f13.net

Source (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=841)


Edit by Trippy: fixed title

I have to admit, I didn't see that coming just yet.

Huh.  Well, good luck to all involved.  I'm not the kick-in-ass-as-they-leave type, so I'll leave it at that.  

P.S. Fire Barnett.  

Damn.  June 23rd was yesterday.  Yes... stating the obvious.

I don't like to see anyone lose their job.  This is going to be an interesting next few months in the life of WAR and DAoC.   

DAoC will outlive WAR.  Cruel, but true.

I actually kind of feel bad for Mark Jacobs.  Missteps?  Sure.  But underneath he always seemed like a passionate, well-meaning guy (as much as I can judge such things from viewing his Internet posts) who maybe got too emotionally invested.  That doesn't make him a monster.  He did bring us DAoC, which brought a lot of people a lot of enjoyment and showed PvP wasn't dead after UO.  For that alone, I wish him good luck. 

Paradigm shift. Mythic w/o Jacobs. Weird.

Obvious EA action is obvious.

Also, don't fire Barnett. He's so fitting for a Star Wars title it's not even funny.

I know many people who will refuse to work with him or a company he is involved with for reasons that have nothing to do with the way he  posts on forums.

Jar Jar Binks?

Insider tease  :mob:

I hopped over to Stratics hoping for some comedy and was not disappointed. They sat there trying to figure out what Bioware was, and didn't know anything besides "They made some Sonic game!" until one of the moderators apparently googled an answer.

You must be kidding. They have to know of, well, any of the BioWare titles. Even if you don't like them.

I don't feel sorry for Jacobs, especially after this...

Fairly befitting. The most damning actions perhaps were his numerous comments in interviews stating how to measure success in WAR. His superiors need only reference his own benchmarks to reveal his baby had been what he himself would have considered a failure. As it stands, WAR is holding at 300k subscribers, and thats after a massive "Recruit a Friend" campaign plus launching in Russia. In other words, the game is still shedding subscribers. Jokes aside, unless something changes, the subscription slope eventually ends up at 0 (or, at least, an impractical number to validate keeping the game open).

Making a change like this is definitely a good thing. My concern is honestly for his replacements time - being as he will now be responsible for two studios, that's a lot of product to manage. I wish him well and hope he surrounds himself with highly talented individuals to share the load.

Hopefully they don't expect a miracle that will somehow salvage WAR.  It feels to me like they basically just handed Ray Muzyka a giant anchor.

Somewhere eldin is toasting this news with a wine cooler purchased with my server donation.

Didn't we all see this coming? Why would EA maintain two seperate MMO teams, especially when Mythic is clearly doing poorly.

I didn't see it coming for the above reason. I thought that with two elder games and a flop, they wouldn't want to burden a team making what is really a likely super-hit provided it doesn't suck. I figured they'd just kill all of Mythic. This reduces costs, but I don't see that it does anything for the Mythic stable and it's a negative on SWTOR.

I am far too lazy and sleepy to search, but I am almost positive that more than one of us predicted this exact outcome when the EA/Mythic deal was first announced.

Everyone in the known universe saw this happening before WAR was even released.

Shame this action wasn't taken months ago when it would've mattered.

I know it's not quite right to laugh at someone for getting fired, but here goes.  Bahahaha.  At this point, WAR has gotten to the level of naked pointing and chuckling that I keep expecting Ashton Kutcher to jump out, telling all the fans that they've been punk'd.

Eeeh, you never know. They might throw some decent people onto it, and start doing a slow-but-quiet lotro styled rework. Could turn into be a solid game in a year or two.

The comments on Brokentoys are depressing - evil EA strike again apparently.

You need to stop grinding that axe.

Look, Mythic screwed up. Everyone knows it.

But the style in which this thing is going down is CLASSIC EA tactics. Claaaaaaaaaaasssssssssssssssssssssic.

I've been laid off in the biz. Recently. I know the hurt, confusion and angst it causes, especially for the huge bulk of people caught in the crosshairs who clock in day after day busting their asses.. That said, Mark Jacobs is one of precisely four people (Gaute, McQuaid and that tubby fuck Barnett being the other three) I'm not going to shed a goddamned tear for. Fuck those guys. They ran games into the ground, acted like fucking rock stars while doing it and didn't show the slightest empathy for those nine to fivers they fucked over.

The less people who made MMOs in 2001, ESPECIALLY the rock star breed, that are left in the industry in 09 the fucking better. Good riddance.

Maybe Rob Denton should post a youtube video of himself getting drunk at work and making fun of Jacobs? Or am I getting my Mythic people mixed up, was that Barnett?

God, it would be awesome if Barnett covered his ass by making a youtube video where he threw Mark under the bus. I mean, Mark doesn't deserve that, but I'm pretty sure Barnett is just high enough on the shit-weasel quotient to do it.

You're associating Jacobs with McQuaid? C'mon, man. No comparison. Jacobs overpromised and underdelivered with WAR, but he's not a total clown shoes.

So what happens?

 I'm going to bet they keep a skeleton crew to keep WAR on life support for ~1-2years, once SWTOR hits closed/open beta offer any remaining subs free month of SWOTR + swag (beta invite, items, etc) then shutter WAR.

It's broken on too many technical levels, give up the IP license and be done with it.

All of DAoC is being consolidated to a single server.  I imagine that WAR will eventually suffer a similar fate.

By eventually, I mean in a few months. 

Don't sweat IainC and Modern Angel, while understandable, they have an axe to grind.

Even they know Mark, while a bit of an egoheaded prick, is nothing like McQuaid. But yea, internet, rage, drama, forums, etc.

1) Saying that I feel no remorse over either of them being shitcanned does not mean that they are equal.
2) There's goddamned poetic justice after what he said about their earlier layoffs
3) There's goddamned poetic justice for not kicking the shit out of Barnett when he shit on that coder on youtube
4) If Barnett goes I'll resub for a month just to show my support for them doing the first thing right in nearly a year

Do you seriously think that EA would pull a stunt like this if WAR was on course with the original projections?

Do you really believe that NCSoft or anyone else (with the possible exception of Sony) would not have done something like this?

All I'm saying is that there's a tendency to paint EA as the villains of the piece through some bizarre assumptions and the more rational reasons are hand-waved away in lieu of 'EA strikes again'.

As for axe grinding, I'm not Hrose but I'm definitely not an impartial observer either, however I don't see how EA are the bad people in this case.

EA are bad people. Terrible people. If they're the good guys something has gone terrible off the rails.

Seriously, though... come on, Barnett!

I didn't call EA bad. I just called it classic EA. You think any part of Bioware wanted a piece of Mythic? You think Mythic wanted to make the UO shit? None of the involved parties wanted any of that. Like I said, it's classic EA. But I'm not painting them a villain at all in this scenario. Mythic are the ones that screwed the pooch.

Meanwhile Paul is off in Quebec (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tScrU-S5u6w) talking to other EA creative directors.  :why_so_serious:

EA is a villain in the saw way that a wild snake is a villain. Its just their nature.

I never said you did. If you note, my original comment was aimed at the posters on Brokentoys.

This is very apt

Scorpion, not snake.

I've been sober for over a year now. With this wonderful news I think I'm going to break my dry spell and head right on out to the liquor store....

Jacobs is gone..

/dance

Too late for WHO IMO.  I know so many people in game today that fully plan to hop onto Aion when it comes live, they had a year and they wasted it.  They would have to come up with some miracle fixes, nothing short of Jesus himself to fix this game before that happens. 

Jesus wasn't a particularly good coder but MAN could he dance!

Barnett needs to go.  MJ had to go because he couldn't make his numbers.  

I have no axe against MJ.  

I would like to see Barnett die in an electrical fire.  Slowly.  Just so all those 3-star people he loved to bully could watch him on the way down.

Paul you fuck, never mention, travel to, or associate with with Canada again.

They've pretty much done this, based on that statement. It's not a merger, it's killing off Mythic while keeping at least one Mythic guy they presumably like, and presenting it to the world in a positive way.

The statement neither says nor implies anything of the kind. They fired Jacobs and merged Mythic with Bioware, under Bioware's leadership. That doesn't mean the WAR live team was disbanded, the game put in maintenance mode, or anything of the kind. It doesn't mean it wasn't, either.

Obviously they have had several rounds of layoffs recently, and it doesn't make much sense to have mythic in northern virginia with bioware's MMO studio in austin, so it doesn't take nostradamusHRose to predict that more layoffs and relocations are in the cards. But if the decision has been made to put WAR to rest, it's not obvious to an external observer.

I just had a clarification about this. Mythic are not merging with BioWare, they will remain separate studios and presumably remain in their current, separate locations. The two studios will comprise the membership of an MMO/RPG group within EA to share resources etc but they aren't being reduced to a single entity.

Public intemperate quotes aside, everyone I've talked to (I never worked with him directly, having been burned at the stake prior to Warhammer's development) that has worked with him does not paint him as a bully at all.

But but, he rides a pale horse.

Paul's Video Blog (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/videoblog/blog2009.php)

Zero June videos, I don't think Paul will go, but I imagine he's distancing himself from WAR.

Fired, yes. But I'm pretty sure you don't need to weep for Mark Jacobs. The EA purchase of Mythic probably netted him a decent sum plus a nice golden (or at least silver) parachute. His game sucked balls, and he was too pig-headed to listen. Oh, and he not only hired Barnett, he continued to allow Barnett to speak to the public after it was proven over and over again that that was the last place Barnett should ever be allowed to speak.

