Nice try to spin that one lmao... New games with server merges are NOT "working as intended"... Far from it. I don't think WAR is going to be shut down anytime soon but they clearly anticipated more subscribers than what they actually achieved. Moving people from server to server is never ideal.
What if a game company wanted to do an innovative approach. Have starting servers where characters stay for N amount of time (say 30 days and/or levels) and then get promoted to a long term server of the user's choice. I see some advantages.
1) Since it is for the lower level characters, starting players and trial accounts, the low level areas could be busier than they current way of running games. 2) Trial accounts would be limited to this area, and not be able to spam your long term servers.
3) Players could find their friends and coordinate a move to a long term server. I've seen people complain they they picked a server and their friends picked a different one.
I personally do not run xfire (or any other background application I can shut off) while playing WAR. I want the graphics set high AND want high frame rates. Xfire cuts into performance....although i don't know to what degree. As someone else said, XFire stats reflect XFire users. I would be hesitant to extrapolate that data to a "universal" pronouncement.
That's all I have to say as I must relog into WAR. It's a whole lot more fun to play the game than to read much of the venom spewed here. Honestly haters, do you really feel you are changing the world with your rants?
Originally posted by Handa That's all I have to say as I must relog into WAR. It's a whole lot more fun to play the game than to read much of the venom spewed here. Honestly haters, do you really feel you are changing the world with your rants?
People who love the game, play the game.
They do not see these forums.
The vast majority of people that post here merely preach to the choir.
On that account...
Are forums, then, comparable to X-fire in terms of being used to to represent how well the game is doing?
I'm glad at MBJ's statement, good to see it, and you are right...
Time to relog in and get my guild together to go take some objectives from Destruction.
Enough is enough and i think yhis is enough, people get serious! Does the % number of population contributes to your happyness? Like What Would we care about Subscribers Drop or Rise... it's like we won't quit just because someone did... You love the game and you will still love, it's "our" own choice, not yours.
Quit whining about the numer of subscribers.
whiners gone ...
Roses are gray Violets are green, I love your legs... And what's BETWEEN!
Nice try to spin that one lmao... New games with server merges are NOT "working as intended"... Far from it. I don't think WAR is going to be shut down anytime soon but they clearly anticipated more subscribers than what they actually achieved. Moving people from server to server is never ideal.
Says who?
I would rather have a server merge than a bad launch. And technicaly its not a server merge. But a character transfer service. Theres a difference. Notice how they point out its free right now. Its a common pay service. And you will have to pay for it later on.
This isn't a case of "technically" something that has a false appearance of what it truely is. These are server mergers that give players the choice of where to move and don't shut down the old servers yet.
No company wants to have 20 empty servers that they advise people not to make new characters there and/or move their old characters off. I also doubt a company wants to announce server mergers only a few weeks after launch, which is why they are dressing it up as free transfers. It is smart marketing to make it appear to be something other than mergers, but the reality is what just that. Even though it will be generally viewed as the kiss of death (even as Mythic stated in an interview), it is the right thing to do for the health of the game. I've been enjoying the game more since the mergers to be honest.
I don't think the game is going to die or anything like that, but I sure don't believe mythic over estimated the number of servers by roughtly 40% considering how they won't shut up about their great sales numbers.
I am putting War on hold until they sort out the server pops but I feel that its easier to merge the servers than it is to deal with the long waits to get on. Our guild were getting wait times of over 2 hours on our server and this made it really impractical to play so we moved servers - now we find ourselves on a low pop server where we cant get any scenarios and the pqs are empty. If they sort out this problem we will all go back because we love the game - In the meantime we have gone back to WoW.
I started my WAR gaming days on the second largest EU server in Order side. Up to a certain point I was experiencing queues and the server was listing both sides as high/high. Then something happened and the queues disappeared and the server listing went from high/high to med/med. There are three possible explanations. I fear that only Mythic knows for sure:
They didn't know how many people the servers could handle. They saw that the the servers could handle double the load that they had originally anticipated and hence lowered the server cap on all servers.
They lost almost half their subscription base once the box month was over.
They knew how many people the servers could handle. However, they kept the server cap artificially low, because a big number of full servers looks good for marketing purposes.
For one reason or the other, the spark was gone on the server I was. It seems that the original server cap was actually the critical size needed for the game to be fun. So the fun was going down the more I levelled and the fewer people I had to play with. It became so stagnant, that I had either two choices:
Leave the people that I came to know and like for a new server or,
Leave the game and come back once the server issues were resolve.
My comeback will be after the holiday season, if at all. The game is heavily dependant on a healthy server population. Once they decided on the max amount of people that could play on a server, they were in trouble. The problem is that the original population cap was too small for the game to be fun, which left them with the majority of servers in a non-fun status. Apart from the servers that kept growing once the server cap was doubled, every other server was dying. Slowly but steadily.
