f13.net

Well it's been over a month and by all accounts it looks like people have been jumping ship left and right once 'teh shiny' wore off.

Now the question is, what happened? There's at least three threads that have all spiraled off into this land so let's try and consolidate.

Specifically not what's bad about the game but what happened, or could have happened to change the outcome?

My personal thought is the beta is where it all started. Testing by teir, keeping things very hush, it led to an isolationist development, poorly implement(but good) ideas and a confused vision.

Number one reason - Too many servers, not enough people.

He's back :awesome_for_real:

Gonna do it right this time.  :awesome_for_real:

Twins maybe?

edit: nevermind.

Actually, I don't know if what's wrong can be quantified yet. I've had most of my toons on Ulth and just hit 12 with my main. Frankly it was a starting to feel like a real bitch - never anyone doing PQ's, tons of time waiting to get into any scenario that didn't start with Norden and end in Watch, Tier 1 RvR was a dead zone or I just never saw anyone. I saw a total of 4 enemy players, killed one, got killed by another...boring.

So I rolled on another server (Drakwald) destro side. There are tons of lowbies running around doing things. I haven't been able to do a scenario yet (either the queue would never pop or the game would CTD before one would pop). I think what's broken on one server may be fine on another. Hate to say it, but Mythic's best option may be to shutter some servers and wait and see if the population demands more room at a later date. People would probably scream and moan that they'd have to transfer, but I think there'd be more fun to be had if there were more people to play with.

If one thing needs to change it's that goddamn chickening mechanic. Take it out. EQ did things right years ago by having a PvP level range. Or at the very least do a CoX damage modifier where everyone can participate but you won't have 40's one shotting 1's and 1's can do some damage against a 40.

Thread seems premature.  Most people haven't even reached the endgame RvR yet, we also have no idea how many people have left.  Thread will be timely once WotLK releases.

As an outsider looking in, I have noticed the mood shift pretty quickly from "Robot Jesus" to "Uh....I like it but...."

The next phase is just not logging in, not for any particular reason...you just lose the urge to grind anymore. It's kinda happening on a similar timeframe as AoC, scarily, and I find the thread name to be kind of fitting if there is a mass exodus within the next month.

The testing environment may be part of it, but it runs a little deeper than that. I don't think any MMOG designer has ever fully matched most aspects of their implementation to the underlying central idea behind their design. Blizzard has had the best process for tacking back and forth in the wind to keep their live management of their design close to the core customer base--they've sometimes drifted quite far from that core, most notably at the point where they were pouring most of their design resources into AQ and Naxx under the influence of ex-EQ designers, but they've found a way to keep steering back from extremes while larding on various small minigames and smaller activities to keep a range of constituencies amused.

WAR, on the other hand, is nothing if PvP isn't happening in a way that satisfies the people who've come for PvP. That's the clear design decision that they made early on, but I think Mythic hasn't entirely understood how to consistently implement a design that will achieve that goal. In part, that's because they've been distracted by a perceived need to supply a lot of the "default" features of a MMOG around WoW's standardization--in effect, trying to put a few eggs in other baskets. This is a bad idea: you cannot compete with WoW in that respect. But the more you play WAR, the more clear it becomes (and here defects in the testing process are important) that the designers didn't even fully understand what players want when they want to do PvP in a *MMOG format*.

I can get online any time I like, for no subscription fee other than for an overall service like XBL, and have a fast-paced multiplayer team battle in any number of well-designed games. Some of these even have well-defined "classes", like Team Fortress 2. This is the analogy to scenarios: scenarios in WAR are WAR's version of standard-issue multiplayer gaming, with the one proviso that the consequences of one game session carry over to the next (e.g., I get XP, RP and maybe some item drops) and that because of those consequences, players of the same class will vary somewhat in their underlying abilities. Because of that in turn, the competition between players is governed partly by those in-game abilities as much as it is governed by the reflexes of the person playing the game.

That is not enough to define PvP in a MMOG format. What most PvPers want is for PvP to matter in a wider gameworld, to spill out of the heavily domesticated environment of a scenario, to involve large-scale coordination of many people to achieve meaningful objectives that have consequences which persist over some amount of time. If that's what people want, that's what you have to deliver. And this design objective has a lot of really complicated problems built into it which no MMOG to date has successfully addressed. WAR is the latest to only partially and spastically deal with the implementation of such a game--at times because I think Mythic's designers didn't really understand that this was THE selling point for their game, and at times because I think they chickened out on really embracing this concept because of its intrinsic difficulties.

So they have a game that's not really fish nor fowl, but a customer base that is there pretty much only for the fried chicken.

What went wrong?

Mythic made the same mistake George W Bush made in 2000.   When Bush took office, the philosphy was "Anything besides Clinton".  This lead to Bush throwiing a lot a of good stuff and really crippled his Administration.

Mythic did "Anything besides Blizzard"

Chat system:  The right answer was "copy Blizzard" Mythic's Answer: Waste valuable resources reinventing chat.  (and it sucks)

Beta Testing: the right answer was "copy Blizzard"  Mythic's Answer: "Try to keep every super serkit"  Result: The beta test didn't reflect how the players would actaully play the game at live.  They had no idea Open RvR wasn't going to be as popular in Live as it was in Beta.

Leveling speed: The right answer was "copy Blizzard. Fast leveling is good!" Mythic's answer: ZOMG ONE WEEK BEFORE LIVE NERF XP"

I could go on and on, but it's pointless.

I get a lot the complaints people bring up about WAR

I personally think it is the incentives for ORVR that are most lacking


the one thing I don't get is "omg the leveling is soo slooow"  :uhrr:

Sorry, but the leveling is really really not slow. I have no idea where people get this from. My time /played to 35 is around 3-4 days. That is nothing in an MMO environment!

If I'm to have only one opinion, I think it pretty much went wrong around the time the designers at Mythic decided it wouldn't have any kind of player funneling. With less spread of content, what content there would be could have been tighter, hell, even populated despite the low cap on server population. Even with proper rewards for each sphere of gameplay in place, this is an issue.

There's too much of everything - whether it be PQs, parallell zones, scenarios, RvR lakes, classes or gameplay flavours (and nearly, capital cities). It's trying to make everything available within arm's reach and missing the point of "massive" in the attempt. I imagine huge amounts of resources have been spent on making six completely different PvE progressions.

Like I've said before - it's Autobahn for cyclists.

It's not even that it's slow. It's that it *feels* slow. For serious, every single quest is kill some things or pick something up in a spot where you have to kill things. Every. Single. One. There's not a single escort quest that I've found. There is no scripting of any complexity besides in a few of the PQs. Every single mob is exactly the same.  Repetitive is even worse than slow.

But you have to have PvE. If you have no PvE to establish the narrative of the wider world then you're stuck with Fury. If you're stuck with that, why don't I just fuck off and play TF2?

The XP curve is balanced around doing PQs, PvE and scenarios in equal measure. Only one of those is fun and it's only fun if you're not running the same scenario all day, every day. You have to PvE for remotely decent loot. I could be level 40 in a day and it would STILL feel grindier than it actually is in mean time investment terms.

Then there were the technical issues which, admittedly, have gotten a little better. But not good enough. Collision issues based on lag, lighting effects which cause a freeze every so often, I still crash... it's tiresome. Not gamebreaking, mind you, but tiresome.

The thing is... the game DOES funnel you, and it does so brilliantly, IF you make it to Tier 4.  So, the problem seems to be that getting to Tier 4 takes too long/too much work.  This is especially felt in Tier 3, where things just went from "moderately fast" to "horribly slow".  Sure it is not horribly slow compared to OTHER games, but it is horribly slow compared to the previous tiers.  That is the problem.  Players who were taught to expect a certain speed of advancement hit a huge slow down.  Then they are stuck in a tier NOT designed to funnel people and get the idea that the game will always be like this.

Gotta get people to T4.  Now, we did not test it enough to know if that will be lasting fun, but it is much better than T3, at least in my experience.

1) Low levels of participation in all aspects but scenarios.  PQ's and open RvR are great in concept, but don't seem to be popular beyond the first tier.

2) Off-peak time populations are too low

3) Rewards don't justify effort

4) Poor to terrible itemization

5) The grind after 25 is crippling.  Add 1) and people are doing nothing but waiting on scenario queues for the same (read: most efficient) scenarios

6) Population imbalances weren't properly addresses and adjusted for

7) Crafting sucks and seems useless

8) Class balance issues


Note: I love what WAR wants to do.  I see the beauty of it in the first tier.  I just want the game to get out of my way and let me have fun... but it seems to keep getting in the way with long grinds due mostly to enduring repitition in order to get to the fun. 

I actually found T4 to feel much faster than T3, which was really odd.

Yeah me as well.  I think it's because you can relax, you get boosted to 36 for pvp so there's no mad desire on my part to level fast any more.

What went wrong? Warhammer is evolutionary but not revolutionary, and so it has a big sense of "I've played this kind of game before". Therefore it was important that the game have some better hooks to keep players around.

Specifically:

1.
Without the players, there is no PVP game. As others have said, the players are just too spread out whether its PVE or PVP.

2.
Since T4 is the end game, War put too much emphasis on trapping people in lower tiers with slow exp or forcing people to take time from PVP to grind PVE quests or PQ's for gear. The PVE was pretty boring, and its time we moved past kill 10, 15, 25 of this, that, or the other. There was also a big time sink with people running back and forth to quest NPC's.

3.
Community content, PQ's, were a good idea but there are way too many of them per tier/zone. The public really didn't like how contribution scores worked, and PQ's gave too few loot bags. The people who did do PQ's often couldn't complete them because Stages II/III were generally too hard for 1-3 man teams that weren't premades. PQ's were a good idea, but poorly implemented.

4.
RVR simply had too many lakes. Each tier had two keeps in each zone, when it probably should have been just 1 keep per zone until Tier 4.  RVR experience was virtually non existant, rewards were few. Nothing pisses off organized guilds worse than busting their ass and then some random scrub who wonders in and contributes virtually nothing ends up with the first place purple loot bag.

Also owning a keep gave you nothing but a place to hang a banner while draining your guild bank of 144 gold per day.

5.
People don't like zergs and scenarios yielded better exp/rewards/rewnown per hour than dealing with RVR keeps. DAOC had towers on the frontiers for smaller guilds, while War gives small guilds nothing. Every PVP game that provides nothing for smaller guilds (AOC, Shadowbane, etc) ends up with those guilds leaving in large numbers because they feel that they can't be part of the end game.

6.
People don't like being mislead, and the notion that PVP gear would be good felt misleading to many. In fact after Tier 2, PVP gear is horrible and not on par with PQ/Quest gear. On top of that there is also WARD gear that is virtually required so you can survive the Fortress Lord, and of course you have to PVE grind dungeons for that. If people are going to be forced to PVE grind for gear, then WoW or other games simply do PVE better.

7.
The other thing of note is that modern games have been a lot more friendly to allowing you to play with your friends even if you outlevel them. Mythic took the old school approach and designed their game to where you are once again separated from your friends if they outlevel you, and removed any possibility for friends to PL their lower level buddies who couldn't keep up for whatever reason.

8.
They made Destruction cool, and made Order look like gimps. Everyone warned them about population imbalances and the potential effects, and Mythic's response was "we learned a lot from DAOC.  In reality they didn't, and in DAOC they had to cluster servers.

In conclusion, the overall game design is too dependent on having a critical mass with both player factions, people are forced into bad PVE, RVR isn't rewarding or fun right now, you are punished for outleveling your friends, and there's no real role for smaller guilds in the game. AOC proved that you can't sell a bunch of boxes and think players are going to hang around for a year while you patch up your game.  Players have less patience for that, and if the game isn't fun then you can lose a lot of your potential subscribers before the 90 window is even up.

 

This. With only 40 levels, the time per level is stretched out and makes each "ding" further away than other MMO games. Blizzard constantly rewards you with treats as you go along. Each level is a "FUCK YEAH TALENT POINT" whereas in WAR it's more like "FUCK NO I HAVE TO FILL MY XP BAR AGAIN" because the rewards (talents, etc) are fewer.

If you notice, you don't even get a career point each level until level 20ish. Thats so they can give you one every level after where you only get a skill every 2-4 levels or so. Also, mastery points don't feel like they do anything until later in the game. Oh, and you just got to a new skill/tactic? NOW WAIT another level because you have to BUY it with another whole level (ie hours of scenario grinding) just to use it.

On the flip side, I still play and enjoy the game for the most part. EQ hell levels learned me well.

The leveling is slow once you hit tier 3 for a few reasons:

• Everyone does the SAME GODDAMN SCENARIO. Scenarios are great ways to level through PVP, but they suck if it's the same badly-designed scenarios. I've now played all but 1 of the scenarios in t3 at least once - and Tor Anroc is the worst design of all of them. The knockbacks, the lava, the distances between battles - it's bad.
• The amount of PVE Quest-based content dries up. At least for the Empire side, I went from having 4-5 quests presented to me in the first town of a new area (High Pass) to having a total of 2 quests (Hergig Landing). Also, quest experience did not increase but the amount of experience needed per level sure as fuck did.
• Each new rank gives me a new ability, only there are some abilities that aren't worth shit. Seriously, at least 2-3 levels, the only new ability I got was a tactic. Since I can only use so many tactics at once, it's pretty inevitable that some will just not be used. And when the tactic is the only new ability at a level, that means I'm stuck using the same special abilities in every fight until the next level. Witch Hunters at level 23 get a tactic that immediately goes into the bin. Too many tactics, not enough special attacks.

Don't we have three thread for this already?

In general: they took what insights they could from WoW but applied it to improving DAoC instead of improving WoW. Everything else was standard Mythic operating procedure, all predictable, all predicted (not testing the way players would actually play, not understanding the concerns veterans brought up, most purchasers having been beta testers so knowing the issues going in, etc.

I still say we need to wait and see where this all nets out in January though. Q4 holiday shopping season is very long. And while WotLK is coming, WAR is still the only game you can advance a character in solely on PvP. That is still going to mean a lot either until players don't like the higher tiers they achieved, or Blizzard rips off the idea.

Nothing went wrong yet.  They still have 3 weeks.

I think that many players are hanging around in limbo, watching the game but not playing it very often, wondering when they are going to make some significant changes.  These players won't wait around very long.  3 weeks of course also coincides with another well known release.

And people wonder why Mark might be stressed out.  The next 3 weeks could determine whether his game is a 250k niche game or a 1 mil+ WoW-competitor. 

I think that decision has already been made.  I'm not sure anyone other than EvE has been able to overcome first impressions. 

I think people make a lot good points but most them could have been easily overlooked if wasn't the pointless grind to RvR.  Either make RvR functional in T1-T3 or get rid the grind.  I think people wouldn't mind being stuck in T3 if there something to do there besides Tor Anrco.  Or they wouldn't mind T3 sucking if it was 10 hours.  Ideally you do both.  

Focus on fun, let retention sort itself out.  Mythic hasn't learned a goddamn thing from WoW.