Oh. My. God. I will now be disappointed if this DOESN'T happen.

I feel at least a little sorry for Mark Jacobs, just because Mythic was his, and now it is not, and I assume he's fucking devastated. I may think he was clueless about a lot of game stuff, I may find it endlessly hilarious about how he doesn't get the internet, but I still gotta feel bad for the guy.

EDIT: Wait, I totally forgot how he was a douchebag about the prior layoffs. Nevermind, sympathy revoked!

People, this was all written in the cards. Now Garriot, McQuaid, and Jacobs get together to form Truimverate studios to make the end all be all MMO. It should release around the end of 2012, at least thats what the Mayans say.

Triumvirate Studios would be a great name for the company who will finally give us Imperator!

With Godager's nose pressed up against the screen door saying, 'can I join guys?"

Schild, with the recent events this rekindle any hope of a interview with Mr Jacobs?

http://www.massively.com/2009/06/24/mythic-employees-shocked-at-mark-jacobs-departure/


There's more on the link.

Umm, yeah. It's EA, remember? They don't do it all at once. I'll be sure to link back to this post in six months when everybody at mythic is either fired or relocated to austin, edmonton, or redwood city. The NoVa office's days are numbered.

They thought BioWare made Bioshock. I am not joking.

It's Electronic Arts. They don't believe in skeleton crews. The servers will be turned off amid much fan backlash right after the next major content patch. It's what they do.

Perhaps this is the start (midpoint?) of Bioware's death as a creative entity.

...

Meh.

So they are slowly turning off the water rather than just lopping off the dead weight. Makes sense, milk the game till the final death throes and then bury it. I am thinking in the world of MMOs, Star Wars > WAR.

UO.

No, there's no reason for one. We know the whole story here, and while putting egos on display is fun, I'm not entirely sure Mark deserves it. Paul might, but I don't think I could talk to him without making fun of his mother, asking him to put his wang in a blender and then proceeding to pull his shirt over his head and teach him some etiquette with the business end of my shoe.

They could mash WAR and SWTOR together and call it Warhammer40k.

But who will write 10 pages that say absolutely nothing now?  :awesome_for_real:

Or just continue development on WAR, which at 500k accounts is certainly further in the red than they had anticipated given their investment but far from valueless. It is possible to steadily grow a MMO without that initial EQ1/WoW-style population explosion; EVE online did it. You can live in the MMO space without competing at WoW's level.

It's all academic anyway, nobody's shutting down a MMO with 500k accounts. Assuming they really have 500k accounts.

Hi!


Wat? :uhrr:

Paul has proven himself very capable of doing that.

Where does that 500k number come from? last i heard it was 300k and that was before the three month subs ran out.

Wut?  EA's last earnings report said they had 300k subs.  There might plausibly be even less now.

And the thing about mmogs which steadily grow is that they steadily grow.  They don't suffer precipitous drops and then a slow bleed for months on end.

The massively piece I linked had some ex Mythic source talking about 500k, wishful thinking I believe, though WAR does launch in Taiwan on June 25th.

OK, 300k then.

As for slowly growing, AoC had a precipitous drop at release and has been slowly growing for months now.

I am fairly sure that that ex-Mythic source wasn't on the distribution list for subscriber numbers. From what I heard internally, subscriber numbers weren't shared with the majority of the staff.

(No, it wasn't me. Based on what was said I'd suspect it was an ex-GM.)

This news makes me very happy.  Not that MJ is unemployed, but my perception (could be wrong) was that he was the bottleneck of the game.  I laid the boneheaded design decisions at his feet.  Now my hope is that Bioware tinkers with WAR and mostly sorts it out.  They can use it as a test bed for SWTOR, trying out new things etc.

I just think MJ is passionate about MMO's and has incredible drive, but has no idea how to make good games and will not listen to those who do.

As a BIG fan of the Warhammer universe I am hoping the game gets an EQ2 makeover.  

Yeah, I'm an optimist on a cynical message board, go ahead and tell me what a dumbass I am.

AoC has improved, WAR hasn't in any way shape or form.

We had a whole damn thread on it... including Mr. J showing up and saying, "No, no. I have promises. It won't be like that THIS time.  We're a completely different company than all those other guys it happened to."

Yeah that sounds about how I remember it. Welp.

Can we Necro that thread just to post a :smug: smiley, or is that bad form?  :oh_i_see:

500k?? Um, no.

Maybe the freckle count on all subs, but not real subs still in the game.

All you need to do is troll the WHO and WA forums, general and server, to see a picture of some zergs but mostly emptiness/lack of population that nothing approaching 500k subs, even with one character each, would seem like.

There are multiple of the few remaining servers (from two players I still know, who collectively play a lot on two servers and somewhat on one other together) who have not seen appreciable population or ORvR activity in quite a while. SC and PQ on their two main servers have been dead even longer. There is just an increasing awareness that there is no living endgame to do, or no one to do it with.  Only Haves are still in it, the HaveNots don't even want bother trying.

That said, the MMO version of check kiting for subs might continue to hide whatever they want it to (for a while). I said many months ago that they would try to align new foreign market launches with strategic quarterly dates specifically to hedge against losing existing subs.

There's a whole thread about subs in the WAR sub forum here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16052.0), 800k registered users, 3 months later 300k subs, Russia launch, 3 months later 300k subs.

You know, outside in the real world of business, when a person sells their smaller company to a much larger one, there is usually an unwritten agreement that the Owner/CEO will stay on for a year and then resign.   I guess I just don't see this as a big deal.

I think it's surprising, to me at least, because Mark always gave me the impression that he would cling to Mythic until the End of Days. And so this is kinda sad.

Anyone want to gamble on how long til they shut off the servers?  I'm guessing 4 months.... :grin:

If sub numbers are growing, it is because WAR is being launched in new regions. It doesn't seem to be building in existing regions.

I'll bet that they're down to 3 servers or less in North America within 6 months. 

This is different though. Mark and Mythic were initially put in charge of all of EA's MMOs. He wasn't a redundant CEO that was just hanging around till some options vested. He was leading an entire divison at EA as Senior VP. Unfortunately he botched WAR so badly that EA gave control of EA's MMOs to BioWare and at that point he *was* redundant.

WAR was too big a cockup to lay entirely at the feet of one or even two guys, really. It was a systematic failure, but of course, MJ was the guy who put the system together. I do feel a bit bad for him; DAOC was a nice bit of work for its time, but it seems from where I'm sitting like he and Mythic never really moved on from that kind of Wild West-y startup way of doing things and when you're talking about the kind of dollars and team sizes involved in something like WAR, it takes a lot of organization that working in a startup-y environment doesn't teach you.

Talking out of my ass, sure, but that's how it *seems* like things worked there from what I've seen.

The world told Mark Jacobs what was needed to keep people playing.  He decided that people wanted scenario-less servers. 

Reading between the lines of some of Sanya's comments, Jacob's does sound like a self-centred asshole to work for.

On one hand, the company he helped build has been taken off him and is likely to be consumed by a larger entity.

On the other hand, he talked a huge game for WAR and was stupid enough to put figures out there that could be later used against him. Ultimately he was hanged with his own rope.

DON'T DO IT BIOWARE! DON'T BE FOOLED!  :why_so_serious:

BioWare appears to be making the non-MMO MMO. Mythic doesn't need to go anywhere near it.

The warhammer alliance guys assumed this meant bioware employee's would be stopping work on SWTOR to come and resource / fix warhammer. I guess boundless optimism is required at this point.

Seems highly unlikely given that further "restructuring" and layoffs are almost certain.

DONT LET MYTHIC NEAR SWTOR.

Seriously, don't.  SERIOUSLY. 

How about I just post one here, and we can pretend it's in the old thread?

(http://xs840.xs.to/xs840/09264/big_smug_grin837.png) (http://xs.to)

(http://img55.imageshack.us/img55/4339/bioware.jpg)

WAR will be alive 12 months from now... will it not suck then? No Idea, but the IP and exposure/cred the license gives is too much to shut down anytime soon.

That happens the day you sign up with EA. You might get one or two nice titles while you still have a modicum of creative control and original staff in your original office, plus EA cash infusion and distribution. When has it gone well after that? Is it better to burn out or fade away?

Wasn't sure which thread to put this in.

Executive Producer's Letter - Part 3 (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=843)


I was expecting something major in part 3, but I didn't see much from a quick read.

Oh my god, what a brilliant idea. They are going to merge some servers.

Nah, that wouldn't be radical. My guess is that they plan to instance everything and put everybody on the same shard. Like guild wars.

One giant server with ques to get in and max keep populations at 10 people per side!  Hey look we fixed crashing by 85%!

The sad thing is that their game simply can't handle the population required to make it fun.  Putting more people into their empty servers just means more people getting left out when their endgame reaches the extremely low population cap.

if they had the libraries and infrastructure to instance easily they would have done it by now. 

no, they are grasping.  But maybe they will license something to help.  Who knows?  Meanwhile Aion for PvP and LotRO for PvE

This times 10. Right now I'm quite interested in Old Republic (in a cautious way) but if Mythic gets involved I'm writing it off!

"Mythic" won't work on SWTOR. They'd be EA employees working for the bioware-led MMO dept in austin. And I would be flabbergasted if that did not happen at some point. Either right around christmas 2009 (just because EA is evil) or summer 2010 when SWTOR shows signs of slipping its release date.

Besides, lots of talented guys working at Mythic. WAR wasn't a raging success, but that doesn't mean all those artists, UI coders, quest designers, etc, should be condemned.

Completely agree.

