Do people even understand what a "devil's advocate" is?
Looking at the posts in this thread....I would say apparently not.
On topic:
Fair commentary in this article showing the often over-looked side of WAR. I'm not a Warhammer fan, but I did play the game for a short while after it was released and also during beta. It wasn't "my thing." Just my opinion.
DAOC was all about RVR, yet was a vibrant virtual world and Blizzard spent too much time designing WAR around WOW features and forgot the best of what made DAOC really great.
Yeah... I hated that Blizzard designed WAR with WoW features in mind. ;D
War failed because they could not bring the legend into a real mmog structure. With what the development team was handed, they had a lot of room to express some ideas and they failed. What WAR is, is a example of what NOT to do. The packaging for WAR was incomplete, horrid, lacking. The game failed because of the mechanics and visuals, immersion was not there. The world was static and failed, it lacked the life it was suppose to have as one of the mega IPs you can buy into. Failure to build on top of a legend, failure to see the vision of WAR was the developers downfall.
I expect large amounts of effort into the core design process of visuals, sounds, and mechanics. These do not mean top of the line, I expect top quality. That doesn't mean real life graphics and flawless sound, that means well designed visuals and immersive sound. The mechanics were ruggid and horrible. No polish to any of the tiers at all. Polish creates immersion, but polish alone cannot make a game successful. Psychological evaluations of your target audience on the conscious and subconscious levels were not included.
I blame a poor design document and poorly researched PR. Will War learn? No. They seem to have carried the mindset of WAR into their next game.
I struggle not with life, money, emotions, and world, but against old mindsets and selves to be proven obsolete in a age and time of rapid changes. Go create fun, so you can have fun.
I think the disappointment of WAR was that the concepts they had were so good. The RVR, the PQs...they came so close but then fumbled through horrible execution.
And they added battlegrounds, which meant no one did the world rvr (why cook a meal when a 14 yr old will bring the epixz right to the window?).
DAOC was all about RVR, yet was a vibrant virtual world and Blizzard spent too much time designing WAR around WOW features and forgot the best of what made DAOC really great.
Yeah... I hated that Blizzard designed WAR with WoW features in mind. ;D
A couple of my friends got into WAR and were big fans of the pvp. They came over from DAoC and had no complaints except for low population. I Tried it out for a little while. It seemed pretty good. Right of the bat I liked how you couldnt walk through people. Human shields ftw. I think maybe Mythic failed in their advertising. Because I remember them saying this gfame was gonna have all kinds of crazy features that were missing at launch. I think I read somewhere that one of the main faction cities wasnt even in the game at launch? Could be wrong, but I think the overpromise, and under deliver thing kind of bit them in the ass.
This genre is tough. A good launch is 80% of the battle, imo. If you can nail that, you'll do ok. But screw up your launch and not even a million miracle patches will bring people back.
A couple of my friends got into WAR and were big fans of the pvp. They came over from DAoC and had no complaints except for low population. I Tried it out for a little while. It seemed pretty good. Right of the bat I liked how you couldnt walk through people. Human shields ftw. I think maybe Mythic failed in their advertising. Because I remember them saying this gfame was gonna have all kinds of crazy features that were missing at launch. I think I read somewhere that one of the main faction cities wasnt even in the game at launch? Could be wrong, but I think the overpromise, and under deliver thing kind of bit them in the ass.
This genre is tough. A good launch is 80% of the battle, imo. If you can nail that, you'll do ok. But screw up your launch and not even a million miracle patches will bring people back.
The first impression REALLY does mean everything. That is more true for MMO launches than about anything. There's just no repairing a terribly failed launch. There are so many games that can testify to that.
In my opinion, Warhammer started out a very fun game. I agree that it certainly had its share of problems as have been thoroughly discussed over the past few years, but if you set aside your bias with the IP and look at the game as released as a stand-alone product, I believe an objective observer would say it was a good game. For me, I loved it. The lore was interesting, the Tome of Knowledge was cool for the exploration incentives, classes were appealing (if unbalanced, but I believe true complete balance in classes is impossible), and above all the RvR keep sieges were incredibly fun.
