Well it's common knowledge now that WAR is a watered down half baked WoW clone that was made to draw casual PvPers with its even more brainless style of button meshing gameplay and zero skill requirements, and pretty much even offended the casual players on how brainless it was. But I can't help but to think Mythic wasn't behind all of this stupid decision making and that EA played a major part in it.
I mean let me pose another question while at it.....would you trust Mythic with another MMO if EA was to seriously bow out of this one...or do you think they'd mess it up again. Because honestly I still expect more from Mythic than what I got here. Maybe not as much as Daoc but definitely more than WAR.
Honestly, WAr is not a bad game. Skill has a massive factor in it however there is too much button spaming. (the meters alone show this).
The fault of WAr is quite simple their game engine sucks , this new and improved gamebryo is far worse than the one they used 7 years ago (is it 8 now?) It just a bad engine, can fix that. Really if mythic were to do this agian what they shoudl look at is just that.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
All MMOs have a rough start, WAR just had a slighty more bumpier start. If you like PvP, more then the PvP WoW offers (joke), WAR is good for you. If you prefer good PvE, you might be a little dissappointed. WAR has PvE in it, but it's a PvP game. All this talk of WAR being a total letdown is correct, for some people, but not all of us. I got my inspiration back to WAR since the release of the Slayer class. Atleast it's not like the "I win button" classes we have in the game. If you don't like the game, then it's okay. You don't need to start telling other people why they shouldn't play the game or not. It's childish and I don't see how you can benefit from it.
I'm going to rant now, and it's not against you Zoldaire. But inspired by similar posts I have read over the months which you conveniently summarized and I highligted in red.
Let's get one thing straight, right off the bat. PvP in WaR is TEH SUCK to use terminology most on these forums will immediately grasp. Let's all stop hiding behind the over-abused "well ofc the PVE sucks, it's a PVP game" cause it's not, or at least not a well made one. The best that can be said to define pvp in this game is calling it WoW: Casual PvP edition.
So why is this a bad PVP game?
FUndamentally, because it does nothing a PVP game should do well.
1) Mega lag in most "large" scale battles. That in and of itself is no good in a Pvp game. Right?
2) Total and complete lack of tactical or strategic elements. It's a bloody button mashing zerg. Just face it.
3) Classes are flat. Yes, yes there's 3 gazillion of them etc (well divided by two if you consider mirrors) but if you stopped to look at skills and abilities you would see that they really mimic each other much more than appearance would let on (gimmicky class mechanics excluded). (Pushbacks, detaunts, etc everyone has them). Additionally abilities for many classes are very uninsipired. Ex. Archmage's 3 main heals are a "Direct heal" "direct + hot" *hot" I mean... come on devs!. Another game we all know released its then main healer with that exact set up... but that was eons ago in gaming history.
4) Combat is muddy. There is no justifying this and it has no excuse. The combat IS muddy. Most f2p games have better combat strcture (animations, synch, lag, targetting, etc) than WAR.
5) WaR is nowhere. Yes yes again if you're on one of two? three? high pop, balanced servers you could run into a battle. But for most peeps (and for months after realase) there simply was NONE. This again is unacceptable for a pvp oriented game.
I'm sure there's more but that should get the flamers going.
For your second point.
There is a very good reason why I would LOVE to see whoever is left in the game leave. I am very tired of crap mmos being released by companies to make a profit a leeching off those consumers that for whatever absurd reason decide to stick with it and give them money for half baked products.
Why?
Because (true for every other product categor but MMOs it seems) if a product sucks it gets pulled. If it underperforms it gets pulled. If it does not reach certain RoIs it gets pulled. In short, if it is not successful it get pulled.
"oh but WaR is successful! it doesn't have to have 10mil subs to be successful!"
Wrong.
Let's stick with the usual accepted figures: (and remember that the game cost "less than 100mil $ but was considered one of the largest investments in MMO history)
1 Mil boxes
750k sold
250k current subscribers (if that)
Ok... let's use those same figures in other scenarios.
A tv show launches and is expected to take 10 million viewers. It does ok at 7.5m the first week. Three weeks down the line it's a 2.5mil. Guess what happens to that TV show? It gets yanked.
A new car launches on the market and sells 100k the first month, 75k the next and 25k the following three. Are they going to make a new version of it the coming year? Probably not.
An electronics company produces 1milion esoteric kitchen appliances. It ships 750k and 500k get returned to the shop. Will you ever see one of those again?
And so on and so forth.
The reason why these games can carry on with such objectively dismal performance is that the MMO business model allows it. They've made the game the high up front costs have been already paid and they've sold the boxes. Now, provided they keep a minimum of turkies... i mean players paying every month (with the added bonus of some other barnyard birds buying the box further down the line) they have more money to be made going on (minus salaries and maint etc) than they have with closing down the whole operation. It's that simple.
So yes, for the love of all that's holy... stop playing this wretched game. If enough crap MMOs die a spectacular fiery death then MAYBE we'll have developers really thinking about what they're producing instead of the half-baked uninispired and badly designed (and unfunished to top it all off) crap that is unfortunately now the norm and that sells anyway.
Rant over.
/signout
Wow. Obsess much?
I disagree with the "fundamental" PvP flaws you've listed, other than some lag issues.
As to your crusade - good luck, and you might want to talk to a mental health professional.
Adiaris probably put a lot of time and effort into that post of his. How sad that he has nothing better to do with his life, and that he thinks any of the WAR players give a toss. I pity him.
Adiaris probably put a lot of time and effort into that post of his. How sad that he has nothing better to do with his life, and that he thinks any of the WAR players give a toss. I pity him. Now back to WAR.
I agree that it is quite sad and that the effort put into such posts would be better spent probably playing a game the person enjoys, unless ofc this is the game the person enjoys!!
However everyone deserves to have their say, doesn't say we have to agree with them or take notice of them, just as they don't have to agree with those who enjoy the games that they dislike.
I liked the gameplay in WAR I liked just about every class I played. It just seems to me they took the best parts of DAoC and then threw them out in favor of keeping the worst parts. You have to spend a lot of time in PvE in order to be effective in RvR and the worst part is that the final end game is more PvE, but to participate in that even more PvE is required. There doesn't seem to be the same kind of pride in keep ownership that DAoC had. And even though it was a serious grind, at least the DAoC crafting resulted in good gear that allowed you to customize your character somewhat.
Anyway, I don't think WAR was a dismal failure, but it darn sure wasn't a great success either. I'd go back if they ever ironed out their problems, but I don't see that happening. If Mythic ever makes a DAoC II then I would be willing to give it a shot as long as they concentrate on more RvR and less PvE.
I played it when it first came out and I thought it was a bit to wow like and basicly not like warhammer at all.
the only concepts I really liked where RvR and public quests. other wise very tired, and those two items are not enought to keep me going for very long. got to 30 in a few months and went yawn, and quit.
if i want to play wow I can play wow.
still looking for that cool classless levelless sandbox game
played:WoW and Eve off and on 5 years Tried:CoH/V, PoTBS, War, TR, STO, FE TOR is likely to rock
I can tell from a lot of these posts that the "haters" have either never played WAR, or only played when it was first released.
A few clarifying points for you all from someone who has played the game since beta.
1. Open RvR combat is being improved almost every patch. Currently you can spend an entire day on the game and never have a lack of people to fight. This is due to the incentives that Mythic has added to the game to participate in Open RvR combat and also the server mergers that have been happening have added a lot of people to my server.
