' lost to negatively impact their gameplay.  " What do you mean I can't do the endgame dungeons because my side is getting crushed in pvp".    For every negative things you say about pvp in WOW ( it has no overall consequence.. there is no horde vs allaince)..  I will show a negative part of pve that having those features will cause in Warhammer. 

Also.. just because warhammer pvp is more involved, does not mean WOW pvp isn't good.  I personally love doing AV.  Yes, I'm looking forward to Warhammer PvP.. but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy WOW pvp.  I just don't understand why people think WOW is so terrible when 4 years after launch, it subscriber base is still growing and people queue nonstop to pvp.

Originally posted by syxx

Originally posted by Azrile

Originally posted by syxx

Lets just say it doesnt matter what spec in WOW you are, you still need gear to be efficient in certain places.

Mythic already officially stated gear will only be 20-30% of what your character is capable of.

WoW right now is prolly about at 75% gear and thats an estimate from a player thats been playing since launch.

 

75% is overstated.  The difference between S4 gear (best you can get right now) and S2 gear (basically what anyone can get) is maybe 3-5% difference in DPS and Health.   A good pvper can easily over come that vs an average player.  It's really the same as class balance... in 1v1 fights,  certain classes have an advantage against certain other classes, but a good player can always beat an average player.

In fact, I bet if you take a good pvper and put him in S1 gear (really outdated), he would win most of his matches even against handpicked gear and class of his opponent.

 

Its not overstated if you think about it.

Lets say you just hit level 70 on your mage and you have +450 fire damage (fire specced).

Since its S4 like you said if you just started pvping your facing other mages that have 248 base damage just off the S4 gear alone..+ resil,stam,intellect etc. you dont have a chance in the world.

Hell you could almost say its 100% gear based cause your not going to kill someone with s4 gear while you just hit 70...

Its all gear in WoW... i dont care how much skill you have because if someone rightfully obtained their s4 gear you arent going to kill them by yourself.

Let's put that in perspective.    If someone rightfully got S4 gear.. that means they've been pvping at lvl 70 for a few months.  Do you really think a player that has just reached lvl 70 'should' beat that player.  A new level 70 player hasn't even pvp'd with all of their skills.   It's not about the gear.. its about a player with months of experience pvping vs a character with little experience.

Lets take that scenario and magically give the new lvl 70 character S4 gear..  so now they are equally geared.  The experienced player will still destroy the inexperienced player 100% of the time... the only difference is it will take about 5 seconds longer ( 2spells).   Even if you reverse it and give the experienced pvper crap gear, they will still beat an overly geared average player.

Originally posted by Baltus

The discussion between which is better at this point is a little silly, especially since not a lot of people have played WAR and the once that have can't talk about it.  

Trying to convince a person that WAR is good when they hate it is like trying to convince an Giant's fan to now root for the Cowboys.    War is not better or worst that WoW, it is different as PB said on a video, if WoW is the Beatles then WAR is the Rolling Stones and that is about it, there is a market for both games and I honestly belive that WAR will do good.

As simple as this, WoW is a PvE centric game with poor PvP (we all can agree on that at least) and WAR is PvP centric with some well thought PvE.  that doesn't mean WAR is better is just means is a  newer game with improved features and a different focus.  every game that comes out brings out new things and if the developers are smart, will improve them, that is why WoW took good stuff from previous games and made it better.   That is why now the WoW expansion will feature sieges, which wont be as good as WAR's just because the game doesn't have the base to do that, they can tweek the engine but it is not the same as building it from the ground up.

WoW is an old game and it is declining,  that is why Blizzard is developing a new mmo, if WoW was still the top game in features they would just develope more expansions,  another thing we have to realize is that better game doesn't always equals more subriptions.   WoW is now for the mmo's what the Ipod is for the mp3 players, there might be better ones but evereybody wants an Ipod.

like everything, there will come a game, it might be war, it might be another game later on that will take the crown from WoW, that is also something that is bound to happen, maybe in 1 year maybe in 4, we just have to wait and see.