From WoW? Why even say that, they didn't learn from Funcom.

They have roughly the same amount of content after the first half of the game - which is fuckall. And the key features don't work - though this time it's more due to the lack of people.

I can't find the quote, but someone nailed it in an earlier thread.  Something to the effect of: "Name one game that has suffered retention problems because players leveled too fast?".  

WAR appears to be very endgame focused and there doesn't seem to be much reason for the 1-40 journey beyond learning to play your class.  You don't get interesting abilities often enough, you don't obtain anything worth keeping, and you certainly don't feel like you matter to the game world.  It's like DAoC deja vu.  The only reason anyone did anything beyond get to level 50 asap was because they wanted to stay in a particular BG.  

Age of Conan.  Of course, it's never just fast leveling that kills a game, but it's fast leveling in combination with other things.

I pointed out in the epic thread that there are 2 reasons to have slow leveling:

1)  So a player feels they have an investment in their character and don't want to go else where.  Note that this has been relegated to the endgame only thanks to WoW, but it was the model used the entire game for EQ and DAOC.  If you simply don't give the player an opportunity to attach to their character, they will simply move to a game where they will.  This was what happened to those who got to 80 in AoC to the best of my knowledge.

2)  If your content at high levels sucks, or your endgame needs a lot of work.  This also applies to AOC.  In this case, you hope that your earlier content is good enough to keep people playing long enough for you to fix the later shit.  You certainly don't want people leveling up quickly and seeing they have nothing whatsoever to do for the next month as you desperately try to patch faster.  You're better off just giving people a grind.

I'm pretty sure WAR doesn't fall into the first category, because their endgame theoretically should be solid for player attachment assuming RR80 takes a long time to get to, and there's plenty of content/other means of advancement at 40.

So we're looking at either stubbornness or the second category.

PvE sucks because:

- Each PvE fight plays exactly the same. The different abilities mobs use largely cannot be interrupted or mitigated, nor do they seem to have unique weaknesses or strengths, so players fighting them wind up using the same abilities they always use in roughly the same sequence. Therefore differences between mobs and mob types feel entirely cosmetic.

- On a similar note, mobs don't pull in groups, likely because players lack group-mitigation abilities (root, mez, fear). As frustrating as these abilities are when used against you in PvP, their absence makes PvE less tactically interesting.

- Monster hitpoints scale faster than player damage. so time per kill increases as experience bar percentage per kill decreases.

- Individual level progression does not guarantee any notable player improvement. Many new skills, for example, will have limited use in PvE. New Career Tactics don't stack with old ones and there's no reason to change Tactics for 99% of PvE fights.

- Any time spent PvEing is time you can't spend grinding scenarios for superior experience plus renown. PvE feels like a waste of time.

I don't think this had anything to do with fast-leveling. Even with slow leveling, post 40 was a nightmare. I don't think they could've filled it out fast enough either way, particularly with the previous leadership.

Cue Mark Jacobs positive spin in 3... 2... 1...

At the moment, PvE serves two functions:

1) A way to improve gear.  The reknown gear is terrible.

2) Something to do while waiting on a scenario queue.  

As you noted, the PvE is pretty terribly implemented.  It's dull and often too slow paced.  I'm fine with this as long as I'm able to get the same or better rewards from pvp/RvR.  Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case... which is a monumental mistake.

Look at this http://blue.mmo-champion.com/ take a moment to scroll back, see how far it goes. This is direct developer to customer feedback, this is how you run a business. Now granted some of those posts are frivilous but most address issues and even if they are trite they let players know that yes, someone is out there listening.

Not having official forums....is it a game breaker? no not really but I guarentee it doesn't help retention and in some places I'll bet it can be that last nail in the coffin. It boggles my mind still that mythic somehow thought not having forums was a good idea. That was my first indicator that this game was destined to mediocrity because it's being run by a team that is stuck in a mindset of five years ago.

You know, I'm going to sort of defend Mythic on the no official forums decision, if only as a backhanded compliment. Having no official forums would be fine, if the Herald site was actually used in anything other than a pisspoor manner. Dev diaries? Barely noticeable hot fix messages? Maybe it's the design, but the customer communication that site is supposed to provide just isn't there. DAoC Herald was much better run in the days when I played DAoC.

I reached level 22 and never once experienced oRvR.  Without the promised oRvR there is absolutely nothing to keep my interest.  I came to this game specifically for pvp that was not like WoW battlegrounds .

Okay, I'm going to tackle this one and be not nice about it.  Did you ever check open groups in the various zones for RVR warbands?  They're really easy to find.  You just have to go to the warcamp, and hop flight points till you see action, if any is going on. 

Barring a lack of groups, you can also check the maps for hot spot activities, they show up there, and you can easily run out there and see if a group is going on, and ask to join or just help them.  Did you?

Barring that, did you ever go to the warcamp, and ask around if anyone wanted to RVR, did you ever take the initiative to try to form an RVR group of your own? 

Barring that, are you in a guild, if so, did your guild ever form up for RVR?  Mine certainly did, and it was fun.  If not, why have you not at least looked around for a guild to join, in a game focused around group activity?

I mean, come fucking on, there are literally ZERO barriers to rvr, other than low population servers.

A lot of little things for me.

The dreadful grinding while not necessarily slow (since I can't even bring myself to get high enough to truly experience the pain by most accounts) is mindnumbingly dull.  It's like all the quests are filler for lore which I don't read anyway because I'm not a Warhammer junkie, but they put no thought into how they're actually done or how they should reward players.  The PQs are generally barren so while you can solo the first two stages if you want to grind inf it becomes very slow and tedious and you're still missing out on the money shot.

The scenarios feel like they were ripped from Unreal Tournament and don't fit within the context of an mmorpg.  Plus they're boring and lopsided.  There's no permanency so you end up with 11 other mismatched pugs and nobody communicates because it's all over in 10 minutes.

There's no community because the playerbase is isolated, provincial and totally transient.  If you're like me and don't have a lot of online friends good luck meeting anyone you'd like to guild with, so enjoy pugging your way through scenarios to 40.

On the plus sides-
The classes are awesome and all a lot of fun.  They may not all be balanced for 1v1 but they all have a place in group matchups.  I like that some of the hooks are pretty well thought out (grudge and the melee healer stuff).  Some of the others feel like poorly implemented gimmicks though.
ORvR when it happens is a blast.  There should be more rewards though and more importance on zone control.  I think they should've focused on more quests and PvE in the lakes so people would more stuff to fight over.

I just started playing last night. Overall, the newbie experience wasn't as friendly as I was expecting. I died in my first two fights just because I was fighting the wrong things. Levelling is fast, compared to most MMOs out there. Nevertheless, we still haven't seen conclusive evidence that players need slow levels in order to maximize retention...because nobody's really tried fast levelling except WOW (and we saw how badly that went). With AoC, I agree with Schild; there was no way they could have kept ahead of the players. It wasn't fast levelling that hurt them.

I can see how PvE can get boring, if that's all there is to do outside scenarios, and if mobs don't get much more interesting. I'm still surprised Mythic thought they SOLVED realm imbalance issues, especially since I see no difference between WAR and the first month of DAOC's release. Well...there was a pop-up when I was choosing my server, which said "The server you've chosen is full! We recommend this other server, where there's an imbalance and the population is less!"

I ignored it and went with the unbalanced bloated server because that's where all my friends are.

I would say, I personally feel it has a a lot to do with expectations. War is everywhere!!!!!

Errr... wait....

As soon as the critical mass figured out that RVR hardly moves their exp bar, RVR lakes became a ghost town. People came to WAR with the promise of awesome RVR, and instead found a PVE game that is not as good as WoW, they found the same type of battleground with only a different name, and got frustrated with class balance and population imbalances.

While it would be more far to compare WAR at release to WoW at release, thats just not how it works out. People playing WAR today are going to be comparing it to WoW from yesterday, and when you take the awesome RVR out of the picture, WAR just doesn't stack up.

I honestly feel that Mythic fucked up badly here. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and its going to be very hard to win these people back. Like someone said up above, I think the ship has already sailed on them attaining and then retaining 1 million + subs. People came for RVR and when it wasnt here, started leaving. This only made it worse, as now WAR has a whole bunch of Medium and Low pop servers. As of Monay evening at 6:30pst, there was one server with High Order, and one server with High Destro, both where servers offering the 20% bonus. These servers where already not "full" feeling when on high pop, now I would imagine most feel like ghost towns. This renders RVR even harder to find, and PQs an excersise in frustration. I don't want to have to grind step 1 of a bunch of PQs. Honestly, as far as PQs go, its just more grinding. I think they should make the influence in t1, t2 and t3 so that if you complete all 3 PQs for a chapter, that fills your influence bar. We don't need more grinding.

That brings me to another point. Because of the EXP change a week before release, it means you HAVE to grind to level up. Ether PQs or Scenarios. There are just not enough quests with the current quest EXP being so low to let you advance by only questing.

I think the number 1 thing that they did NOT learn from Blizzard is that people don't like forced mindless grinding. Now, cover that grind with a thin layer of quest and people will love it.

I still stand by what I have posted in other threads.

Grinding shouldn't stand in the way of getting to the good part of the game, which is the PVP and RVR. But even the PVP can feel grindy if you force people to do it to level.

Yes.  I was once invited to a warband.  Nothing came of it after 45 mins of struggling to find more players and nobody willing to run across the entire zone to stand around in an RvR lake and jerk themselves off hoping more people would show up.


No.


No.


Yes, I was in a guild.  An organized group of players interested in leveling will most effectively spend their time rolling scenarios, and that's what we did.


How about the lack of incentives?

To the two who suggested that the leveling was 'lul super fast' - Sure, the total time to go from 1-40 may only be, what, 4 days played... That's still 96 hours of miserable drudge work that, I would suggest, is only fundamentally enjoyable to people who are fucked in the head and actually need games to serve as some kind of opiate to distract them from how shit their life is elsewhere.

In addition, WAR's competing against WoW - how long does it take most people to get a level 70 on WoW?  Yeah, 0 hours, because most people already have one, and if they don't, it's because they HATE HATE grinds, which means they'll definitely HATE HATE the WAR grind.  Mythic doesn't have a time machine, so they're not competing, in any way, with WoW on release - they're competing with WoW currently, and in three weeks, they're competing with WoW + another insane expansion.

The big thing for me, though, is the way all the little stupid things accrued:  Crafting is awful and useless, with a good dash of HG:L inventory clutter thanks to those fucking seeds;  Gear is essentially shit - I've never noticed a difference in my ability to compete in Scenarios at my various high and low points of gear quality;  PvP gear is super-shit;  Any non-instanced PvP is fuck-all worthless to do;  Better, faster gear from PQs;  Infinitely better xp from anything else;  Way better renown from scenarios;  Controlling a keep doesn't do shit.

From all reports, the end-game is completely fucked up, which is no surprise, given that they jacked up xp requirements to level.  

The game just feels like it was under-budgeted, was rushed out in less than four years, and never had a hope of being a big contender.

(and Ard: there is a GIANT barrier to oRvR: There's no fucking reason to do it other than 'fun', no rewards whatsoever - this is an MMO, you fucking need rewards for a desired activity.  I've done oRvR, I took a couple keeps, and the activity was fun until I realized that it wasn't doing shit to progress any aspect of my character, and then it felt like a waste of time.  It felt like I had to get back to 'work'.  Then I stopped logging in daily, and shortly thereafter, I stopped logging in).

Ignoring the mechanical issues of PVE, they could fix a lot of this by making PVE type quests that are centered in the RVR lakes which would provide XP and small RR point increases, eg.  kill 5 guards and 1 opposing player.

This would give somewhat easy XP, renown points would be gotten (gets people out of scenarios some), and, more importantly, gives people things to do in the RVR lakes other than run around and look for other folks to kill.  

Of course the XP would have to scale correctly-  if the XP doesn't match what you get in scenarios it won't happen.  

It slows down a lot after level 8 and then again at 15 and drastically at 20+.

Right now I am level 30, and I have ovef 5 days played. And I am not the exploring/crafting type.

As a web developer and not a game developer, I'm actually going to stick my nose in here for the first time. Although their web site isn't a foundational problem with their game, Mythic could certainly be leveraging it a *lot* more than they currently are.

You're exactly right about the Herald, and it's not just limited to that. The WAR site is stuck in "announcement" mode rather than "live game" mode. They're linking to reviews and trying to get people into the game, rather than trying to keep people within the game.

I don't know about you guys, but the biggest, best part about the WoW site back when WoW was first released was its Under Development page. This page outlined all the goals Blizzard had for their game, what the next patch was going to bring, what they planned to add in the long haul, etc. Largely, if you had a problem with something, the Under Development page said, "Listen, we're already on it, a fix is coming and this is what it's going to look like. This is coming in x patch."

I feel their retention of players would sharply increase using such a means of communication. There's a lot of great stuff Mark has posted out there (thinking largely of his comment about people needing 10 tons of brain damage to not want to RvR after their fixes), but there's no central place to read it all. 95% of the players are probably playing right now (or not) without any knowledge that Mythic is addressing their issues.

Second to that, Mythic has an opportunity. Blogs are big, and an official Warhammer Online blog would be a perfect solution to the lack of official forums.

Most of you probably are aware of Valves blog at teamfortress2.com. This is what I'm talking about - MMO's constantly have issues to address, so while you don't have forums for people to post wildly on, use a blog which can be easily moderated. For example, Mythic could post that they're "Looking to make RvR more rewarding" and mention:

a) What the goals are
b) What the technical challenges and restrictions are
c) What their current ideas are

...and finally ask what the community can come up with. Granted, 90% of the ideas are going to be crap, but you might get the odd good one. Beyond that, they would be communicating with the base on a number of levels, by both revealing what they are addressing, plus the thought process which goes into making a positive change. The teamfortress blog gave me even more respect for Valve, because I was able to readily see the challenges and restrictions they put into each game design decision. Finally, the players can participate and communicate on an "official" level, without needing the staff to moderate a full forum.

Is this going to solve all the problems WAR is currently experiencing? No. Might it help with retention? There's a real possibility.

I don't think the game has failed yet and it seems to me the responsiveness from Mythic has been pretty darn good.  Maybe not fast enough, but who's been faster.

I've never wanted a game to succeed as much as I want WAR to succeed, which I find odd.  I think I like so many of the concepts (open groups, RvR lakes, scenarios, public quests) that I really hope they can solve the population problem quickly so more can experience how fun these can be.

I read the epic thread and, well, I agree with both sides of the argument.  Mythic is gun shy to make modifications too fast, understandable, but not making them fast enough might kill the game.

WAR is not dead yet, though.

Right now I'm paying money to make a gob if Tier 2 or less characters on various servers and I play where the action is.  That defines the problem, I think, but I'm not smart enough to have a solution.

The issue here isn't lack of rvr, the issue here is that you're more interested in grind and rewards vs player conflict.  I think you honestly might be in the wrong game.  The rvr game is honestly the lowest to barriers entry I've seen in ANY mmo.  The issue is the carrot, which as been discussed to death, and has been stated many times over that the rewards are being upped. 