2. You can level from 1-40 doing nothing but RvR. I really don't do anything but ORvR in the game. The only quests I do on any character are the ones related to ORvR combat. I haven't done a scenario since they added Choppas to the game. ORvR is the most fun I have had in an MMO game in years.
3. I'm not sure what you mean by the combat feeling muddy but I can tell you that they are focusing on a few classes each patch to update and improve. Next patch they are going to be toning down the AoE damage (and as a healer I can tell you it's log overdue) and buffing Shamans and Archmages, as well as a number of other improvements.
4. The game still suffers from a large amount of graphic lag. At least more than it should based on the graphics that it is using, but Mythic is working to correct these problems and have made some small improvements in the last few patches.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Dunno what problems people have, but im quite happy with the way WAR is going. Already it is loads better than vanilla wow ever was, anyone remember how god awful it was back in the days before BC? How hybrids where only good for healing, itemization was horrible, class balance nonexistant, and there where only 2 lvl 60 instances? Battlegrounds didnt exist and pvp was the zerg between tarrens mill and southshore.
Yet know what? I had fun there. Some of my fondest memories of WoW was back from that time, the current WoW is so far away from that game you can hardly recognize it anymore. It feels bland and generic now, class balance gets completly screwed up every patch. Yeah it has 12 million subscribers, so what? Alot of people play counterstrike too, yet i cant stand that game.
War is alot like that early WoW, people complain that its not where WoW is after 5 years of developement, yet that doesnt matter to me, cause i have fun now. Just like i had fun with the pre BC WoW. The main difference is i know War developement will take a different route compared to the route WoW took years ago, given time the already big differences between the games will continue to grow.
So yeah, people just expect too much. You simply cant throw a mmorpg on the market and then expect it to be as refined as a 5 year old mmorpg with two expansions. I honestly think its impossible. The sooner people start to realize that the sooner they will stop falling for hypes, a good game needs alot of time and i dont blame War for having to go through the same problems every other mmorpg including wow had to face early on. If you played WoW half a year after its release you know what im talking about.
So yes, for the love of all that's holy... stop playing this wretched game. If enough crap MMOs die a spectacular fiery death then MAYBE we'll have developers really thinking about what they're producing instead of the half-baked uninispired and badly designed (and unfunished to top it all off) crap that is unfortunately now the norm and that sells anyway. Rant over. /signout
Although this part is quite harsh, yet i totally agree with it. Just like another post that petition to close down warhammer. Because Devs till now still come out with un-finish games and treat us like idots.
As much as i live warhammer characters, graphics and PQ, yet the rest of game is just 1 big joke.... Even after they release Choppa.... /sad
Its really high time to force the Devs to think out of the box and stop wana be a WoW clone, but the worst part is... its not even a clone! Just a wana be.....
I suffered from huge client instability on a brand new Commodore Gaming rig (with a custom WAR skin).
When you got to tier 3 the only populated bits were people camping the scenarios.
Warhammer was created in the UK and yet Mythic felt it was ok to hand over the running to GOA and for months before release everybody said it would be a nightmare yet Mythic said it would be ok, geuss what it wasn't yet GOA are still running the EU side.
Mythic are identifying problems and sorting them, but when the problem of leeching in scenarios started happening it seemed to take a very long time for mythic to acknowledge it and then to fix it.
So I geuss that Mythic made some very bad decsions and then are taking a while to turn the problems around.
Well given that the game is 7 months old and you can pick a copy up now for £9, I'd say the game hasn't failed but needs to find it's way fast before newer games takes people's interest away from WAR.
I put the blame at Mythic and such minds as Paul Barnett. Paul Barnett should be in car sales, the way he was trying to sell a lack of features as a good thing (for ex. Crafting. Which in the words of Mr Barnett is not necessary because this is WAR!!! In WAR!!!! ppl don't need clothing, food, armour, weapons, houses to sleep in, because in times of WAR!!!!! ppl don't do such things. They just go to WAR!!!!)
They never tried to build a wolrd MMORPG. Just a hybrid between a world and a game MMO. WAR would have been a better game if it would have been an assortment of like 30 maps ordered in hierarchical pyramid. Lock a map, proceed to next until final one, win WAR!!!! start from Map 1 one again. No more need to run around, no need for pseudo PvE, just ... wait for it ... wait... WAR!!!!
Wow 2009 is MILES above the original Wow. You say that yourself in your post and then you fall back to Wow bashing as usual. Talking of fucked up contradictions marked in blue. )) ------- Problem is VERY simple: the engine of War is not good enough to have fluid responsive controls in a PvP game. It lacks polish in every other inch of the game. So it falls flat on its face compared to "the standard" except RvR (which isn't even offered in Wow). The result is that Xfire numbers of War are down to 3000-3500 Xfire players as compared to the 15.000 Xfire players in early Oct 2008 and the 5500-6000 Xfire players at Xmas. The ratio between Wow and War Xfire players is now at a never seen 30 to 1 ratio. That means: 5.000.000 western Wow subs divided by 30 = 160/170 K subscriptions. So IF that makes you happy (a game which supposedly having 1.000.000 copies sold and 170 K subs before the summertime) than that's fine. But is SHOWS Mythic didn't hit the chords right. In fact it plays its music constantly out of tune. (as in synchronised spell castings). As Xfire was always right in predicting trends (when games were NOT being promoted through Xfire channels), I predict EA won't even talk about the next quarter subsription numbers. The figures are indeed that bad.
There is no contradiction at all, and no wow bashing at all in what you quoted. Vanilla wow WAS aweful by today standards(standards that where set by wow itself btw) which is obviously hindsight, back then we had different standards and where quite happy. Would i play vanilla wow again given the chance? Hell no. Did i still have a very good time back then? Hell yes.
What i tried to say is that the starting point for both games was quite similar, and that all in all war actually isnt bad at all compared to where wow was at the same age, i even go so far as to say its more enjoyable now than pre bc WoW ever was. Largely due to pvp xp, better rvr support(and yes i liked to think of the tarrens mill/soutshore zerg as some kind of rvr), better grouping mechanics, scenarios and PQs. I simply dont expect a game that is half a year old to compete content or even mechanic wise with a game thats has gotten patched and reworked continiously for almost 5 years.
And the responsiveness imho got mostly fixed with 1.2.1, im atm running around with my shaman zapping things and its ALOT smother imho. Actually so much so that im dusting off my magus.
And yeah im quite happy with the population as well, so wow has 12 mil players, thats great. I still hardly get a BG to open on my <70 twinks, i still cant get groups for low lvl inis while leveling. So tell me, what good are these 12 million people doing me when i still have to grind quests solo till 80? What good are 12 million players doing me if i cant advance my character by doing the things i enjoy(pvp and instances)?
And please tell me, what other mmorpg besides wow has significantly more players than warhammer? AoC? Nope been there done that, empty servers. Vanguard? Even worse. EQ II? Yeah right. According to your logic no mmorpg besides wow is worth playing, cause they are all pretty much around where war is, most actually do alot worse.