What killed the experience for me is the thing that, I believe, makes or breaks any MMORPG: Community. I have a couple of ideas on why the community changed in my time of playing WAR. First, the initial buzz brought lots of players to the game, and with the variety of shards it was easy to find a local community that fit your game style (I usually go for the RP-PVP as it attracts more mature players and has an enforced naming guideline). Apparently, for varied reasons, these initial numbers quickly fell away leaving many shards desolate. And as many of you will attest, RvR does not happen without a population. Second, the shard mergers brought together communities that had initially segregated themselves on purpose. When my RP community merged with the leetspeakers who could not seem to understand chain of command in a warband, the game lost its spark for me. The incredible fun I had running over Destro as a unit, people understanding "burn the healers first, ignore their tanks", was a just a memory. It seemed that no one understood or cared to learn basic tactics. It was "Let's zerg 'em!" all the time, and it was supposedly fun for them to have the entire warband pushed back into camp and to fight just outside the range of Order's guards.
I will also add a couple comments regarding the report on classes made in the article. First, I cannot agree that there was diversity among the classes just because each race had three or four to choose from, since most were just mirrors of another class in another race. For instance, Disciples of Khain = Warrior Priests. Also, the Dwarves and Greenskins were not the only races that launched with just 3 classes; Empire and Dark Elves did as well. Knights of the Burning Sun / Blackguards released post launch. Though these were not mirrors of one another, they were in fact mirrors of existing classes already in the game (Knights mirror Chosen and Blackguards mirror Ironbreakers).
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -Edmund Burke
Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards. -Lois McMaster Bujold
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. -Abraham Lincoln
Why do people beat on this game so much? The PvP is great and the game has cleaned up alot since release.
I think the problem is with PvP there are winners and loosers 'L' and with PvE everyone wins. Since WAR is based on PvP there are loosers and they usually quit because they don't have the b@lls to stay and fight.
Why do people beat on this game so much? The PvP is great and the game has cleaned up alot since release.
I think the problem is with PvP there are winners and loosers 'L' and with PvE everyone wins. Since WAR is based on PvP there are loosers and they usually quit because they don't have the b@lls to stay and fight.
You have part of it right. A huge part of the games failure was that it lacked a real PvE endgame. So they lost all the PvE players a soon as they hit max level.
My biggest problem with the game was the fact that the Engineer and Chaos Mage broke PvP endgame. PvP was actually fun until you hit that last bracket.
On top of that the game did not feel polished at release. The combat animations and timing seemed off.
I like that "little buggy" from op. :-)) Besides being ultra buggy had very bad support. Very bad. And forget about wow problems at start. That was at THAT time. Today is today. If once car broke every 1000km now is no longer acceptable.
You should give it another go if you like PvP. The game mechs seem to work well great especially in team play. Concerning balance, I haven't seen anything that stands out and the good players find ways to shine even if thier class is gimped. eg Original WoW level 60 druids were sad but you would see a few players that were still good.
The only thing I would like is if they made an open server where you could fight cross faction like DaoC.
Playing it right now, since six months after having played at release and I'm loving it. What we need is more badass organized guilds (KN), but population is definitely healthy.
Thats what im talking about. I think alot of old players are coming back i know i did. Also T2 and T3 are active not as much as T4 but some people on the free trial end up subscribing. You get decent battles in T2 and T3 on Badlands.
Mark Jacobs defined success and failure for WAR. He said (paraphrasing) "If we are opening more servers in six months, it's a success. If we are closing servers within six months, it's not a success." Well, we all know that withing a few months they were closing servers rapidly.
The primary problem for WAR was the lack of a third faction IMO. The 2-faction system almost always resulted in 1 side outzerging the other, resulting in people logging off, and then eventually cancelling accounts. This of course made the server even more imbalanced, and the cycle continued until there just wasn't enough to sustain that server, it was closed, and the cycle repeated itself on the next merged server.
Add to this the claim that Mythic had spent much more time on balancing the characters than they did in DAOC, and yet Bright Wizards were stupidly overpowering for the longest time in the game. Such imbalances just made the server populations fall dramatically. Add to this a warzone locking mechanism that was initially broken beyond repair, and you have the failure of WAR.
Do people even understand what a "devil's advocate" is?
I was wondering the same thing about the original article and seeing the replies it has generated think that is why the conversation has taken the direction it has.
I see that devils advocate view claiming that warhammer was somehow a success, but reading the article doesn't really say why or how that is. It just seems to ramble about this or that in some unrelated manner and then drifts off at the end about what ifs and should haves that would have made warhammer better.
Honestly the original article spends more time talking about the games problems than it ever does saying anything positive about it.
Why do people beat on this game so much? The PvP is great and the game has cleaned up alot since release.