That doesn't stop a good many people from taking keeps on any given night.

The main issue here is the same as the main issue in raids for WoW or any other mmo.  The vast gulf between players who want to do something for fun, excitement, and accomplishment, and the people who just want the carrot to use as a measuring stick for their epeen.

Seriously, if you wanted to rvr, you could have.  You CHOSE not to, through your own inaction and inability to actually talk to people.  Congratulations at failing at life.

This I completely agree with. And beyond just communication, it baffled me that I couldn't click on a server and see the current realm status for each tier. WTH happened to the good ole days of monitoring keep and relic status from work? I mean, I couldn't do anything about it, but it was awesome to be able to keep track of it. Warhammer Herald has gotten a fail in my book, so far.

As for the rest of the game, I'm certainly seeing some of the same problems I see recounted here. I'm still in new and shiney mode, though, so it'll be a bit longer before I can give an accurate assessment. I do know that I'll be sticking around for 1.1 at least, though.

(god dammit, I hit quote again)

I dinked around with WAR on Sly's account. The very first thing I noticed is that I don't like the chat font. That's something I'm going to be looking at for a very long time if I choose to stick with a game, and it's one of the first things I pay attention to.

Maybe there's some way to change the font, but the next thing I noticed is how sluggish the client seems. And so I really don't care to figure out if I can change the font.

If I were going to make a MMOG (larf) I think the first thing I would do is inflitrate Blizzard HQ and zap the guys coding the client with a mind sucker and get all their talent points.

So, I didn't expect to be sucked into WAR. I'm perfectly happy with WoW, but I'm a bit disappointed that it only took me Rank (level, whatever) 3 to decide it wasn't my cup of tea.

Woah, yeah, anyone who doesn't oRvR because it feels like a waste of time with regards to character progression fails at life!  We don't know what fun is!

Sorry, players don't mold their definition of fun to the game - it's supposed to go the other way around.

I think you can change the font by right clicking on the chat window tab.

It's not a matter of haste (although the monster on the horizon makes haste an issue).  It's a matter of reacting correctly the first time.  I'm not convinced, YET, that WAR is heading in a direction that will keep it out of the abyss.  Time will tell volumes here.

No.  The issue is that I shouldn't have to go out of my way to find conflict in a game where "War is Everywhere!".  The game world is too large and the factions are too segregated.  Objectives need to overlap.  I have never seen a Destruction player in this game outside of a scenario.  I experienced more open world PvP leveling in WoW (on a pvp server obviously) than I have in Warhammer.  This is largely because in WoW the factions are forced to quest in the same area.  I am more fearful of getting attacked questing in WoW than I am in Warhammer.  That is a fundamental problem.  

Last I checked, WoW had John Cash as lead programmer. You can't really get much better off if you want responsiveness and solid client-server performance than hi-jacking a veteran id Software coder.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/09/1811213

This was in 2000 - so he was practically (maybe even actually) recruited specifically for WoW. Good call there Blizzard.  :drill:

Yes, yes I am, I don't even try to hide that anymore.

I'm not categorizing all people that don't oRvR.  I'm ripping apart a horrifically bad straw man arguement.  His initial post was bitching about a lack of orvr, but it was almost completely based on his own failings, not the game's.

Anyhow, I'm giving myself an internet time out for being a dick.

Being a dick is fine as long as you make a solid point.  No need for time outs here. 

Listen, if I'm going to pay for a self-proclaimed PvP game I don't expect to log on and have to dick around for an hour or more begging and pleading with people to willingly spend their time participating in an activity that - though fun in theory - is actually entirely counter productive to their advancement.  I am also not going to spend days and days leveling to 40 in the vain hope that somehow things will get better.  I've played these games long enough to know that things never get better.

The game failed to provide incentification, so yes, it's the game's fault. We let virtual worlds be the sandboxy things that separate experience seekers from experience creators. Games are supposed to funnel you into what you signed up to enjoy, put there by people you paid to give you enjoyment. When that doesn't happen, it's because parts of the game fell down for you as a player. Sometimes it's easy to write that occurence off as the person not being the target demographic. But WAR had a very clear audience and missed its mark. Because of such game design things as:

1) World layout
2) Rewards (or lack thereof) in RvR
3) Travel
4) Racial pairings vs player funneling

None of these things are fine as is for the crowd this game was designed for. None of these are solved by someone willingly taking a chance spamming groups all over the place while they make the trek of one of five or however-many lakes there are just in their tier. And all need to be addressed together because indivdually:

• Fewer lakes unto itself won't solve the social problems.
• Solving the social problems won't solve the population splintering/compartmentalization problems.
• World size won't make running the distance worth the effort.
• Guaranteeing great rewards won't guarantee a fight is waiting for you unless you reduce the lakes.

The matrix of interactions is more than a magic bullet will fix. The major frustration is the actual strawman of a new no-scenarios server being held up as the best current short-term idea.

Bad Slyfeind, extending your impressions of a game based on the first few levels. Bad! You get the timeout Ard doesn't need to apply to himself :grin:

 For me it's not failed yet, but in limbo. I'm not going to be in WoLK, I'd only be playing WAR to kill time and have fun. Population issues aside, the big one for me is broken and poorly designed characters.
 Order design is completely pathetic. I rolled a couple characters to play with you guys order side but i can't get past like...level 3. Bright wizard is decent but massively overplayed. Why do i have to play a retarded looking dwarf to be the good tank? Or a completely fruity elf with bland everything going on to be a range DPS.
 Destruction...awesome. My favorite is marauder, it's basically the look I'd go for if i could design appearances myself. Unfortunately, PvP mechanics in War are awful.
 I'm only in tier 1 ( i have no motivation to log in and level, already) and I'm having flashbacks to playing a warrior in Alterac valley; sit around and watch ranged characters go at it, or suicide charge over and over. From what i read, the CC later on is even worse. There's no way im going to pay to play a game to be frustrated because they can't figure out class balance.
 Range DPS classes are sad, aside from Bright wizard and Sorc, but as i said already, overplayed. Overall totally uninspiring and I've played MMOs to long to have much patience left for them to fix what should be obvious. Seriously, why so much CC? have they not played a MMO in the last 10 years?
 

See, here is where you are wrong. The vast majority of people will do the fun thing, which is keep RVR. What will happen is that the people who leveled up and geared up faster than the vast majority will likely own those players are there for "just the fun." That's fine the first few times, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if I want to be more effective, I need to level/gear up. Sooner or later, even in WAR that realization sinks in. I was barely functional in RVR at level 1-8, but the difference in performance from levels 1-9 to the performance at level 11 was massive. HUGE. By the time you hit t3, you realize that yes, you can RVR/PVP for fun in those tiers, but you'll be better at it when you are closer to the level cap for your tier. It's the Rule of 11. If the MMOG Knob goes to 11, 10 will never do.

So you go level in questing and scenarios, because that's about 1000 times quicker than oRVR leveling - which makes oRVR leveling even slower because there are now less people to play against.

Long time reader , going to dip my foot in the pool here and prepare to get torn apart for first post  :ye_gods:

In short I came to WAR for Open-RvR/PvP , that was my main knock against WoW , I liked most of it but open field PvP is my favorite and that's WoW's real weak point

I came in expecting tons of open field PvP , especially rolling on an Open-RvR server , but have found very , very little of it - I have instant 15 minute scenarios all day playing as order , but I think WoW's original AV was even better than any of the WAR ones curently

Anyway , with such a severe lack of Open-RvR , for whatever reason , it's just disappointing ,

My most fun Open PvP game was Lineage 2 , I know it had an insane grind but I had lots of fun in Castle Sieges and the danger involved in open field PvP ,

I was hoping the same would be in WAR , just without the insane grind - the grind isn't near as bad but the PvP is worse(or more scarce) , thus my main reason for wanting to play WAR is the most lacking atm

Snipped the rest, because, frankly, you're dead on.  I wasn't arguing whether or not there were issues with the rvr.  There are.  It's like a baby seal that's been clubbed to death with a dead horse at this point though.  I was arguing that HIS issue with 'omg guise, theirs no RVRz' was strictly due to failings with how he said he was playing the game, not with how the game presented the opportunities. 


That's the straw man right there.  That was choice, not lack of rvr.

It honestly doesn't take more than a minute or three worth of zoning to find out if anything is going on with the way the game is set up currently.  It's not ideal, but it does work, especially in Tier 4 where you can actually add the battle tracker thing to show you which zones are under attack. 


You're right there, and I concede that.  My bad.

And the time out was because I try not to chain respond to trolls, and I get dickish when things spiral out of control.  I hate fallacious arguments and redirection pretty much more than anything else though.

The corollary to this is that even though they made Order look like gimps, class balance favors Order in a couple of key areas, notably Bright Wizards in just about every respect and Ironbreaker knockbacks. From personal experience, I know of 4 players who have ragequit after ranting about BW's on vent.

If you log in and want to RvR, there just is no way to do it unless you get extremely lucky and someone else already put together a warband and you happen to be looking at the right map at the right time to see it.

Bolded part seems like hyperbole to me.

And what do you do if you there isn't anything going on?


I'm not trolling.  I've been answering you honestly.  I did not go out of my way to initiate oRvR. 

Build a group, take some keeps, get the other side's attention, profit?

I'm obviously arguing from a newbie point of view without much experience with open RvR in this game, but if it's like DAoC and you want something to happen, then you make something happen. Organize a war party and start taking keeps and light up the map. It seems the system is in place and you're more than welcome to use it. Now if you want to argue that the rewards aren't up to snuff, that seems fair from what I've read. But complaining about nothing going on and then not doing something about it is silly.

Ok, I can see that. I think where we differ though (and perhaps is Checkers' point as well) is where you see a lack of RvR based on choice, I see that choice being the fundamental problem as affected by the core world design. Players aren't choosing to go to RvR in enough frequency or in enough density to drive up the probability of there being RvR to be had when they show up. For all the stuff discussed.

So he (and others) choose to play the game based on the (lack of) incentification that is a byproduct of how it's designed.

The end result is the same: a rampant belief that there's no RvR to be had. But different beliefs in the causes. THAT is where things get complicated because it's the beliefs in the causes that are at the heart of how to solve them.

As Brogarn just said: you can do a lot of this yourself: build group, light up map, others will show up (if you build/destroy it, they will come). But that is then where the world itself (size, fragmenting, travel times) gets in the way. You can call out all the people you want, but they need to think you'll be there when they show up.

This is at heart a problem with this generation of MMO gamers. WoW trained us for much faster action, and Scenarios give that too us. It's why I keep going back to wondering whether RvR even has mass potential. This is the latest and best test case of it and it ain't working so far. Some argue the solutions are easy, but we're not the ones accountable for that :-) It may be possible in the same way a Raph-world may actually work. But you still need to be able to get the resources and talent to do it right. If you lack either, then yes, it is impossible.

Let's call the following issues that I notice, might need addressed, but do not indicate a failure of the game ... yet.  Each of these issues, it seems to me, can be tweaked to make the system work much better.

1. The RvR world aspect of the game.

I had fun in both scenarios and oRvR in tier 1.  I regretted leaving tier 1 when I leveled up.

Tier 2 was less populated than tier 1 and, in my opinion, the scenarios weren't as good, but I still had some fun taking and defending a keep.  Something needs to be done to make tier 2 as approachable as tier one.  More people required to do stuff in orvr, but less people available = problem.   There has to be a fix for this, I don't see this as a major design error that will kill the game.

I understand, but have not experienced, that when you get to tier 3 you feel like you now have to get to the end game because tier 3 is mostly dead, at least on most? servers.

Something needs to be done to make RvR more approachable as you level, not more difficult.  it might be as simple as a mechanism that alerts all players in a certain level range that X location needs defenders and in response your local flight master can take you directly to the location where players are grouping to defend.  This mechanism should be usable by players who want to wage an attack too.   War is everywhere, yadayada.  I dunno, I need to feel like the world needs my help rather than I have to decide to help.  

In my opinion a fun game, at every level, removes a lot of the concern with leveling up.  

Renown gear should be the best in the game.

2.  The PvE aspect of the game.

These are experiences from Ironfist, a server with decent population.  We had a queue a few times, now listed as medium population.

The first public quest I did, in the human area, was just an absolute load of fun.  I only did it with 5 people and we had to be careful but we won it, got some nice loot, maxed out our influence, and got more nice loot.  We had fun!

The next PQ, the windmill was not as quick but I've done it numerous times on various alts, gotten good gear, and generally had fun. Each additional one tried was less fun.  Influence came very slowly and most of the PQ's needed more than a small group of people to complete.  Why?  Why isn't every public quest as easy, or nearly so, as the first one.  I'm not saying you should level up fast in public quests but you should be able to gain influence fast and get your gear.  Fun!  I'm an equal RvR / PvE player and I was hoping to be able to do most public quests without feeling like it was something hard to do, more like raiding, that needed time and organization.

If the leveling treadmill remained the same but all PQ's were easier and influence did not scale each chapter then I would be doing a lot of these just to experience them.  In doing so I would be leveling and if leveling I wouldn't be noticing the grind.  Now like I said I kind of like PvE (not a WoW player though) so I don't mind it as long as I have something interesting to do and the rewards come quickly.  Fun.

Gear gained through PQ should be the second best in the game, though equal to renown gear at each rank.   Since renown goes past rank levels renown gear is still the best in the game.  The difference between Renown gear and PQ gear might be simply cosmetic.

--- end of wall, primed for possible deletion.

The problem is I've only spread out the players more by improving each aspect.  bleh.  I can't help but think back to the idea of Darkness Falls, where to get it you had to do something.  Maybe PQ get turned off if you don't rule the tier?

It's obvious why I'm not a game designer.  :)

In conclusion, I see tweaks, not radical redesign, so I have hope.

Completely agree. I don't think it would take a redesign, but small tweaks, like better notification or interactive maps or things I can't think up or I'd be making a lot more money. I see a system that's fundamentally sound but needs better rewards and better ways of leading players to it.

EDIT: Removed a sentence that really didn't make sense.

(didn't read rest of the thread, apologies if I end up parroting)

I absolutely loved the PvP in this game as a Shadow Warrior.  I have absolutely no complaints about it from a mechanical standpoint.  What made it not fun for me was the leveling grind when PvE and constant scenario queuing wouldn't cut it anymore, and the fact that my game crashed like clockwork every hour or so (which I'm attributing to compatibility issues with my graphics card).

Way, way too early for this thread.

Ah yes, but I can already see where the deficiencies will be.

In support of "finding the fun," another way to look at it is, if there's a "trick" to finding the fun, then it's doing it wrong.

I agree.  

Generally you want various activities in your game to have equivalent risk/reward ratios over time invested.  Since WAR has essentially eliminated the risk component it becomes a simple reward equation. As has been pointed out by many posters time spent in open RvR doesn't provide the sort of in game rewards other activities provide.