It was all Mythic's fault. People like to blame the publisher, but EA got suckered by the hype as much as we were. They acquired a team of talking heads when they thought they were getting a game studio. You give a team of monkeys five months to fix their game or five years and the end result is the same. The best thing you can do is try and find a good date to release to try and recoup as much of your losses as possible. WAR wasn't released in such a state that half a year of more development time would have produced a radically superior product. Their first mistake was building WAR off of what felt like a completely unenhanced version of the DAoC engine. That's just not something you can redo quick in a couple of months.
War as a PVP game is a failure. It has a perfect engine for the best PVE game ever created but Mythic doesn't know what PVE is and defently dont know how to design it.
And to those claiming WOW is setting standards... Im sorry but WOW has 10 times more stability problems than the new MMO games. Last patch had huge amount of serious bugs even tho it was tested for months. And even tho the game is watering down every class to be pretty much exactly the same to be able to balance PVP arena - there are still huge unbalancing issues that have been overlooked for months.
This is the standard ? No... The true standard in WOW is that the game has been delivering what MMO players are looking for. Note - HAS been delivering. But no longer. I think the latest content patch in WOW is one of the worst patches ever released in the history of MMO gaming. Blizzard has set new "standards" in noobness after 4 years of WOW.
WIth all this said. WAR simply is to shallow and one sided for me to ever be able to enjoy it. If the game is all about RVR then why the hell does the game not build something more unique than standstill, ugly looking, "siege" combat ? I blame Mythic 100% for the game design. I feel sorry for Gameworkshop to have to see the name of Warhammer beeing destroyed by naive and simply BAD design of WAR.
are certain things EA's fault? if you mean DoKs, stealthing witch elves, favorability to order for the kiddies, and releasing waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too early to compete with WotLK? id say yes
are certain things Mythics fault? if you mean trying to out-wow the 800 pound gorilla, shitty CS, 0 itemization and buff/nerf logic then yes
both sides are to blame but with the way DAoC was in its prime im going to lay the lion's share of the blame on this one on EA for executive meddling and all around stupidity that theyre well know for.
There is no contradiction at all, and no wow bashing at all in what you quoted. Vanilla wow WAS aweful by today standards(standards that where set by wow itself btw) which is obviously hindsight, back then we had different standards and where quite happy. Would i play vanilla wow again given the chance? Hell no. Did i still have a very good time back then? Hell yes.
What i tried to say is that the starting point for both games was quite similar, and that all in all war actually isnt bad at all compared to where wow was at the same age, i even go so far as to say its more enjoyable now than pre bc WoW ever was. Largely due to pvp xp, better rvr support(and yes i liked to think of the tarrens mill/soutshore zerg as some kind of rvr), better grouping mechanics, scenarios and PQs. I simply dont expect a game that is half a year old to compete content or even mechanic wise with a game thats has gotten patched and reworked continiously for almost 5 years.
And the responsiveness imho got mostly fixed with 1.2.1, im atm running around with my shaman zapping things and its ALOT smother imho. Actually so much so that im dusting off my magus.
And yeah im quite happy with the population as well, so wow has 12 mil players, thats great. I still hardly get a BG to open on my <70 twinks, i still cant get groups for low lvl inis while leveling. So tell me, what good are these 12 million people doing me when i still have to grind quests solo till 80? What good are 12 million players doing me if i cant advance my character by doing the things i enjoy(pvp and instances)?
And please tell me, what other mmorpg besides wow has significantly more players than warhammer? AoC? Nope been there done that, empty servers. Vanguard? Even worse. EQ II? Yeah right. According to your logic no mmorpg besides wow is worth playing, cause they are all pretty much around where war is, most actually do alot worse.
To the first highlighted point.
What you are saying is that 4 years later and the best effort mythic could produce is to release a game in as "bad" a state as another game was 4 years ago. What sort of twisted logic is that? Hey look at that game and how bad it was 4 years ago, warhammer is in the same sad state, so everything is fine? Why should we applaud a company for repeating the mistakes of the past?
I have to break your view of how things were, but millions of people waited in line to play wow at release. Yes they waited for hours just for the chance to log in an play. The overwhelming majority of warhammer players left. Even on servers where they could log in anytime they chose, they walked away. The game is just not fun enough to work through the issues.
The release of these two games is miles apart, despite your opinion of their similarities. Wows gameplay was well thought out and warhammer was still in the drawing board concept stage and most of those concepts don't work.
As for the second highlight:.
Here you go again, just because other games are struggling to get servers with populations, warhammer is fine? Yes there are a lot of games where the overall population is going to be a hinderance to playing a massive multiplayer online role playing game. Yes the population problems in this game were a gigantic problem for gameplay and resulted in 64 servers closing, some of the worst in mmo history, because of how population dependent this game is.
The game was rushed and that is the end story. EA/Mythic tossed a huge amount of money and developers in an attempt to speed up the developement cycle of the game and it didn't work. Quality takes time and companies need to start acknowleding this.
Originally posted by Daffid011 To the first highlighted point. What you are saying is that 4 years later and the best effort mythic could produce is to release a game in as "bad" a state as another game was 4 years ago. What sort of twisted logic is that? Hey look at that game and how bad it was 4 years ago, warhammer is in the same sad state, so everything is fine? Why should we applaud a company for repeating the mistakes of the past? I have to break your view of how things were, but millions of people waited in line to play wow at release. Yes they waited for hours just for the chance to log in an play. The overwhelming majority of warhammer players left. Even on servers where they could log in anytime they chose, they walked away. The game is just not fun enough to work through the issues. The release of these two games is miles apart, despite your opinion of their similarities. Wows gameplay was well thought out and warhammer was still in the drawing board concept stage and most of those concepts don't work.
As for the second highlight:. Here you go again, just because other games are struggling to get servers with populations, warhammer is fine? Yes there are a lot of games where the overall population is going to be a hinderance to playing a massive multiplayer online role playing game. Yes the population problems in this game were a gigantic problem for gameplay and resulted in 64 servers closing, some of the worst in mmo history, because of how population dependent this game is.
The game was rushed and that is the end story. EA/Mythic tossed a huge amount of money and developers in an attempt to speed up the developement cycle of the game and it didn't work. Quality takes time and companies need to start acknowleding this.
Am i really that hard to understand? War had x years of developement, wow had x years of developement. Im comparing what both companies released after a similar developement time. Wow probably by now has probably gotten about 10x as much manhours put into than war. Obviously its going to be more refined, has more content, more balance etc.
If you truly expect any company can produce in three years what it took blizzard 8 years to create your simply delusional. It doesnt work that way, you have a limited amount of devolpers available and a nearly unlimited amount of potentional content. No MMORPG will ever upon releaseday be able to compete with WoW. Not even if they gave themselves 10 years of developement time, cause the player feedback helped shape WoW.
Regarding population: According to xfire Warhammer is 22th most played game OVER ALL. That includes sport games, RTS, shooter and other mmorpgs. Ignoring free to plays and AoC, which is only as high as it is now due to the recently released trial version, warhammer basicly tied as the second most popular fantasy mmorpg with LotRO, which has hardly any pvp content. Its also quite stable in that position.
So i can only repeat: Yes im happy with where warhammer is atm. Im on a full server with a stable population, the game gets a bit better every patch, and im not in the least bitter about the subscriber numbers or people deciding its not the game for them. Contrary to what you seem to believe around 300k subscribers is the norm for mmorpgs that are doing ok, its not a sign of struggling to fill servers, its wow thats completly out of line with its 12 million subscribers.