 

one thing is sure, WAR is a quality game with lot's of great features and it is VERY well thought out and designed and I can attest to that.

 

 

 

You keep saying Warhammer pvp is good and it has decent pve?  You get all that from a closed beta?  PvP is difficult to fine tune and balance is everything. 

You also keep saying WOW is 'declining' when just two months ago, they announced they have reached 10.9 million subscribers.  Not only that, but Vanilla WOW, The expansion AND the battle chest all are on the top 10 PC sales non-stop.  Those are new players buying the game.  WOW is still growing it's subscriber base.

You also make an assumption that pvp is bad in WOW.  Again, play WOW and queue for the Arena or the battlegrounds.  On every server there are 100's of players doing both at any given time.    Right now, not even at endgame, I can queue for AV and get into a 40v40 game within 10 minutes.  There are a lot of people who enjoy pvp in WOW.

And just because a game is new, doesn't mean it will 'improve' the features of an older game.  Funcom did many of the same things that WOW did, but they didn't improve on anything except graphics.

Originally posted by syxx

Originally posted by Azrile

Warhammer has about a month before WotLK is launched.   I think a lot of it will have to do with Lake Winterspring when it is launched in beta in a few weeks.  There are already videos floating around of WOW's seige weapons and they look fun.   My guess is that most serious WOW pvp'ers ( yes, I can say that with a straight face) will come to Warhammer on Sept 18 and try it.  I also think they will have their eye on the WotLK beta.

It will all come down to how polished Warhammer is during that first month.   If the pvp is bugged, unpolished and imbalanced, I don't think most WOW players will risk falling behind in WotLK hoping Warhammer gets fixed.  There is a huge advantage in WOW to getting to endgame pvp early.

I honestly think Warhammer has the potential to maintain over a million subscribers if it is balanced when launched.  I think WotLK will really limit how long Warhammer has to fix problems though.

 

The problem with this is its still going to be that boring game at level 80 after you run everything a few times. In my opinion all this content is too many years late for blizzard and WoW.

People got turned on to pvp by blizzard as an alternative to raiding and now even more want pvp and theres no better place to go for it then WAR.

WoW will forever be focused on pve, those pve guys that can raid all the time will stay if all of their friends stay in WoW.

Right now though all those pvpers are gonna be flocking to WAR with their friends and their friends, friends for massive pvp battles. Everyone see's WoW now as pve and WAR as pvp  in my opinion.

I stated that probably all the serious pvpers will come to Warhammer on Sept 18... but they will also have their eye on  Lake Wintergrasp, which will be the equivelant of an endgame tier in Warhammer.  There will also be a new battleground.  Don't forget that Blizzard is not full of dummies.  All of those hardcore pvpers will be the ones getting beta keys for WotLK.

There is also the inertia factor.   A player is more likely to stay in a game that he is familiar with and has an invested interest in.   Look at  all the terrible games out there kicking around with 50k subscribers who are so invested they will never leave.

Originally posted by syxx

Lets just say it doesnt matter what spec in WOW you are, you still need gear to be efficient in certain places.

Mythic already officially stated gear will only be 20-30% of what your character is capable of.

WoW right now is prolly about at 75% gear and thats an estimate from a player thats been playing since launch.

75% is overstated.  The difference between S4 gear (best you can get right now) and S2 gear (basically what anyone can get) is maybe 3-5% difference in DPS and Health.   A good pvper can easily over come that vs an average player.  It's really the same as class balance... in 1v1 fights,  certain classes have an advantage against certain other classes, but a good player can always beat an average player.

In fact, I bet if you take a good pvper and put him in S1 gear (really outdated), he would win most of his matches even against handpicked gear and class of his opponent.

Warhammer has about a month before WotLK is launched.   I think a lot of it will have to do with Lake Winterspring when it is launched in beta in a few weeks.  There are already videos floating around of WOW's seige weapons and they look fun.   My guess is that most serious WOW pvp'ers ( yes, I can say that with a straight face) will come to Warhammer on Sept 18 and try it.  I also think they will have their eye on the WotLK beta.