That being said, I agree far more with Ard then Checkers.  True, its better game design to make the RvR more rewarding, but you as a player have to take some responsibility to "find the fun" in this or any game. This is especially true of any activity that requires other players to cooperate or compete with you.  A good argument can and has been made that Mythic is not doing all they can to facilitate this process, but its always going to be harder to get to the good stuff in a PVP centric MMO then a PVE based one,  and still harder then any single player game.

Typical marketing blather aside ("War is Everywhere!") instant gratification and PVP mmos are never going to be synonymous

*Inserts Thane joke*  :grin:

I don't feel that I should have to go out of my way to make the very thing happen that is supposed to be the central focus of the game.  For one thing, being new, I didn't even understand exactly how you would do that.  I'm a computational chemist.  Drug design is more intuitive than the RvR system in Warhammer.  There is almost nothing in the game that suggests to the player that they should do anything in particular, at all, other than the standard quest grind until eventually they notice that little orange button on the left of their minimap and click it.

Clue: OP has been religious about his pursuit of disdain for this game. It touched him in a bad place.

Response to OP: no difference from any other game - this is f13. We leave games and post the hate before we've even started most of the time. By this point in WoW's history, Bat Country was finished.

Okay, maybe it is a bit early for this thread, but many of the gameplay design issues people are bitching about really should have been identified ages ago.

I mean really, the fact that the crafting design sucks should have been obvious before the first line of code was written.

Looking at my dwindling guild roster I got to say, this can't be Mythic's plan.

Possibly a minor thing to others , but to me everything about PVE screams boring and beyond bland

The blaring mechanic that shows this to me is zero social aggro , as in I can walk up to a packed humanoid camp of mobs , pick the named captain out , hit him and nothing is going to help him , even the 30 other guards standing around him/her

I prefer PvP/RvR but do like to dabble in PVE also , but once I figured out there was even less danger than usual (compared to other games) , it made me want to do PVE even less , thus further eliminating the chance of some random open field RvR going on

I'll let the three pages here and the many pages in other threads speak to the merit of this.

I'm not saying 'war is dead' but clearly things have gone and are going wrong. You cannot deny that people are jumping ship nor that many servers have the 'ghost town' effect.  If you want to argue against that then I feel you're simply not paying attention.  

I myself did want desperately to enjoy warhammer, I played in beta for the entire free trial and quite frankly once release hit and they nerfed exp I was hit with a ten ton truck of 'unfun' my own final straw was when I had finished all my level range quests for all three pairings on my chosen and then it was either grind mobs or grind tor anroc a few hundred times.  Neither option seemed fun in the least to me.

People say I'm negative and to be true, I am but I also like to think I'm also fairly good at seeing where things are headed. I could tell AoC had issues when I hit 50, not many believed my then and I 'know' warhammer has many as well.

edit:much like aoc i think people are so hungry for meaningful pvp they are just ignoring some glaring problems that would be unexcusable in other games. Good pvp can make up for a lot but I think even the pvp is starting to lose it's luster now that it no longer has that new game smell. As previous poster mentioned: crafting....how in hell should that get a pass? or pve...sorry but pve is half this damned game. in FACT all the pvp in warhammer is so you can...PVE raid kings and cities.

You're right. I'll stop having fun at once. WoW is the one true game.

I'm not saying you're right or wrong, I'm just saying you are in an ever dwindling minority.

Paying my respects to the illeterate master of MMO prediction: Hail lakov_sanite!

 :grin:

Wow, just as I was all set to start play.

Oh well.

Back to WoW for expansion time.

CoX (City of Heroes and City of Villians) has revamped leveling and made it, "If you wanna go nuts leveling you can do it in about 50 to 75 hours to make level 50."  WoW is just a blur now when I make a new character and level up like mad.  Both games have ways to help play with your friends and boost your leveling speed (or soon to have).  I haven't purchased this game for me and my son yet, and if I keep hearing the stories that leveling sucks, why the heck should we buy it?  72 to 96 hours to make it to level 35 doesn't sound that attractive, since you still have 5 more levels to go (how long will those levels take?).  Plus is it going to be a ghost town next month if we do decide to get the game?  Plus I hated EQ and DAoC for the grind.

When there are less than 5 "high" population servers out of 55 during prime time after the free month wore off, I'd say that people are voting with their wallets. Major changes are needed fast, or server clustering will need to happen within 6 months.

Next thing you know, I'll be listening to music that isn't sung by Pop Idol winners and runners up.

This is correct.  WAR has a ton of potential (just as AoC or worse, PotBS does/did).  If something immediate isn't tossed to the wolves to cull losses now, their losses to WoW will be even more extreme than expected when the expansion hits.  

There's really not much of a grind in terms of total xps needed to level - comparing this to say EQ / Lineage 2 / and so on , its actually very fast

The problem is the by far and vastly efficient/quick way to level is by far the most boring (to me and my playstyle anyway)

You can play Tor Anroc in tier 3 and Serpent's Passage in Tier 4 (if you play Order on most servers) and get instant scenario pops every 15 minutes - they give more by far more money , more xps , more realm points than anything else , nothing comes even close

At tier 4 , I've gotten a level each night playing just a few hours , problem is it's mind numbingly boring

But I can't go do keep takes or open field RvR because , well everyone is standing around the scenario quest givers , and PVE is just as mind numbingly boring with less xps reward by far

So there really isn't much of an xps grind total wise , it's just that it's doing the mind numbing boring way is the quickest and takes the fun out of it

It's hard to put something together across 3-6 warcamps when 90% of the PVPing player base is trying to level up via scenarios. That doesn't even go into the fact that not everyone has the ability to organize. Hell, I'd reckon less than 3% of the population has the ability to organize groups in an MMOG even halfway competently.

What went wrong was a profound misinvestment of development and testing on PVE.

The superior Chat system in WAR should mitigate this problem

Saying there's not much grind compared to Lineage II is like saying it's not really cold outside compared to the frozen reaches of Pluto.

Agreed , bad example , but still even compared to WoW pre -"bring a friend and level to 60 in a day" promotion , it's still possible to level very fast in WAR ,

It's just unfortunate you have to choose to do the most boring part of the game to do so

Assuming your generalization of "3% of the population has the ability to organize groups" is correct, that's not exactly the game's fault. There's really no way to get past that without holding everyone's hands every step of the way which doesn't allow for freedom or in my opinion, fun. So I think blaming the game for that is unfair. In DAoC it took leaders to step up to get anything done and they did. It'll happen in WAR, too.

Putting something together across 3 - 6 warcamps can be an issue, but that seems to be where guilds and alliances step in. Join one if you're not in one and use those lines of communication to set up defense and attacks.

As far as people being in scenarios instead, I think if the rewards were where they need to be, they would leave the scenarios to participate. You just need something to give the realm a vested interest in defense or attack. And there doesn't seem to be one right now that I know of. But that's a tweak, not a redesign.

It is the game's fault if it doesn't give us good tools to mitigate the lack of organizational skills. Raiding in EQ1 is a perfect example. I managed to lead a lot of successful, multi-guild raids in spite of the fact that I had no tools with which to accomplish this: No voice chat, no raid chat channel (had to use /shout or /ooc), party size of 6, no way to know if my target was available or not, horrible travel times, serious level disparities in players, etc. etc. etc. I did it, but fuck's sake I wouldn't want to wish that on ANYONE. It almost broke me on MMOG's completely. Yet, the EQ design was centered around raiding almost exclusively after a certain level.

WAR provides some decent help to RVR - the open groups mechanic, markers on the map for PVP action, even the scenario queue. Why isn't there an RVR queue? Hit a button to register yourself for attack or defense (or both), you get notified when RVR gets kicked off (only when a character on your side is involved in PVP combat in an RVR lake), and you get the option to teleport to the warcamp nearest the action. If there is an open warband with the RVR flag up, you get put into it, or you have the option of starting one and advertising your intention in the RVR queue.

The scenario queuing system shows much of this can be done. Hell, if it takes instancing the RVR lakes, I'm all for that though that may be a case of the horse having left the barn already. But as it stands now, the oRVR system doesn't do nearly enough to draw people in while the scenario systems is offering free blowjobs door-to-door.

Of course... if WoW is your major competition, then perhaps following their current level curve might be a good idea.  Seriously, the biggest thing they could fix is tripling XP in T2/3.  Let people fly through those levels and leave the zones thinking "Dang, I did not even get to see the other pairings... and now I am ready to move on.  Oh welll, maybe I will roll and alt to see that content later."  That was my experience in WoW even BEFORE they made levelling faster.  I did not have to do the whole "zone jump to find the next quests" thing just to keep finding content.

That said, my server is doing great, and looks to be doing great for some time to come.  We have a near perfect balance between Order/Destro and the RVR lakes are active almost every night across almost all of the tiers.  So... as long as Mythic can keep the lights on we will be having fun in WAR :).

That'd be an appropriate riposte if this were SB or something even smaller like Endless Ages. However, this is a game intended to appeal to a similar market WoW is catering to, but is turning out to have missed the mark on a few areas critical to larger appeal. The last time this happened they up and redesigned the entire game three years in. But at least SWG had the virtue of being unique. WAR is a shade of WoW. If they can't get a wide enough appeal, it slows down the pace at which they can make the sort of changes needed to gain that appeal, and then to keep who they have.

The game can be fun. But they need to focus on the third leg and in a way that doesn't gimp the other two if they hope to retain a lot of interest. My own opinions of RvR aside, it is a great idea on paper and as positioned. It's just a PITA to partake in right now.

It is if you don't account for it. WAR doesn't have enough tools to let the 3% get groups together. That's fine of course because WoW didn't for a long time either. Except now it does, and that's just for a PvE game. For a PvP game where player funneling is the most important thing, you don't want to not have teleporting, meeting stones, better functioning chat, 'lock-like summoning, etc. There's fun to be had trying to find the enemy in a large-ish landscape, but only if you have enough people to do it on both sides after it not taking you so viscerally long to get there (on paper distances are always shorter in reality than they feel).

Like others said, I feel it's too early to write WAR off, but I will share what helped me make my decision to end my subscription. Maybe it will give some usefull insight? bullets make it go quicker.

• tier 1, and 2 were fun from all aspects of the game at launch, not so much a month after

• tier 3 PVE sucked the fun out, nothing but kill quests

• since there were so many tier 3 scenarios I was left going to the one that was guaranteed to have people playing and would reward xp/renown regardless of win/loss

• personal outside influences like budget, time, and taking a break before wrath launch

• I can always come back when things have changed

The personal stuff has nothing to do with the game but might shed some light on circumstances for people leaving. The last one was a biggie, the game was no longer fun for me so  I will come back when it is.

I think one sign of danger is too abrupt of a shortening of playtime , as in every mmorpg has players going gangbusters at first and then slacking some after the newness wears off , but some are able to keep you playing lots while others suddenly lose interest far more

Example for me anyway
EQ/DAOC/Lineage2/WoW all had me still looking forward to playing/logging in far after the initial rush even

But games such as

EQ2 (at launch)/Vanguard/LotRO/and the most glaring for me - AoC , all had me suddenly not even looking forward to logging in much too soon which resulted in fairly early exits (and EQ2 was the only one I gave a second chance later on)

WAR is almost dead in between those two categories atm for me , and could teeter either way depending on how quickly they implement things

MMOs are first and foremost an optimization problem where you find the best strategy to maximize rewards. Like it or not players will predictably choose an activity they don't like over an activity they do like if the reward is better, because MMOs are geared far more towards optimizing than enjoying.

Asking players to find the fun is naive. If they were going to do that they'd choose a different genre. You can't blame the players for doing exactly what you should expect.

I could tell AoC had problems over a year before release, I know virtually nothing about it, I don't think I've seen a screenshot, I did see some guy on a horse kicking people off a cliff, that was funny.  As for WAR can you link me to a forum where people might discuss these "issues" that WAR has?

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=14972.0

but watch out, the modz there are like dicks or someting, banned me after I posted my essay on WAR and how to fix it.

It's so easy to join!

WAR never designed for reality, never expected for so few people to participate in open rvr. Wasn't expecting for their scenarios to get boring because their simple tool for grinding to 40 instead of a form of competition. If the player base was 1-2million, than WAR problems wouldn't be so obvious, but of course like any new mmo they never considered what their grindy game would be like without 1million foaming-in-the-mouth fanboys chugging the pathetic game along.

There is a glaring assumption being thrown around though that people are hungry for meaningful pvp, and desperately want to rvr but can't.  Seeing as how easy it is at the moment on my server to get t3 oRVR going I can't think that t4 would be so different on a well populated server with all other things being equal.  Regardless of the actual item/xp rewards if there was such a strong desire for oRVR people should be participating precisely because it is fun and want they want to do.

So either 1) People are exaggerating to a certain degree how much they want to orvr because they want the rewards boosted, to match their expectations of the effort required and/or 2) Because of the grind the average type of player that has made it to t4 so far has had to 'play the game' as with any other MMO, and is so far still out of the habit in game of joining in oRVR battles because of the min/max mindset they have put themselves into.  Considering that those of us still in t3 are 'stopping to smell the roses' type players we are the ones more likely (like I did last night) to throw in with open rvr groups and spend the night taking keeps and then when destruction finally arrive have a ball defending until its time for bed, and only gain a quarter of a level and not care, and get no loot and not care, because it is fun.

So even if they do make oRVR more rewarding to shift the min/max crowd into more participation they have failed to create an in-game culture so far that celebrates the 'fun' aspects of the game for the sake of fun and will always have trouble in the end-game justifying to players the repetitive zone flipping and city seiges without the ever increasing phat loot carrot.

I'm curious , was the scenario vs open-rvr reward problem brought up in beta at all ? Was it never noticed or ignored ? Or expected maybe to not be a problem in live ?

It just seems so glaring it would hard to miss 100% -

But then again I remember in EQ2 beta many were telling the devs that  group xps debt would not fly - their response was it would improve socialization and make groups work together better - our response was it would make groups even more cliquish and elitist -

At launch when you got xps debt from someone who just joined your group and fell off a cliff halfway across the zone it was quickly shown what a horrible idea it was

It was brought up, but people did open RVR for fun since they weren't allowed into t3-4 from what I believe. So the sheer scale of the problem wasn't even considered by the beta community and obviously not the devs. Also there was an XP nerf and a even funnier change to the RVR equipment that swung the pendulum to PQ's as the only source of pvp equipement.

well I haven't played wow in at least 2 years now, so I don't know what they've done to their leveling curve, but at launch I remember it taking me quite a long time to get to 60. I also remember almost giving up around 50 because of how god damn boring it was.

The only thing that kept me in the world was my love for Warcraft and the polish that had gone into the game.

As for people saying that the PvE in WAR is horrible compared to WoW, I'm not sure about that. The one big thing that WAR lacks would be dungeons. They have some, but they're not obvious and they're quite few. As for regular questing I don't remember WoW to be anything but boring as shit, like any other MMO, except for the fact that they had some incredibly frustrating types of quests as well(1% dropchance type quests). I wouldn't necessarily call that kind of variety a positive thing.