Originally posted by Rocketeer Am i really that hard to understand? War had x years of developement, wow had x years of developement. Im comparing what both companies released after a similar developement time. Wow probably by now has probably gotten about 10x as much manhours put into than war. Obviously its going to be more refined, has more content, more balance etc.
If you truly expect any company can produce in three years what it took blizzard 8 years to create your simply delusional. It doesnt work that way, you have a limited amount of devolpers available and a nearly unlimited amount of potentional content. No MMORPG will ever upon releaseday be able to compete with WoW. Not even if they gave themselves 10 years of developement time, cause the player feedback helped shape WoW.
Regarding population: According to xfire Warhammer is 22th most played game OVER ALL. That includes sport games, RTS, shooter and other mmorpgs. Ignoring free to plays and AoC, which is only as high as it is now due to the recently released trial version, warhammer basicly tied as the second most popular fantasy mmorpg with LotRO, which has hardly any pvp content. Its also quite stable in that position.
So i can only repeat: Yes im happy with where warhammer is atm. Im on a full server with a stable population, the game gets a bit better every patch, and im not in the least bitter about the subscriber numbers or people deciding its not the game for them. Contrary to what you seem to believe around 300k subscribers is the norm for mmorpgs that are doing ok, its not a sign of struggling to fill servers, its wow thats completly out of line with its 12 million subscribers.
No I don't expect a game to rush to market in 3 years with the same level of resources that it took another company 6-8 years to do. I'm not that foolish, but it seems mythic was and it cost them. Again it doesn't really matter what wow was like in 2005, because mythic knew what they were currently up against. If their best effort was to aim so low as to compete with the original state of a game in 2005 then they blew it.
Did wow release with the same amount of content that everquest had? No? Ok, then lets stop making excuses by comparing games at different periods of time as if it is relevant. Blizzard did what it needed to do to unseat the current leader with a solid game. Mythic rushed a game to market and it is was obvioulsy not ready for market. I'm not talking about bugs or performance (which it has a fair share of problems), but concepts and game designs. Far to much of the game just did not work and that is unexcusable to the majority of people.
A few hundred thousand players might be the top end for mmos (note: that is not the norm, but rather the BEST EFFORTS other mmos can muster), but do you think it should be the norm to lose 70% of the people who try your game in the first month or two? Lets be realisitic here. The only reason 100-250k people is the best effort for most games is because most games are failing to do what they set out to do. This market is so huge that even a dissaster of a release can get a 100k+ where it used to take a solid game to do that. The only reason blizzard is running away with almost the entire market, is because of the sad state so many mmos are in. Saying a few hundred thousand is the norm is like handing ribbons to every game that says "everyone is a winner" just for showing up.
Seriously, when mmos sell over 1 million copies in the first months then the average size of a game should not be a few hundred thousand players. The market for much bigger exists and that is exactly what these companies are aiming for. The reason they are not retaining those numbers is because their offerings are not worth leaving for.
You may think 300k is successful, but mythic stated 250k was their break even point.
War as a PVP game is a failure. It has a perfect engine for the best PVE game ever created but Mythic doesn't know what PVE is and defently dont know how to design it. And to those claiming WOW is setting standards... Im sorry but WOW has 10 times more stability problems than the new MMO games. Last patch had huge amount of serious bugs even tho it was tested for months. And even tho the game is watering down every class to be pretty much exactly the same to be able to balance PVP arena - there are still huge unbalancing issues that have been overlooked for months. This is the standard ? No... The true standard in WOW is that the game has been delivering what MMO players are looking for. Note - HAS been delivering. But no longer. I think the latest content patch in WOW is one of the worst patches ever released in the history of MMO gaming. Blizzard has set new "standards" in noobness after 4 years of WOW. WIth all this said. WAR simply is to shallow and one sided for me to ever be able to enjoy it. If the game is all about RVR then why the hell does the game not build something more unique than standstill, ugly looking, "siege" combat ? I blame Mythic 100% for the game design. I feel sorry for Gameworkshop to have to see the name of Warhammer beeing destroyed by naive and simply BAD design of WAR.
The engine to WAR was fucking awful. It ran no better then Anarchy Online which is still a DX7 game engine. Awesome that a 2008 title runs as well as a game 7 years old and doesnt look much better.
You keep saying mythic did this, mythic did that. When its infact the publishers decision when a game gets released. As hard as it sounds, the devs working on the game are merely employees. They are not in a position to say, "hey lets keep this game in developement for another two years". They are limited by time as well as money constraints, what should they have done, work 20 hours a day instead of 8? Many new games are plagued by this problem these days, not just mmorpgs.
But dont get me wrong, i dont think another half a year developement would have made much difference for the game. I think the problem pretty much is that most mmorpg gamers are already playing wow, where they have a high level character and a nice guild. Also they are happy with wow. So some bought warhammer, tested it a bit, and then went back to wow for wotlk or cause they didnt like the game. Most people in my wow guild that tried warhammer actually liked it, just not enough to shelf their high level wow chars and abandon their social contacts with the game.
Also the mmorpg market startet with WoW, atleast in western countrys. They didnt take millions of players away from EQ or ultima or whatever, those games never had such a following. Blizzard simply had a strong following with their previous warcraft and diablo titles that they sucessfully lured to the mmorpg genre. I know several people who got internet in the first place just to be able to play this game.
But then again, what do you propose people should play that are sick of wow since your opposed to warhammer so much? I tried basicly every mmorpg out there after i got sick of wow, and war is what i kept coming back too. Its simply the only true alternative imho.
Who care, EA is going to shut the thing down anyway its a failed attempt at a Warhammer game. License will be sold off to someone else or EA will sell off Mythic to (yep you guessed it) SOE!!!!. SOE buys all junk games noone wants. How much you want to bet this will be on the Station list in like 4 or 5 months.
You keep saying mythic did this, mythic did that. When its infact the publishers decision when a game gets released. As hard as it sounds, the devs working on the game are merely employees. They are not in a position to say, "hey lets keep this game in developement for another two years". They are limited by time as well as money constraints, what should they have done, work 20 hours a day instead of 8? Many new games are plagued by this problem these days, not just mmorpgs.
But dont get me wrong, i dont think another half a year developement would have made much difference for the game. I think the problem pretty much is that most mmorpg gamers are already playing wow, where they have a high level character and a nice guild. Also they are happy with wow. So some bought warhammer, tested it a bit, and then went back to wow for wotlk or cause they didnt like the game. Most people in my wow guild that tried warhammer actually liked it, just not enough to shelf their high level wow chars and abandon their social contacts with the game.
Also the mmorpg market startet with WoW, atleast in western countrys. They didnt take millions of players away from EQ or ultima or whatever, those games never had such a following. Blizzard simply had a strong following with their previous warcraft and diablo titles that they sucessfully lured to the mmorpg genre. I know several people who got internet in the first place just to be able to play this game.
But then again, what do you propose people should play that are sick of wow since your opposed to warhammer so much? I tried basicly every mmorpg out there after i got sick of wow, and war is what i kept coming back too. Its simply the only true alternative imho.
You are right that is was EA/Mythic (I don't know who had what amount of control to be honest so I just say mythic) that decided when to publish the game. I stand corrected.
You are wrong about when the "market" started. The market was already hovering around 6+ million active subscribers in mmos at wows release. That does not count free to play players or anyone who had already left. Sure the market exploded right around wows release, but it was already growing at a predictable rate. There is a chart somewhere showing the rate of growth following a nice curve that details it better than I can. Why do you think so many companies were investing 10's of millions of dollars into game development prior to wow? The only difference is that companies did not realize how big one game could get.
