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Why WAR failed to perform.
Holgranth
Member Posts: 380
The following is my OPINION it should not be taken as hard stone cold fact. However Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, going from over a million players at launch to around 300,00 is a stone cold fact.
These are, in my OPINION as a long time gamer and as a person who has played WAR several times at different points in its life cycle, the biggest reasons WAR has failed to be the colossal success it was hyped to be.
Public Quests:
I am a big fan of Public Quests in concept and really enjoyed those first few that were done right. However the rest were terrible for several reasons.
PQ’s are utterly dependant on the right number of people showing up. If you have too few people it is an exercise in frustration as you desperately race to beat timers only to fail yet again. If you have to many there’s barely enough time to throw more than a direct damage spell on an enemy before they go down and have to be outrageously lucky to get any loot.
While a few of the early PQ’s had, interesting, varied objectives, scripted events and other cool stuff almost every later PQ followed a set pattern. Phase 1: kill bunch of weak enemies standing around in small groups in a clear area. Phase 2: kill a bunch of slightly stronger enemies that were standing around but previously unattackable . Phase 3: Kill a large boss type enemy who spawns in the center.
Because of the lack of any originality it very quickly becomes a giant multiplayer grindathon. In my opinion the game would have been far better off with two or three well designed, interesting, innovative public quests per zone instead of scattering poorly made repetitive ones every which direction.
If they had done that they could have also made them scale with numbers and used the same system as RvR to bump people up to the appropriate level.
Contribution System:
The messed up “contribution system” also played an important part in making WAR less than fun for many people. The first thing was that in the beginning the contribution system was based on dps. Whoever did the highest dps had the best chance of getting loot.
That wasn’t so much “spitting in the eye” of tanks and healers as snorting mucus out of the back of your nose, hacking it up with some phlegm and bits of rancid food from your throat and letting fly full into the face and mouth.
It also meant that the person who was highest leveled and most geared, therefore needing the rewards the least, was the most likely to GET a good reward. This also applied to Tier 4 sieges and PQs where the person who already had a good gear set had the biggest advantage as far as getting the best shot at getting more gear.
Solo Questing:
War’s solo questing SUCKED. They tried to emulate WoW and succeeded in making all the mistakes that Blizzard had made in classic WoW and subsequently improved upon in Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Litch King.
Boring, grindy kill X quests with a few gather Y’s thrown in for good measure. There were a few gems, like the quest where you secretly gathered powerful venom from corrupted spiders for a shell-shocked Warrior-Priest who wanted to put those wounded who had no hope of survival out of their misery. But it was mostly dung heap.
They made the level chain mistake that PLAGUES classic WoW and other games. First quest in the chain has you killing Rank 20 and 21enemys. Second quest has you killing 21s and 22s. Third quest sends you up against 23s. The grand finale sends you but against 24s with a single 25 that must be defeated.
This wonderfully counter intuitive design makes it so that a player that starts the first quest at the appropriate level (19-20) doesn’t have a hope of actually completing the chain in one go. Because this mistake is repeated frequently its easy to end up with a quest log full of half done quest chains you can’t complete for few ranks.
Then there are the quest chains that lead to Public Quests. Again it’s the same sort of mistake WoW made with having quest chains send you into and elite infested area that required multiple people out of the blue.
Counterintuitive design, if people are solo questing throwing them in a PQ that either requires them to solo a significant portion of the early phases or find a group it interrupts the flow. If they wanted to do PQs they would be trying to do PQs.
Finally the city quests and the design of the city’s themselves. For reasons known only to themselves some of the quest designers at Mythic thought it would be a good idea to put a few hostile enemies with ranks varying from 1-40 is random spots around Altdorf and the Inevitable city. They to make life even more fun ensure there were plenty of quests leading to these enemies that could be accepted by anyone of any level with no indication of what level they were intended for.
I’m not a particularly violent man, but if I was I would want these people strung up from flag poles as a warning to future generations of game developers.