 In the end I think mythic made a misstake by making hundreds of PQ's and so few dungeons. Had they put a few more of those in, I think they would have been able to soothe a big portion of the PvE crowd.

The painkillers are making me too tired to read past this.  If it has been covered, go ahead and skip it.

Has anyone mentioned we have a thread about perceived boycotts because people aren't showing up?  It's great to say destroy it and they will come, but that's proving to not be true.  Notifications aren't enough if there is no way to get to the action before it's over and if there is no reward for doing so, why bother most of the time?  As long as players feel a need to level up or else feel useless, there is little incentive to stop doing the rewarding activity in a vain attempt to find a fun one.

Those solutions have been covered elsewhere, but I think it's important to dispell the myth that even if people work hard that open RvR will find them.  On many servers that just isn't true.

I came late to the party so the new shiny hasn't worn off yet.  But already I'm not feeling the hook, a reason to log on every day and level my characters.  It's not helped by guildies are endlessly moaning about T3 and the broken endgame stuff.  Other than that it's hard to put my finger on, they've got all the ingredients for a great MMO but somehow it just doesn't quite jell.  If they actually get people RVRing and make scenarios strictly optional for progression it should help a lot.

I think there's a general consensus that RvR needs to be incentivized and that systems to bring people quickly to where the action is are also needed (or at least highly desirable).  The only point I was trying to make is that even with these in PvP is always going to be less "on demand" then PvE and that there is more expected of a player.

As far as your point I think it's naive to assume that all players do play MMOs optimally. This is manifestly not the case.

Perhaps this means that its impossible to have a major MMO which centers on PvP, time will tell.

the Darkness Falls thing from DAOC sounds like shitloads of fun

I wonder why they didn't put it in the game?

It was more of a riposte against the fashion of every harpy creating their own personal doomcasting thread that all the known issues can be repeated in. Nobody is going to say anything new here. We know what is wrong, its been said. Saying "this thread is not for repeating what is wrong or how to fix it, but what would have made this a better game" is silly. What would have made this a better game is not doing what is wrong or fixing what is. However, some people are unhappy that the game hasn't gone away yet or that some people are still playing it. Its that much of a cancer to them.

A lot of people fell for the "the game is going to be like WoW but with better PvP" nonsense. Other than the fact that Warcraft shamelessly stole ideas from Warhammer, the game was never going to be like WoW and any expectations (game play or retention of subscribers) based on that premise are and always have been worthless. This was always going to be DAOC with Orcs. And any post-WoW online game is going to get big sales numbers, most of whom will not stay. The next game that gets close to WoW subscriber figures will be the next Blizzard MMOG. The next game that is "like WoW" will be made by a company that "is Blizzard".

personally I hope the next big MMO will be Planetside II


but you know, a good game, unlike the original  :awesome_for_real:

Where are my god damn MMOFPS games?  :heartbreak:

I don't really have any love for WoW anymore, but comparing the solo PvE is pretty much no contest.  The difference between the two?  In WoW I could do quests above my level that would take just about all of my abilities and be challenging (the right pet, stealth, crowd control, interrupts, self-rez, consumables, cooldowns, etc..).  There could be a lot of strategic choices.  WAR is more, go here spam your most powerful abilities on 10 mobs, come back to me.  Or go here, slog through a bunch of trash mobs, fetch an item, slog back through those trash mobs because our respawn rates are ridiculous even in the most isolated corners of the world, come back to me.  There's no scripting and no strategic choices.  You don't even have to worry about adds because as long as you pull with a ranged attack, there are none.

Then you go to turn it in and it's just ugh.  If it can't be done well (and I don't think Mythic should invest in making it fun) they could at least pump up the xp gain.

Have you looked at Tabula Rasa?

http://www.rgtr.com

Indeed, but finding that the combat was not what I wanted and the world pretty bland, I gave it up during the trial

Here is one thing I think did it in for me for now....

If you don't know how swordmasters work, you have 3 'stances' norm, improved, perfect. using a norm ability leads to improved using improved leads to perfect using prefect leads to norm.

When I'm next to someone in PvP or even a PvE mob and I hit the hot-key for an ability to start this loop off and my character does a little half swing animation but I get "ability not in range" or some stupid error for like 4-5 key pressed, That makes it incredibly frustrating.

I think it depends on the server.  My brother was getting bored with the game yesterday, so I figured "Hey, you haven't done any ORvR yet, let's try that."  Ran to a keep that was under attack, found out that it was one guy, killed him, and stood around for about five minutes.  Heard that there was some other guys attacking the other region, so we hoofed it back to our camp, flew over to the other lake, and hunted around for this other group.  There were about ten other allies with the same idea, so it wasn't exactly a battle when we found the four or so enemies, but whatever.  Then we sat around waiting.

It was maybe an hour of wandering around, for two short fights.

Anyways, while I agree that it's a bit premature to be doomcasting, I do have a few complaints to vent.  My main gripe with the game is the technical problems, which are still not fixed.

-My character has a cape which for some reason defaults to "visible, guild heraldry off" so he's basically wearing a white square covering his back (I.E. the only part of him that I can see 99% of the time).  I can change it, but the next time I zone, it'll change back.

-Collision detection problems.  As a melee, this is incredibly annoying.  Blocking other players rarely works as you want it, and yet they are all able to get in your way.  It seems like the collision detection fucks up the position reporting, so I generally have to try to keep out of the path of flag runners unless I want to start swinging at empty air.  That seems highly problematic.

-Position reporting problems.  Related to above.  If I had to pick one technical problem to fix, this would be it.  Characters who look like they're in range but the server tells me are not.  While they're better than they were at release, pets are still pretty bad with this.  NPCs are horrible at this.  My White Lion has to be in melee range to fight, and getting close enough to attack an enemy that my pet has engaged, when they're twenty feet apart and swinging at the air, is ludicrous.  It's like trying to punch a quantum event.

-Ability cooldowns which do not appear.  Mostly on the morale abilities, but sometimes on normal ones, too.  Looks like it's available on my hotbar, but if I try to use it, I get a "Not ready yet" message.

-Spell animations which don't terminate.  The Archmage/Shaman beam spell, for example, does this a lot, where I'll be shot with a beam, die, and for the entire rest of the match that stupid beam will follow me around the map, a big glowing line connecting me to the point where the Archmage was when I died.  Sometimes other spells do this, too, like that Sorceress one where they make this big pit in the ground around them, I had one map of TA where an enemy Sorceress had that pit graphic stuck to her feet for the whole rest of the match.  Sometimes I'll get stuck in executing an animation; my Chosen will raise his axe to strike an enemy which dies, and then I'll just stand around with my axe over my head until I die.  My Zealot has this weird spellcasting animation where he cuts his wrist to heal, and every day I get stuck in it at least once at the point where he's just sitting there, sawing away at his forearm with this dagger.

-Performance issues.  Maybe related to my crappy computer, but why does this game have such lame graphics options?  No texture detail slider, no model detail slider, just a toggle for lighting effects and a drop box for shadows and spell effects.  The difference between the lowest and the highest settings is barely noticeable.

-Scenario scoreboards are fucked up.  Come out of spawn as a level 2, you get bolstered up to rank eight, which gives you like 800 extra hp.  That 800 hp is added to your "healing done" tally, for some reason.  Play as a Sorceress or a Bright Wizard, and damage you inflict to yourself is added to your "damage dealt" tally.  For bonus points, kill yourself before the enemy can, and get credit for striking a killing blow.

If the ability itself didn't succeed, I think that glitch would invoke enough of my triggers to make me dump playing the character.

I don't think so. I've already seen it first hand. There were around 80-100 concurrent logs in my guild at the moment but around 30% have questions floating around 'should I resub?' What makes you think they'll wait for new classes? There wasn't enough effort to convince the players to stay on at the moment. The people who level quicker and do regular grps in High level instance are doing it the WoW-style in War. They're really doing it for loot since ORVR rewards suck dick, and grinding RR just to put your gear on is painful and boring. (SERPENTPASAGE YAY!)

I never had that sort of 'do i re-sub past the free month or not' question when I first started playing WoW. I wanted to see more of the world more than anything I didn't have enough time to check it all out, Duskwoods, Vancleef, Kalimdor, Stranglethorn. It was all good looking and the flavor of the zone is truly unique, it gave me more incentive to explore. Warhammer doesn't

Quite true that.

Actually this thread may be a bit premature. According to the poll of bat country most folks are staying.

... because they hope to see fixes come in, not because they are OMG WOW AWESOME about WAR.

To repeat, WAR's biggest mistakes were:

 - a beta test that (mostly) examined gameplay one sector at a time and missed finding out that the whole thing didn't have any synergy when put together

 - a number of systems (sides, classes, population caps, large world) that saw players spread far and wide from each other, when for PvP you need to gather them together

I don't understand this thread. If you mosey over to the Bat Country boards you will notice that most folks are resubscribing.

There are a few vocal critics: we get it WAR is not for you.There are problems (I agree with Nebu's asessment) but it is still fun enough for most folks to keep playing.

When the majority of players say they won't re-sub,that is the time for this thread.  Until then reports of WAR's demise are greatly exaggerated,

It won't appeal to everyone long term, and there's obviously lots of short term issues needing addressing. But it's working fundamentally - the game has issues but the biggest problem is people are broken.

Bat Country seems to be about 50% on the stay side, good for this crowd.

And hey if it's not for you - WoW added motorcycles! Go check that out. Please.

Sorry for the (kind of) double post.  I thought my first one was eaten.

In response to "folks staying hoping for a miracle patch" that may be part of it.  But I doubt you would see suck a high BC retention if that was the only thing going on.

Keep in mind that 'What went wrong' isn't the same thing as 'the sky is falling'. Despite the fact that a lot of people are still going to sub for the next month, that doesn't mean everything is going right. There are serious problems with the game.

it's simple, when you try out T3 Open RVR that had 50 v 50 with one on the keep, you'll realize the engine really really struggled. Now how is this gonna work in end game when you siege a fortress with 100 v 100 or more? Content with current situations are one thing but the questions in everyone's mind is mostly that there are a lot of broken things like classes, bad scen balance rewards, engine lag but the thing they trumpeting up the most is new classes for December. Yay?

Chip Rommel is correct in his assertations.

I should never have bought those CEs...

I don't have any significant lag in big keep battles. I don't think it's the same for everyone. Also, as far as I know, they've been working on the "new" classes since beta, since they are not "new" at all, but just scrapped old concepts that they promised to give us back someday. :oh_i_see:

Epeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen.

Don't do this.

Oh haha wow. I think this is the third time I've had to delete this twit.

Oh well, then make this the fourth and last time, I don't want to be part of this "community" anymore.

Bye.

You were never part of it to begin with. Thx for playing though.

The main problem is the server population caps are too low. If each server held more people and there were fewer servers overall the complaining about PQs being empty and open RVR fights being too hard to find would vanish.

The related problem is that even if they suddenly found a way to drastically increase the population cap they wouldn't use it because of fear that it would give the impression of server merges due to loss of subscribers. Pride goeth before the fall of your game.

^^ Here's a large factor. And you've got to think, most of us testers were anxiously awaiting oRvR alla DAoC and so didn't pay much attention to the scenarios as much. There were events or "brawl nights" where the devs encouraged everyone to go out to a certain tier of oRvR. They didn't put it in practice, where people are going to strive 2x as hard to level (and find the quickest way to do so -- scenarios). The segmented testing is biting them in the ass.

I think a lot of people *want* to like oRvR, but the fairness and ease of getting into a scenario is just a lot easier.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

All i can say is that im having fun, the game is still holding my intrest, and with the recent adjustments to ORvR, its moving in the right direction. Long term? I don't know.

 :awesome_for_real:

It actually was pretty cool.

First 10 minutes meant clearing out the enemy, then the rest of the time killing monsters for seals. The seals would buy you armor and junk. But most of the people sold the seals to crafters so the crafters could get the armor and tear it down into materials for higher end crafts.

I never understood why they didn't do more DF in DAoC.


You're doing the same thing we're doing in reverse though. You're assuming the modicum size of BC in WAR speaks volumes to the intentions of the majority of the player base. That is no more representative than this outsider thread is.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I get the sense that most of the critique isn't about the game sucking or not being for us, but rather that it's about lost potential. The emotional element is similar to the early SWG days, though slightly less vitriolic because WAR only promised to do one thing well (relevant PvP) in an IP about combat anyway whereas SWG was trying to do the everyman thing. So we're passionate about dissecting what could have been done differently in beta and what could be done differently now. A lot of people are not likely to return though, so there's only vested interest in the conversation, not really the outcome.

Which is the reason why threads like this can largely be ignored by Mythic. Mark's always been about talking to and about the customers he has, and less so about the ones he lost or may get someday. This is why I said early on that WAR is going to evolve into whatever the community at that point expects, not what the early adopters who have a track record of quiting anyway demand.

And yes, that latter group includes me.

Look, I might be resubbing for one month, but that sure as hell doesn't mean I'm super happy about this game.  I'm not really having that much fun right now, though one main reason I'm not having fun is because no one seems to ever be online  : /.  I suppose it might be time to start an alt on a high population server. 

I figure that when WoTLK comes out it will utterly destroy this game, even for the people who want to play it, unless they deal with population/RvR issues.  If 50% of the population goes away...the 50% that stays has a significantly worse time.  That's not good for Mythic.  Epic fail potential.  They need server merges and to improve RvR incentive and gameplay for everyone asap.  Right now they are in a very bad spot.  Yes, I'm doomcasting.  Too bad, cuz I love the game. 

Mythic needs to put some heavy focus on End game/T4 and stat.  I don't know 1 person playing today who's level 40 that isn't bored. What goes with bored Mythic....cancelling that's what.  Not to mention you have WOTLK on your ass so get a move on.  Im level 37 and finding even my interest to login lessening daily.  There is no incentive to RvR, while the increased gains are a nice little fix it's far from fixing the problem cause if there is no one out there what good is it?  Most people just pound out scenarios all night for better reknown/xp leaving half your game world empty all day long.  None of this is news. Alts are fun and all but I'm basically doing the same thing I have already done. 

Once they fix end game/RvR stuff and provide people a reason to not leave they need to balance the crap out of classes.  BW's can suck me hardcore, nerf that crap or make my DoK about 3 times better to give me a fighting chance.  I wish I could dot from range at 700 / second..yeah that's fair compared to my +400 HP every 3 second heal.  Let me do the math real quick....oh yeah this = me screwed.  Yeah I know they said they will fix this crap, but make that a high priority as in cant fix fast enough. 

Lastly, fix loot cause getting purples that are worse then greens is like playing AOC and as a DoK I don't need fricking intelligence on my gear.  To go along with this is fix your dam algorithm on PQ's and keep sieges cause seeing random bozo (a) run into a keep just as the Lord dies and win a gold bag makes me want to stab something.  Oh and its also nice to see me heal a raid for 15 minutes straight to get +85 bonus when some dude in the corner half afk got +500 because they do damage...good times.  I guess anytime I feel like simulating my RvR experience in Warhammer is to go take my bike seat off and go for a ride on a dirt road. 