Some people didn't leave wow for warhammer, because they are happy with wow. I don't buy the concept that people didn't stick with warhammer, because they didn't want to give up high level toons and guilds. Those people never left wow in sizable numbers anyhow. People didn't stick with warhammer, because the game was a mess in so many ways. If the game was great then people would have left their current games and stayed with warhammer, just like people left eq for wow and ultima for eq before it. It didn't matter what high level characters or guilds they had. People get bored and change games, that is the cold hard reality of mmos. The only difference is that for the past 4+ years there have not been a great deal of reasons to switch to a new game. Just look at the release history for mmos since wow and you see the picture.
Lastly I'm no opposed to warhammer. My wife and I both have active accounts and play every week. I just don't let my enjoyment of a game cloud my objectivity. My playing the game doesn't somehow change the situation that warhammer is in or how it got there. Those are simply facts that my entertainment value in a game cannot change.
And that is where i disagree with you. You say warhammer is a mess, i say wow is a mess too. I have active subscriptions to both games(because of friends playing wow), i play both, and wow has atleast as many problems as warhammer does. They just have different problems, but both can heavily detract from your enjoyment.
Wars problems are population imbalances and lack of incentive to actually RvR instead of RvM, also the pve side is not as developed and the keep fights are too static. Class balance might be a issue, but really it isnt, realm balance is the issue and its far easier to address than wows attempt to balance each class for 1on1, group pvp and pve at the same time.
WoWs problem is how they totally mess up all the classes every few patches, im sick of all the pve nerfs for pvp sake and vice versa or how they make all the classes the same. I also dont like how pvp fights are getting faster and faster, paladins and DKs are simply totally out of line with their damage and survivability. Example. WoW has great pve content, which i enjoy more than Wars pve content i admit, but if you want to pvp you better be damn sure your playing one of the current fotm classes because for all others its a total pain. Also you better not be sick of running the same BGs over and over that you have run for years. Open pvp is a joke.
So what are people complaining about? That wow has better raids? Yeah they do, better instances too. If that is what you want dont touch war, wow does those things exceedingly well(why are you even considering giving it up?). However if you dont like wow pvp anymore, or if you got addicted to lvling through pvp, or if you like running around in big raids for open pvp, well its not as if you have much choice then but to either suck it up and be bitter, or live with the quirks and try to have a good time in war despite them.
Let me make that very clear, if there was a better game around for this kind of pvp, i would change to it in a heartbeat. But there isnt. Neither AoC nor EQ II nor Vanguard nor LotRO not even Daoc offer me the kind of pvp war does, i tried all of them and none has a pvp system as fleshed out as war. It is simply unique, and if you want that you dont have a alternative atm.
Let me make that very clear, if there was a better game around for this kind of pvp, i would change to it in a heartbeat. But there isnt. Neither AoC nor EQ II nor Vanguard nor LotRO not even Daoc offer me the kind of pvp war does, i tried all of them and none has a pvp system as fleshed out as war. It is simply unique, and if you want that you dont have a alternative atm.
The point where a lot, or actually probably even most people who played Daoc disagree with you.
You have some strange points in your comparison. Wow constant nerfing of classes, but warhammer (mythic) ishas a rather well known reputation for the same thing. In all reality this is something common in every game, but blizzard has far more to balance for compared to warhammer.
You say warcraft has overpowered/underpowered classes and flavor of the month, but when you put the same comparison to warhammer somehow it doesn't matter, because it is a team based game? Come on, team play is not an excuse to have classes that suck or are wildly over powered. Even saying that you are being completely over dramatic about wow. "Totally mess up all the classes every few patchs" is being just a tad bit extreme don't you think?
What were people complaining about warhammer? There is far to much to list, but it really isn't important to list them all since the outcome is what is important. People left, because warhammer didn't do what it set out to do.
I'll present it like this. If the rvr combat of warhammer was removed how many people do you think warhammer would have? It would be pretty safe to assume warhammer would lose the majority of the remaining subscribers. Then consider the state of rvr at the release of the game and you can see the full picture of what happened. Even the rvr has limited draw, because it is the same thing over and over in almost identical settings.
We can both gush about loving the game, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation. Warhammer has issues and even the devs admit so in their patch notes and state of the game addresses. Just go read the first few state of the games and you can see just how far mythic missed the target of this game. It was filled with notes about changing almost everything in the game.
Comments
Honestly, WAr is not a bad game. Skill has a massive factor in it however there is too much button spaming. (the meters alone show this).
The fault of WAr is quite simple their game engine sucks , this new and improved gamebryo is far worse than the one they used 7 years ago (is it 8 now?) It just a bad engine, can fix that. Really if mythic were to do this agian what they shoudl look at is just that.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
All MMOs have a rough start, WAR just had a slighty more bumpier start. If you like PvP, more then the PvP WoW offers (joke), WAR is good for you. If you prefer good PvE, you might be a little dissappointed. WAR has PvE in it, but it's a PvP game. All this talk of WAR being a total letdown is correct, for some people, but not all of us. I got my inspiration back to WAR since the release of the Slayer class. Atleast it's not like the "I win button" classes we have in the game. If you don't like the game, then it's okay. You don't need to start telling other people why they shouldn't play the game or not. It's childish and I don't see how you can benefit from it.
I'm going to rant now, and it's not against you Zoldaire. But inspired by similar posts I have read over the months which you conveniently summarized and I highligted in red.
Let's get one thing straight, right off the bat. PvP in WaR is TEH SUCK to use terminology most on these forums will immediately grasp. Let's all stop hiding behind the over-abused "well ofc the PVE sucks, it's a PVP game" cause it's not, or at least not a well made one. The best that can be said to define pvp in this game is calling it WoW: Casual PvP edition.
So why is this a bad PVP game?
FUndamentally, because it does nothing a PVP game should do well.
1) Mega lag in most "large" scale battles. That in and of itself is no good in a Pvp game. Right?
2) Total and complete lack of tactical or strategic elements. It's a bloody button mashing zerg. Just face it.
3) Classes are flat. Yes, yes there's 3 gazillion of them etc (well divided by two if you consider mirrors) but if you stopped to look at skills and abilities you would see that they really mimic each other much more than appearance would let on (gimmicky class mechanics excluded). (Pushbacks, detaunts, etc everyone has them). Additionally abilities for many classes are very uninsipired. Ex. Archmage's 3 main heals are a "Direct heal" "direct + hot" *hot" I mean... come on devs!. Another game we all know released its then main healer with that exact set up... but that was eons ago in gaming history.
4) Combat is muddy. There is no justifying this and it has no excuse. The combat IS muddy. Most f2p games have better combat strcture (animations, synch, lag, targetting, etc) than WAR.
5) WaR is nowhere. Yes yes again if you're on one of two? three? high pop, balanced servers you could run into a battle. But for most peeps (and for months after realase) there simply was NONE. This again is unacceptable for a pvp oriented game.
I'm sure there's more but that should get the flamers going.
For your second point.
There is a very good reason why I would LOVE to see whoever is left in the game leave. I am very tired of crap mmos being released by companies to make a profit a leeching off those consumers that for whatever absurd reason decide to stick with it and give them money for half baked products.