Whether or not MJ was let go due to accountability for WAR's disappointment, the appearance of accountability is good to see.  The gaming industry is too competitive for the old school MMOG designers who won't be swayed from their vision. More Hartsman and less Jacobs, please.

It's not just changes, it's also a second generation thing. If you are doing a sequel or second game or whatever, you absolutely have to avoid the mistakes you made the first time. You might be able to get away with new mistakes, but you can't repeat the same things. A funcom game can't be buggy. A SOE game can't have grind. When I saw a recent thread that someone in Mythic was gathering metrics on class imbalances, I just lol'd. How many times did I read that on DAOC boards? Yeah. Right. That's Mythic-speak for "sorry, you're at the bottom of the deck, we'll fix it 18 months from now when you get back to the top." I might not have been thrilled to hear something about metrics if I was hearing it about WoW or EQ2, but from Mythic it was just a non starter, more of the same.

Well... no.  :why_so_serious:

http://joshdrescher.com/


He's probably a great guy, but I'm quoting that whole thing, just so I can find it again in 6 months.

His quote about War patch 1.1 (http://www.warcry.com/articles/print/5566) last December still tickles me.

Mr Drescher should be reviewing Austin real estate right now because by Christmas he will wish he had.

Were they all already laid off and all that remained was the 3-star talent? And I am not knocking the personnel, but when you have your poster boy throwing you under the bus, its only fair to run along side. The bus ran great for the parts it was given, too bad someone steered it off the cliff while text messaging.

 

Seems a prickish attitude to insist there's not talented and creative people at Mythic.  Especially considering Bioware AUSTIN already grabbed a lot of talent from companies far less illustrious.

Most damning thing I've yet to read about this whole kerfuffle...

Exactly. I guess they don't want my one month sub.

By operational do they mean execs? Somehow I find it hard that operation = design.

Yeah...if this is meant to reassure folks I think you have done the opposite of that.

Maybe the directives they operate under are now completely different?  Shrug.  "Same leadership" != same vision.

Get your filthy logic out of here!

http://joshdrescher.com/


Haven't the poor folks at Mythic suffered enough?

I am sure they will cluster servers like they did in DAoC. To let certain zones/instances be shared across servers.

Doubtful when literally next sentence they spell out "Our plans for WAR remain the same"... it reads overall like a claim that despite the main guy leaving nothing is going to change (so the "Chicken Littles" calm down) which is, welp  :uhrr:

Re: Executive Producer's Letter - Part 3 (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4231381#post4231381)


Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One- two -why then 'tis time to do't.

You are being heard (http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=highelf_wl&message.id=4002#M)


Doesn't quite fit with "Our core operational leadership remains the same, our production and development staff remains the same.  Our plans for WAR remain the same".

Reads more like "Please don't leave.  We need your money."

I don't think much, if anything, will change.  Just the heads on the block.   WAR is beyond fixing and we all know it.

No drama to be found here, but this is a link to Jacobs's blog: http://onlinegamesareanichemarket.wordpress.com/

My post to the WL/MRD communities was flat out something they deserved. Promises had been made and not kept. They deserve an answer as to where their Career review stands at the moment and I did the best I could to give them one.

There's been a loooooooong history of upcoming changes that don't happen for years. It would be a nice change to get things only stated when they're actually coming soon.

Every mythic fan still occasionally references the infamous style review. <3

You don't owe anyone anything and no fansite "deserves" anything.  They all should be grateful for any crumb tossed to them.  

Any fan of PvP MMO's hopes that WAR will improve. If the new crew can make that happen, then the result will speak louder than any post you could make.  

I have a personal belief that people should get what they're told they'll get. If they don't, within reasonable expectations, they deserve information.

You're 100% correct in that our actions will speak a magnitude of decibels louder than our words...I, however, am paid to be a warrior with my words not just my actions. In many ways, the words of a community team = our actions.

I really, really wanted to like WAR, and for a long time after I canceled I continued to hope that the game would turn around.  But I pretty much gave up on that after a few months, and I'm not seeing anything to make me believe that the crew working on Warhammer understands and appreciates RvR implementation any better than they did before MJ was dumped.  Why would they suddenly develop a collective ability to create a viable RvR-centered game just because of these changes?  

It's not like Jacobs' departure is some miracle exorcism of the Evil that Possessed them and cruelly kept them from success.  These are all the same folks who have seemed clueless about RvR so far, plus Bioware which may bring some needed programming finesse but which has zero MMO PvP experience.  And Paul Barnett is still on board.  It's like asking me to buy another dose of snake oil from pretty much the same carnival.

I appreciate your sentiment and understand that your job is community building. 

I see your point.  I just have my issues with the sense of entitlement you get at most fansites.  They need to be more appreciative of the efforts made on their behalf.

If only.

That's not really targeted at you in any way. I've kept up with the WAR community team exactly this much: "not at all."

Edit: That's not quite true, I kept up with the WAR team while playing to know that none of the changes that were plaguing the game were going to get fixed any time soon.  :why_so_serious: :ye_gods:

In all fairness, those posts were made on our OF. While still a "fansite" in some translation of the word, it is our primary mode of communication.

No offense taken, I've been reading here long enough, prior to my Mythic life, to know better than to be offended or think that anything said here is a personal attack on a huge level...for the most part  :why_so_serious:.

All I can say is, I look forward to the opportunity of working towards winning players back, yourself and others here included. There's no denying that many have negative feelings towards our game and we have a lot to do to correct those feelings. 16 tons and all that.

Hmm what about step 1. Treat your scenarios like an alternative ( and valid) play style and not an excuse to grind xp/renown.

You might be able to fix stability, but you'd still have a terrible, pointless PVE grind.

This is going to turn into the vault if we don't stop now while we still can  :grin:

Andy, at least you are posting here, which is good. And I know that you can only go so far in what you say or promise, regardless of what you might believe is right.

There are some simple obvious points I want to make, that every single person I personally know who has played WAR (~22 people) collectively agree on:

1. ORvR was expected to be THE focus of the game. It is not, and anything short of a revamp of the entire way the game works won't change that.

2. Most if not all people who are players I know, or posters unhappy with WAR in its current form, define ORvR by certain very obvious standards.

    a. The world is non-instanced, at least anything remotely related to ORvR. Frontiers, cities, anything part of the ORvR system. See DAoC. Do not see WARs split-up tiers, strange zone splits and geography.

    b. The world is persistent and lives on with whatever effects you and the other in the realms hae managed to accomplish. See DAoC. Do not see scenarios.

    c. The ongoing interest in ORvR is a combination of the ever-changing circumstances, politics, alliances, backstabbing, strategy and community-belonging feel that only real players vs. other real players can create and make dynamics day after day. No amount of bling, points systems or treadmills are going to remain viable and interesting unless player and realm dynamics are the center of the game system. You cannot possibly create enough content and mechanics on your own to appease the ORvR-craving population; the players do it for themselves with a living world. SEE DAOC FRONTIERS AND 3-WAY REALMS. Do not see WARs overbearing treadmills, locking rules, and mind-boggling reliance on PvE for its daily RvR system.

    d. Realm pride and guild support must innately be the top priority for players, not because they are forced to but because the game just allows you to want to. SEE DAOC.

    e. The ORvR must be the focus more than simple loot whoring and bean counting. This also alienates a lot of people who want the sheer fun of ORvR but not the b.s. of mindless gear shinies. And it must be quickly offered at every level range if you have a PvE component to familiarize and grow your character. See DAoC Battlegrounds and Frontiers. See populous WAR T1 and maybe T2. Do not see DAoC's ToA, WoW, WAR T4, or any other game that puts myriad roadblaocks between you and playing in ORvR. If ORvR is truly the point of the game (and not just lip service), then goddamnit let people GET TO IT.

There are an awful lot of people, myself included, who won't believe anything will change and will not give any "second chances" without anything short of a direct admission by SOMEONE at Mythic that you just plain screwed up in how you fundamentally slanted WAR. You were obviously trying to WoW-ize it instead of produce a more modern DAoC II with all the knowledge of what had worked great (a lot) and what didn't (ToA) for ORvR reasons. You know that we know that you know ... but of course no one will say that because they either don't believe it (epic fail) or can't change it now so won't say something they cannot do (your fault; Beta people tried to tell you a lot of things but you didn't listen to them or your past experiences).

Mythic bit the hand that fed them. Big time.

So, are you going to admit that scenarios are a stupid damn thing to focus so much attention on, and they should have never, ever been the primary means of, well, anything related to ORvR? Or that involving low-level PvE antics in ORvR goals is wrong?

Now where did I put that starfucking emote....

This is not accountability. Accountability for WAR is someone at Mythic stepping up and publicly admitting they messed up some basic things about its gameplay and focus.

So far, every single shred of official info or employee post has been (a) leadership is the same, and (b) WAR core gameplay is already right and they just need more population and class balance. They want more subs and returning players, but they say the exact worst thing that anyone who knows WAR at all needs to hear.

I know why they don't admit it, but really for their sake as a business to right itself, they better say it and embrace it and start DOING SOMETHING THE FUCK ABOUT IT sooner than later.

someone link this thread on WHA.  :why_so_serious:

Why, is the banhammer getting rusty?  Did schild run out of kittens?

I called it but was too late to stop it.

Why the hell would I want Mythic community reps or devs to "admit" anything?  I'm so not interested in psychotherapy here.

I'd like an RvR-focused game.  They haven't made one yet.  I'm not convinced their team has the capacity to do so.  That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the burden the CR folks face in travelling around to various boards to post right now, but shrieking for confessions doesn't do much.