It is quite possible that their biggest mistake was a biased sample population for the test servers.  The way they did it it was pretty secretive and selective, so probably only the people that really wanted to do it were in the beta.  So they could have made a pile of warm stinking garbage and the test server population would have been into it.

For the population numbers they were looking for they should have piped in a few WOW addicts and some folks from FPS type games too.  

They have said repeatedly that we will see a DF like dungeon in post release.  T3 DF would be awesome and very helpful.

Also I am a customer they have and I really don't see the game any different than most around here.  I am just more tolerate of the downsides than most.  Mostly I am just pissed off that they added a pointless grind to the game to drive away the people I wish to hang out with.

Planetside, while not a mass appeal game, as solved getting people together to PvP.  It took them a few years.  You can login to find the zerg, medium, squad, or solo PvP and get there in minutes.  They have highlights on the maps, queues to go to fight quickly, but most importantly a world layout that funnel players together, they changed many base links to get to that point.  Warhammer starts the game with three different canyons to spread players out and never recovers.

Lakov has a pattern.

This is the same thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=13673.0) he started 40 days after Age of Conan's launch. Now, 40 days after Warhammer's launch here we are again. He has a point now as he had one for Age of Conan. Gaming Graveyard is the next step and there's a fair chance it'll hit these boards in a few months.

I will spare you my list of Warhammer's faults. Let me just say that MMORPG's audience has grown up so quick I doubt an out-of-time World of Warcraft hitting the shelves in 2008 would be spared the short-tempered fate of ultra-churning, and not because of the outdated graphics.

Both Age of Conan and Warhammer are very good MMORPGs, just not polished (the former) or evolutionary enough (the latter), and both share too many design flaws when it comes to what they really want to be (PvP? PvE? Open? Battlegrounds? Casual? Hardcore? Skill based? Item based?). Once again I honestly think they'll both be great in like 20 months, much better than whatever will be coming out by then.
But this, once again, is the problem with the MMORPG industry: games are released in uncertain, doubtful, despicable stages of design and polish passes. Not many want (to pay for) a piece of that anymore.

A lot of the polls I've seen indicate around 25% of the initial players won't resub after the 30 free days. Then there are a lot of people who are giving the game another 1-2 months (a full 90 days since release) to show major improvement. The more Mythic resists making big changes and just does small ones that don't really help, the more likely the people giving them 90 days might choose just to give them 60.

It is easier to keep a customer than lure new ones or win back old ones. In 14 years of online gaming I have only returned to 4 games (AC1, CoV, DAOC, WoW). The vast majority of the times that I cancel my sub, its a permanent deal.

People are screaming about the PVE exp curve, itemization, and lack of RVR. Mark can't snap his fingers and fix it overnight, but 97% of all their servers being Medium Population during prime time should light a fire under someone's ass over there to get things going. There is NO game without players PVP'ing, and without a good PVP element this game can't compete with WoW........period. They are staring a 50% churn rate in the face, with little time to turn it around.

They can make 750k, 800k like AOC did, type sales announcements all day long but what will keep boxes selling and subscriptions paid is going to be players and internet word of mouth. Just like Funcom got lableled "Failcom" over the AOC debacle, Warhammer is starting to be labeled as "War is Nowhere". Go to the major sites (Vault, MMORPG.com, etc) and you'll see public opinion is already souring on the game due to the problems with the core mechanics of the game (PVP, items, RVR, PQ's).

This isn't 2001 when DAOC released and you had a year to fix your problems. Its 2008 where you have to move faster, or lose a massive chunk of your players to someone else in the blink of an eye.

I disagree with that.

If you look over the AoC threads you can find a very small number of defenders and a lot of people claiming bait and switch.  For WAR you find a lot more people saying some tweaks and adjustments are all that's needed.   I find war every night I've played, though last night (which ended up fun) started off with 20 minutes of running to find a flight master.   That's 2001 design dumb, but fixable.

Does anyone recall the standard retention rate of most games.  Is it much above 75% of box buyers?

I feel a little bad piling on with the WAR hate, but this was too much.  Today I recieved this from Mythic:

"Greetings and thank you for contacting Warhammer Online In-Game Support.

We attempted to contact you in regards to your appeal, Ticket#: (XXXXXXX) and unfortunately, found you to be offline."

This was from a ticket submitted three weeks ago and was in regards to my character being unable to interact with quest items.  Were I still playing this would be the kind of straw that breaks the camel's back.

See, you need to keep playing so you have the option of quitting in disgust.

Borehammer is my favourite.

I have actually resubbed to games just so I could tell them something else in the "why did you quit"  box that I forgot the first time.  I don't know why I think they read that.

Where AOC failed Mythic has a chance to not fall into that same hole.  AOC had major bugs and every class had broken abilities at launch.  End game in AOC was broken and almost non-existent and don't get me started on AOC PvP which pretty much didn't exist.  What AOC failed to do was listen to the players and make the needed changes quickly.  Keep in mind that 5 months after AOC launched many of the problems that plagued that game the first day are still there and their development team doesn't have an understanding of their own game. 

So far from what I have seen from Mythic is a good understanding of what people want fixed and they appear to be trying to make the changes in a relatively fast amount of time.  I have hope for Mythic still and if they make the changes most have posted here they still have a chance to make Warhammer an outstanding game.  Ill give them 2-3 months of subscription time to make those changes (basically until end of 2008) and if I don't like what I see by then I won't stick around.  IMO they have so far done a reasonable job of fixing problems only 1 month after launch(IE mailboxes) but they need to make these top issues the highest of priority for this game to survive.  Mark's state of the game addresses many problems but talk is cheap and action means more then words.  Time will tell

AOC sold over 800,000 copies and within 4 months had greater than a 50% churn, which is abysmal for a new game. Its core features, massive sieges, simply did not work, and there was virtually no end game content. A guild city took close to 500,000 in game resources to build, and my guild was one of the first to build a full Tier 3 guild city in North America but it still took us nearly 4 months of daily work. Once one got to level 80 in AOC you basically sat on your ass because sieges were so laggy that 75% of the attacking or defending forces would crash out.

The end result was that there was hardly any meaningful PVP, the arena system was horrible, and PVPr's left because the game didn't cater to their needs. The August report had AOC with 415,000 subscribers as of August 15th, but I'd be surprised if the next quarterly report shows AOC with more than 200,000. That isn't a total failure, but it doomed them to the realm of MMO mediocrity, damaged their product's reputation, and short of a miracle they'll never pass the 400k mark again.

Who knows what War's churn rate will be, but a lot of the 55 servers have gone from high populations to medium or low populations. PVP players who expected "War to be everywhere" are mostly not seeing War anywhere.  PVP players who expected to be able to level and gear out via PVP are finding out that they have to PVE grind for the best gear, and having to PVE to even level efficiently due to population imbalances or low rewards for losing scenarios.

Warhammer hasn't damaged itself too bad yet, but the AOC example is a good modern example of what will happen to your game if you don't deliver what you promised. PVPr's by nature are not a patient customer, and they won't sit around for a year waiting on you to fix your game. They'll just leave, call it a piece of shit to anyone who will listen, and move on to something else.

That might work if WAR had a why you quit box.  :drill:

I. O. U.  $15

Here's what went wrong for me.

1. Scenarios > oRvR. This was advertised as an RvR game, not a WoW bgs clone. It wasn't fun in wow, its not fun in WAR. I fail to see how they could've even THOUGHT this was a good idea. Stop babystepping this, and do some real work.

2. The leveling GRIND, not just the speed. Max level in 5-6 days isn't so bad, its the GRIND that makes it not fun. For me to level at a decent speed, I have to grind the same scenarios over and over and over. If I lose, it makes me mad because of how little xp you get unless you win or come close to winning, it was a waste of time. I can't help that my team might suck(or that I might suck -.-) but I don't like being penalized all because my team didn't do their job or because the other side has too many of one class that is just decimating us. If I do quests to level, I have to go in all the racial pairings through all the tiers and do every single quest I can to avoid running out or having to leave my tier early. UNLESS I grind scenarios repeatedly, I will run out of quests and influence to grind, and its not fun. The grind SUCKS, not necessarily the speed.

3. The population imbalance doesn't bother me so much, IMO(NOTE IMO) destruction is severely favored over Order. I will admit, BWs and IBs pwn face, but without those two classes, we've got nothing. WE> Witch Hunter, Marauder > White Lion, BLORC > Swordmaster, DoK > WP, Shaman > AM.  Also, it doesn't help that almost every scenario has 4-5 chosen or blorcs in it, and a lot of times, if we don't have BWs, we get slaughtered. Come 1.1 nothing will change, soooo many people want to roll Blackguard. Why? Because its probably the coolest looking tank in the game aside from Chosen. Destruction tanks are much cooler than any of the Order tanks(even if IBs are so much fun).

I could go on, but those are the 3 main points for me.

EDIT: Actually, I'll give my 4th point.

4. The fact that Mythic seems to be trying to slow us all down from hitting 40. Some people hit 40 in a couple days, Mythic nerfs it. Players hit 70 in WoW in 2 days, Blizzard acknowledges them and gives them a pat on the back. It's obvious that Tier 4 and end game raiding wasn't ready for release. I've heard many level 40s saying that city sieges super buggy and all people do in tier 4 is scenarios anyways. They shouldn't have rushed the games release before Lich King(even though EA might've made them)

There's no reason to rush to the end of WAR as it exists.  Players are just trained by other MMO's to think that they need to as a matter of course. 

The grind isn't so much about the fact that it takes too long to get to 40. It's an issue that the trip to 40 is repetitive and largely uninteresting.  The lack of itemization and rate of giving fun/useful abilities is similarly slow.

This.

For me that would be the most incredible indictment of the game possible because I saw nothing while I ground through T1 and T2 that was all that much fun. Scenarios were at first, but only for a level or two. They wore out their welcome just before I got out of T1 and I quite a level before I'd have left T2 and running Morkains one more time was one of the things I just couldn't conceive of doing. They would have been better off breaking up the levels more and having one BG per level range, so you escaped before you got sick of them.

If there is no reason to get to the end, no great end game of RVR waiting, then I don't see a reason to play the game at all. And really that's why I dropped out, I lost faith that there was anything waiting at the end and what I was doing really wasn't very much fun.

As a counterpoint: there's *always* a reason to rush to the power ceiling: you have more strategic options available to you in combat.  I obviously can't speak for everyone, but I always have more fun in combat when my opponents and I have access to every ability our classes offer.  Low level PvP is only fun because of how fast leveling is - aside from that, it's overly simplistic and thus inherently dull after a couple of rounds.

In addition, any dev team worth its salt will prioritize class balance at the power ceiling over class balance prior to that point.  Thus, another reason to 'rush' to cap.

Rushing to the cap means one of two things:

a) the 1-40 game isn't as fun as the cap game. 

b) We're preprogrammed to race to the cap. 

Maybe both?

Or, it means that since this is a level-based game they had to create level-based content.  Since everyone will eventually reach the Cap they created More content focused on the Cap levels.  So, to enjoy the bulk of the game you Have to reach the Cap.  This is defintely true of WAR.  It was designed to have tons of players running around in T4 killing each other and doing PQs and such.  The Cap is somewhere between 28-31 for most people (meaning you have access to T4 and most Mastery abilities), the rest of the levels being Icing.

The problem is that people are getting stuck well before they reach the Cap, even the "reduced cap".  XP should literally Fly until people hit at least 28, if not 30.

While my above points are a factor, for me, to be honest, it's mainly:

3) I rush to cap because I'm preprogrammed to HATE HATE grinds, so anything I can do to cut down the grind is great.  Thus why I leveled exclusively via doing scenarios, dropping group once in them, and topping DPS as an Archmage who didn't heal anyone but himself (no xp for healing).

4) Rushing up lets me make early informed calls as to whether or not a game is dog shit.  If I find a super-grind of doom approaching level cap, I'm done.  WoW did that to me and I quit for like half a year, AoC did that to me at ~50, EQ did that to me at, like, level 12.  I'm kinda surprised I stuck it out to 32 in WAR - I blame peer pressure (hell, my friends and I all, as if telepathically linked, just stopped logging in permanently within one day of each other without any discussion of the game at all).

Agreed. I don't see whats wrong with wanting to hit level 40, I want my new skills/tactics/morale abilities. I also want some better armor and I want to do city sieging. As it is right now, what you do at level 1 is not much different from level 30.

For me the only rush is that I bought the game late and played around with classes before settling in. Guild members were already in T3 or T4.

No mentor or sidekick system left me unable to play with friends so I'm stuck trying to catch up.

I'm really sick of the whole concept of levels. With so many other advancement mechanics around, talent points, AA systems, rep grinds, even something like quests to unlock new skills/abilities I just don't see the point. In a PvP game your just spreading your playerbase over 4 tiers for no reason. Then your forced to add in the "bolster" buff to eleviate some of the problems it causes. I just think they had no balls. /rantoff

A grind of a diffrent name, is still player induced. There is a difference between player made grind, and Game forced grind.

Its a bit of both. Insert form tirade about levels in multiplayer computer games here. If the developers are copying bad designs you can't really blame player behaviour when they are copy 'grinding' practices from other games. You could make the 1-n9 experience as wonderful as you liked, but people will still want to circumvent it because your decision to use levels set a certain expectation based on prior games.

You can decide if a game is shit far sooner than that.  There's any number of examples to choose from. That really isn't a good reason.  Rushing to the endgame gets you to the endgame content faster, but ultimately your retention will depend on the quality of the game at the endgame.  

I'd say that MMO's force people toward the endgame more because of the status quo than any other reason.  It's as if people don't really stop to enjoy the trip to the endgame until they've already made it there at least once.  MMO's have a definite arms race appeal to them for many achiever types.


Edit: Righ beat me to the punch.

Well, I got to pick which grind I wanted to do - I chose the one that was simultaneously the most fun (I *love* to compete, and I think PvE is misery) and the fastest (averaging, I'd say 22k xp for each Tor Anroc, losses included).

My 'player made grind' was a lot more fun than any other grind the game offered.  It was also much shorter.

Edit: Also - what else would I do?  It's either do scenarios (fun and fast), do quests (awful rehashed crap), or siege keeps (I did that about three times, then realized that it's either a PvE raid where you stomp a couple of enemy players along the way, or it's a stalemate that transitions to loss via attrition, and either way I don't advance my character at all).

Yeah, we are on the same page, Bloodworth.

Oh, i just posted that to make sure we are all on the same page. I think most here are talking about the Game forced grind (out of necessity, not want).

When I was playing I can't really say I was rushing to the cap but I certainly wanted it over with. I felt war's pve experience just gets very stale and people want to be done with it more than it's their nature to rush to an endgame.  Scenario's are fun and I think if they were less xp/reward per hour than rvr that even staunch anti-wow people might enjoy them as something fun to do.  As it is though they are being overused, people are getting sick of them but the alternative is equally boring and repetitive PVE.