Why?
Because (true for every other product categor but MMOs it seems) if a product sucks it gets pulled. If it underperforms it gets pulled. If it does not reach certain RoIs it gets pulled. In short, if it is not successful it get pulled.
"oh but WaR is successful! it doesn't have to have 10mil subs to be successful!"
Wrong.
Let's stick with the usual accepted figures: (and remember that the game cost "less than 100mil $ but was considered one of the largest investments in MMO history)
1 Mil boxes
750k sold
250k current subscribers (if that)
Ok... let's use those same figures in other scenarios.
A tv show launches and is expected to take 10 million viewers. It does ok at 7.5m the first week. Three weeks down the line it's a 2.5mil. Guess what happens to that TV show? It gets yanked.
A new car launches on the market and sells 100k the first month, 75k the next and 25k the following three. Are they going to make a new version of it the coming year? Probably not.
An electronics company produces 1milion esoteric kitchen appliances. It ships 750k and 500k get returned to the shop. Will you ever see one of those again?
And so on and so forth.
The reason why these games can carry on with such objectively dismal performance is that the MMO business model allows it. They've made the game the high up front costs have been already paid and they've sold the boxes. Now, provided they keep a minimum of turkies... i mean players paying every month (with the added bonus of some other barnyard birds buying the box further down the line) they have more money to be made going on (minus salaries and maint etc) than they have with closing down the whole operation. It's that simple.
So yes, for the love of all that's holy... stop playing this wretched game. If enough crap MMOs die a spectacular fiery death then MAYBE we'll have developers really thinking about what they're producing instead of the half-baked uninispired and badly designed (and unfunished to top it all off) crap that is unfortunately now the norm and that sells anyway.
Rant over.
/signout
Wow. Obsess much?
I disagree with the "fundamental" PvP flaws you've listed, other than some lag issues.
As to your crusade - good luck, and you might want to talk to a mental health professional.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
Adiaris probably put a lot of time and effort into that post of his. How sad that he has nothing better to do with his life, and that he thinks any of the WAR players give a toss. I pity him.
Now back to WAR.
I agree that it is quite sad and that the effort put into such posts would be better spent probably playing a game the person enjoys, unless ofc this is the game the person enjoys!!
However everyone deserves to have their say, doesn't say we have to agree with them or take notice of them, just as they don't have to agree with those who enjoy the games that they dislike.
I liked the gameplay in WAR I liked just about every class I played. It just seems to me they took the best parts of DAoC and then threw them out in favor of keeping the worst parts. You have to spend a lot of time in PvE in order to be effective in RvR and the worst part is that the final end game is more PvE, but to participate in that even more PvE is required. There doesn't seem to be the same kind of pride in keep ownership that DAoC had. And even though it was a serious grind, at least the DAoC crafting resulted in good gear that allowed you to customize your character somewhat.
Anyway, I don't think WAR was a dismal failure, but it darn sure wasn't a great success either. I'd go back if they ever ironed out their problems, but I don't see that happening. If Mythic ever makes a DAoC II then I would be willing to give it a shot as long as they concentrate on more RvR and less PvE.
I played it when it first came out and I thought it was a bit to wow like and basicly not like warhammer at all.
the only concepts I really liked where RvR and public quests. other wise very tired, and those two items are not enought to keep me going for very long. got to 30 in a few months and went yawn, and quit.
if i want to play wow I can play wow.
still looking for that cool classless levelless sandbox game
played:WoW and Eve off and on 5 years
Tried:CoH/V, PoTBS, War, TR, STO, FE
TOR is likely to rock
I can tell from a lot of these posts that the "haters" have either never played WAR, or only played when it was first released.
A few clarifying points for you all from someone who has played the game since beta.
1. Open RvR combat is being improved almost every patch. Currently you can spend an entire day on the game and never have a lack of people to fight. This is due to the incentives that Mythic has added to the game to participate in Open RvR combat and also the server mergers that have been happening have added a lot of people to my server.
2. You can level from 1-40 doing nothing but RvR. I really don't do anything but ORvR in the game. The only quests I do on any character are the ones related to ORvR combat. I haven't done a scenario since they added Choppas to the game. ORvR is the most fun I have had in an MMO game in years.
3. I'm not sure what you mean by the combat feeling muddy but I can tell you that they are focusing on a few classes each patch to update and improve. Next patch they are going to be toning down the AoE damage (and as a healer I can tell you it's log overdue) and buffing Shamans and Archmages, as well as a number of other improvements.
4. The game still suffers from a large amount of graphic lag. At least more than it should based on the graphics that it is using, but Mythic is working to correct these problems and have made some small improvements in the last few patches.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Dunno what problems people have, but im quite happy with the way WAR is going. Already it is loads better than vanilla wow ever was, anyone remember how god awful it was back in the days before BC? How hybrids where only good for healing, itemization was horrible, class balance nonexistant, and there where only 2 lvl 60 instances? Battlegrounds didnt exist and pvp was the zerg between tarrens mill and southshore.
Yet know what? I had fun there. Some of my fondest memories of WoW was back from that time, the current WoW is so far away from that game you can hardly recognize it anymore. It feels bland and generic now, class balance gets completly screwed up every patch. Yeah it has 12 million subscribers, so what? Alot of people play counterstrike too, yet i cant stand that game.
War is alot like that early WoW, people complain that its not where WoW is after 5 years of developement, yet that doesnt matter to me, cause i have fun now. Just like i had fun with the pre BC WoW. The main difference is i know War developement will take a different route compared to the route WoW took years ago, given time the already big differences between the games will continue to grow.
So yeah, people just expect too much. You simply cant throw a mmorpg on the market and then expect it to be as refined as a 5 year old mmorpg with two expansions. I honestly think its impossible. The sooner people start to realize that the sooner they will stop falling for hypes, a good game needs alot of time and i dont blame War for having to go through the same problems every other mmorpg including wow had to face early on. If you played WoW half a year after its release you know what im talking about.
Although this part is quite harsh, yet i totally agree with it. Just like another post that petition to close down warhammer. Because Devs till now still come out with un-finish games and treat us like idots.
As much as i live warhammer characters, graphics and PQ, yet the rest of game is just 1 big joke.... Even after they release Choppa.... /sad
Its really high time to force the Devs to think out of the box and stop wana be a WoW clone, but the worst part is... its not even a clone! Just a wana be.....
RIP Orc Choppa
I suffered from huge client instability on a brand new Commodore Gaming rig (with a custom WAR skin).
When you got to tier 3 the only populated bits were people camping the scenarios.
Warhammer was created in the UK and yet Mythic felt it was ok to hand over the running to GOA and for months before release everybody said it would be a nightmare yet Mythic said it would be ok, geuss what it wasn't yet GOA are still running the EU side.
Mythic are identifying problems and sorting them, but when the problem of leeching in scenarios started happening it seemed to take a very long time for mythic to acknowledge it and then to fix it.
So I geuss that Mythic made some very bad decsions and then are taking a while to turn the problems around.
Well given that the game is 7 months old and you can pick a copy up now for £9, I'd say the game hasn't failed but needs to find it's way fast before newer games takes people's interest away from WAR.
I put the blame at Mythic and such minds as Paul Barnett. Paul Barnett should be in car sales, the way he was trying to sell a lack of features as a good thing (for ex. Crafting. Which in the words of Mr Barnett is not necessary because this is WAR!!! In WAR!!!! ppl don't need clothing, food, armour, weapons, houses to sleep in, because in times of WAR!!!!! ppl don't do such things. They just go to WAR!!!!)