Now, server transfers is another cover up for server merges. It seems that Mythic is more interested in the game image than in it's health. There is only one problem that would create issues due to the server merge and that's castle ownership. But castles change hands on an hourly base, so it's not that big of an issue anyway. So, instead of merging two average servers and create one healthy one, they chose to let the players do the merge. The problem is that some of them will choose to leave the game, looking at the mismanagement from this very early in the game's life. From my point of view it seems that the WAR developers are more interested in the marketing image than the game health. And that''s never good news.
I started my WAR gaming days on the second largest EU server in Order side. Up to a certain point I was experiencing queues and the server was listing both sides as high/high. Then something happened and the queues disappeared and the server listing went from high/high to med/med. There are three possible explanations. I fear that only Mythic knows for sure:
They didn't know how many people the servers could handle. They saw that the the servers could handle double the load that they had originally anticipated and hence lowered the server cap on all servers. They lost almost half their subscription base once the box month was over. They knew how many people the servers could handle. However, they kept the server cap artificially low, because a big number of full servers looks good for marketing purposes.
For one reason or the other, the spark was gone on the server I was. It seems that the original server cap was actually the critical size needed for the game to be fun. So the fun was going down the more I levelled and the fewer people I had to play with. It became so stagnant, that I had either two choices:
Leave the people that I came to know and like for a new server or, Leave the game and come back once the server issues were resolve.
My comeback will be after the holiday season, if at all. The game is heavily dependant on a healthy server population. Once they decided on the max amount of people that could play on a server, they were in trouble. The problem is that the original population cap was too small for the game to be fun, which left them with the majority of servers in a non-fun status. Apart from the servers that kept growing once the server cap was doubled, every other server was dying. Slowly but steadily. Now, server transfers is another cover up for server merges. It seems that Mythic is more interested in the game image than in it's health. There is only one problem that would create issues due to the server merge and that's castle ownership. But castles change hands on an hourly base, so it's not that big of an issue anyway. So, instead of merging two average servers and create one healthy one, they chose to let the players do the merge. The problem is that some of them will choose to leave the game, looking at the mismanagement from this very early in the game's life. From my point of view it seems that the WAR developers are more interested in the marketing image than the game health. And that''s never good news.
I would vote for "best post of the week".
But replace Mythic with EA on this one. EA is in need of a succes in the MMO branche these days and they were the ones that needed that minimum 20% piece of the cake in this field before the calender year ends.
Poor MJ is but a punching ball in the middle of a giant "corporate" battle between Activision/Blizzard and EA .... and within EA itself I am sure. The man of Myhtic is merely getting the punches and tries to defend his product in between those fights. I don't think he has the capacity to be on top of this.
This is no longer about having good MMORPG's, this is ALL about market shares and hyping financial stuff.
EA was set out to have that 20% market share and everything shows. The NEED to publish it months in advance of WotLK (deleting content), the hype of "most pre-ordered EA game yet", the 800K fix, the million set goal.
While no one even notices that EA Spore just outsold War for its 1st fiscal quarter that ended Sep 30. 2.000.000 copies in 3 weeks that game made for EA.
So "it" didnt happen and all the rest is now damage control and certainly some heavy internal EA discussions about saving the "marketing image" at all costs.
Frankly ignoring the thing everyone can see (downward trends both in sales and players and empty servers) shows just how much the "marketing machinery" falters
Apparently EA doesn't have a plan B and now it's up to MJ to save the furniture.
That's why these discussions are important. Gameplay is the least of the worries of EA. Believe me, the only thing that counts are the finances. Blizzard stumbled by accident into that goldmine (I really think they just wanted to make a good game back then for 500K players).
But NOW everyone just wants to have a share of that gold,.... gameplay is not even important (they think...).
I started my WAR gaming days on the second largest EU server in Order side. Up to a certain point I was experiencing queues and the server was listing both sides as high/high. Then something happened and the queues disappeared and the server listing went from high/high to med/med. There are three possible explanations. I fear that only Mythic knows for sure:
They didn't know how many people the servers could handle. They saw that the the servers could handle double the load that they had originally anticipated and hence lowered the server cap on all servers. They lost almost half their subscription base once the box month was over. They knew how many people the servers could handle. However, they kept the server cap artificially low, because a big number of full servers looks good for marketing purposes. They knew that the starting areas would be very crowded at launch, so putting an artifical limited would helped to ensure that people were not standing on each others feet
For one reason or the other, the spark was gone on the server I was. It seems that the original server cap was actually the critical size needed for the game to be fun. So the fun was going down the more I levelled and the fewer people I had to play with. It became so stagnant, that I had either two choices:
Leave the people that I came to know and like for a new server or, Leave the game and come back once the server issues were resolve.