Population Balance:
This was one of the first things I asked when I first heard details about Warhammer Online back in 2008, “What are they going to do to keep the factions balanced.” As it turned out pretty much nothing. Population was HORRIBLY skewed toward destruction on almost all servers at launch. There was no system in place to help out the under populated side of the equation which was a colossal failure.
A failure they should have seen coming 50 miles away. Mythic already had Dark Age of Camalot under their belt and WoW as a prime example of what NOT to do. I had played on a severely imbalanced WoW pvp server and had seen first hand how much it SUCKS to be the guys outnumbered 3-1.
Many people believe that Mythic had the answer sitting in front of them the whole time and should have made three factions which would have solved all the population problems. While I am not convinced it would have, it likely would have helped alleviate them somewhat.
Ultimately what they needed to do was hit the ground running with population balance. Put in powerful incentives to play on under performing factions. Used a system to give advantages to the outnumbered side like spawning more powerful guardians at battlefield objectives. Allowing players on the outnumbered or outperformed side to cheaply hire hirelings that would follow them out into battle.
It would be hard to design. Hard to implement and require constant adjustments and tweaking on a realm by realm basis, but it would have been far better than throwing the whole thing to the wolves like they did.
Class Balance:
Class balance is hard. Very hard. I don’t think a lot of people appreciate exactly how hard it is to balance classes in a video game. That dose not however changed the fact that WAR’s class balance was miserable at launch and improved very, very slowly.
A lot of it had to do with the way Mythic designed classes. They originally intended to have 24. Each class was to have a “mirrored” class on the opposite side that fulfilled the same function and use similar mechanics. Ultimately only 20 made it into launch and balance was terrible at all levels.
There were ridiculously overpowered classes, there were underpowered classes, there were classes with bugged abilities. It was an unholy mess.
A lot of the blame has to go to the fact that they tried to make 24 classes each with three different specializations. Even though each class had one class on the other side that was similar to it there were plenty of imbalances between the mirrors themselves.
Ultimately what Mythic should have done was create 12 classes and mirrior them PERFECTLY. They could have made their lives a lot easier by letting each class have a unique skin but copying the mechanics down to the letter.
This would have allowed them to address issues a lot faster and insure that even if one class was a bit out of balance (there will ALWAYS be at least one class a bit out of balance) both sides have them.
Crowd Control:
Again something that should have been seen coming. Dark Age of Camalot had crowd control issues, World of Warcraft had and has crowd control issues, and so do plenty of other games. Its not fun spending 30%-80% of your time stun locked or snared.
I am of the opinion that crowd control in PvP should be about limiting the amount of damage an enemy player can do not about completely disabling their ability to move and fight.
Warhammer has detaunts that effectively work like that but ruins it by also having stuns galore including area effect stuns. Although crown control has been significantly nerfed it was completely god awful for months after launch.
No Defense Incentives:
At launch and for a long time after there were no real incentives to defend a keep or battlefield objective.
There were no rewards for successful defense but plenty for successful offense. Therefore most players and guilds chose to ignore any keeps of their own under attack and go attack an enemy’s.
Little Early Mass RvR Focus:
I was not in the Warhammer Online Beta. However as I understand it WAR wasn’t supposed to be the sort of mass RvR game that Mythic was hyping fans into hoping it was. WAR was going to be heavily dependant on “Scenarios” and Public Quests to move the Realm War Campaign across zones.
So instead while physically capturing keeps and battlefield objectives was going to contribute to the campaign, public quests and scenarios were going to be just as if not more important than the action in the RvR lakes.
This was not what most people wanted. This is not what most of the hype had been about. War was supposed to be EVERYWHERE. Armies were supposed to clash on giant open air battlefields not in instances that reset every time someone won.
The fact that WAR was not designed to play as a mass RvR game ala Dark Age of Camelot from the very beginning was probably the most significant failure of all.
Poor Performance:
Right out of the gate WAR had massive performance problems whenever large numbers of players congregated. Unfortunately this generally meant open world RvR which was the primary reason most people were interested in the game. Almost anytime 50 or more people got in a small area like a keep things started getting laggy. In tier 4 fortress sieges were so bad that it was often more of a slide show than a video game.