They never tried to build a wolrd MMORPG. Just a hybrid between a world and a game MMO. WAR would have been a better game if it would have been an assortment of like 30 maps ordered in hierarchical pyramid. Lock a map, proceed to next until final one, win WAR!!!! start from Map 1 one again. No more need to run around, no need for pseudo PvE, just ... wait for it ... wait... WAR!!!!
There is no contradiction at all, and no wow bashing at all in what you quoted. Vanilla wow WAS aweful by today standards(standards that where set by wow itself btw) which is obviously hindsight, back then we had different standards and where quite happy. Would i play vanilla wow again given the chance? Hell no. Did i still have a very good time back then? Hell yes.
What i tried to say is that the starting point for both games was quite similar, and that all in all war actually isnt bad at all compared to where wow was at the same age, i even go so far as to say its more enjoyable now than pre bc WoW ever was. Largely due to pvp xp, better rvr support(and yes i liked to think of the tarrens mill/soutshore zerg as some kind of rvr), better grouping mechanics, scenarios and PQs. I simply dont expect a game that is half a year old to compete content or even mechanic wise with a game thats has gotten patched and reworked continiously for almost 5 years.
And the responsiveness imho got mostly fixed with 1.2.1, im atm running around with my shaman zapping things and its ALOT smother imho. Actually so much so that im dusting off my magus.
And yeah im quite happy with the population as well, so wow has 12 mil players, thats great. I still hardly get a BG to open on my <70 twinks, i still cant get groups for low lvl inis while leveling. So tell me, what good are these 12 million people doing me when i still have to grind quests solo till 80? What good are 12 million players doing me if i cant advance my character by doing the things i enjoy(pvp and instances)?
And please tell me, what other mmorpg besides wow has significantly more players than warhammer? AoC? Nope been there done that, empty servers. Vanguard? Even worse. EQ II? Yeah right. According to your logic no mmorpg besides wow is worth playing, cause they are all pretty much around where war is, most actually do alot worse.
It was all Mythic's fault. People like to blame the publisher, but EA got suckered by the hype as much as we were. They acquired a team of talking heads when they thought they were getting a game studio. You give a team of monkeys five months to fix their game or five years and the end result is the same. The best thing you can do is try and find a good date to release to try and recoup as much of your losses as possible. WAR wasn't released in such a state that half a year of more development time would have produced a radically superior product. Their first mistake was building WAR off of what felt like a completely unenhanced version of the DAoC engine. That's just not something you can redo quick in a couple of months.
War as a PVP game is a failure. It has a perfect engine for the best PVE game ever created but Mythic doesn't know what PVE is and defently dont know how to design it.
And to those claiming WOW is setting standards... Im sorry but WOW has 10 times more stability problems than the new MMO games. Last patch had huge amount of serious bugs even tho it was tested for months. And even tho the game is watering down every class to be pretty much exactly the same to be able to balance PVP arena - there are still huge unbalancing issues that have been overlooked for months.
This is the standard ? No... The true standard in WOW is that the game has been delivering what MMO players are looking for. Note - HAS been delivering. But no longer. I think the latest content patch in WOW is one of the worst patches ever released in the history of MMO gaming. Blizzard has set new "standards" in noobness after 4 years of WOW.
WIth all this said. WAR simply is to shallow and one sided for me to ever be able to enjoy it. If the game is all about RVR then why the hell does the game not build something more unique than standstill, ugly looking, "siege" combat ? I blame Mythic 100% for the game design. I feel sorry for Gameworkshop to have to see the name of Warhammer beeing destroyed by naive and simply BAD design of WAR.
are certain things EA's fault? if you mean DoKs, stealthing witch elves, favorability to order for the kiddies, and releasing waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too early to compete with WotLK? id say yes
are certain things Mythics fault? if you mean trying to out-wow the 800 pound gorilla, shitty CS, 0 itemization and buff/nerf logic then yes
both sides are to blame but with the way DAoC was in its prime im going to lay the lion's share of the blame on this one on EA for executive meddling and all around stupidity that theyre well know for.
To the first highlighted point.
What you are saying is that 4 years later and the best effort mythic could produce is to release a game in as "bad" a state as another game was 4 years ago. What sort of twisted logic is that? Hey look at that game and how bad it was 4 years ago, warhammer is in the same sad state, so everything is fine? Why should we applaud a company for repeating the mistakes of the past?
I have to break your view of how things were, but millions of people waited in line to play wow at release. Yes they waited for hours just for the chance to log in an play. The overwhelming majority of warhammer players left. Even on servers where they could log in anytime they chose, they walked away. The game is just not fun enough to work through the issues.
The release of these two games is miles apart, despite your opinion of their similarities. Wows gameplay was well thought out and warhammer was still in the drawing board concept stage and most of those concepts don't work.
As for the second highlight:.
Here you go again, just because other games are struggling to get servers with populations, warhammer is fine? Yes there are a lot of games where the overall population is going to be a hinderance to playing a massive multiplayer online role playing game. Yes the population problems in this game were a gigantic problem for gameplay and resulted in 64 servers closing, some of the worst in mmo history, because of how population dependent this game is.
The game was rushed and that is the end story. EA/Mythic tossed a huge amount of money and developers in an attempt to speed up the developement cycle of the game and it didn't work. Quality takes time and companies need to start acknowleding this.
Am i really that hard to understand? War had x years of developement, wow had x years of developement. Im comparing what both companies released after a similar developement time. Wow probably by now has probably gotten about 10x as much manhours put into than war. Obviously its going to be more refined, has more content, more balance etc.
If you truly expect any company can produce in three years what it took blizzard 8 years to create your simply delusional. It doesnt work that way, you have a limited amount of devolpers available and a nearly unlimited amount of potentional content. No MMORPG will ever upon releaseday be able to compete with WoW. Not even if they gave themselves 10 years of developement time, cause the player feedback helped shape WoW.
Regarding population: According to xfire Warhammer is 22th most played game OVER ALL. That includes sport games, RTS, shooter and other mmorpgs. Ignoring free to plays and AoC, which is only as high as it is now due to the recently released trial version, warhammer basicly tied as the second most popular fantasy mmorpg with LotRO, which has hardly any pvp content. Its also quite stable in that position.
So i can only repeat: Yes im happy with where warhammer is atm. Im on a full server with a stable population, the game gets a bit better every patch, and im not in the least bitter about the subscriber numbers or people deciding its not the game for them. Contrary to what you seem to believe around 300k subscribers is the norm for mmorpgs that are doing ok, its not a sign of struggling to fill servers, its wow thats completly out of line with its 12 million subscribers.
No I don't expect a game to rush to market in 3 years with the same level of resources that it took another company 6-8 years to do. I'm not that foolish, but it seems mythic was and it cost them. Again it doesn't really matter what wow was like in 2005, because mythic knew what they were currently up against. If their best effort was to aim so low as to compete with the original state of a game in 2005 then they blew it.
Did wow release with the same amount of content that everquest had? No? Ok, then lets stop making excuses by comparing games at different periods of time as if it is relevant. Blizzard did what it needed to do to unseat the current leader with a solid game. Mythic rushed a game to market and it is was obvioulsy not ready for market. I'm not talking about bugs or performance (which it has a fair share of problems), but concepts and game designs. Far to much of the game just did not work and that is unexcusable to the majority of people.