Now, server transfers is another cover up for server merges. It seems that Mythic is more interested in the game image than in it's health. There is only one problem that would create issues due to the server merge and that's castle ownership. How you can ignore something like "choice" is beyond me. Maybe I want to choose the server that my character is moved to. That is not the same as server merges. And from a practical point of view, this system - char transfer - is in fact much more self regulating than forcing two servers together. I actually think the way they handled this is quite nice - moving everyone from low pop servers to med pop servers, rather then merging 2 low pop servers to maybe yield another med pop server. There are other possible outcomes and combinations, but overall just allowing char transfers to med pop servers to get more high pop servers seems the most reasonable and logistically most feasible thing to me.
War seems to be travelling along quite well and my guildies and me except for two are playing it and will never play WOW again. I don't play it as much as i did as WOW and don't feel the need to, that is a great thing for me.
I think a lot of people that are subscribed to War do the same thing, they play it but not as much as they did WOW or the mmo they came from.
Xfire is mainly used by people who often jump from game to game but people like me who almost purely play mmo's don't really need to run Xfire. I wouldn't say Xfire should be totally ignored but it shouldn't be taken as gospel either.
I don't know what the numbers are but i am happy with the game so far and during peak times the scenario's pop very regularly.
Anyone who says thius game is buggy must be biased this released smoother and with less bugs than any other game i have played including WOW. I will say though i have been sent to my desktop about 5 times with no error message when playing it which is an oddity.
They knew that the starting areas would be very crowded at launch, so putting an artifical limited would helped to ensure that people were not standing on each others feet
They had three starting areas. Neither of them was crowded. In fact, the most fun starting area to be was the Empire one because it had the most people on and it was easier to do public quests. The rest of the quests were hastle free because Mythic made a good choice by having a 100% drop rate of quest items.
So no, in my opinion the server cap was pure marketing spin, nothing else. My opinion of course, which is not overly important. What's important is that a good portion of servers are dying and a good game is suffering because forces outside the game development dictated choices that hurt the game.
Bottom line, instead of starting with 5 strong servers and keep adding servers depending on demand, they added 4-5 times the amount necessary, so as to show big subscription numbers. This was done regardless of whether the servers were in a life support state from day 1 due to (real) low population and the inevitable loss of percentage of people. Perhaps they were expecting to keep a momentum that was never there to begin with.
How you can ignore something like "choice" is beyond me. Maybe I want to choose the server that my character is moved to. That is not the same as server merges. And from a practical point of view, this system - char transfer - is in fact much more self regulating than forcing two servers together. I actually think the way they handled this is quite nice - moving everyone from low pop servers to med pop servers, rather then merging 2 low pop servers to maybe yield another med pop server. There are other possible outcomes and combinations, but overall just allowing char transfers to med pop servers to get more high pop servers seems the most reasonable and logistically most feasible thing to me.
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps this was the best way out of a bad situation. However not everyone will choose to transfer. A percentage (a small one if you like), inluding myself, chose to abandon the game, rather than to abandon the community I created in the server I chose. I loved the way the open PvP was handled in the game. But T4 was a ghost town. I run into a vicious circle of people leaving because there were not enough people to play that led to more people leaving. Eventually I grew bored myself and left as well.
Maybe I was just looking for a drastic change seeing as how the new single player games coming out, the new expansions and the holiday season will not help WAR recover from the loss of subscriptions that the hustle of server or server rerolls implies.
Did I mention that I was playing on an EU server and GOA still has no estimate regarding server transfers? Sometime after the US ones are over is the last official line I read. Sorry, but I couldn't wait for them to allow transfer to a fun server while I'm paying day in and day out for a residence in a ghost town.
I started my WAR gaming days on the second largest EU server in Order side. Up to a certain point I was experiencing queues and the server was listing both sides as high/high. Then something happened and the queues disappeared and the server listing went from high/high to med/med. There are three possible explanations. I fear that only Mythic knows for sure:
They didn't know how many people the servers could handle. They saw that the the servers could handle double the load that they had originally anticipated and hence lowered the server cap on all servers. They lost almost half their subscription base once the box month was over. They knew how many people the servers could handle. However, they kept the server cap artificially low, because a big number of full servers looks good for marketing purposes.
For one reason or the other, the spark was gone on the server I was. It seems that the original server cap was actually the critical size needed for the game to be fun. So the fun was going down the more I levelled and the fewer people I had to play with. It became so stagnant, that I had either two choices:
Leave the people that I came to know and like for a new server or, Leave the game and come back once the server issues were resolve.