Even when not faced with large numbers the game was a bit slow and clunky. A 0.5 of a second delay between clicking a button and seeing any result was fairly common even on high end computers.
Bugs:
Bugs like class balance are a lot harder to detect than many people think of. A minor tweak in one piece of code can accidentally set of a chain reaction that cripples the game. WAR however suffered from way more bugs than was acceptable at launch. Getting stuck in the terrain, characters stuck doing casting emotes, power slides down hills, broken class mechaincs and many, many, many more.
Emphasis on Gear:
Again one of the things that I strongly dislike about WoW’s pvp and one of the things that Dark Age of Camelot had significant issues with. (Trials of Atlantis anyone?)
To quote Yatzee Kenshaw, “It all comes down to who started the battle wearing the biggest boots.”
When you have a system where gear gives a significant advantage in PvP you make life miserable for any player who doesn’t have the gear.
If you have a system where the way to get gear is to PvP you make that players life even more miserable. Honestly WAR as a pvp game should have made gear a lot more of a vanity thing and less of a, “your totally screwed once you get to tier four if you don’t have epics.”
Tiered, Zoned World RvR:
This decision was yet another poorly thought out design choice that had plenty of previous examples of why not to do it. After the initial rush the lower level areas of any MMO generally become ghost towns.
In every Tier the game was spread out across three pairings and after the initial rush, especially when interest in the game started dropping fast, finding enough people to capture battlefield objectives and keeps could be a serious challenge.
On top of that the fact that all the zones were disconnected and the RvR in one had almost no influence on any others meant that with no incentive to defend and no homeland to protect many players simply found it easier to avoid the enemy and go to a different zone when they encountered resistance.
This is an offshoot of the fact that WAR was not designed from the ground up to be an open world RvR game.
Lackluster Crafting:
While this one is comparatively minor beefs the fact that WAR’s crafting system sucked didn’t do it any favors.
Very Little Music:
Again very minor in the grand scheme of things but still relevant, same songs over and over and over again gets old fast.
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
Comments
so what are your thoughts about the game now? becuase there are not bugs atleast I dont see them.
Music is fine by me.
Public Quests I think are fine as well, thre kind of like mini raids, you just know you have to form a group first.
When doing faction warfare I think its tough for server balance. But in all honesty I dont think its that bad, becuase most people have an order and destro player. and I think in time it evens out.
My only complaint is I wish it didnt have instances.
But I love the PVP in this game its very fun. I never even bother with pve.
but crafting is needing.
As of now? PQs still suck. I know other people love them but I find them to be boring multiplayer grindathons that follow the same boring repeitive structure over and over again with different skins on the MoBs.
Sever balance is very hard as I said in my OP. It will never, ever, EVER be perfect. BUT instead of hitting the ground running at launch Mythic let it go to the dogs. Sure it might be balanced now but bielive me it WAS horrible and it turned a LOT of people off the game.
The game runs fairly smoothly now, nothing spectacular.
Bugs are slowly going away but my BW still got stuck in casting position the other night when I tried a little RvR.
Balance is getting better its impossible to perfect but its no longer the horror it used to be. CC is still OP in my opinion.
Crafting still sucks.
Ultimately the biggest flaw in the whole thing is that WAR was not designed from the ground up to be a Mass RvR game, however a mass RvR game is exactly what fans wanted and exactly why Mythic hyped it to be.
In the end because of all the basic design flaws such as tiered content and making the game gear based it would take a total overhual from the ground up to make this game what it was hyped to be. At the moment its mediocre in my books and will probably studder along with a small devoted dev team and a small devoted playerbase.
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
It's a very impressive wall of text, and honestly a higly detailed and elaborated personal oppinion about the game, it could be even a review, as a matter of fact, it is somehow. So, my only complains actually are these (in question form):
1.) Your text is amazingly lacking any facts related to any changes happened in the game since launch - so it's about the state of the game now in your oppinion, or a slightly edited version of a formerly written 'review'? (Of course, you can say that these are those factors which have not changed at all, but, well...)