A few hundred thousand players might be the top end for mmos (note: that is not the norm, but rather the BEST EFFORTS other mmos can muster), but do you think it should be the norm to lose 70% of the people who try your game in the first month or two? Lets be realisitic here. The only reason 100-250k people is the best effort for most games is because most games are failing to do what they set out to do. This market is so huge that even a dissaster of a release can get a 100k+ where it used to take a solid game to do that. The only reason blizzard is running away with almost the entire market, is because of the sad state so many mmos are in. Saying a few hundred thousand is the norm is like handing ribbons to every game that says "everyone is a winner" just for showing up.
Seriously, when mmos sell over 1 million copies in the first months then the average size of a game should not be a few hundred thousand players. The market for much bigger exists and that is exactly what these companies are aiming for. The reason they are not retaining those numbers is because their offerings are not worth leaving for.
You may think 300k is successful, but mythic stated 250k was their break even point.
The engine to WAR was fucking awful. It ran no better then Anarchy Online which is still a DX7 game engine. Awesome that a 2008 title runs as well as a game 7 years old and doesnt look much better.
You keep saying mythic did this, mythic did that. When its infact the publishers decision when a game gets released. As hard as it sounds, the devs working on the game are merely employees. They are not in a position to say, "hey lets keep this game in developement for another two years". They are limited by time as well as money constraints, what should they have done, work 20 hours a day instead of 8? Many new games are plagued by this problem these days, not just mmorpgs.
But dont get me wrong, i dont think another half a year developement would have made much difference for the game. I think the problem pretty much is that most mmorpg gamers are already playing wow, where they have a high level character and a nice guild. Also they are happy with wow. So some bought warhammer, tested it a bit, and then went back to wow for wotlk or cause they didnt like the game. Most people in my wow guild that tried warhammer actually liked it, just not enough to shelf their high level wow chars and abandon their social contacts with the game.
Also the mmorpg market startet with WoW, atleast in western countrys. They didnt take millions of players away from EQ or ultima or whatever, those games never had such a following. Blizzard simply had a strong following with their previous warcraft and diablo titles that they sucessfully lured to the mmorpg genre. I know several people who got internet in the first place just to be able to play this game.
But then again, what do you propose people should play that are sick of wow since your opposed to warhammer so much? I tried basicly every mmorpg out there after i got sick of wow, and war is what i kept coming back too. Its simply the only true alternative imho.
Who care, EA is going to shut the thing down anyway its a failed attempt at a Warhammer game. License will be sold off to someone else or EA will sell off Mythic to (yep you guessed it) SOE!!!!. SOE buys all junk games noone wants. How much you want to bet this will be on the Station list in like 4 or 5 months.
Remember this thread when that day comes!
You are right that is was EA/Mythic (I don't know who had what amount of control to be honest so I just say mythic) that decided when to publish the game. I stand corrected.
You are wrong about when the "market" started. The market was already hovering around 6+ million active subscribers in mmos at wows release. That does not count free to play players or anyone who had already left. Sure the market exploded right around wows release, but it was already growing at a predictable rate. There is a chart somewhere showing the rate of growth following a nice curve that details it better than I can. Why do you think so many companies were investing 10's of millions of dollars into game development prior to wow? The only difference is that companies did not realize how big one game could get.
Some people didn't leave wow for warhammer, because they are happy with wow. I don't buy the concept that people didn't stick with warhammer, because they didn't want to give up high level toons and guilds. Those people never left wow in sizable numbers anyhow. People didn't stick with warhammer, because the game was a mess in so many ways. If the game was great then people would have left their current games and stayed with warhammer, just like people left eq for wow and ultima for eq before it. It didn't matter what high level characters or guilds they had. People get bored and change games, that is the cold hard reality of mmos. The only difference is that for the past 4+ years there have not been a great deal of reasons to switch to a new game. Just look at the release history for mmos since wow and you see the picture.
Lastly I'm no opposed to warhammer. My wife and I both have active accounts and play every week. I just don't let my enjoyment of a game cloud my objectivity. My playing the game doesn't somehow change the situation that warhammer is in or how it got there. Those are simply facts that my entertainment value in a game cannot change.
And that is where i disagree with you. You say warhammer is a mess, i say wow is a mess too. I have active subscriptions to both games(because of friends playing wow), i play both, and wow has atleast as many problems as warhammer does. They just have different problems, but both can heavily detract from your enjoyment.
Wars problems are population imbalances and lack of incentive to actually RvR instead of RvM, also the pve side is not as developed and the keep fights are too static. Class balance might be a issue, but really it isnt, realm balance is the issue and its far easier to address than wows attempt to balance each class for 1on1, group pvp and pve at the same time.
WoWs problem is how they totally mess up all the classes every few patches, im sick of all the pve nerfs for pvp sake and vice versa or how they make all the classes the same. I also dont like how pvp fights are getting faster and faster, paladins and DKs are simply totally out of line with their damage and survivability. Example. WoW has great pve content, which i enjoy more than Wars pve content i admit, but if you want to pvp you better be damn sure your playing one of the current fotm classes because for all others its a total pain. Also you better not be sick of running the same BGs over and over that you have run for years. Open pvp is a joke.
So what are people complaining about? That wow has better raids? Yeah they do, better instances too. If that is what you want dont touch war, wow does those things exceedingly well(why are you even considering giving it up?). However if you dont like wow pvp anymore, or if you got addicted to lvling through pvp, or if you like running around in big raids for open pvp, well its not as if you have much choice then but to either suck it up and be bitter, or live with the quirks and try to have a good time in war despite them.
Let me make that very clear, if there was a better game around for this kind of pvp, i would change to it in a heartbeat. But there isnt. Neither AoC nor EQ II nor Vanguard nor LotRO not even Daoc offer me the kind of pvp war does, i tried all of them and none has a pvp system as fleshed out as war. It is simply unique, and if you want that you dont have a alternative atm.
The point where a lot, or actually probably even most people who played Daoc disagree with you.
You have some strange points in your comparison. Wow constant nerfing of classes, but warhammer (mythic) ishas a rather well known reputation for the same thing. In all reality this is something common in every game, but blizzard has far more to balance for compared to warhammer.
You say warcraft has overpowered/underpowered classes and flavor of the month, but when you put the same comparison to warhammer somehow it doesn't matter, because it is a team based game? Come on, team play is not an excuse to have classes that suck or are wildly over powered. Even saying that you are being completely over dramatic about wow. "Totally mess up all the classes every few patchs" is being just a tad bit extreme don't you think?
What were people complaining about warhammer? There is far to much to list, but it really isn't important to list them all since the outcome is what is important. People left, because warhammer didn't do what it set out to do.
I'll present it like this. If the rvr combat of warhammer was removed how many people do you think warhammer would have? It would be pretty safe to assume warhammer would lose the majority of the remaining subscribers. Then consider the state of rvr at the release of the game and you can see the full picture of what happened. Even the rvr has limited draw, because it is the same thing over and over in almost identical settings.
We can both gush about loving the game, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation. Warhammer has issues and even the devs admit so in their patch notes and state of the game addresses. Just go read the first few state of the games and you can see just how far mythic missed the target of this game. It was filled with notes about changing almost everything in the game.