It will all come down to how polished Warhammer is during that first month.   If the pvp is bugged, unpolished and imbalanced, I don't think most WOW players will risk falling behind in WotLK hoping Warhammer gets fixed.  There is a huge advantage in WOW to getting to endgame pvp early.

I honestly think Warhammer has the potential to maintain over a million subscribers if it is balanced when launched.  I think WotLK will really limit how long Warhammer has to fix problems though.

Originally posted by Sain34

Originally posted by Azrile

Originally posted by Raunu

Honestly, if you really think that a Shamen and Warrior Priest feel like the same class... Then thats just too bad for you.  Just wait till you play the game and compare the two classes for yourself.

You can say this about ANY MMO, there are only 4 Arch types and whatever class you pick will fall into one of these or maybe a combination of them.

For instance if you pick up a bow and shoot people, you fall into the ranged arch type.
Pick up some heavy armor, a sword and shield then you will fall into the tank arch type and so on.
 

If you're really that jaded with MMOs then don't play them. Even with Sandbox games your character will fall into these Arch types.

Honestly, all these people making gloom and doom posts and saying things that are true of many if not all popular MMOs. 

 

But that can be said about WOW too.    An affliction Warlock and a Destruction Warlock are almost completely different (they even need different gear).    An Enhancement Shaman is completely different from an Elemental Shaman.   A Moonkin Druid is completely different than a Feral Druid.   A Shadow Priest is completely different than a Holy Priest.

While it is probably inaccurate to say that Warhammer only really has 6-8 classes.. it's just as inaccurate to say that WOW only has 9 classes.

 

The argument is "what do you consider a class" because I can come out and say that WoW or any other game for that matter only has 4 classes, Tank. healer. MeleeDPS and MagicDPS  and I would be correct.

 

And that is exacly my point in my original post.   If you hate WOW, you are going to say that wow has only 9 classes and Warhammer has 20+.   If you are anti-warhammer, you are going to point out that many of Warhammers different classes are actually the same.  It all comes down to what your bias is. 

My point is simply that the difference between an elemental shaman and an enhancement shaman is probably going to be greater than the difference in two of the classes in Warhammer.

I'm not talking masteries and talents.  Those are subtle changes to a class that add a few things.  In other words, I wouldn't claim that a fire mage and a frost mage are two different classes in WOW.. since the basic gameplay is very similar.  However, in the examples I gave above.. the gameplay is so completely different that the 'specs' might as well be a different class. 

Originally posted by Raunu

Honestly, if you really think that a Shamen and Warrior Priest feel like the same class... Then thats just too bad for you.  Just wait till you play the game and compare the two classes for yourself.

You can say this about ANY MMO, there are only 4 Arch types and whatever class you pick will fall into one of these or maybe a combination of them.

For instance if you pick up a bow and shoot people, you fall into the ranged arch type.
Pick up some heavy armor, a sword and shield then you will fall into the tank arch type and so on.
 

If you're really that jaded with MMOs then don't play them. Even with Sandbox games your character will fall into these Arch types.

Honestly, all these people making gloom and doom posts and saying things that are true of many if not all popular MMOs. 

But that can be said about WOW too.    An affliction Warlock and a Destruction Warlock are almost completely different (they even need different gear).    An Enhancement Shaman is completely different from an Elemental Shaman.   A Moonkin Druid is completely different than a Feral Druid.   A Shadow Priest is completely different than a Holy Priest.

While it is probably inaccurate to say that Warhammer only really has 6-8 classes.. it's just as inaccurate to say that WOW only has 9 classes.

I think the WOW effect will be perfectly balanced

A) On one side their will be players that will hate War just because they will expect it to be like WOW.  Anything 'missing' will be brought up.  Everything will be seen in 'wow' terms.  Any class that casts dot's will be the new 'warlock' etc et

B) On the other side you will have the wow-haters who will love any game that isn't WOW.  Anything that is done differently than WOW will be seen as an improvement.

