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[Column] Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: A WAR Worth Fighting For?
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The news that Warhammer Online: Age of Recknoning is closing in December has come as a shock to some. In today's Devil's Advocate, we peer into the crystal ball to examine things that just might have prevented this sad happening. See what we think before leaving your own ideas in the comments.
Since Games Workshop isn’t renewing the license for WAR, and since attention for a Warhammer MMO seems focused more on the Warhammer 40K: Eternal Crusade massive action RPG, I think it’s time for a short thought experiment.
My question to myself is simple: if things turned out differently, what could have been done to make Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning a WAR worth fighting for?
Read more of Victor Barreiro Jr.'s The Devil's Advocate: A WAR Worth Fighting For?
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Comments
Such a mismanaged game, and the finger can be pointed at everyone (Mythic, EA, GW, etc). =/ Easily my biggest letdown of the last decade.
If only they had used the funds that were spent to make the garbage that was Wrath of Heroes (just my opinion, I'm sure there were a few who enjoyed it) on a WAR Free to Play transition. Making WAR F2P wouldn't give it a bajillion players or anything like that, but it likely would have brought in those looking for a PvP/RvR fix and generated some revenue from a cosmetic cash shop (renown/exp boosts, costumes, mounts, pets, etc). Those funds then could have been spent on adding more content, fixing bugs, etc. WAR was very unique and there is not another game out there (that I'm aware of, aside from maybe DAoC) that gave you a sense of rivalry as well as some awesome PvP/RvR like WAR does.
Could have, should have, would have, I suppose. It is what it is. I'll be playing on and off on an endless trial account doing some Tier 1 RvR until December 4th or so, when I'll activate my 14 free days to come back for one last WAAAGH with everyone else when the lights go out.
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Is this type of conversation required every time a failing MMO is shut down?
What could have been done? It could have been made properly. Since it wasn't, just about everyone hated it and it wasn't profitable. End of same old story.
The problem with the game was apparent fro day 1. Mythic went to big in all the wrong directions. If it were me calling the shots, i would have done the following.
1.) 3 factions. If armies and classes were already mirrored, how hard would of been to add some cosmetics and classes of other races, a dogs of war faction if you will.
2.) shrink the rvr pools. There is no need for 3 different pools per tier. While we are at it, they should have done away with scenarios. Either pick open rvr or set size battlegrounds, but quit splitting your player base up. Its a niche game, so let it be niche. Which brings me to my next point.
3.) too much focus on pve and public quests. Your an rvr game from a company that has success doing rvr stuff. Wile im not saying hay make daoc 2.0, they would of been better off making daoc with a warhammer skin. I know a lot of people that feel this way about it.
4.) 1 capital city was fine, no need to spread out your social hubs either. The fact that got chopped was a god send to the social aspect of the game.
Such a Strong platform wasted on weak developers, who have shown success in the genre!!! I for one am so glad we have a new direction of game making that has been presented by the likes of SOE. Its apparent this day and age that developers and publishers are so disconnected from their audience that we keep getting served up crap. I honestly feel like picking a modern MMO to play is like picking a flavor of a turd. At the end of the day its still a turd! So looking forward to developers reaching out to us consumers from here on out.
OK, I'll shed a crocodile tear for what the game could have been.
But for what was actually delivered, let's just say good riddance and leave it at that.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Paul Barnett's clown act aside as a used car salesman with similar savvy...
They ignored their DAoC community while bragging that they were utilizing DAoC concepts (Land of The Dead was a crapfest attempt to give us something like Darkness Falls...which we asked for and got...Land of the Dead instead.../RvR with TWO realms??? yet it's three realms that adds a wild card approach that today's gamers won't see until they play Elder Scrolls Online - so I suppose they really didn't know what they were missing...but we did...)
They didn't listen when we threw life jackets in the first year.
Now they will drown and I will drink to their deaths.
Time to refocus on Dark Age...Mythic. Thank you.
Sometimes I wonder about the legality of these companies pulling the plug on games.
Federal court has ruled time and again in favor of the consumer.
1) Digital goods and all rights associated with those goods belong to the consumer.
2) Seller is required by law to provide reasonable access to said digital property.
3) Seller can not impede, infringe, restrict transfer of said digital goods.
That being said for a company that is not going out of business to just turn off a game that I purchased, I have to wonder just how legal that is.
I would think at the very least that if they decide to no longer provide me with access, that they should at the very least have to provide me the server source code so that I can provide my own access.
I would have said it.
My YouTube MMO PvP Channel
The company that creates DAoC 2.0 will literally obliterate the competition. EA knew this - this is why they bought and locked all ALL development of Dark Age of Camelot including a new server that endless threads begged for - because they were unwilling to risk losing even more players from Warhammer (better known now as Failhammer).