I think the problem is with PvP there are winners and loosers 'L' and with PvE everyone wins. Since WAR is based on PvP there are loosers and they usually quit because they don't have the b@lls to stay and fight.
maybe a wake up call is going to help you. The devils advocate is trying to make a point, that clearly people here don't agree with, and for several reasons that all is mentioned in this thread. Its still absolute possible to play and enjoy this games PvP (as i did for a little year ) while consider it a HUGE failure. because it was. This topic is NOT a bunch of bad PvP'ers whining about not being able to compete on the scene.
And summing up on the thread, I don't think the devils advocate succeded in making alot, if anyone, see WAR as a succes. Not because he didn't make a good job trying , but some cases are just lost. This is one of them!
i actually really liked War, i'm not even sure why i stoped playing except that it got boring quite quickly. the RvR was awesome, the public quests where fun, most of the classes were very fun to play, the collision system in pvp worked, the graphics where good, the world quite large.
perhaps i felt like it never really had anything unique about it i guess. it was almost exactly like WoW without the addicting factor....
it still puzzles me as to how excatly it sort of faded so quickly. i do know that i was turned off by all the cc, knockbacks, knockdowns, stuns that used to be there after about Tier 2. it was even worse then WoW, but they sort of adjusted that after about 6 months. i'v tried to go back to it a few times but i always end up just getting bored quickly.
War is just on of those games you wish it had just something more just not sure what.
I liked Dark Age of Camelot because every class had a reasonable chance of winning against any other class and the three realm setup. I despise WAR specifically for it's rock / paper / scissors model and its two realm system. It left me feeling helpless agaisnt half of the other classes and some, like the Magus and Shadow Warrior left me feeling helpless against everyone, period. It's harder to balance and it leaves many players feeling extremely frustrated when they are constantly in no-win battles due to either the afore mentioned model or due to population balance.
The PvE aspect of the game felt uninspired more due to it's lack of decent XP and item rewards than it's lack of inspiring story. If I was tired of being beaten to death in PvP, I didn't look forward to doing any of the PvE, knowing that I would have to do all three racial areas and still wouldn't level even half way through the tier's level range and it got exponentially worse as you entered higher tiers.
The game is not currently failing in regards to income, I'm assuming, but it is bleeding subs so badly they are merging into a single server for the USA. The devs seem absolutely clueless on what direction to take the game in order to not only increase their population, but to keep their diehard fans from bleeding out as is.
I've returned several times to this game and I cannot say that I like the recent changes to the realm lakes or the removal of forts from Tier 4. The old system had it's flaws, but good grief, this new system is atrociously boring, so much so that the current players call it Doorhammer and Waithammer.
750k box sales (in the first month) and 200k or so active subs is somewhat of a dissapointment, but not a failure. Mythic being bought etc did not solely rest on the success/failure of this IP. They've more than made their money back, people are still playing. Sure, servers are gone, numbers rapidly declined, but the game has a lot of good ideas in it and it's still running.
I guess you could consider rapid decline of subs within 3 months of launch a "failure," but there's still 200k or so active which is a lot of people - rivaling what the "classics" like UO and SWG had back in the day (in a much smaller market, but it's still enough people to have an active community).
Mythic being sold/merged isn't based on Warhammer. It's based on overall company policy and direction.
Matrix Online was a failure. Most people on this site are stuck in their "forum bubble" and simply don't understand that not every gamer is a pessimistic doomspeaker. Nor do they understand success/failure in business terms. And apparently, they also don't realize what it takes for a game to be fun to some people.
750k box sales (in the first month) and 200k or so active subs is somewhat of a dissapointment, but not a failure. Mythic being bought etc did not solely rest on the success/failure of this IP. They've more than made their money back, people are still playing. Sure, servers are gone, numbers rapidly declined, but the game has a lot of good ideas in it and it's still running.
If warhammer had anywhere even close to 200k players it would be receiving regular paid expansions and very likely being sold in stores. It would have a sizable development team and most of all it would require far more servers than it currently has.
I very much doubt Warhammer made it past the 1 year mark with more than 100k subscribers. The retention rate for the game was just terrible. Keep in mind there used to be over 100 servers.
I'm not sure I would bank on EA making their money back from purchasing Mythic and funding the development of Warhammer after splitting revenues with Games Workshop. The game might be making more money than it costs to run right now, but that doesn't mean the initial investment has been recovered.
then why is the topic writing about WAR in the past tense?