I'm hardly worthwhile of that emote.

Tell that to Redgiant.  :awesome_for_real:

Redgiant, no one likes an asshole, so don't be one.

Well that comment is the first step... at least from my perspective that is the first I have read or heard anyone from Mythic even beginning to admit that the game was perhaps, "not awesome". Now if someone with the ability to make change would admit to errors in and a focus on the following:

1. The T3 and T4 cockblocks
2. The "McQuaid" inspired grinding required
3. The fact that getting to Rank 40 should be EASY and that gaining Realm Ranks should be hard.
4. Stop trying to be a PVE game, because as such it sucks... hard (see #3)

For the record... I do not see any stars to fuck around here and secondly I am done with the game, for good. The good ideas WAR had are or I believe will be implemented into WoW which is a vastly better game even if the PvP will always feel sterile.

1. queue BGs from anywhere - check
2. xp from pvp - check 3.2
3. guild tax - hoping
4. guild leveling - hoping
5. collision detection - yeah probably not

I'm going to laugh bloody tears when people realize that rvr can't hold the subs needed to make it work.

Hey. Andy.

I bet a shload of people will resub if you punch this guy in the cock and get it on camera:

http://mythicmktg.fileburst.com/war/us/home/images/newsletter/2009_06/PaulWModels.jpg

And I mean hard. Hard like, the next photo is his medical documents for "Severe Cockpunching."

I would resub for a month to see that.

That is a horrible picture. Like, nobody could possibly admit to liking anyone who posed for that, even ironically.

I got a present for you Andy. In handy avatar size.

(http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1329267/pb_av.jpg)

Yeah, this. I will never EVER subscribe to the game as long as this dickbag is still working on it. I don't give two rat fuck's in a the wind how nice a guy he is to work with. His public persona and the derision he seems to hold for even the most loyal of his customers, as well as his rampant unprofessionalism and just general muppetry ensure that I will never touch WAR until he is gone.

Start in his office, then shoot the fucker who refused to change the leveling curve, the assholes who won't or can't instance Fortress assaults and anyone involved in the capital city system and the ward gear.

Oh, Andy... how does it feel to be called a 3-star talent?

What the hell are those pants?  :ye_gods:

Cockfags (TM)?

Well.  I admit I'd like to see it.

But unless it was immediately followed by his public statement that he's decided to "pursue other interests", it wouldn't be enough to inspire a resub.  It would definitely warrant a "thank you!" to Andy for inflicting the pain on our collective behalf, though.

I get why Andy gives a shit if War gets fixed and makes happy, but why does anyone else.  Is this game even relevant anymore?  It was broke from top to bottom and if people's lives and careers weren't so invested in keeping it on life support, they'd be the first to pull the plug and let their loyal fanbase come crashing down.  The only reason at this point that anyone that doesn't receive a paycheck from EA should even care about it is whether or not some valuable lesson was gleaned from this disaster, but seeing as I'm either a pessimist, or a realist, I'll be awaiting the next train wreck.

Damn you.

Because...

Despite the game:

1. Being far worse than even my biggest fears
2. Being around 10% of what most expected
3. Being more PVE inspired than PVP
4. Being a step BACK from DAOC
5. Being poorly coded
6. Having the worst grind since EQ1
7. Having no end game at launch
8. Being led with a myopic vision of what fun is
9. Doing literally nothing better than other games on the market

It is still a kick ass IP... I mean quite possibly the best IP available. This alone makes it worth talking about, even in a bitter "EFF YOU" kind of way.

It's cathartic... at least for me since my dumbass bought 8 collectors editions   :ye_gods:

I would resub for 3 months to show my support for said action.

On an observational note, I like how he has archer girl holding a pair of backup sunglasses in case his current ones break from extreme horn throwing.

Because, believe it or not, they actually had the basis for a really good game.  However such ideas tend to be ignored in the subsequent rounds of "let's crib the good ideas from this awesome game" when they're in a product that isn't considered all that awesome.

In many ways it's the same "so close" feeling that led to monstrous threads about SWG.  There's also a tough balancing act to follow, but if they can follow EQ2's path instead of SWG's, they might be able to start growing again.

Because Tier 1 was fun as hell. If they ever fix all the other stuff I'd resub.

That.Is.Awesome.

I think it is part of the arrogant douche baggery kit...

Has any company ever learned from any of the numerous train wrecks? I mean really, ever?

Don't say Blizzard either.

I didn't THINK I could hate Paul more, and yet. There it is. More hate.

Funcom might be.  Too early to know for certain, but I am seeing the glimmer of possibility.

(http://forums.f13.net/Smileys/classic/spinstar.gif)(http://forums.f13.net/Smileys/classic/spinstar.gif)(http://forums.f13.net/Smileys/classic/spinstar.gif) :hello_thar:

Funcom is just repeating their recovery to the first time they had the problem - release buggy horrible mess, then fix it 8 months later. If their 3rd game releases cleanly, then I'll give them credit for learning, but not before.

He said STAR fucking.

Don't be sick.

Actually it's because anyone who goes even remotely near the stand gets given a pair. At Leipzig last year our booth babes had multiple pairs as did all the random marketing people who wandered in and out as well as a few boxes of them that are thrown into the crowd at random intervals.

My 2008 Leipzig Gallery (http://www.flickr.com/photos/12252757@N02/sets/72157606980230855/) should give you plenty of examples.

So I don't really understand the sunglasses thing. I understand it was, indeed, a thing but like. Why?

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

WAR is everywhere. And it's really, really bright. Here's some sunglasses.

I think we should all change our avatars to the paul one.

I will second this motion.

The more I look at that picture, the more I want the next frame to be KuChe, the Korean God of Skullfucking, to pop out of that backdrop and make Barnett his bitch.

You're cute.  Let's fuck. :drill:

Seriously: beware the entitlement that fan sites / communities feel once you start giving them answers.  I don't want to suggest that you should be completely opaque, but play your cards carefully.

Basically Paul and Jeff were doing a video interview and it was so bright in the office where the interview was taking place that they were squinting all the time so Paul ran across the street to a convenience store and bought two pairs of the most horrible sunglasses he could find. Since then they've been part of the scenery in every interview, press conference, podcast and trade show. Mythic get boxes of them with the WAR logo printed on the arms which they'd hand out with the posters, t-shirts and goodies at cons etc.

Your first post was in THE Warhammer thread. It would be best if you didn't give advice like that, hombre.

Thanks for answering! That is the definition of running a joke into the ground, I think, but at least it wasn't someone going YOU KNOW WHAT WE NEED, SUNGLASSES out of the blue!

It brings up the possibility that he's actually a really nice dude, and everything he does in public is simply furthering thousands of horrible in jokes that we don't get.

Or, he's a tool with an excuse for the sunglasses. <3

Thanks for ruining that bit of fun, IainC.

This reminds me of my start at f13 which, and I hope you've all forgotten by now, was in that WAR thread when the dev(?) started posting here a bunch. Was I the only survivor of the following carnage?

No, and don't think that makes you special.

While I am still playing WAR, I would at least reactivate my wife's sub just to see that.

But he is special for defending Darkfall.

I'll take it, dammit.

Anyways, I'll be hitching my horse on the Mortal Online wagon in a week

You know, if the hopeless stopped buying worthless games, we'd have less of them.

Just sayin'

+1  

sorry Andy-man but he's the face of your game

One for the road:
(http://www.imagedump.com/image.cgi?file=547111.jpg)

Other than Demon's Souls, which ones aren't worthless, particularly in the MMO variety?

Nobody would give a crap about anyone employed at Mythic if the game actually worked.

(http://www.imagedump.com/image.cgi?file=550399.jpg)

Sanya Weathers's MMO Underbelly: No Endgame For MMO Devs (http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/3224/page/1)

http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com/

Was it just my imagination, or did she basically just say "Fuck you Mark, couldn't of happened to a better guy"?

/scratches head

Um, that was a whole lot of words saying little…

I know absolutely nothing about the situation, but it surely seems as if Mark Jacobs might have been very good to work for in the beginning, but then lost control of what he created.  Thus you have a lot of people that really like the guy but don't like what he's become.  And maybe it isn't a conscious thing on his part.  Maybe it was the sell out, maybe it was less attention to the lower level guy.  It probably is different for each person that worked for the company.  I thought it was a decent little read that showed obvious mixed feelings that were overlayed by "pissed off".

If only someone with first-hand knowledge of the situation had said that explicitly! (http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/06/24/outsized-personalities/)

The important thing about that picture, the big clue, isn't the shades or the girls or the stupid look on his face. It's his belt buckle. ROCK STAR. That's what he's trying to be. And that belt buckle is three quarters of the problem with the MMO industry. Stop being fucking ROCK STARS and just be a coder/developer/writer/coffee maker/whatever. Shut up, sit down, make a good game. Fuck you.

So I guess the question to ask, is what sort of MMO can be made with a 25-30 person team?  And how the hell would you do it?  What sort of niche would you try for?  And if you're not trying for a niche, what the hell are you thinking?

I dunno. I kinda disagree. Celebrity can be a great marketing tool, and it's one that the gaming industry has largely avoided so far. Our biggest celebrity was... who? Sid Meier? Romero, maybe?

Of course he's douchey, all celebrities are douchebags. But your girlfriend buys those trashy magazines to read about them anyway.