If people could just level 1-40 on their pairings quests alone it wouldn't have been so bad but once you have to start doing chapter 10 orc,chaos,dark elf your quests per level triple and then you can see the giant hamster wheel around you. Not only is it a grind, it's also a pain in the ass to have to fly to the different pairings and grab all those new quests. It breaks your rhythm and the storyline of your character and takes you out of the Immersive environment they try and create.

It's clear the whole flow of the game was disrupted by the exp nerf pre-release and honestly I can't think of one fix that could have solved all these woes more than that.

Fuck levels.

If you need a grind crutch then make capping out skill/ability wise impossible - Eve.

Levels will go away as soon as players stop creating a demand for games with them.  Seriously though, levels are really pretty meaningless in WAR just as they were in DAoC.  This is the case since everyone will be playing the majority of their gametime in the endgame.  Reknown are the true levels in WAR. 

A) Renown.
B) The levels are absolutely not meaningless, in that they are the thing most likely to prevent people from ever getting to the endgame.

As somebody who has done an unreasonable amount of PvE on one character for the story and 'complete the tome' reasons, I'm pretty sure that you can do 1-40 on your native pairing only - you just have to complete every PQ influence line as you do it as well as all the 'flagged PvE' scouting and collecting quests in the RvR areas. Nobody in their right mind (I'm prepared to concede that I'm doolally) would do that, especially when there's nobody else doing the PQs and it involves solo-killing stage one twice each time. Despite this unpleasant grind, I still felt it was less painful than killing furbolgs and undead in WoW. However, those were about 'rep' and not 'getting to a maxed-out character' so I understand why the WAR grind kicks more people in the goolies.

Well, whether it's gone wrong for other people or not, I'm about done with it in terms of personal fun, pretty much as I'm done with it in terms of looking at how the internal culture and social practices of the game have come together in the first month of live. I logged on last night, joined the queues, one scenario popped in two hours of waiting, and it was Tor Anroc. There was no open PvP happening, nobody in the very large guild I'm in felt like doing PQs. Everyone was just plugging away at PvE hoping that scenarios or RvR would start up, but nothing really did in the two hours I was on. That was two hours I could have been playing any number of other things, even WoW. Having nothing to do but WAR PvE is like getting stuck carving a bar of soap in your prison cell.

This, basically. After thinking about it more, I've decided to go ahead and cancel until i see some patch notes. I feel like I've hardly played the game and I'm already bored and frustrated with it. Which is a little troubling, I think i have a high tolerance for MMO issues.
 Aside from the ghost town feeling, its class balance and lack of meaningful combat. It feels like button mashing. I also feel like i can't really enjoy my character because i see a mountain of re balancing and whatnot in the future, and i don't want to invest in a character that may be completely different in three months.  Sadly i don't have much faith they will do a great job, after seeing what they went live with. T4 pvp is repeatedly described as a race to see who's Magus or Eng can do their AE pull the enemy into a ball and kill them all first.

 I'll try and throw in some ideas instead of being completely negative. Get rid of the AE/enemy pull garbage. If anything, change it so they can toss their allies into combat from a distance. Knockbacks are out of control, stop it. At best, knockback should push characters back a few feet, not so far as to take them out of meaningful combat. Too many roots and snares as it is, people hate this. Give squishes other tools like blink, shields, invis, etc. With so many people favoring range, give melee a better means of closing the gap. I hate to keep stealing from WoW, but they did a good job. Charge, real stealth etc are a good thing in this kind of combat, imo.
 Make counters and strategy meaningfull.

I think this pretty much sums up the experience most are having with the game. It seems really fun at first and then BAM! (http://www.metacafe.com/watch/703994/funny_dog/)

Not with PvP they didn't. And stealth in any form is bad for class based PvP. Sure, everybody loves sneaking up on people while invisible and killing them when they pull a mob. Its not so much fun for the victim. Arms race. Before you know it, everybody wants to be a stealthing, flying, unrootable AoE'ing class and nobody will play anything else. Its bad enough that ranged DPS is grossly overpowered in this game and picks up the best reward rate for both XP and renown. Lets not encourage them to bring in other BAD ideas to 'fix' the game.

 Fair enough. Only reason i tossed stealth in was to give melee a chance to engage without getting blown up by all the waiting range classes. If they can come up with better, im all for it.

Resist gear, resist buffs, and healers do the trick.  That's why they have the large hp numbers. To survive the time needed to close distance.  They are the go between in no man's land.

Tell that to all the grey guys I ganked in the Midgard frontier.

Leveling in the frontier was a risk/reward thing. 

Besides, gray ganking is lame.  You kill the guy PL'ing them and leave the gray to die to mobs and take an xp death!

14 line paragraph, double spaces after sentences, block of text.

Levels will go away when there is a successful game without them.  There is a small horde of us here who think it's crap game design.  We have red names who think it's a crap design.  Who is going to fund it though, when the only 'successful' games have levels?

Unfortunately, they're not meaningless.  My Swordmaster is level 23.  I've done all the quests through Tier1 to Tier 2 and am about to move on to Saphery.  I'm being sent to areas where mobs are four and five levels above me, and I cannot even use the quest rewards.  Levels are acting as a barrier.  My only option is to grind, which I won't do.  (Unlike Righ, I'm not willing to solo kill five hundred mobs in first stage PQs to advance.  I am doing a ton of exploring to look for quest unlocks, but their xp is minimal.)

You mean like, say, Ultima Online?  Or Eve Online?

You forgot... WoW changed the meaning of "successful".

You bastard!

No it didn't. It changed the meaning of "what you need for people on the internet to really give a rat's ass."

I'm guessing that by "people on the internet" you mean "investors"?

Are you suggesting that there are people who are not on the Internet?

What we're willing to call successful and what is successful enough to get funding is vastly different.  Or the people with enough pull can't think outside the level paradigm.  There are a multitude of reasons, but the end result is UO and Eve are more or less niche now, and while they might provide some good lessons and examples, the right people don't care.

Was Jacobs talking about how they were going to be a solid game looking to do as well or better than EQ2, LotR, or CoX?  No, he was telling us how they would be competing with WoW and making them shiver in their boots.  We saw the same thing with AoC.  When a game company comes out and says, "We're looking to make a solid game which makes a decent profit, but don't care about competing with the big dogs.  WoW numbers would be fantastic, but 200k would make us happy," then I'll think there is some hope.

DING, baby, DING.  DIKU 4EVAR.

Yes.  One of them is running for president.

I like levels. It's one of the simplest mechanics for showing your characters progression from fresh-faced recruit to heroic champion. It also acts as a tutorial by allowing a gradual growth in the complexity of the mechanics available to you. Through questing it allows you to explore regions of the gameworld and the lore / factions etc. And getting the ding / quest completion is just addictive in itself.

The trick is that the pacing has to be tied to the content and the goal of the game. There is no point in having a slow levelling scheme if you aren't growing the gameplay through new abilities and don't have new parts of the world to explore. Grind is when you are levelling through pure repetition rather than acceptably concealed repetition. In a PvP game, where the point of the game is competiting with other players, the level grind should be shorter so you can get to the meat of the game on an equal footing. From what I have been reading War does badly on all of these as endlessly repeating a scenario cannot offer new environments to explore and the growth in character flexibility is also somewhat limited.

Warcrafts level, abilities and wealth / itemization growth is extremely impressive. They have even gone back and filled some of the holes they had on release so that a new player is confronted with a 30% reduced climb and a lot more to do. That's one of the advantages of rolling around in money of course, but it also means they are still attracting and retaining new players when the game is old.

And ultima online definitely had levels. Compressing "warrior" and "mage" down to one skill didn't make raising that skill any less of a grind. Skill based games also have the issue where you have to do bizarre and counter-intuitive things to level less used skills. Whereas levels let you focus on exploring the world knowing your skills while grow in order to support what the class should be able to accomplish.

Why do I always miss things?  :pedobear:

You need to train HaemishM better :awesome_for_real:

lol no he talks I just don't listen


P.S. - I see SOMEONE opened the floodgates and let (I missed a WHOLE WORD THERE) people in!

I'm assuming that many of you here were in the beta......

What happened?  From all accounts the beta was phenomenal.

They set up the ideal environment for things to work and that environment never pointed out the problems with the fucking game. >_<

Theoretically, awesome.

20/20 Hindsight: Shit shit shit.

Elaborate?  Some of the problems are just hard to miss.  How did all of the CC make it into the game?  "Uh we have this cool idea that someone should be able to suck every player within 65 ft to a single point!"  How does something like that get through beta as a good mechanic?  That's just one example of many, I can't think of many good things to say about WAR's endgame at all at this point, really.  Which is sad, because the concept is good and appeals to me.

Most of the CC doesn't annoy me. Just that one ability does. I don't know how it made it to retail.

I don't know how half the shit made it to retail.

That sums it up for me too.  I've taken to rolling alot of alts - at least t1-t3 are at least moderately enjoyable, heck I even enjoy Tor Anroc, different classes are fun, and the grind isn't terrible up to 25 or so.  I guess the bright and shiny newness of the game was enough to distract for the first month or so but now that that veneer is wearing thin the problems come through and there's lots of them.

Well, sure they missed a lot of little things that are irritating, but to me the big picture is what is killing the game. 

They really missed something in the psychology of why people do things.

WOW clearly played on the "slot machine" psychology that gets gamblers.  WAR seemed to miss on the psychology of "ding, I leveled" and "hey, that is a 25 man zerg coming at me and I'm all alone............guess I'll do a scenario instead. :ye_gods:

Some (from speaking with my close friends whom have played the game) feel that what we were promised was a global war, and what we got were skirmishes. As it stands, the game doesn't do PvP any better than WoW's Battlegrounds.

There is actually something that could get Tanks and melee in close combat. Most of the time anyway.
Tanks hold the line and charge forward together. Attracting attention. This works very well since BW & Sorcs like to roast the tin cans. 50% disrupt and block rate should ensure them make it to the front. Heals on them to sustain their presence while the close combats flank. Ranged fire just keep pressure.

HOWEVER, sustained presence is impossible in the light of massive KB & Magnet pulls in this game as well as root. I was being ping-pong'ed left and right even tho I made it to their midst. Before I could twist my third Chosen Aura I was already flying. And I would be out of range of heals and die from 9 DOT. Playing guerilla warfare wouldn't work either with the way DOT work. Once they land, you're fucked till you're healed or hex removed. This needs to be changed to whenever a dot ticks, it has a gradual increase on disrupt chance. 2.5% increments per tick would ought to make it less bullshit for a fully dotted tank to just curl up and die in a corner waiting for heals after the BW does 3 keypress.

tldr version:
roots & knockbacks made it hard for tanks to do anything remotely useful except to spam the same thing blindly at other enemy grp. Please give tanks counters against knockback. I don't mind being stunned or disabled.
dots made it doubly hard for melee to survive an encounter as well. dots should come with a disrupt component per tick.

I friggin' loathe being disabled.  Roots are really annoying, but I have Juggernaut.  I can handle the ping pong fairly well.  Dying in two seconds from eight people focusing fire makes me grumble, but I deal.  Being disabled makes me yell unpleasant things at my monitor at a volume which wakes the neighbors.

when you're 'disabled' you're stuck in that position till you get up in 2-3 second ready to pick a target
when you're 'knocked' you're flying in the air for 2-3 second, unable to do crap, target's range has changed and hence you're really clueless till you land. You need to visit Dragonwake T4 RvR map to understand what I mean. I had idiots running to the bridge to gank a swordmaster despite me telling them 'ITS A LONG WAY DOWN HE HAS AOE KNOCKBACK' Boom. 5 people just fell off the bridge. 

Now do you still prefer to be knocked than disabled?

How would you know? You didn't play Beta :awesome_for_real:

Also, you are wrong. I couldn't say if *all* the issues people are bringing up now were brought up in Beta cause I didn't follow the Beta forums all that closely but many of them were. We even talked about many of them in our, you know, thingy.

They never tested the big picture in beta. It was mostly a bunch of very specific use-cases with testers mostly being funneled to them.

And the psychology part has always been an issue with them for some reason. Either they have one type of player their games eventually depopulate to, or they don't adequately test their social engineering experiments.

Maybe in T4 it would matter.  I've only done a handful of T3 stuff, and in T2 I was a goddess of win since I parked my Swordmaster on the flag.

When I'm knocked back I at least can tell I'm not able to do anything while flying.  I start thinking about where I'm going after I land, too, since I'm pretty good at judging my arc.  (Also Gust of Wind... I can do it back.)  When I'm disabled though, I stand right back up and can't do anything for four or five seconds.  Laying on my back wouldn't make it much better.

Maybe it's a dramatic thing.  Soaring through the air to land on my feet ready to charge back in feels heroic.  "Heh.  That all you got?  Thanks for giving me some room to build up momentum for my giant sword."  Forcing me to the ground in a vulnerable position where I take my time standing?  Doesn't feel heroic.

Its still a pretty laughable situation though, that Mythic are in that oRVR is what the game was most marketed for, the thing most people on the boards say they want to engage in, and yet they are all but being held to ransom to make oRVR more rewarding or people wont play.  They are playing catch-up with public opinion already, making apologies and trying to buy back favour.  Whether their subs numbers are bad or not they have created a public perception that the game is lacking in key features and are chasing opinion, not dictating it.

The lack of official boards and a firm grasp on public communication and its tone has created the perception in many that the game is failing, even if the figures may indicate its not doing as bad as all the doom-callers are saying.  Its certainly going to hurt retention and growth though.

The 'nice-honest guy, we know of the problems and are fixing them' approach didn't work for Funcom either, add that they called so early for player opinion in working out solutions gave away so much control that they just shot themselves in the foot really.

funcom had horrible public relations

their official forum was absolutely horrible

their patches were horrible

Was that a haiku?

More like a seppuku.

Here's what I see.

You have people saying they like oRVR.

You have people saying they hate getting zerged.

Decide.  :)

His point is valid
There are problems with both ways
This is not easy

Also, on the point of Beta.  Here are two key things they missed from the Guild beta phase:

1) Capped levels at 20 for the first push.  They capped us at T2 for the majority of the first push.  Then they opened T3 for a couple of days... not nearly enough time for us to see the XP decrease and play ANY of the scenarios really.  Then they wiped, gave us all level 31 characters and went to the next problem...

2) Release was coming soon... only the Captastic of the Captastic wanted to LEVEL again.  We had level 31 chars, we had almost all the ablities we wanted, we WANTED to RVR... so, that is what we did.  You had armies of level 31/32s running around RVRing the entire time.  We queued for some scenarios, they popped ALOT.  Everyone was doing PVP, because people "felt" like they were levelled enough.

What Mythic probably saw was this:

1) People levelled through T1-2 at a good rate, everyone was happy with the experience.  Assumption... "Our levelling speed is good", whoops we missed T3!

2) People love the T4 RVR and scenarios.  I think this will be true... if people GET there.  Once people start hitting 31+ in masse I think the RVR areas will get much more populated.  It is just so much easier to jump in once you get to T4.