My comeback will be after the holiday season, if at all. The game is heavily dependant on a healthy server population. Once they decided on the max amount of people that could play on a server, they were in trouble. The problem is that the original population cap was too small for the game to be fun, which left them with the majority of servers in a non-fun status. Apart from the servers that kept growing once the server cap was doubled, every other server was dying. Slowly but steadily. Now, server transfers is another cover up for server merges. It seems that Mythic is more interested in the game image than in it's health. There is only one problem that would create issues due to the server merge and that's castle ownership. But castles change hands on an hourly base, so it's not that big of an issue anyway. So, instead of merging two average servers and create one healthy one, they chose to let the players do the merge. The problem is that some of them will choose to leave the game, looking at the mismanagement from this very early in the game's life. From my point of view it seems that the WAR developers are more interested in the marketing image than the game health. And that''s never good news.
I would vote for "best post of the week".
But replace Mythic with EA on this one. EA is in need of a succes in the MMO branche these days and they were the ones that needed that minimum 20% piece of the cake in this field before the calender year ends.
Poor MJ is but a punching ball in the middle of a giant "corporate" battle between Activision/Blizzard and EA .... and within EA itself I am sure. The man of Myhtic is merely getting the punches and tries to defend his product in between those fights. I don't think he has the capacity to be on top of this.
This is no longer about having good MMORPG's, this is ALL about market shares and hyping financial stuff.
EA was set out to have that 20% market share and everything shows. The NEED to publish it months in advance of WotLK (deleting content), the hype of "most pre-ordered EA game yet", the 800K fix, the million set goal.
While no one even notices that EA Spore just outsold War for its 1st fiscal quarter that ended Sep 30. 2.000.000 copies in 3 weeks that game made for EA.
So "it" didnt happen and all the rest is now damage control and certainly some heavy internal EA discussions about saving the "marketing image" at all costs.
Frankly ignoring the thing everyone can see (downward trends both in sales and players and empty servers) shows just how much the "marketing machinery" falters
Apparently EA doesn't have a plan B and now it's up to MJ to save the furniture.
That's why these discussions are important. Gameplay is the least of the worries of EA. Believe me, the only thing that counts are the finances. Blizzard stumbled by accident into that goldmine (I really think they just wanted to make a good game back then for 500K players).
But NOW everyone just wants to have a share of that gold,.... gameplay is not even important (they think...).
Hey Good Post, I think we actually agree for once.
I agree totally that the huge success of WoW must have taken Blizzard by surprise & that now almost all MMO development is being warped by financiers wanting to reproduce the same goldmine. Unfortunately I don't think anyone ever will though, because at least in my opinion it was just one of those unpredictable 'Being in the Right Place at the Right Time' phenomena.
I am not knocking WoW, especially since not having played it I wouldn't dare to, but it isn't as if it has some magical secret formula. Although I think initially Blizzard were just very lucky, they have managed to stay 'King of the Hill' & keep on growing by paying close attention to their customer base & shrewd marketing, which is one heck of an achievement.
Whilst it's possible that another game might unpredictably have a similar mass appeal & give WoW some serious competition, such phenomena are difficult to create to order & less likely to succeed when the contender is pretty similar to the reigning champion.
Assuming that there ever is one again, the next huge phenemona might be something utterly different like a 'Space Opera' which manages to successfuly combine Fantasy & Sci-Fi elements. In the meantime though I think developers would be better off trying to design games that succesfully appealed to more modestly sized niche markets than trying to be the next big thing & overstretching themselves.
If you can't "Have your cake & eat it too", then how can "The proof of the pudding be in the eating"?
I notice that the amount of people playing on the server where I am is increasing instead of decreasing lately. There are slower nights, sure, but mostly there is no problem finding groups. There's enough open RvR each nights and also the scenario's are always doing well. PQ's depend a bit. I've no complaing really about a lack of players and I still log on each time looking forward to new adventures.
I notice that the amount of people playing on the server where I am is increasing instead of decreasing lately. There are slower nights, sure, but mostly there is no problem finding groups. There's enough open RvR each nights and also the scenario's are always doing well. PQ's depend a bit. I've no complaing really about a lack of players and I still log on each time looking forward to new adventures.
Rather than wait for European server transfers, I just 'bit the bullet' & created a new character on a higher population one. Since then it's been fine & there are no problems at all with lack of players.
If you can't "Have your cake & eat it too", then how can "The proof of the pudding be in the eating"?