That being said, i had fun the first tier and second tier was losing its luster. I agree with the MMO consensus that if they implemented the Counts or Tomb Kings as a playable faction (or even combining them) then a lot of subs would have been kept. So much lore and much to draw a game from (Rowhins Detailed faction list) and within months it crumbled. Bugs, promises not kept, Progression flaws (battlegrounds vs. open world), Public Quests were a great idea, but poorly implemented (loot tables terrible, experience rewards week, healers were gipped), crafting as an afterthought instead of a feature. No MMO designer should invest time and money into a feature "just because"
The game was truly an example how marketing can set the bar so high for a game that we feel anything short of it is a bust.
Comments
Looking at the posts in this thread....I would say apparently not.
On topic:
Fair commentary in this article showing the often over-looked side of WAR. I'm not a Warhammer fan, but I did play the game for a short while after it was released and also during beta. It wasn't "my thing." Just my opinion.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
Yeah... I hated that Blizzard designed WAR with WoW features in mind. ;D
0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3
War failed because they could not bring the legend into a real mmog structure. With what the development team was handed, they had a lot of room to express some ideas and they failed. What WAR is, is a example of what NOT to do. The packaging for WAR was incomplete, horrid, lacking. The game failed because of the mechanics and visuals, immersion was not there. The world was static and failed, it lacked the life it was suppose to have as one of the mega IPs you can buy into. Failure to build on top of a legend, failure to see the vision of WAR was the developers downfall.
I expect large amounts of effort into the core design process of visuals, sounds, and mechanics. These do not mean top of the line, I expect top quality. That doesn't mean real life graphics and flawless sound, that means well designed visuals and immersive sound. The mechanics were ruggid and horrible. No polish to any of the tiers at all. Polish creates immersion, but polish alone cannot make a game successful. Psychological evaluations of your target audience on the conscious and subconscious levels were not included.
I blame a poor design document and poorly researched PR. Will War learn? No. They seem to have carried the mindset of WAR into their next game.
I struggle not with life, money, emotions, and world, but against old mindsets and selves to be proven obsolete in a age and time of rapid changes. Go create fun, so you can have fun.
I think the disappointment of WAR was that the concepts they had were so good. The RVR, the PQs...they came so close but then fumbled through horrible execution.
And they added battlegrounds, which meant no one did the world rvr (why cook a meal when a 14 yr old will bring the epixz right to the window?).
LOL
I'm sure this was just a typo.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
A couple of my friends got into WAR and were big fans of the pvp. They came over from DAoC and had no complaints except for low population. I Tried it out for a little while. It seemed pretty good. Right of the bat I liked how you couldnt walk through people. Human shields ftw. I think maybe Mythic failed in their advertising. Because I remember them saying this gfame was gonna have all kinds of crazy features that were missing at launch. I think I read somewhere that one of the main faction cities wasnt even in the game at launch? Could be wrong, but I think the overpromise, and under deliver thing kind of bit them in the ass.
This genre is tough. A good launch is 80% of the battle, imo. If you can nail that, you'll do ok. But screw up your launch and not even a million miracle patches will bring people back.
The first impression REALLY does mean everything. That is more true for MMO launches than about anything. There's just no repairing a terribly failed launch. There are so many games that can testify to that.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
I like Warhammer IP.
I don't like poor graphics, poor animations, poor collision detection, bland gameplay in any game.
For me, it was a waste of a very good and popular IP.
So yes, it is a failure, waste of a great potential, same as AoC, STO and more.
NEW IDEAS that can refresh the STALE state of MMORPGs
In my opinion, Warhammer started out a very fun game. I agree that it certainly had its share of problems as have been thoroughly discussed over the past few years, but if you set aside your bias with the IP and look at the game as released as a stand-alone product, I believe an objective observer would say it was a good game. For me, I loved it. The lore was interesting, the Tome of Knowledge was cool for the exploration incentives, classes were appealing (if unbalanced, but I believe true complete balance in classes is impossible), and above all the RvR keep sieges were incredibly fun.