Sanya stated it in her article - hype.  People like Paul and his shenanigans build hype for the game.  The real problem is that the MMO industry just sucks.  WoW's success has propelled a formerly niche market into the mainstream, and companies are still playing the same games they did when it was a niche market - either making clones of of the current success (Warhammer) or spending all their time tell how you their game in the anti-clone (Darkfall).  The most sucessful games - LoTRO and EvE, do so because they either didn't hype or they did hype, realized it didn't work, and buckled down and fixed their damn game until the hype was reality and they see an increase in subs.  But that takes time, and investors hate waiting. 

No, Paul and his shenanigans build hype for Paul. I'm sure there's some small subset of a subset of people who got turned on by that but you build legitimate hype through pre-release FAQs, videos and ads. I am not turned off by seeing people talk about their game; that's the job, they're the face. But guys like Barnett, Godager and McQuaid are interested in pimping themselves. They're leeches.

Absolutely his shenanigans build up the paul brand. But everybody wins when you cross over. Take Rachael Ray, for example. She parlayed looking like a comfortably doable chubby girl next door on a mediocre cooking show into a multimedia empire in a under five years, and the food channel made an absolute fortune off her.

Lets imagine Paul somehow became a real celebrity. "Real" defined by your girlfriend knowing who he was dating and having seen pictures of him at the beach. You don't think that would be valuable from a marketing perspective? That it wouldn't introduce his game to a formerly unreachable audience?

One, you're assuming that his horseshit would translate to a wider audience. Two, none of this has anything to do with the fact that he's odious and prevents at least me and Haemish from resubbing even if the game becomes the best thing ever.

Whoa, that illustration is ugly.  Sanya doesn't look like Jeff Goldblum in Lara Croft cosplay irl does she?

She didn't make an ass of herself in the process and she showed people how to make good food.

Paul just shows how to make an ass of yourself and shit on everyone below you.  It's a terrrible comparison.

The real problem is the same problem it's ever been: a publishing and marketing plan that casts a far wider net than the actual product has any right to have. Without the big ass plan the buyout brought to WAR, the game would have started as a quaint little sub-forum here, and quietly moved to the Graveyard around February due to general malaise about the game, and been a Steam deal two weeks ago. And that would have been fine. Couple of hundred thousand people bouncing between it and other third-order games until they receded to more server mergers and eventually had to make the choice between DAoC or WAR.

The game was what it was. The mistake was positioning it as something well more than it had any ability to be. And in the world of large company politics, that's harder to recover from than any sort of missed potential with your consumers.


A lot of them are. Not WoW nor any truly big budget game, but the market isn't saturated with $60mil offerings either.

The belt buckle was a key point for me too.

However, I don't hate Barnett. He's unprofessional in a number of ways and is a hype machine, but the game design ultimately lies at the feet of Jacobs as the head of the studio. Barnett wasn't the only one to open his mouth and say stupid things; Jacobs should have known a lot better. And reign Barnett in.

Punch Barnett in the dick? No. Return him to GW consultant status and say thanks but goodbye. I figure Barnett knows that the WAR train will end sooner or later, so is prepared for it.


Sanya's been covertly critical of Mark for a long time - no names, but her target is often clear. Her comments on the announcement were seen as being gleeful (http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-5353-MMORPG-Examiner~y2009m6d24-Mark-Jacobs-has-left-the-EA-building).

Key difference: I'm not being paid to control the Vault.  Otherwise I wouldn't have broken my lurk out of sheer rage in order to slag some random starfucker who used Final Fantasy as an example of good player-driven, character based narrative.

Instead, I would have shown up to throw completely fucking random ideas at you, while trailing a thousand frothing retards which you would have to go final solution upon.  Speaking of which, I can finally see MJ's point about no official forums now, it would warm the cockles of my black heart to shit on somebody's floor and make them clean it up, while telling them that I'll just stop coming if they're going to act like that. :why_so_serious:

The mistake was also in building it such that you needed 500k subscribers to be considered a success by the President of the company. That's bad business because Jacobs should have known better.

As for Barnett, that's not hype. He tries to be hype, but hype generally doesn't involve pissing upon your current and future customers from a very great height while being the most unprofessional gasbag imaginable and throwing co-workers under the bus.

Well fucking said.


There are two (very nice looking) ladies and one cunt in the above picture. Check out the belt buckle that the cunt is wearing.


edit - ok I've caught up to the thread now. Was out of town for 3 days, and had that pic in my email (WAR newsletter) when I got back. The thread wasn't up to the belt buckle when I read MA's post.

While they are certainly very attractive, the choice to use two filipinas to represent a High Elf and a Dark Elf may be symptomatic of the many decisions that were made where the worst possible option was the one that was used. Also, the DE staff is really bad.

Looks to me like the staff is going >_<

Dear f13,

When commenting on the picture in question, could you stop reposting it?  If one must receive a burst of explosive diarrhea right in the mouth, one would like to not keep repeating the experience. 

Sincerely,
Everyone

Exactly. The Tier 1, and even Tier 2 game were just about perfect. I've yet to hear anyone have bad stuff to say about the game at that stage. Honestly, I consider the game at that point to be much better than WoW. It's not until you get to the grind, oRvR zergs looking for anything to fight, etc. that it gets bad.

The biggest roadblock to resubbing for me is actually the loss of my character names. I had some really great names that I've used all the way back to UO, but because of mergers and whatnot they've been renamed randomly and then had the letter "x" added to the end in a subsequent server merge. I know it's technically the same toon, but the attachment I have to "Foxglove" the Shadow Warrior is considerably greater than to "AenthylX" the Shadow Warrior. Give people free renames for  god's sake.

I have a firm rule about people with a random x in their name that doesn't otherwise belong there.

It's kind of the same rule I have about people with the Jenkins title in wow.

Wait, they renamed characters randomly and added a letter, but didn't offer free renames?  Please tell me one or both of us missed something.

Man I was soooooooooo bored tonight. Then I rediscovered this thread.  :why_so_serious:

All I know is whoever hired those chicks to be their elf cosplay models needs a fucking raise.

no

Oh poop, I knew I should've worked more than 15 minutes on the animation.

Yea, that would've helped.

Lol, both AoC and WAR would be fundmentally better games if progression ended at level 20. But hey good thing mythic doesn't know that right? Mark Jacob even said himself that WAR would have done better if it had 120 levels to grind  :awesome_for_real:

I don't think I'd have lasted to 10 if there were that many.

Ie, killing off Mythic. If that was true.


Who suggested it did?

Also, can you read?

It's not about the tiers. It's about the player density. Tier 1 and 2 alone suck, because you don't have any of the "magic" that comes from random PQ wins and random sparks of violence in RvR lakes. But for those to happen consistently required some fundamental rethinks on zone design and level disparity. Fewer lakes, fewer PQ areas by a lot, mentoring, and better level design to funnel players together.

Old argument. March 2008 old.

Yeah, can someone comment on this? I mean I know I'm setting myself up for a punchline, but NOBODY can be THAT stupid right?

I could be remembering this incorrectly, but I think the re-names with the "x" are placeholder names assigned to characters during the transfer process, and you're expected to choose your own name before you log the character in for the first time on the destination server.

Then again, I may have completely muddled my recollection.  I haven't had anything to do with the game in months.

Erp, it's me. My guys have been through 2 server mergers that I'm aware of. When transferring you get to keep your name as long as it's not already taken on the new server. IF it is, you have to rename your toon. By now everyone here should know what it's like trying to find an unused name. After 30 minutes of trying to find one that wasn't taken I just used the random name generator on the toons I had too. For the second server merge I just said fuck it, I've had enough. I let my sub lapse and didn't transfer them. I logged back in for the 10 day free call to arms thing, and they were all on new servers again, except this time they had the names I had renamed them too, but in most cases had one or two "x"'s at the end of their names. I'd imagine that when they moved them for me if a name was taken, they added an "x" and if someone had transfer ed before me and had an "x" added on their name, I got "xx".

Sorry for the confusion, the way I wrote about it was misleading.

T1 and T2 were so much fun because at that stage it was all about pure PvP fighting. Loot didn't matter yet. Complicated rules didn't matter yet. Time sinks didn't matter yet.

For all WARs complexity, it turns out the simplicity of the low level fights was the most fun.

I know I am repeating myself but I still can't wrap my head around the fact that a company that wasn't being run by pothead teenagers let Captain Cheesedick anywhere near a webcam/journalist/interview/etc.

Yeah, we keep running over the same ground because Mythic keeps showing an inability to design content that actually fits with how players behave.

I did enjoy the PvP aspects, but got to the start of rank 2 and couldn't PvE anymore. WAR had some of the most basic PvE design I've seen in a recent MMO.

It's clear that MBJ thought that the PQ concept would positively revolutionize PvE; and, while it is indeed a nifty incremental innovation, it fails as a complete substitute for PvE.  And, to make matters worse, the PQ virus that hit every Tier, Zone, Pairing, Race, Chapter, segment, level, and group-size actually made PQ's less helpful than they could have been; to wit, it wasn't enough that you did a PQ, you had to do this PQ for this tier for this zone for this...ad infinitum to get the reward thingy.

The fact that Mark publicly laid claim to his invention of this game innovation seems to me to be one clear example of where a good idea was driven into the swamp by the absolute certainty from the one person who could not be gainsaid that at least points to one visible marker of the MBJ effect.

That said, I think y'all are wrong to focus on Paul's belt-buckle... I believe he is trying to be ironic; perhaps he even fails at irony, but hey... any stick with which to beat the dog.

The sunglasses are plenty good to beat him with... an inside/beta/pre-launch joke that might have appealed to the rabid crowd following the hype is hardly worth propagating after your game has [mostly] failed.