Perhaps someone will wake up and take the Dark Ages mmorpg that created Siege Warfare and 3 realm RvR with 44 races and 24 classes...to a new graphics engine.
Literally 2.0 could just be a new graphics engine (and cut frontiers in half at least and force travel routes by land...).
Camelot Unchained?
It wasn't a success? It was the 2nd highest population mmorpg durings its prime. Only Everquest had more population the DAoC did back then. You really need to do some research before you open up and toss out some worthless crap.
In a world of sharp knives, you would be a spoon.
VB youre too nice.
1) The number one reason was bad management of the game and I lay that firmly at the feet of Mark Jacobs. I love the man for bringing to life some of the most intense MMO experiences Ive ever had and one of my favorite MMO despite all its flaws and problems. But I think it was his bad decisions that lead to the games downfall.
How much can I say was his fault with certainty, none. This is all conjecture and my opinion and what I could surmise from a game I was, and still, am passionate about. Since he was the top of the Mythic food chain so to speak, he gets to carry the blame.
2) The desync as someone else said. This game had really, really bad optimization at release and for a good six months afterwards. To the point they had to take some features out of the game because the code couldnt be fixed.
This hurt the game pretty badly, the AI and pet pathing was truly borked, to put it nicely. And large battles would crash whole servers, then zones, then groups of players.
3) This is one of Mark biggest follies and in many ways should rank in with #1.
Its where he put his foot in his mouth about how "merging servers was a sign of a MMO failure." He said this after Mythic kept having to add servers.
And just so everyone knows WAR had a pretty damn good launch, and even tho it bled subs its nowhere like what happens today.
Then Wrath of the Lich King released and WAR started bleeding, but not as bad as some might think. I know alot of people whowere dual subbed to WoW and WAR.
And what did Mark do when servers started to lose players and in reality did become ghost towns...he did nothing, thats right not a fucking thing. Because to merge servers would to be to admit his game had failed, by his own definition.
I personally had about 7 friends who said "fuck it, Im out" and went back to WoW full time because of it.
4) Class balance. Here something most people dont know. WAR had (shortly after release) 24 unique classes. Not like WoW where the mage as an example was mirrored on the Horde and the Alliance side. WAR had 24 unique classes. Its one thing I really loved about the game. And as you can imagine it was a bitch to balance.
This cause problems and pissed people off. But guess what? Most people stuck with the game, because they could see the potential if Mythic would just listen.
And guess what happened...? Mythic listened!!
The people would were responsible for class balance/combat/pvp convinced the powers that be to open specific sub forums for "like" class balancing. And opened it to the player base to state why they thought there class was unbalanced and/or why they thought their "like" was over powered.
They even went about it the right way. They said we are going to focus on one group at a time. The first being the Shaman vs the Archmage. And you know what, for the most part people on both sides were being very reasonable. A lot of progress was made, it wasnt about making one class OP it was about making it fair.
It was one of the industry highlights of Dev to player base communication, both group coming together to make the game better for everyone.
And then guess what happened. Mark opened his mouth and said something like"WAR will reach (or increse) is subs by yada, yada, yada, or I will step down."
And all of a sudden this great Dev and player cooperation and communication stopped. As we found out later because the were more or less all focused on releasing WAR to the Korean market.
Fuck fixing it and making it a better game, it became about whoring it out to as many people as they could.
Guess what happened? Mark stepped down. Why? Who really knows. I mean all of this is, like I said, opinion and conjecture. But I personally think the fact that the Koreans didnt want to play a fucking broken game may had something to do with it.
But like I said, what do I know.
All that negativity I just wrote; I could write five times the amount of what I loved, found positive, ground breaking, innovative, fun, and down right fucking awesome in the game, much less all the potential I saw in it.
I cant talk about it much less write about it without becoming a sad, broken, bitter ex-Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning player. Fuck.
To Mark if you happen to wander by and read this. Please dont hate me for what I wrote, as Im sure Ive got some or most of it wrong from your perspective. But I wrote what I wrote because that is how I seen it go down and deserved or not, you get to be Atlas, or Jesus if you prefer.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
Your logic does make sense. There should be SOME way to continue to provide what you paid for. But i guess thats where the EULA comes in play.
Any actual proof of that? Guess not. Not too sure if I want a cash shop in a pvp game.
I'll back this up DAOC was a huge MMO when it launched it didn't start to die till WoW came out.
3rd'ed! also lets just say after a decade or so DAOC isn't the one being shut down either. It has survived its predecessor.