The A type players will see 4 classes... the B type players will brag about 20 classes. 

Me personally, I think the WOW lovers are right about this.  the 20 classes mainly seem like 4 classes with a few 'racials'.   Kinda like an undead Priest plays very differently than a NE priest in PvP.

Originally posted by mbd1968

I sat watching that video open mouthed,,, in shock not awe...why would I play a fantasy game so I can drive round in a Humvee with a rocket launcher.  If this is what WotLK has to offer I won't be buying. I'm officially killing time until something better is released.

I dunno.. I think it looked pretty awesome.  Remember bombing runs?  It's not like you suddenly stopped running around doing quests and all you did was bombing runs..  The same will be true about vehicles/mounts.  It will just be another way for the devs to mix up questing a bit.  I know it sounded really cool when they talked about the 'escort' quest where you ride the NPC away from enemies on a horse as you 'bombed' those persuing you.

I like the fact that they are adding more technology to allow them to get away from the ' kill x' type quests as much as possible.

Originally posted by Xenosaiyan

I hope they don't shut down AoC, I just want it to become F2P, also

Independence day Online

I don't think they will shut down AoC.. it will become like Anarchy Online.   I still never understood why EA shut down Earth and Beyond.  It had a rocky launch.. but it was one of those games that actually got better after the first month.   A year after launch, it still had 50k subscribers who were for the most part very happy.

None of those games every got over 50k subscribers.  I don't think they are really major titles.

Are there any other games that have completely closed down ( I'm talking about games that came from major companies).

Asheron's Call 2
Earth and Beyond

My defintion of a good lauch.

At the end of your free month, have you.

1. Cancelled the game
2. Emailed your friends trying to get them to play!

I only ever started two MMORPG's at their launch ( UO and WOW), and all I can say is that with both games, I could't wait to get my friends in game with me.

After the first month of AoC.. did anyone email real-life friends and try to get them to join AOC?

The 20% mark is accurate, it came from Funcom themselves.  Basically they said on sales in NA and western Europe they get  20% while sales in Eastern Europe is less than that.

I'm not sure how much this relates to the current times.. but about 6 years ago, a tech person at UO said that the cost of bandwidth and maintaining servers accounted for about 50% of a players monthly subscription fee.  This did not include the development team, just  the back end stuff.  This was when UO had about 250k subscribers...  I'm guessing that it scales upwards a little bit, just because staffing...ie.. it probably takes the same number of people to maintian 10 servers as it does to maintain 50.

Which is why I think once you get down to 100k subscribers, you probably are using most of your subscription fees on server/tech people rather than developers.  I've never seen a game with under 150k subscribers have free, regular content like WOW and LoTRO.   They always are on life support and just sell an expansion every year.

There are two big differences between WOW at launch and AoC at launch

1.  Blizzard was known as a company that put out great, polished games.  Funcom had a pretty terrible reputation from the AO launch

2.  Blizzard's problem meant they were making a ton of money.  They simply had too many players paying them to play the game.  It was easy to figure out that it made sense for them to shell out some money and add servers.  You knew the problem was going to get fixed.   AoC on the other hand now has a half-finished, bugged game.. and their subscriber base is dropping rapidly... where are they going to get the money to pay for the developers to fix anything?

Wow double its player base every 3 months for the first year.  AoC is probably losing half it's subscribers every month.

Funcom is just a bunch of kids that have no idea how to make a game.  The only thing they did was hype and brag.

OMG.. does anyone remember the comment made about " Wow being fast-food and AoC being a steak dinner?"   LOL

Wow, talk about bad timing.

Just today Funcom released a statement, in it they said they only get about 20% of box sales.  Assuming they sold 800k boxes (probably about right) that means they made about 8 million from the game.  Unfortunatly for them, this game cost 40 million to make.   Even assuming 1.5 million in box sales, that still means they are 25 million in the hole.