I'm sorry MBJ lost the company he built; no amount of money will soften that blow.

Hate to disagree but I was shocked 3 minutes into the game, when I hit the first mob and realized it was the most bland combat in a mmorpg since the first generation, and made the LotRO seem like an action game, let alone WoW. That was the dealbreaker to me, never reached the point where the grind hits you, never had problems with the loot, never realized how broken the PvP was or anything else... I got to level 11 and realized how utterly boring the combat was. And since fighting is what you do 80% of the time in this game (the other 20% being running), I realized I was fooling myself hoping for the poor visual and audio cues and the totally unengaging actions to miraculously become fun. The combat in WAR is as visceral as Paintdryer Tycoon.

At that stage, the game for me was lots of beautiful and promising menus and features (and that's why I really wanted to like it. I bought two boxes, a few around here know why), plagued by the pathetic combat. That's why I will never be able to enjoy WAR. Slow and bland as a browser game.

I'm going to bet that he meant Tier 1 & 2 pvp.  The Pve in WAR is terrible, just as we'd expect from Mythic.  Noone in their right mind would PvE in a Mythic title any more than was absolutely necessary.  It's just not their thing.

The combat wasn't any different for me in PvP. I've been there. Same frustration.

To be fair, he probably did mean PvE.  I myself never played DAoC.  Tier 1 is the time for learning, so not having advanced AI isn't all that surprising.  Plenty of other games ramp up, and it's not like AI is stellar in any MMO (see previous rants).  But it didn't get better, and around Tier 2 is when the willing disbelief started to fall off because by then you should know the basics.  Then you hit Tier 3 and the disparity is worse because you have the majority of your abilities...

I liked the PvP combat, but my two mains were a Swordmaster and a Disciple.  I had some amazing small battles where I won because I outlasted opponents.

I tried all classes up to level 10 or something, Swordmaster is the one I lasted until 14 I think. Seriously, to me (and just strictly combat-wise) audio, visuals and general feedback was so slow, lacking and bland that I really couldn't do it. You could say that was the consequence of coming from AoC, but even now I think every MMORPG released after 2003 has a more engaging combat than WAR's. PvP or PvE, same thing.

The one thing I did like about War combat was it moved slow enough in PVP that you could actually do something. I don't know if later equipment made that impossible, but it was a vivid and positive contrast to WoW where the average combat consisted of a one second combat where an uber twink one shotted me. Unfortunately when you translate that pace to PVE, it's ungodly boring.

T1 was fun because:

a) No class had any cc at all, none whatsoever.

b) There was no keeps and forts, keeps and forts transform the game into a tank/back line healer/ranged AOEr game only.

c) The rvr lakes were small, you could actually get from one BO to another in the three mins you have to defend, in t4 it takes you 2 and a half mins to run from one place to another and then you have zero chance of wiping the defending force in time

d) You don't have 40 level worth of abilities that do almost the same thing, games really need to go back to giving you stat/skill points when you level rather than spreading out your abilities all the way to max level, some classes change drastically at level 40 (my marauder got their pull and my SM got his two hander defensive skill).  You should have all your abilities by level 10 tops, and having three bars worth of bullshit that does almost the same thing is ridiculous.

Edit: e) We played t1 when the game launched and it had a healthy population, that helped a ton.

I had plenty of fun in WAR...then I hit tier 3, leveling slowed to a crawl, and Tor Anroc was the only thing to do.  I actually ground it out, finally when to t4, and then realized the end game was terrible.   Tier 1 and 2 were great fun, it just had no staying power for me.

I know that was a long time ago, and I've missed plenty of changes...but I just haven't been able to bring myself to go back to the game. 

I'm embarassed to say, that when I played in beta, I honestly believed that WAR was so much fun that it was actually going to beat out WoW in subscribers over the first year.  I never left t2 though.  It's interesting to me that the biggest thing that changed between beta and actual open play was really just how the players played the game.  It was like the second it was "real," everyone shifted into screw fun now, we're supposed to have fun later mode.  Never mind the fact that there was actually no "fun" scheduled for later. 

 Which brings me to a question, how can a pvp game every get properly tested if just the mindset of the players can determine whether or not the product is viable.

This, except I didn't grind it out. I leveled 3 characters up to Tier 3, trying to give them time to put some fun in, or even imply that fun might be coming Soon(tm). Instead I saw the clownshoes ward gear shit they were putting in, and left for greener pastures. I honestly blame TA as the biggest reason why I left. I liked grinding BGs, and would happily have done so until max level. However, being knocked into lava over and over again is not my idea of fun.

It is important for devs to understand basic and game-related psychology.

Put levels and items with stats in a game and an achiever mentality takes over.  It doesn't matter whether because it's what players are used to, or they want to be the best, or they need some protection against the people who do those things, it becomes the point.  And yes, most players will do so to the detriment of fun.  Those who don't, in such a system are then at the mercy of those who do.  So they either join in or quit.  Probably both since they want to give it a shot but soon realize it's not actually fun.

You know what is almost universally 'fun' ? Winning.


People love to fucking win and will do almost anything to guarantee that they will. Doesn't matter what game your playing, be it a MMO, FPS, RTS, Monopoly or Hide'n'Seek, if there is sure fire way to ensure victory, someone will do it.

Doesn't matter how shitty, cheap, unfun, lame, tedious, boring it is, if it means they win and the other guy losses, then it gets done.



You have to build around the desire to win. Instead they offered the choice of "Well we could have 'fun' doing this, but we'll WIN doing that".

DAoC  :awesome_for_real:

I said this last year.


Going back to the initial hype for the game, Mark Jacobs made a lot of quotes about the importance of being able to see the RVR zones from the PVE zones and their hope to "attract" people to try PVP.  Given that Imperator was going to be PVE only, plus their desperate attempts to ensure a Warhammer city wouldn't be captured for at least 6 months, I really think Mark just didn't get it.  He wanted WAR to be a PVE game, that's why there are 1,237,000 quests, it's drowning with bland content, pvp was only intended as a sideshow.  Even the scenario thing, how hard is it to force rotate them instead of boring everyone to death doing the most efficient ones?

First week or so T2 was great, I remember one keep attack that lasted over 24 hours.  People used siege weapons, attacked, defended and then they figured out the game doesn't reward you for any of that, in fact having fun actually slowed your progression down.  They front loaded an endgame on players who were used to the exact opposite, we levelled straight past it.

I was involved in a couple of T2 sieges and I really enjoyed them.

There really was a lot to like about the game. The grind was just too awful and mythic gave no indication they understood what people's dissatisfactions were or had any plans to change them.

As someone who really has an attachment to names I can completely agree. I rolled on Chaos Wastes and made sure I got all my names including the Ares and Omen which freaking rock, only to merged and lose them... I still have them in WoW so I am done with WHO.

OK so I have a serious, if somewhat rhetorical question. I just wish someone with some knowledge would answer because surely I am missing something.

By and large the VAST majority of current and former WHO players agree that Tier 1 and Tier 2 were pretty kick ass. The feeling and pace of accomplishment was brisk and things were pretty fun... then BAM you get beat over the head with the mind numbing grind stick in Tier 3 and basically hit a brick wall in Tier 4.

In my 3-4 months there I leveled 6 characters between 20-25 with only one making it to 30.

I know I am not alone. I also know that I am not a casual player. I have grinded out 5 level 80s in WoW, two of them now with Ulduar Gear and 2 additional in at least Nax 10/25 gear.

But WHO fell off a cliff in Tier 3 so my question is, why is it so tough for the devs to see this and address it? And by address I mean something more than the "spit in the face" 10% increase.

Why is the 20-40 grind meant to be so arduous? I can see the realm ranks 40-80 taking a while, but 1-40 should be  breeze so people can see if they like the class, enjoy the accomplishment of leveling and growing attached to your now level 40 players makes it a little harder to quit playing.

I submit my theory that if XP from 20-40 would have been increased 300-400% that this alone would have saved 200k subs and they would be sitting at 500k subs complaining about RvR, end game and performance issues but NOT wanting to leave the game.

Stop linking your fucking blog you douchebag.

Pride?  Hubris?  Ego?  Cluelessness?

Take your pick from those and a dozen other one-word condescending retorts.

But is that really the case? Just seems like it happens too often with too many developers to be this simple.

Maybe one day you'll post something 1/3rd as interesting as Lum and you'll have room to talk.

http://pastie.org/528161 (http://pastie.org/528161)

A developer gets it into their head that getting to level X should take people a certain amount of time, or else they'll find it too easy / hard and quit. With WAR, the people in charge obviously didn't trust PvP to hold players at endgame, since they put it on the back of a large XP grind to get there (and slowed down progression just before launch). Holding players through the mid-game - and perhaps stopping a large number from crashing the endgame at launch, which is still probably untested and buggy, if it even exists - is seen as important to keep players playing.

It also happens because devs quickly learn that players can't be trusted to self-report on XP issues, even if the players are correct.

Arguable mythic never needed tier 3-4.

We can only speculate. I'd imagine it has to do with players willingness to play everything in the hope that it'll be the Next Big Thing and developers tend to take that as the wrong cue for what they're doing right.

It would require them to admit they were wrong. That's why none of these things ever get fixed until some new person takes over and makes changes.

That's another reason Scott Hartsman rocks.

My overwhelming 20/20 hindsight perception from early beta is that there was always a current of abject horror that the game engine could not do what the game designers hoped it would.