What killed the experience for me is the thing that, I believe, makes or breaks any MMORPG: Community. I have a couple of ideas on why the community changed in my time of playing WAR. First, the initial buzz brought lots of players to the game, and with the variety of shards it was easy to find a local community that fit your game style (I usually go for the RP-PVP as it attracts more mature players and has an enforced naming guideline). Apparently, for varied reasons, these initial numbers quickly fell away leaving many shards desolate. And as many of you will attest, RvR does not happen without a population. Second, the shard mergers brought together communities that had initially segregated themselves on purpose. When my RP community merged with the leetspeakers who could not seem to understand chain of command in a warband, the game lost its spark for me. The incredible fun I had running over Destro as a unit, people understanding "burn the healers first, ignore their tanks", was a just a memory. It seemed that no one understood or cared to learn basic tactics. It was "Let's zerg 'em!" all the time, and it was supposedly fun for them to have the entire warband pushed back into camp and to fight just outside the range of Order's guards.
I will also add a couple comments regarding the report on classes made in the article. First, I cannot agree that there was diversity among the classes just because each race had three or four to choose from, since most were just mirrors of another class in another race. For instance, Disciples of Khain = Warrior Priests. Also, the Dwarves and Greenskins were not the only races that launched with just 3 classes; Empire and Dark Elves did as well. Knights of the Burning Sun / Blackguards released post launch. Though these were not mirrors of one another, they were in fact mirrors of existing classes already in the game (Knights mirror Chosen and Blackguards mirror Ironbreakers).
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -Edmund Burke
Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards. -Lois McMaster Bujold
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. -Abraham Lincoln
Boom! Morning Nerds.
Why do people beat on this game so much? The PvP is great and the game has cleaned up alot since release.
I think the problem is with PvP there are winners and loosers 'L' and with PvE everyone wins. Since WAR is based on PvP there are loosers and they usually quit because they don't have the b@lls to stay and fight.
You have part of it right. A huge part of the games failure was that it lacked a real PvE endgame. So they lost all the PvE players a soon as they hit max level.
My biggest problem with the game was the fact that the Engineer and Chaos Mage broke PvP endgame. PvP was actually fun until you hit that last bracket.
On top of that the game did not feel polished at release. The combat animations and timing seemed off.
I like that "little buggy" from op. :-)) Besides being ultra buggy had very bad support. Very bad. And forget about wow problems at start. That was at THAT time. Today is today. If once car broke every 1000km now is no longer acceptable.
You should give it another go if you like PvP. The game mechs seem to work well great especially in team play. Concerning balance, I haven't seen anything that stands out and the good players find ways to shine even if thier class is gimped. eg Original WoW level 60 druids were sad but you would see a few players that were still good.
The only thing I would like is if they made an open server where you could fight cross faction like DaoC.
Thats what im talking about. I think alot of old players are coming back i know i did. Also T2 and T3 are active not as much as T4 but some people on the free trial end up subscribing. You get decent battles in T2 and T3 on Badlands.
If WO:AOR goes F2P then it may yet enjoy some success, viz Age of Conan & LoTRO.
Mark Jacobs defined success and failure for WAR. He said (paraphrasing) "If we are opening more servers in six months, it's a success. If we are closing servers within six months, it's not a success." Well, we all know that withing a few months they were closing servers rapidly.
The primary problem for WAR was the lack of a third faction IMO. The 2-faction system almost always resulted in 1 side outzerging the other, resulting in people logging off, and then eventually cancelling accounts. This of course made the server even more imbalanced, and the cycle continued until there just wasn't enough to sustain that server, it was closed, and the cycle repeated itself on the next merged server.
Add to this the claim that Mythic had spent much more time on balancing the characters than they did in DAOC, and yet Bright Wizards were stupidly overpowering for the longest time in the game. Such imbalances just made the server populations fall dramatically. Add to this a warzone locking mechanism that was initially broken beyond repair, and you have the failure of WAR.
WAR was a failure for what the company wanted but it was not something they had to pull the plug on due to massive losses
(looks at Tabula Rasa)
City of Heroes operated at a profit for years with 100-150k subs
I have no idea how many subs WAR has but the game is 3 years old now -- and still hanging in there
EQ2 fan sites
I was wondering the same thing about the original article and seeing the replies it has generated think that is why the conversation has taken the direction it has.
I see that devils advocate view claiming that warhammer was somehow a success, but reading the article doesn't really say why or how that is. It just seems to ramble about this or that in some unrelated manner and then drifts off at the end about what ifs and should haves that would have made warhammer better.
Honestly the original article spends more time talking about the games problems than it ever does saying anything positive about it.
maybe a wake up call is going to help you. The devils advocate is trying to make a point, that clearly people here don't agree with, and for several reasons that all is mentioned in this thread. Its still absolute possible to play and enjoy this games PvP (as i did for a little year ) while consider it a HUGE failure. because it was. This topic is NOT a bunch of bad PvP'ers whining about not being able to compete on the scene.