2.) What is a purpose of a review about WAR in February 2010 which wants to prove that it definitely was not, has not been, and maybe won't be ever a huge financial success? I like the game pretty much, but even I don't think it's gonna be able to reach ever a subscriber base what it could have had with a proper launch. But you are the only one who may answer this question
3.) OK, these are those factors which lead to the fail of WAR "to perform" in your oppinion - I can even agree with some of them. Have you seen anything that has been changed in any positve way since launch? If you're answer is basically "no", fair enough, but I expect a similarly elaborated explanation (even in a case of a "yes", tbh
)
1. Mutt and Jeff spent too much time doing silly videos instead of fixing their game.
2. Faction imabalnce.
3. Everything is too repetitive too fast.
4. Crappy game engine graphics wise.
5. PVE game mechanics is horrible.
I recently did the trial and I must say the game has imprved a little but not to the extent where you will see a ton of players come back to resub. What they need to do is condese the rest of the NA seevers into one server because it is the only way the game will be alot better for the players. I'll even come back to sub if they do this even with all of its flaws.
War is a good game, but to remain competitive War needs a RvR area where people have fun and another area for PvP-Super-mega twink-camp-hacker-greifer-farmer-invisible-one shot-ninja-kill steal-latency filled-erase all my reputation-bot run-ultimate-lose my information-SUCK-map where all the bad players can go live out their wildest dreams to take advantage of people looting their corpse and be allowed to sell them on eBay.
Wait! There are about 4 games out there that already do that. Oh! That's why no one's playing War. okay. 
Well, I can only agree with the 1st point
(Second point is too looes; it's as repetitve as every other MMO, except that RvR makes it less repetitive in my book; graphics is great imo, but it depends on taste; 5th is too loose again - although my oppinons are not better that anyone else's)
Public quests were also one of the biggest reasons I didn't like WAR. On paper, they're good ideas, but in reality, they rely too heavily on the number of people present in the zone. With people power leveling or quitting there just isn't enough bodies to do these fun events; not to mention they get tedious and boring after a while. The same can be said about Champions Online, who used a similar scenario.
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
Fair enough; I did realize the frequent past tense, but wanted to be sure, thank you.
I will try and make a "What they did; What they should have done;" post tonight or tomorrow. Which is going to be even more of an opinion piece.
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
I will try and make a "What they did; What they should have done;" post tonight or tomorrow. Which is going to be even more of an opinion piece.
look forward to reading it, so far i've found it to be very informative... even if it is a 'wall of text'!
My two cents and btw I agree with the OP - couldn't find one thing I didn't agree on and I played have played since beta.
Archetype Failure:
Want to make money with an mmorpg? Give people what they expect:
Be able to shield guard anyone (not just in your group)
Archers do not aim their bow at the sky if a mob is ten units away
Archers do ranged dps - not dot hop dot skirmish run dot kite hop
Archers can dual weild use a shield (according to Games Workshop) in most mmorpgs and books
To overcome stealth - you must work as a team - to present broken stealth in Warhammer is to state that people (a) cannot deal with stealth unlike that other HUGE mmorpg we all know of (b) that we can give broken stealth to say we have it - and even consequence the rogue archetype with poor armor choice and escape mechanisms...
PVE Failure:
I have played I believe every mmorpg that has been on the shelf at Best Buy since 2001 - and have attempted a number of free to plays and digital downloads.
Pve to level in some games is okay - doable even - in Asheron's Call 1 I really liked pve - pve in Warhammer while not as boring for me as say Allods - is just god awful.
PvP Failure:
The way pvp works in Warhammer (use your own reasons) makes people really be able to advertise their own flaws as well as overall class issues. Warhammer groups run in multiple directions in a scenario each doing the "Warsong Gulch" solo dance as if each person can get the flag successfully and no one else matters.
NO DEFENSE REWARDS FOR OUTGUNNED OUT LEVELED faction - just 10 minutes of 500 vs 25 pain scores.