Originally posted by LondonMagus Hey Good Post, I think we actually agree for once. I agree totally that the huge success of WoW must have taken Blizzard by surprise & that now almost all MMO development is being warped by financiers wanting to reproduce the same goldmine. Unfortunately I don't think anyone ever will though, because at least in my opinion it was just one of those unpredictable 'Being in the Right Place at the Right Time' phenomena. I am not knocking WoW, especially since not having played it I wouldn't dare to, but it isn't as if it has some magical secret formula. Although I think initially Blizzard were just very lucky, they have managed to stay 'King of the Hill' & keep on growing by paying close attention to their customer base & shrewd marketing, which is one heck of an achievement. Whilst it's possible that another game might unpredictably have a similar mass appeal & give WoW some serious competition, such phenomena are difficult to create to order & less likely to succeed when the contender is pretty similar to the reigning champion. Assuming that there ever is one again, the next huge phenemona might be something utterly different like a 'Space Opera' which manages to successfuly combine Fantasy & Sci-Fi elements. In the meantime though I think developers would be better off trying to design games that succesfully appealed to more modestly sized niche markets than trying to be the next big thing & overstretching themselves.
I think the next big game is just waiting to happen, but most game companies spend to much time staring at the prize and not what made Blizzard so successful with WoW. There is a virtual legion of people who have left WoW and are searching for something new which just has not delivered yet. I have no doubt that number is in the millions.
I remember reading articles about WoW before its launched and their design process. The phrase that kept popping up was [paraphrased] "we looked at every part of the game and asked one question: Is it fun?". That was their philosophy as far as I can tell and it worked. They hired gamers to help design the game and weed out things they didn't like from EQ and other games for example. Their goal was to make a fun game first and if they did that people would reward them with money.
It just seems that so many companies now forget that. They just take whatever formula they think is working in WoW and tack on some new features and assume that will be a monster hit. Most hit the market before they can even start to question the aspects of their game with "Is it fun?", even if they planned to do that in the first place. It doesn't help that there is a very vocal population of people so desperate to have something other than WoW they will be purposfully disingenious during a games beta to developers and players alike.
The bigger part of the problem is that there is now so much money involved in making an MMO no one wants to take a chance anymore. They want to play it safe and keep things the same, which is proving to not work.
I think the next big game is just waiting to happen, but most game companies spend to much time staring at the prize and not what made Blizzard so successful with WoW. There is a virtual legion of people who have left WoW and are searching for something new which just has not delivered yet. I have no doubt that number is in the millions. I remember reading articles about WoW before its launched and their design process. The phrase that kept popping up was [paraphrased] "we looked at every part of the game and asked one question: Is it fun?". That was their philosophy as far as I can tell and it worked. They hired gamers to help design the game and weed out things they didn't like from EQ and other games for example. Their goal was to make a fun game first and if they did that people would reward them with money. It just seems that so many companies now forget that. They just take whatever formula they think is working in WoW and tack on some new features and assume that will be a monster hit. Most hit the market before they can even start to question the aspects of their game with "Is it fun?", even if they planned to do that in the first place. It doesn't help that there is a very vocal population of people so desperate to have something other than WoW they will be purposfully disingenious during a games beta to developers and players alike.
The bigger part of the problem is that there is now so much money involved in making an MMO no one wants to take a chance anymore. They want to play it safe and keep things the same, which is proving to not work.
QFT!
It's the most basic question needed to be answered about every game being made, and those idiots don't ask it. That is the difference between a hit and a flop. Also the production-line kind of developing that ie EA do, is a recipe for failure. Their videos often look like it's to best game ever made, but when you get to play it, it's beyond shittiness.
I just looked at the people playing War on Xfire on friday (just before the weeked). It was at 6.065 all time lowest. (at the end of september it was about 13K on a week day.)
I looked up the number of Xfire players in Wow for this friday. It was 90.748
That's a ratio of 14.9/1. Meaning if those 90K Xfire stand for the known 4.5 M Wow subs (as Xfire isn't used by Chinese). You come up with a player total of 300 K for War these days.
It pretty much shows that the initial talk of 800K at the end of Sep (and mentioned in the EA financial report) has now come to a 300K player base. The graphics proved this in the past weeks.
It will be interesting to watch how the next 4 weeks will go along to see the final results after the expansions of Wow, LOTRO and EQ2 have launched.
The upcoming weekend will be the last weekend before the competition launches, so we'll see if the 7900 weekend players of last weekend lessened.
We should see the final audiance War will get after Mythic launches its 1.1 patch. My guess is the equivalent of about 200 - 250 K players. I hope they stay on the 250 K course, because under 150K, EA could take some drastic decisions.
Comments
What if a game company wanted to do an innovative approach. Have starting servers where characters stay for N amount of time (say 30 days and/or levels) and then get promoted to a long term server of the user's choice. I see some advantages.