I don't know a thing about game engines and/or coding, but a lot of initial game design features (and I mean hard-coded ban-your-ass-from-beta coded) all had to do with keeping people compartmentalized in little zones... spreading out the player-base, and hoping for lots of skirmishes, but no big battles.

Just a few examples:
1. RvR was originally *all* instances; not some, but all.  There were originally PvP waiting rooms, but they were just that... a place to go to get ganked while you waited for the scenario to pop (before there was queue anywhere).
2. the re-designed RvR lakes had a zone-line running down the middle for *every* pairing... effectively splitting each into two zones.
3. The overall geography was like playing the the Swiss alps... small areas surrounded by impenetrable valleys or insurmountable mountains.
4. End-Game City-Sieges were (by-definition and plan) instanced.
5. Fortresses, the only non-instanced end-game were eventually instanced.

If I may be absurdly reductionist, WaR doesn't work because their map is broken... and their map is broken becuase they knew their engine could not handle more than 25/side in a confined space.  Thus they had to make it seem as though "WAR IS EVERYWHERE," but not just in any one particular place.  There were lots of observations about Map/Geography/Critical Mass in the beta forums... I can only wonder if they hoped they could code around the limitations of their Engine/TechDesign (whichever).

As such, I really don't think it _can_ be fixed; and I don't think they give $65M do-overs.

(http://img.skitch.com/20090629-fp324ijnwfk4ijajdj4ufk9st6.jpg)

I've been saying this for a while.  WARs engine cannot handle the game they built around it, this explains their initial focus on scenario based pvp. 

(http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/6509/54738903.jpg)

I'm just tired of watching people - you're not the only one - copy posts off of forums - not F13 specific, either - and paste them to their blog.

Then they proceed to SirBruce the fuck out of the post(s) in an environment where their legion of ass kissers can tell them how fucking clever, correct and smart they are.

Like this. http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/05/01/worst-presentation-ever/ (http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/05/01/worst-presentation-ever/)

The people who do this kind of stuff need to collectively get over themselves. It's pathetic.

I don't mind clicking a link here to get to another place that might have different content along a similar vein over here or over there or even way over there.  I prefer it to having the entire thing copied here when there's already something going on there that I can read.

Would you like a Pamprin, Nija?  Because really, dear, you don't have to go clicking on links if you're so grumpy.

Perhaps it's a slow news day. Pretty sad though. I'm sure some groupies will rush in to defend his honor since he's a red name and well known.

It still irks me that Curt Schilling can come here, do his shitty imitation of McQuaid, and still have dozens of people firmly attached to his "ball sack".

With his last post, he's got a valid point.  Not sure it's a point worth being made here.

Mark Jacobs is the punching bag in this thread, not Lum and his blogging/posting etiquette.  If I see another screenshot of a text editing program...

The Tier 1 game was so good because the PVP was solid... and it was actually PVP. It has taught me that castle/town/city sieges should be the exception in medieval fantasy MMORPG PVP, not the rule. See, slamming your dick against a door over and over again so that you can break through to slam your dick into ANOTHER door before finally being allowed to climb up a set of stairs to pound on a mostly static bag of hit points is BORING. What's the difference between doing that or just flipping a switch in the castle if there are no players present to defend? The keep lord shit in DAoC was tired, but it was DAoC and no one else was doing that kind of thing. But you take the T1 PVP which was all about pitched battles between asymmetrical sides across a town and the keeps just fall flat. The Empire/Chaos T1 RVR lake was brilliant.

Plus, all the keep sieges really really really need to be instanced. Maybe you can have a zone that is all about great big pitched field battles but to get into the keep take, you have to queue up outside the keep instance (meaning you have to fight through the pitched battle zone to get there). Each side only gets a certain amount of "tickets" (yes, like the tickets in Battlefield 2) which are respawns for the keep zone. As one person dies, they get booted and the next person in the queue gets dropped in (defenders appear in a safe room in the keep). Certain points in the keep when taken quicken the rate of ticket loss. When your side is out of tickets, you lose. Set a timer on when the castle can get retaken. But really, for WAR, most of the game should be the pitched battle zones, with maybe 6 keeps total (1 for each race).

(http://img.skitch.com/20090629-m4qtk37kx38kqkgh9gadr1qd8g.jpg)

(http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/60/madeatwwwtxt2piccoms.jpg)

Trendwhore.

Speaking of trends.


The only time in the past week, maybe.

Really HaemishM nails where WAR went fundamentally wrong with this. WAR expected to attract 500k+ players who are only interested in the keep seiges and nothing else. And they failed to realize that market for that game is several times smaller. How do you mess up the WarHammer IP? By not accounting for the large number of people who wanted to play a WarHammer game, not DAoC redone with EA money. I've been saying the bolded about WAR and pvp in general for months when we still had "what if someone did pvp right" discussions.

If WAR were this, it would have more active subs than it does now.  WAR failed in every way possible.  Not only did it turn off Warhammer fans, but it also turned off DAoC fans.  Fans which otherwise would have been money in the bank.  WAR is almost nothing like DAoC in implementation.  Yes, both games have keep doors to beat on and too much cc.  That's where the similarities end. 

Stun. Root. Aoe. Dead. Rinse Repeat. Yep your right considering that Root and Aoe is all you need in WAR   :oh_i_see:

I think WAR did attract the DAoC fans and most of them are still playing, well except the ones who went back to DAoC   :drill:

This image posting and bitching from Nija is making me stabby.

You just linked the same one they were talking about.  :uhrr:

Or in this case, some  of us tend to agree.  I would point out that the entry in question was made before the post in question.  Having answered the question before it was asked, why the hell would anyone write it out a again, especially when the hyperlink exists?


I like the keeps and the BOs because they give people something to fight over.   Otherwise, you end up wth Emain Macha, either large zergs groupfucking everything in site, or gank groups waving their epeens around.  To me, that is one of the differences between PvP and RvR - in RvR you fight with and agaist other players over something. 

 

I want to say that instances are bad, and that companies need to take a cue from CCP's usage of Stackless Python to do I/O.  However, I can't really argue with outside of a desire for non instanced PvP.

Exactly 0 of 22 people I know who started at release day playing WAR still are still subbed (and all of which happened to also have played DAoC back in its day). The last sub of those was a 1-month retry back in March.

Also, no one that I know of who I used to guild with on Nimue or Guinevere are still playing WAR; most if not all tried it at release. Many of us were in contact leading up to WAR thinking it would be great to ORvR again in style.

It is very much the opposite of your comment in my experience. Most ex-DAoC players are not still playing. The players still putting up with WAR have no decent frame of reference to see how much it sucks, or they just love WOW semantics.

I know of only -1- DAoC fan that plays Warhammer and thinks it's any good.  That, or he's playing denial about the game and trying to find the silver lining.  The rest of them have either quit or a hanging on because that's where their friends are.

New Emskrank is really the only place they got it right in the entire game.

sadly I'm using the WHA forums as my reference, its not a bad guess to associate the WHA with WAR remaining playerbase.

Doh, so I did.

Wait here, while I go write a blog post about this experience we're all sharing.

I appreciate the irony of you complaining about Lum linking to his blog on a related post, then you go linking to Lum's blog on a related topic.

Plus linking to the time Lum publicly disagreed with F13's ideas on a topic just makes all this look really petty. Who knew a thread about Mark Jacobs getting kicked out of Mythic would end in pettiness?

This thread has better RvR than the game  :oh_i_see:

/me gives you all a Terrible Embrace!

There now, don't you feel better?

I feel dirty.  :oh_i_see:

(Damn you Marauder pull!)

Blink.

Now that came out of nowhere.  Thanks. :)

Damnit!  I thought about doing the Photoshop angle to get around Rasix's threat, but just didn't feel like pushing the envelope.  Well played!

Uhh.. I've got nothing about Mark Jacobs leaving EA, sorry.  Only contribution I can make is that I enjoyed WAR while I played it and ended up stopping because of a billing glitch.  Wasn't bothered enough to figure out the glitch because I can always play EQ2 at any time. 

War only had 4-5 medium populated servers prior to the 1.3 patch. Looking at all the complaining and guilds announcing they are going to <insert game name here> on those few decently populated servers means there is a looming server consolidation coming, or that the games coming out in the Fall of 09 will suck most of the remaining life out of Warhammer.

The press might be talking up Land of the Dead, but the player base is mostly upset over it because its diluting world RVR and there are so many other issues with the game that should have been fixed before this live expansion was done.

The producers letter part 3 should have been the priority over the past 6 months, and most folks aren't giving them another 6 months to fix the game. I don't know if all this was Mark's agenda or not, but they can't sit back and wonder why all their players are leaving when the players asked for a pork chop and Mythic gave them a chicken leg.  Yea we still get to eat, but when you don't give me a pork chop I'll leave and pay someone who will. Mythic utterly failed to listen to their playerbase, someone's head had to roll, but sadly its too late for most people to care.

Diluting RvR? Not enough people to form roving gank squads or not enough small bands of hapless victims?

Not enough "fix bugs/broken design", from what I gather.

You know.. I actually thought Mark was pretty decent, but I think his view of the game design is out dated.  Think for the most part most of the designers are now.  Having tried AOC, War, EQ2 and now back to WOW.  I have a pretty clear opinion that building a leveling treadmill is not the solution.

The death knight class really brought it home.  Why put off the fun when you can start off going full throttle?  Either I am old as fuck, or I am just fed up with having to pay; then whack the mole for weeks, and then actually get to play the game I want.

Barnett is the shamwow guy, a douche with an overly inflated ego.