WAR got 300.000 subscribers?
Somehow I strongly doubt that. 100.000 is a more likely number.
But seriously, game has many flaws, but what ultimately killed it for most people is that the end-game was so dissapointing and underwhelming. A game that is more fun level 1-10 than 30-40 is a failed game, that should just never happened.
Im not gonna doubt one word that was said in that wall of text. I just got the shorter version.
WAR has alot of technical issues and a very limited team working on the game now. There is no future content patches coming in - In other words the game is in maintenance mode. In MMO terms - that means the game is dead.
Yes... WAR is dead.
Peace !!!
From my experience through closed beta, open beta, and two months into release, I agree with pretty much everything the OP mentioned.
The big things that killed it for me were:
-Being a Witch Hunter and having a Witch Elf be superior to me in almost every aspect.
-Dying in Scenarios due to the massive amount of AOE and CC in the game. I would continuously die around a large group of people fighting each other and I wouldn't have a single person targeting me.
Of course there were many more problems but at the end of the day I was just a pvp guy who wanted to kill shit.
I will say that the healing system in WAR was very enjoyable. Allowing players to have two targets, one friendly (to heal), and one unfriendly (to attack), was great and fun. Instant heals FTW!
What i remember about Warhammer is that it was the first mmo that i had pre ordered and even that was an ordeal as there was a whole you can / cant buy the collectors edition it from ireland for a while but id already pre ordered so i was left scratching my head wonder wtf to do.
Then the big reasson for me personaly was GoA and there attitude towards us the customer's i never saw anything like it in my life and it was shocking so bad i just canceled my pre order's because i knew even before it launched that the attitude from mythic and goa this game was going to go no where and fast. You had mythic ignore every single issue going on with the EU customer base, Only jumping in over some argument on a forum where a GoA guy insulted every customer and then tried to re edit his post.
I remember being on this forum years ago when it was only starting to be made argueing over not having official forums and there rep was on here trying to say it was fine yea yea no worries , Just everything about the way they went about this game was rude arrogant (mbj) even the rant's from mbj was so unprofessional utter, train wreck.
I use to come on here and complain and said i wouldnt be happy till someone lost there job and someone did and i was happy.
and thats why i never really come to this forum anymore.
Most of what you say about WAR is old news, and most of the things your crying over have changed-- where have you been----- but anyway who gives a durn no one plays it anymore, its been dead a while now - let it R.I.P. -- no need to beat a dead horse OP --- you could have found something else to waste your typing skills on besdies a dead game
Thats funny, I was on today for quite awhile, and it was busy all day.. at least in T4
/shrug
Thats funny, I was on today for quite awhile, and it was busy all day.. at least in T4
/shrug
Guess you weren't around in the beginning or over the past year /shrug or you would know how unpopulated it really is. From like 15 or so servers down to 3-4 and only T4 is populated - thats the little dedicated fanbase it has left that even keeps it on life support. I played from beta until octoberish 09.
The only reason it feels populated was cause of the dark crag merge. And considering it has 4 tiers and only t4 is active should tell you its not getting any new players--- so if they lose the few people that are left--- the life support plug will be oficially pulled.
Thats funny, I was on today for quite awhile, and it was busy all day.. at least in T4
/shrug
Guess you weren't around in the beginning or over the past year /shrug or you would know how unpopulated it really is. From like 15 or so servers down to 3-4 and only T4 is populated - thats the little dedicated fanbase it has left that even keeps it on life support. I played from beta until octoberish 09.
The only reason it feels populated was cause of the dark crag merge. And considering it has 4 tiers and only t4 is active should tell you its not getting any new players--- so if they lose the few people that are left--- the life support plug will be oficially pulled.
You guessed wrong...
Honestly, i only need one server. If it has 4, or 444, it really doesn't matter to me. As long as its active, I'm good to go...
As i said, Tier 4 is busy, Teir one is (obviously) very busy. T2 and T3 are ok during primetime, and can be certainly be slow during the day, but you haven't played since Oct. obviously know better than I.