1) Since it is for the lower level characters, starting players and trial accounts, the low level areas could be busier than they current way of running games. 2) Trial accounts would be limited to this area, and not be able to spam your long term servers.
3) Players could find their friends and coordinate a move to a long term server. I've seen people complain they they picked a server and their friends picked a different one.
I personally do not run xfire (or any other background application I can shut off) while playing WAR. I want the graphics set high AND want high frame rates. Xfire cuts into performance....although i don't know to what degree. As someone else said, XFire stats reflect XFire users. I would be hesitant to extrapolate that data to a "universal" pronouncement.
That's all I have to say as I must relog into WAR. It's a whole lot more fun to play the game than to read much of the venom spewed here. Honestly haters, do you really feel you are changing the world with your rants?
People who love the game, play the game.
They do not see these forums.
The vast majority of people that post here merely preach to the choir.
On that account...
Are forums, then, comparable to X-fire in terms of being used to to represent how well the game is doing?
I'm glad at MBJ's statement, good to see it, and you are right...
Time to relog in and get my guild together to go take some objectives from Destruction.
Enough is enough and i think yhis is enough, people get serious! Does the % number of population contributes to your happyness? Like What Would we care about Subscribers Drop or Rise... it's like we won't quit just because someone did... You love the game and you will still love, it's "our" own choice, not yours.
Quit whining about the numer of subscribers.
whiners gone ...
Roses are gray
Violets are green,
I love your legs...
And what's BETWEEN!
Says who?
I would rather have a server merge than a bad launch. And technicaly its not a server merge. But a character transfer service. Theres a difference. Notice how they point out its free right now. Its a common pay service. And you will have to pay for it later on.
This isn't a case of "technically" something that has a false appearance of what it truely is. These are server mergers that give players the choice of where to move and don't shut down the old servers yet.
No company wants to have 20 empty servers that they advise people not to make new characters there and/or move their old characters off. I also doubt a company wants to announce server mergers only a few weeks after launch, which is why they are dressing it up as free transfers. It is smart marketing to make it appear to be something other than mergers, but the reality is what just that. Even though it will be generally viewed as the kiss of death (even as Mythic stated in an interview), it is the right thing to do for the health of the game. I've been enjoying the game more since the mergers to be honest.
I don't think the game is going to die or anything like that, but I sure don't believe mythic over estimated the number of servers by roughtly 40% considering how they won't shut up about their great sales numbers.
I am putting War on hold until they sort out the server pops but I feel that its easier to merge the servers than it is to deal with the long waits to get on. Our guild were getting wait times of over 2 hours on our server and this made it really impractical to play so we moved servers - now we find ourselves on a low pop server where we cant get any scenarios and the pqs are empty. If they sort out this problem we will all go back because we love the game - In the meantime we have gone back to WoW.
I started my WAR gaming days on the second largest EU server in Order side. Up to a certain point I was experiencing queues and the server was listing both sides as high/high. Then something happened and the queues disappeared and the server listing went from high/high to med/med. There are three possible explanations. I fear that only Mythic knows for sure:
For one reason or the other, the spark was gone on the server I was. It seems that the original server cap was actually the critical size needed for the game to be fun. So the fun was going down the more I levelled and the fewer people I had to play with. It became so stagnant, that I had either two choices:
My comeback will be after the holiday season, if at all. The game is heavily dependant on a healthy server population. Once they decided on the max amount of people that could play on a server, they were in trouble. The problem is that the original population cap was too small for the game to be fun, which left them with the majority of servers in a non-fun status. Apart from the servers that kept growing once the server cap was doubled, every other server was dying. Slowly but steadily.
Now, server transfers is another cover up for server merges. It seems that Mythic is more interested in the game image than in it's health. There is only one problem that would create issues due to the server merge and that's castle ownership. But castles change hands on an hourly base, so it's not that big of an issue anyway. So, instead of merging two average servers and create one healthy one, they chose to let the players do the merge. The problem is that some of them will choose to leave the game, looking at the mismanagement from this very early in the game's life. From my point of view it seems that the WAR developers are more interested in the marketing image than the game health. And that''s never good news.
I would vote for "best post of the week".
But replace Mythic with EA on this one. EA is in need of a succes in the MMO branche these days and they were the ones that needed that minimum 20% piece of the cake in this field before the calender year ends.
Poor MJ is but a punching ball in the middle of a giant "corporate" battle between Activision/Blizzard and EA .... and within EA itself I am sure. The man of Myhtic is merely getting the punches and tries to defend his product in between those fights. I don't think he has the capacity to be on top of this.
This is no longer about having good MMORPG's, this is ALL about market shares and hyping financial stuff.