And summing up on the thread, I don't think the devils advocate succeded in making alot, if anyone, see WAR as a succes. Not because he didn't make a good job trying , but some cases are just lost. This is one of them!
i actually really liked War, i'm not even sure why i stoped playing except that it got boring quite quickly. the RvR was awesome, the public quests where fun, most of the classes were very fun to play, the collision system in pvp worked, the graphics where good, the world quite large.
perhaps i felt like it never really had anything unique about it i guess. it was almost exactly like WoW without the addicting factor....
it still puzzles me as to how excatly it sort of faded so quickly. i do know that i was turned off by all the cc, knockbacks, knockdowns, stuns that used to be there after about Tier 2. it was even worse then WoW, but they sort of adjusted that after about 6 months. i'v tried to go back to it a few times but i always end up just getting bored quickly.
War is just on of those games you wish it had just something more just not sure what.
I liked Dark Age of Camelot because every class had a reasonable chance of winning against any other class and the three realm setup. I despise WAR specifically for it's rock / paper / scissors model and its two realm system. It left me feeling helpless agaisnt half of the other classes and some, like the Magus and Shadow Warrior left me feeling helpless against everyone, period. It's harder to balance and it leaves many players feeling extremely frustrated when they are constantly in no-win battles due to either the afore mentioned model or due to population balance.
The PvE aspect of the game felt uninspired more due to it's lack of decent XP and item rewards than it's lack of inspiring story. If I was tired of being beaten to death in PvP, I didn't look forward to doing any of the PvE, knowing that I would have to do all three racial areas and still wouldn't level even half way through the tier's level range and it got exponentially worse as you entered higher tiers.
The game is not currently failing in regards to income, I'm assuming, but it is bleeding subs so badly they are merging into a single server for the USA. The devs seem absolutely clueless on what direction to take the game in order to not only increase their population, but to keep their diehard fans from bleeding out as is.
I've returned several times to this game and I cannot say that I like the recent changes to the realm lakes or the removal of forts from Tier 4. The old system had it's flaws, but good grief, this new system is atrociously boring, so much so that the current players call it Doorhammer and Waithammer.
750k box sales (in the first month) and 200k or so active subs is somewhat of a dissapointment, but not a failure. Mythic being bought etc did not solely rest on the success/failure of this IP. They've more than made their money back, people are still playing. Sure, servers are gone, numbers rapidly declined, but the game has a lot of good ideas in it and it's still running.
I guess you could consider rapid decline of subs within 3 months of launch a "failure," but there's still 200k or so active which is a lot of people - rivaling what the "classics" like UO and SWG had back in the day (in a much smaller market, but it's still enough people to have an active community).
Mythic being sold/merged isn't based on Warhammer. It's based on overall company policy and direction.
Matrix Online was a failure. Most people on this site are stuck in their "forum bubble" and simply don't understand that not every gamer is a pessimistic doomspeaker. Nor do they understand success/failure in business terms. And apparently, they also don't realize what it takes for a game to be fun to some people.
If warhammer had anywhere even close to 200k players it would be receiving regular paid expansions and very likely being sold in stores. It would have a sizable development team and most of all it would require far more servers than it currently has.
I very much doubt Warhammer made it past the 1 year mark with more than 100k subscribers. The retention rate for the game was just terrible. Keep in mind there used to be over 100 servers.
I'm not sure I would bank on EA making their money back from purchasing Mythic and funding the development of Warhammer after splitting revenues with Games Workshop. The game might be making more money than it costs to run right now, but that doesn't mean the initial investment has been recovered.
then why is the topic writing about WAR in the past tense?
That being said, i had fun the first tier and second tier was losing its luster. I agree with the MMO consensus that if they implemented the Counts or Tomb Kings as a playable faction (or even combining them) then a lot of subs would have been kept. So much lore and much to draw a game from (Rowhins Detailed faction list) and within months it crumbled. Bugs, promises not kept, Progression flaws (battlegrounds vs. open world), Public Quests were a great idea, but poorly implemented (loot tables terrible, experience rewards week, healers were gipped), crafting as an afterthought instead of a feature. No MMO designer should invest time and money into a feature "just because"
The game was truly an example how marketing can set the bar so high for a game that we feel anything short of it is a bust.