Life support officially plugged? I thought you said it was already dead, and no one was playing?
I currently play WAR and like it, but there are quite a few bugs. It surprises me that there are still as many as there are after the game has been out this long.
Here are a few examples:
-When I bring up map screen, many times large portions of the map are completely white.
-Sometimes the inf tracker in rvr and pqs doesn't show up.
-BOs count down the 3 minute defense timer then reset for another 3 minutes.
-There are are a few more that seem to affect me, but those 3 are the ones that affect the gameplay most for me
Mr. Bagguns
Thats funny, I was on today for quite awhile, and it was busy all day.. at least in T4
/shrug
Guess you weren't around in the beginning or over the past year /shrug or you would know how unpopulated it really is. From like 15 or so servers down to 3-4 and only T4 is populated - thats the little dedicated fanbase it has left that even keeps it on life support. I played from beta until octoberish 09.
The only reason it feels populated was cause of the dark crag merge. And considering it has 4 tiers and only t4 is active should tell you its not getting any new players--- so if they lose the few people that are left--- the life support plug will be oficially pulled.
You guessed wrong...
Honestly, i only need one server. If it has 4, or 444, it really doesn't matter to me. As long as its active, I'm good to go...
As i said, Tier 4 is busy, Teir one is (obviously) very busy. T2 and T3 are ok during primetime, and can be certainly be slow during the day, but you haven't played since Oct. obviously know better than I.
Life support officially plugged? I thought you said it was already dead, and no one was playing?
YOu should care if there are 4 servers or 444. Why ? Cause if they are only 4 then the game will not be getting any new content....EVAH... And guess what ... Its down to 4 servers....
I have been playing WAR until last month and let me tell you... .the game has zero future. Right now EA is most likely working on a plan to make it free to play with item shop.
Sad really since I liked alot about the game. But I also hated alot so in the end the "Im not paying for that" became stronger than "I really like this !!" - Its that simple.
Thats funny, I was on today for quite awhile, and it was busy all day.. at least in T4
/shrug
Guess you weren't around in the beginning or over the past year /shrug or you would know how unpopulated it really is. From like 15 or so servers down to 3-4 and only T4 is populated - thats the little dedicated fanbase it has left that even keeps it on life support. I played from beta until octoberish 09.
The only reason it feels populated was cause of the dark crag merge. And considering it has 4 tiers and only t4 is active should tell you its not getting any new players--- so if they lose the few people that are left--- the life support plug will be oficially pulled.
You guessed wrong...
Honestly, i only need one server. If it has 4, or 444, it really doesn't matter to me. As long as its active, I'm good to go...
As i said, Tier 4 is busy, Teir one is (obviously) very busy. T2 and T3 are ok during primetime, and can be certainly be slow during the day, but you haven't played since Oct. obviously know better than I.
Life support officially plugged? I thought you said it was already dead, and no one was playing?
YOu should care if there are 4 servers or 444. Why ? Cause if they are only 4 then the game will not be getting any new content....EVAH... And guess what ... Its down to 4 servers....
I have been playing WAR until last month and let me tell you... .the game has zero future. Right now EA is most likely working on a plan to make it free to play with item shop.
Sad really since I liked alot about the game. But I also hated alot so in the end the "Im not paying for that" became stronger than "I really like this !!" - Its that simple.
Heh...
You work for EA? Or just making assumptions?
Guess what.. The other MMO I play... only has two servers!
/gasp
How many servers does it take for a game to make new content? 5? 10? 67?
Theres a lot i like about the game too... So I play it. When something better comes along, I'll more than likely play that one, and perhaps discontinue War and/or the other..
Its a game, not a way of life.. I don't read that much into them.
The game has 12 servers worldwide and more about to open in other asian markets.
4 US.
8 GOA.
2 Russia.
2 Twyain.
X Korea.
How do you know that? ((And if you have really been playing it till last month as you claim, why bashing after you stop? You don't have to answer, it's kinda a poetic question...))