EA was set out to have that 20% market share and everything shows. The NEED to publish it months in advance of WotLK (deleting content), the hype of "most pre-ordered EA game yet", the 800K fix, the million set goal.
While no one even notices that EA Spore just outsold War for its 1st fiscal quarter that ended Sep 30. 2.000.000 copies in 3 weeks that game made for EA.
So "it" didnt happen and all the rest is now damage control and certainly some heavy internal EA discussions about saving the "marketing image" at all costs.
Frankly ignoring the thing everyone can see (downward trends both in sales and players and empty servers) shows just how much the "marketing machinery" falters
Apparently EA doesn't have a plan B and now it's up to MJ to save the furniture.
That's why these discussions are important. Gameplay is the least of the worries of EA. Believe me, the only thing that counts are the finances. Blizzard stumbled by accident into that goldmine (I really think they just wanted to make a good game back then for 500K players).
But NOW everyone just wants to have a share of that gold,.... gameplay is not even important (they think...).
War seems to be travelling along quite well and my guildies and me except for two are playing it and will never play WOW again. I don't play it as much as i did as WOW and don't feel the need to, that is a great thing for me.
I think a lot of people that are subscribed to War do the same thing, they play it but not as much as they did WOW or the mmo they came from.
Xfire is mainly used by people who often jump from game to game but people like me who almost purely play mmo's don't really need to run Xfire. I wouldn't say Xfire should be totally ignored but it shouldn't be taken as gospel either.
I don't know what the numbers are but i am happy with the game so far and during peak times the scenario's pop very regularly.
Anyone who says thius game is buggy must be biased this released smoother and with less bugs than any other game i have played including WOW. I will say though i have been sent to my desktop about 5 times with no error message when playing it which is an oddity.
They had three starting areas. Neither of them was crowded. In fact, the most fun starting area to be was the Empire one because it had the most people on and it was easier to do public quests. The rest of the quests were hastle free because Mythic made a good choice by having a 100% drop rate of quest items.
So no, in my opinion the server cap was pure marketing spin, nothing else. My opinion of course, which is not overly important. What's important is that a good portion of servers are dying and a good game is suffering because forces outside the game development dictated choices that hurt the game.
Bottom line, instead of starting with 5 strong servers and keep adding servers depending on demand, they added 4-5 times the amount necessary, so as to show big subscription numbers. This was done regardless of whether the servers were in a life support state from day 1 due to (real) low population and the inevitable loss of percentage of people. Perhaps they were expecting to keep a momentum that was never there to begin with.
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps this was the best way out of a bad situation. However not everyone will choose to transfer. A percentage (a small one if you like), inluding myself, chose to abandon the game, rather than to abandon the community I created in the server I chose. I loved the way the open PvP was handled in the game. But T4 was a ghost town. I run into a vicious circle of people leaving because there were not enough people to play that led to more people leaving. Eventually I grew bored myself and left as well.
Maybe I was just looking for a drastic change seeing as how the new single player games coming out, the new expansions and the holiday season will not help WAR recover from the loss of subscriptions that the hustle of server or server rerolls implies.
Did I mention that I was playing on an EU server and GOA still has no estimate regarding server transfers? Sometime after the US ones are over is the last official line I read. Sorry, but I couldn't wait for them to allow transfer to a fun server while I'm paying day in and day out for a residence in a ghost town.
I would vote for "best post of the week".
But replace Mythic with EA on this one. EA is in need of a succes in the MMO branche these days and they were the ones that needed that minimum 20% piece of the cake in this field before the calender year ends.
Poor MJ is but a punching ball in the middle of a giant "corporate" battle between Activision/Blizzard and EA .... and within EA itself I am sure. The man of Myhtic is merely getting the punches and tries to defend his product in between those fights. I don't think he has the capacity to be on top of this.
This is no longer about having good MMORPG's, this is ALL about market shares and hyping financial stuff.
EA was set out to have that 20% market share and everything shows. The NEED to publish it months in advance of WotLK (deleting content), the hype of "most pre-ordered EA game yet", the 800K fix, the million set goal.
While no one even notices that EA Spore just outsold War for its 1st fiscal quarter that ended Sep 30. 2.000.000 copies in 3 weeks that game made for EA.
So "it" didnt happen and all the rest is now damage control and certainly some heavy internal EA discussions about saving the "marketing image" at all costs.
Frankly ignoring the thing everyone can see (downward trends both in sales and players and empty servers) shows just how much the "marketing machinery" falters
Apparently EA doesn't have a plan B and now it's up to MJ to save the furniture.