The seeds of revolution is growing in this one. Fargull I reached that conclusion when I was 16  :drill:

A mac, really?

(http://randjunk.com/images/cool_people.jpg)

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v307/Rendakor/notepad.jpg)

Yet the most popular play types in a lot of online games tend to be the assault/onslaught/siege/CTF variants.  It's not fundamentally flawed, it gives players a lot of neat terrain to play with, gives the developers a lot of opportunity to implement chained objectives and secondary objectives, and if the zone is well designed inherently increments the difficulty for the attacking force upwards as the defending force is concentrated into a smaller area as long as AoE isn't fucking out of control.

Sometime, probably sooner than later, a developer is going to really realize that the best way to keep retention high in an MMO is not long mindnumbing grinds for levels and artificial mechanics that require extra effort for gaining access to parts of their game, but rather a brisk pace and rich experience in the leveling process and an ease of character attachment.

Gamers have changed and developers are just starting to realize this, chief among them Blizzard. Blizzard has steadily increased the leveling experience awarded in WoW and thus have significantly reduce the leveling time of characters. Yet amidst the vocal minority who complain, WoW has not see any negative impacts and has in fact continued the upward trend in subs. Mark my words, they will eventually create a /55 button and it will be a good thing (that or further increase XP yields significantly).

I was reading a blog archive yesterday from 2004 where people were talking about it taking 5-6 hours to reach level 8 in WoW at launch  :ye_gods:

We have come a long way, and developers will take the cue. Make entry to end game EASY and then make us work at end game all the while providing lots of side content to keep people interested.

MJ, like Brad McQuaid before him, were too myopic and "old school" to see that and they payed the price. Adapt or die, stay the hell out the games business and the let the new breed in if you dont get it.

(http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/8900/onnoticeq.jpg)

Someone went and used notepad.  Now you've done it.

(http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa68/random256/edit.jpg)

(http://www.azaroth.org/usingmspainttotype.JPG)

Edit: FYI I'm not following this thread in the least and am probably missing the point on this joke. I just thought this image was very funny.

I'm expecting this thread to turn into an emacs/vi fight within the next page.

(http://i202.photobucket.com/albums/aa181/Yegolev/text.png)

god

the standard xp theme with that wallpaper

what are you trying to do? blind me?

Might be a bit out of place at this stage, but when I saw those comments the scenario I came up with was a far cry from what was delivered.

Say you're crossing a bridge when, below you, you see a fellow player engaged in a clash with The Enemy. You could continue to progress on your PvE quest, or you could jump down (enter the RvR zone, get flagged and all) and help out an ally in need.

Stuff like that, I guess.

That game is APB. I know, I know... it's not out, EA, blah blah blah. I also swore off getting stoked about MMOs ever again after WAR since it's always a situation where they stomp on my balls. But at the very least, it's a AAA budget title that is taking a different tack, win or lose.

But this is what I meant about the MJs, McQuaids, Gautes making way. They're dinosaurs and they will never, ever change. They will not get it. Like you said, gamers have changed and while rampant corporatism in the industry is bad people still pretending that it's two dudes in a garage with a Dungeon Master's Guide are just as bad.

I use Luna because of you. :awesome_for_real:

EDIT: only at work

Even though I hate WoW, I think it was a good thing that they reduced raids to 5 and 10 mans. Add a solo friendly leveling environment with raids that even small guilds can do, and you have a winner. 

Now if you wanted people to socialize more, you could steal War's public quest idea and put them near flight hubs for easy access.

But yeah...if the end game is supposed to be where the fun is, then it makes no sense to make people slowly grind through boring lower levels.

It does if you want them to stay subscribed for a long time.

(http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/941/josesaramago.png)

stopthatshit.jpg inc.

How did you have time to do that with so much partying happening right there in your computadora?

It was during a well earned break from collecting blackmail material on Eve devs.

This is stupid, but fun.

(http://iria.chem.uh.edu/f13/what now.gif)

Cygwin is like cats and dogs sleeping together.

Also, I think Itto's language is fake.  Prototipo - if I can read it, it's not foreign.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/wuarules.png)

I think I did it wrong.

On the contrary, you may have won.

Man, jokes involving nobel prize winners get no respect.

Jokes are supposed to be funny. It's what makes them jokes.

(http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1143749/HEX.png)

A referecence to the previous american government would be the following step. Sadly, it'd wander into full retard territory shortly after.

Guessing the next step would be binary.

We've just had hex, we can't stop here, this is bat country.

X on cygwin using vi at that. ;D

I'd do an old black and white VAX dummy terminal, but it'd be hard to get a screen cap and we threw those out years ago, which makes it even harder.

Pah, you're all amateurs. I wrote this message using a magnetised pin and a very steady hand directly onto the HD platter at the f13 server farm.

I don't think they consider the efforts they put into making the classes different.  Finding out you don't like playing a Witch Hunter at 40 after 2 months is very different to finding out after 2 weeks.  If it's about about retention (and based on box sales it is) then I wouldn't trust the players to pick the class that suites them best on their first go.  There's a reason WoW players have so many more maxed out characters than normal.

I think the more obvious solution is to recognize that if your PvE sucks, then you better not make it the emphasis of the game. 

DAoC learned (eventually) that making the pve portion trivial added a lot to replay value.  WAR suffers from a double wammy: The PvE sucks making the long grind to the endgame seem even longer AND having a shitty endgame, so the grind that you endured to get there now seems like kick to the groin.  If you're going to make your players grind to get to an endgame, at least have the decency to make the endgame worth the wait. 

I'm not really convinced the grind really keeps people subbed longer than they normally would otherwise, especially if your classes are different and fun and you have a decent endgame. I don't dispute people making MMOs assume this is the case, and maybe it really is, but I do know that I quit MMOs before reaching cap or earlier than I might've otherwise because the grind sucked so bad and because I wanted to try more than one class but that was going to be too soulcrushing to actually do. I'd be pretty surprised if that attitude didn't become more and more prominent as the gamer population widens and ages.

One would have to assume that there is a breaking point where the grind causes more people to quit than a cool endgame would retain.  Each person is willing to put with with varying amounts of bullshit to get to the golden carrot.  The stronger the endgame, the more "grind" people will suffer through to get there.  Obviously, WAR has won the grind battle by making their endgame so stupid and futile as to make any amount of grind seem ludicrous. 

Why not just make the end game actually fun?

Madness!

I hear that's really easy, as evidenced by the hundreds of games out there that are all totally fun.

Oh, it's totally the devs' fault that they can't make an endgame where you do the same thing 100 times over (after having done similar things 1 000 000 times to get there) yet remains fun for years. Everyone knows how easy it would be to fix.  :why_so_serious:

The carrot isn't the endgame at first. Not for people untrained by prior raid/RvR MMOs anyway. The grind sets in more because of the time between new unique abilities than the pure time it takes to level. The people it pisses off the most are those trained by prior games, but they either suffer through or buy a premade somehow anyway.

I would bet there's little correlation between the time it takes to reach the cap and the the length of a subscription. Rather, it's probably more about time between the feeling of "new" as linked to abilities, zones, types of encounters, etc. People who quit because they didn't reach the cap fast enough weren't lured by the endgame enough, probably because there is another game with a more polished endgame anyway.

Since Jacobs had the ethics of an ambulance chaser (and the same profession), I hope he rots somewhere.  Killing off two good games was the least of his crimes.

Your three posts have been very substantive.

Someone referenced f13 on a Warhammer thread on VN in the last couple of days, if I remember right.  I think this is fallout.

Dear gods, no. :cry2:

Actually, I just poked around on VN, and in a thread about WAR's falling subscription numbers someone linked to f13, while another poster mentioned that developers post here and asserted that the level of discourse was intelligent.

So yeah.  Fallout.  There are a couple of really obsessive types on VN who only seem to be able to write some variation of "Mythic sucks".  They never say substantively more than that, and it gets pretty boring.  I've always hoped they wouldn't find their way over here.  I may not post much, but this place is sort of a haven for my warped little brain =P

What Fallout? I see one guy.

Thinking back that warhammer thread, just after Mark started posting, was more enjoyable than the game.  All the new posters discovering this place and deciding to write their first mmo novel in post form was hilarious.  We should have an archive of comedy gold threads.

Not all. Just the absolute majority.

Is that a Frog riding a tiny motorcycle?


If so I approve.

I guess that truly goes to show how far WAR has fallen.

That's how it starts.

One is often enough.

Brand new thread on WHA about Mark leaving (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301435).


He really went out on a limb there, good job he followed up with this warning.


Very odd thread to start weeks after he's left.

He writes for a WAR fansite. Even that tepid level of criticism is notable.

July 29 people.  July 29.



(EA Earnings Conference Call)

Thanks for the update. I refuse to hit that site after seeing (and being the target of) some of the fascist-type censorship. However, I am every so often curious as to what is going on over on the fansites.

I don't think anyone cares any more but since someone mentioned it, here is the only relevant comment on Warhammer from the call:


So subscription revenue grew $7 million from last year's 1st quarter ended June 30 due to Warhammer. The game is generating $7 million in revenue every 3 months right now.

As a point of comparison, I think CoH/V earns about the same amount every quarter and it has between 100k - 120k players (plus $10 booster packs that a lot of people buy).

EDIT: Also, I was thinking about this further and if WAR needed ($15 x 500k players =) something like $7.5m a month revenue for break-even then $7m a quarter sees WAR as not long for this world. Even assuming reduced operating costs due to all the cut backs, the ROI on WAR would have to be pretty bad.