That's why these discussions are important. Gameplay is the least of the worries of EA. Believe me, the only thing that counts are the finances. Blizzard stumbled by accident into that goldmine (I really think they just wanted to make a good game back then for 500K players).
But NOW everyone just wants to have a share of that gold,.... gameplay is not even important (they think...).
Hey Good Post, I think we actually agree for once.
I agree totally that the huge success of WoW must have taken Blizzard by surprise & that now almost all MMO development is being warped by financiers wanting to reproduce the same goldmine. Unfortunately I don't think anyone ever will though, because at least in my opinion it was just one of those unpredictable 'Being in the Right Place at the Right Time' phenomena.
I am not knocking WoW, especially since not having played it I wouldn't dare to, but it isn't as if it has some magical secret formula. Although I think initially Blizzard were just very lucky, they have managed to stay 'King of the Hill' & keep on growing by paying close attention to their customer base & shrewd marketing, which is one heck of an achievement.
Whilst it's possible that another game might unpredictably have a similar mass appeal & give WoW some serious competition, such phenomena are difficult to create to order & less likely to succeed when the contender is pretty similar to the reigning champion.
Assuming that there ever is one again, the next huge phenemona might be something utterly different like a 'Space Opera' which manages to successfuly combine Fantasy & Sci-Fi elements. In the meantime though I think developers would be better off trying to design games that succesfully appealed to more modestly sized niche markets than trying to be the next big thing & overstretching themselves.
If you can't "Have your cake & eat it too", then how can "The proof of the pudding be in the eating"?
Take the Hecatomb? TCG What Is Your Doom? quiz.
I notice that the amount of people playing on the server where I am is increasing instead of decreasing lately. There are slower nights, sure, but mostly there is no problem finding groups. There's enough open RvR each nights and also the scenario's are always doing well. PQ's depend a bit. I've no complaing really about a lack of players and I still log on each time looking forward to new adventures.
Rather than wait for European server transfers, I just 'bit the bullet' & created a new character on a higher population one. Since then it's been fine & there are no problems at all with lack of players.
If you can't "Have your cake & eat it too", then how can "The proof of the pudding be in the eating"?
Take the Hecatomb? TCG What Is Your Doom? quiz.
I think the next big game is just waiting to happen, but most game companies spend to much time staring at the prize and not what made Blizzard so successful with WoW. There is a virtual legion of people who have left WoW and are searching for something new which just has not delivered yet. I have no doubt that number is in the millions.
I remember reading articles about WoW before its launched and their design process. The phrase that kept popping up was [paraphrased] "we looked at every part of the game and asked one question: Is it fun?". That was their philosophy as far as I can tell and it worked. They hired gamers to help design the game and weed out things they didn't like from EQ and other games for example. Their goal was to make a fun game first and if they did that people would reward them with money.
It just seems that so many companies now forget that. They just take whatever formula they think is working in WoW and tack on some new features and assume that will be a monster hit. Most hit the market before they can even start to question the aspects of their game with "Is it fun?", even if they planned to do that in the first place. It doesn't help that there is a very vocal population of people so desperate to have something other than WoW they will be purposfully disingenious during a games beta to developers and players alike.
The bigger part of the problem is that there is now so much money involved in making an MMO no one wants to take a chance anymore. They want to play it safe and keep things the same, which is proving to not work.
QFT!
It's the most basic question needed to be answered about every game being made, and those idiots don't ask it. That is the difference between a hit and a flop. Also the production-line kind of developing that ie EA do, is a recipe for failure. Their videos often look like it's to best game ever made, but when you get to play it, it's beyond shittiness.
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Grammar nazi's. This one is for you.
I dont mind waiting in a queue for 10 or so minutes for a high populated server.Atleast you know your going to play with others.MMO.
I just looked at the people playing War on Xfire on friday (just before the weeked). It was at 6.065 all time lowest. (at the end of september it was about 13K on a week day.)
I looked up the number of Xfire players in Wow for this friday. It was 90.748
That's a ratio of 14.9/1. Meaning if those 90K Xfire stand for the known 4.5 M Wow subs (as Xfire isn't used by Chinese). You come up with a player total of 300 K for War these days.
It pretty much shows that the initial talk of 800K at the end of Sep (and mentioned in the EA financial report) has now come to a 300K player base. The graphics proved this in the past weeks.
It will be interesting to watch how the next 4 weeks will go along to see the final results after the expansions of Wow, LOTRO and EQ2 have launched.
The upcoming weekend will be the last weekend before the competition launches, so we'll see if the 7900 weekend players of last weekend lessened.
We should see the final audiance War will get after Mythic launches its 1.1 patch. My guess is the equivalent of about 200 - 250 K players. I hope they stay on the 250 K course, because under 150K, EA could take some drastic decisions.