Also - to the Magnet ability.  I am pretty sure that was thrown in after guild beta ended... because none of our level 31 Engies could spec it, and you can get it at 29 if you really want to.

1) Guild beta was nothing more than a stress test for the servers.  By the time you guys got in all of the mechanics and tiers were 'tested' and it was pretty much about tuning the server at that point.  The templates were because elders already had 31s that weren't wiped yet, so they gave guilds 31s for a couple days until all of the guild people got their registrations set, etc.  There was no focus testing during the guild beta.  They were there to basically see if anything blew up during "normal" gameplay.

2) Speaking for myself and those that I tested with, closed/guild beta people rvr'd constantly because we thought that's what the game was about.  But as you and others have said it was basically because we were dropped in the same tier at every test.  To duplicate this in production you'd have to have 1000+ people in every pairing and every tier.  Could the servers handle that?  I doubt it, but I'm sure orvr wouldn't be an issue at that point.


What really burns my ass is that basically Mark told us we were all retarded when we wanted more servers during the head starts and first week of retail.  Well, here we are a month later and we have low pop servers because we didn't want a queue during the first two weeks. I fully admit, I cried like a little bitch when I saw a queue the first week and begged for more servers.  Now I wish I had been patient and just waited until they increased the cap per server a week or two ago.


Edit note:  Basically, it comes down to HaemishM's "11 knob" and since nobody gave a shit about leveling in beta we weren't trying to find the 11 knob.  Once the HURHURs figured out they could level in scenarios it was all over.  Now they can't change scenarios because people will bitch, messing with the "way we like to play the game" and all that shit.

A game that is nothing but zerg after zerg probably won't appeal to the mainstream MMO gamer and would relegate WAR to being a "niche" game.  That is okay, I suppose, but I just don't see it being a good long term solution and I'm pretty sure that this wasn't what Mythic envisioned.

One of the things I liked about PQs is that I thought they were a stab at solving the deepest problem in MMOGs: how to get groups of relative strangers to coordinate actions together in a way that went above pure zergery.

The early game PQs cue players to do some very basic tanking-and-healing together if they want to get to the end of the PQ. And I saw a lot of that in Tier 1 PQs: without any communication, players basically enacting the tank-heal-damage triad in a fairly coordinated way.

What would make the later PQs work as progression is if they subtly upped the ante, requiring players to spontaneously coordinate slightly more ambitious or complex sequences. Instead they just go for pure grind with some tank-and-heal at the end.

The *real* trick, however, would be to make oRvR and scenarios in the same fashion. And here Mythic just didn't even begin to address the problem, because the incentive structure of all RvR in WAR encourages players to mindlessly zerg *rather* than to coordinate action. In any T2 or T3 scenario, the genuinely smart strategy for maximizing XP and RP gains is:

a) don't be a tank
b) DPS mindlessly or heal randomly, with the only objective being kill as much or put as many heals on as you can
c) if someone else can happen to hold objectives or cap flags, this is a good thing, but don't give up killing and healing to help that happen

That's a very clear communication about how to play, and it runs exactly counter to what most of the players say they want. I'm not saying it's easy to figure out how to reward players for more coordinated social play, and if you overdo it in that direction, we're right back to more or less requiring people who want to compete to be in hardcore guilds, in vent all the time, and so on. The magic recipe is a combination of intuitive structures for cooperation with incentive structures that reward coordination.

Basically you are saying, "Mythic rewards guilds and punishes solo/new players."  So, the issue then becomes training new/solo players in how to Act like guilds.

The fact is that in scenarios it is NOT the best to just randomly DPS and Heal.  Our guild groups show that in almost every scenario we run, as we top the damage,healing,xp, and renown charts.  But, for a Solo player, it definitely Seems best for them just to DPS/Heal.

Once again hindsight makes me see where WoW understood this.  They only have 3 battlegrounds.  I hated that.  As part of organized guild groups who were forced to run the same BGs over and over I constantly asked, "Why CAN'T they make more maps?!?!"  I did not get this issue, the issue that WAR has shown us.  That is, it is HARD to train solo and new players how to work together.  It takes them doing the SAME thing over, and over for a long period of time in order for strategy to develop.

Now you have people in wow who can be complete PUGs and function almost as well as pre-made groups.  The PUGs have learned the strategy.

That will be harder in WAR because there are so many maps with so many strategies.  Even the pre-mades have not all decided on the best strategy for every map... much less the PUGs.  WoW developed a game that helped people connect in new ways, and destroyed close-knit guilds.  WAR is a much better design for close-knit guilds, but is still trying to figure out how to connect new people in meaningful ways.

That is so so true.

Yesterday, 35 days into release, Khaine's Embrace popped. We ran to capture the first point and everyone stood around, so I clicked the flag and made the capture. I then ran all the way to the opposite capture point (which had still not been captured) and claimed it.

A few minutes later everyone is just slugging it out in the middle of the zone while I'm running around making captures, I'm wondering what's going on when someone says in /sc chat, "WTF is this explosion?"; "How does this scenario work?"; "I don't know what I'm doing."

Over a month into release and T1 scenarios has been Nordenwatch so much, that when one of the others pops, nobody has a damn clue.

(Been lurking here for a week and finally had something to say  :oh_i_see:)

I still think a great way to do this would be to have "soloable" objectives in tier 1 and tier 2 RvR lakes.  This would get people used to the idea of taking objectives in the RvR lakes.  You could give a little RR reward for doing them and maybe a little xp.  I guarantee you if you get two flagged people near one of these they are going to start fighting and that is a good thing. 

New player maybe, that would be a good thing.   Not everything is wrong, jeepers and all that.

To bite, or not to bite. Woe.

This is a real pity, because IMO Khaine's Embrace is a lot more interesting than Nordenwatch. However, it does require more thought than just picking a target and firing, while in Nordenwatch you can just fire away*.

* not if you want to win, of course, but you need fewer clued in people in Nordenwatch than Khaine's.

You need even fewer clued people to win Gates of Ekrund. Nuke the middle.

But it is a confusing map. With Nordenwatch, there is no thought involved about where to run to.

They should have gone with a real open beta instead of an "open" beta. And made it much more lengthy.

We got time to test the game, but not any real time to play it. A beta full of regular people, instead of internet neckbeards, who are playing the game just as they would the release- that's where you'd get the best information of a near-retail product.

Edit: but DAMN what a negative thread/title. I don't think we're exactly at 'rats fleeing a sinking ship' just yet heh.

Don't be so sure.  If people aren't leaving after the first month, many are just staying to see what happens this month.  The levee has a small crack at the moment...   

I don't even know what that map looks like. I can barely get Khaine's Embrace. And this is after playing on at least 3 different servers. I think it was probably a mistake to let people choose scenarios regardless of their geographical region. It's like trying to get any other map but Deck 16 in the old UT.

This.  If I want PvE I will go play WoW's refined version. 

I logged in last night during prime time and waited 15-20min just to do one scenario.  Ran all over the oRvR in my zone and saw nothing.  Last time I did that I found 2 other people and we knocked a keep door down before one enemy showed up and stymied us from the lord room (not like we could've taken it anyway).  Two other times I ran into a lone enemy player.  Won one fight, lost the other.  Oh boy.  I have a job and don't need another one cajoling folks into organizing for something that the game seems designed to funnel folks away from doing. 

Gawd, why is there any PvE in this game?  Why are there so many zones and why are they so freaking big?  Why isn't 20 max level?  Why are flight masters so, so rare?  Why is PvP loot so terribly bad?  Why aren't the servers at least aggregated into a few meta worlds (maybe about ~4 Eve universes from all of the servers)? 

This game is like owning a sportscar that you can't drive until you build the garage.   

That's a great question.  Why is there PvE in this game?  My guess would be something to do to advance your character in times when you don't feel like PvP.  Second, as a means to attract players from "that other elephant in the room" and slowly encourage them to try the pvp game. 

I think that you're hinting at something very correct though: that WAR woudl have been better served to just dump their resources into the PvP aspects fo the game (scenarios and RvR) and really polish the hell out of that.  Crafting and PvE seem like an add on... much as PvP did to EQ.

I'd guess it's because it's a lot of fun to pour money and time into creating content more likely to cause a player to quit, rather than smile.

Or, if you prefer, it's because no one there understood what makes their game fun versus what makes WoW fun, and decided that, zomg, every MMO has PvE, we have to have it too, or else we'll end up like Fury or something (I'd of course posit that Fury's failure was attributable to elements other than the lack of PvE - like how shitty the game play was).

PvE can make zone control meaningful.  It was fun on the Zek servers pre-Kunark to cockblock the other team out of dragon kills or a certain dungeon.  Even in Shadowbane a lot of the PvP happens at the mines.

The kind of PvE that's in the game now though is pretty bad and probably should just be used as a way to level when there's no one around (in that regard should be a lot faster).

The game would be a little boring without PVE.  It does add a little bit of fun, when there isn't anything else to do. 

I mean, if you only had RVR it would just be take a keep.......take a keep............take a keep............and so on.  Pretty boring with no external story.

For me (and, I'd imagine, many others), this game is *very* boring because of PvE (any by extension, the amount of time one has to spend doing boring shit to gain levels).

I couldn't care less if the PvE adds to some kind of 'story'.  Lore in MMOs is complete hack bullshit.  I read novels when I want a good story (and not those 'my first reader' video game novels, which are also complete hack bullshit).

Seanzor is totally excited about the Emerald Dream. He was saying excitedly yesterday about how he wonders if Arthas masterminded the corruption of the Emerald Dream that started in Wailing Caverns (which is his favorite lore instance).

I just want to troll you all day long, is that wrong?

Make more pvp options.  That's the point.  You don't need pve if you give your playerbase a variety of activities that are pvp-based.

I don't agree. The great advantage of PVE is it's always available. Making ALL advancement and game-play dependent on the presence of opposing players is just not a winning option.

I think its also worth differentiating between coop pve and solo pve.  Both have their place but ideally group pve can act as a gateway into pvp. I believe this is one of the purposes of PQs but its not been entirely successful.

The presence of pve isn't really the problem anyway. Its the scenarios.

Ok,

I'm not pulling the flush level just yet (mainly because I'm an idot) but we're starting to expose fundamental design flaws that might take more than a few tweaks to correct.

First rule of marketing, know your audience.

Actually that's the second, the first requires you to be an asshole, but I digress....

The PvE is terrible.  Why not just have us play a virtual slot machine instead?  That would also be something to do. 

If your pvp isn't good enough to attract one other person for me to fight, then having shitty PvE around isn't doing anything more than recruiting resources away from improving the PvP.  Does that make sense?

Worked fine in DAOC IMO.

Whaaat?  I'd have quit at level 16, tops, if not for the scenarios.  Having only oRvR (shit shit shit xp/renown) or PvE (less fun than my job) to level would be horrible.

While I agree scenarios are necessary for off times/casual fun, just because oRvR has shitty incentives doesn't mean that oRvR wouldn't be a fun way to level, rather just that mythic fucked it up.

The scenarios are a good thing.  Everyone claims they hate scenarios, but scenarios provide an extremely important niche.  Scenarios are the only place to reliably get a reasonably fair game.  They are the only place where a smaller group of players can shine.  Tout ORvR all you want, but nothing changes the fact that in the end it is a numbers game.  Furthermore as numbers increase the game swings more and more towards RDPS and further away from melee.  If this game didn't have scenarios I wouldn't play it because it wouldn't have any PvP where individual player skill and decisions mattered.

The problem is Mythic forgot to put the rewards in for ORvR and effectively removed it from the game.  In T1/T2 I can PvE to level fairly effectively or do scenarios.  In T3/T4 I really have to do scenarios to level, but I can do small amounts of PvE to augment it (for items mainly.)  At no time can I effectively progress via ORvR.

When a game has a level system the pressure is on people to progress so they can reach the somewhat level playing field at the top.  Bolster helps alleviate the need to level so you aren't at a disadvantage, but it is still there.  Furthermore, you get more skills and options at the top.  People want to level and will push to level to get to the proper end game.  Getting next to no exp in ORvR killed it, so now people are going to stick to scenarios.

Early on the strength of this game was that it didn't feel like grind because you could pick your poison.  You could do scenarios for a bit, get sick of them and then hammer out a PQ or two, decide you were tired of PvE and do some open RvR, and then get angry about getting zerged and go back to scenarios.  The problem was the cut out the viability of the options.  ORvR was never really much of an option and PvE ceases to be a good option in T3.

T3 and T4 quests could easily stand to have exp gain double, maybe even tripled.  5k exp for a quest, great, I can kill 10 mobs and get that and need 600,000 to actually level.

ORvR is completely reliant on other people running around capping worthless objectives and keeps that don't have enough influence for anyone to care.  People already figured out you can prevent zone loss by boycotting ORvR and scenarios for that zone.  There is no downside to avoiding ORvR and no bonuses to participating.  Those guys that run out and ninja-cap all the objective should get a lot of exp.  Sure it wasn't a lot of effort, but they are the guys who are getting the ORvR ball rolling.  You really want to encourage them to get out there.  With the 100% gains from killing players if you get players from one side in ORvR as long as players from the other side exist and aren't vastly outnumbers they will go in there.  Remember while you wait for a scenario you can PvE, you can't do anything else while looking for people in ORvR.

Also, give the outnumbered side in a tier a bonus.  Give them more exp and more renown for participating.  They will feel like they shouldn't bother because destruction wins due to the fact that they have more players.  Encourage them so that even if destruction wins you will still get a lot of stuff.  That will get them out there.

Furthermore, those promised influence rewards for ORvR can't come soon enough.

In summary things killing ORvR:
-Poor rewards
-Rewards are entirely reliant on other players already being there
-The outnumbered side feels little reason to participate, it looks like a futile effort

Scenarios need to exist as an option for quick, fair fights.  ORvR needs to exist as an option for bigger, more dramatic battles with a feel of accomplishment.  PvE needs to exist as way to progress when you are down on your luck, off your game, or just want something easy and brainless (maybe you had a bad day or are sick and hopped up on Nyquil.)  This game will be at its best when players feel they have a plethora of options to progress instead of only one.

All the players I know who are getting tired of the game and leaving, or on are on the border of leaving is because progress grinds to a halt in T3, the T3 scenarios are weak, and ORvR doesn't exist.  So the game lacks options and puts up a road block of grind that is scaring people away.

where is DAOC now again?

DAOC did just fine in it's time.  It failed because it focused more on PvE and didn't fix any of it's RvR problems.  In other words, it failed once it did what you assholes suggest must be done for a MMORPG to be successful.

But it wasn't WoW, you're right about that.  If you want 5 million subscribers, perhaps you're correct.  Let me give you and any developers out there a hint though:  No one is going to out-WoW WoW. 

I don't know, DAOC may have not be considered a failure in its time...you know when games like everquest was popular...but I'm defiantly sure its a failure in our time.

It means just that.  Extending the /played grind by 400-500% is not fucking fun, at least for me.  The limited selection of abilities that one has before nearing level cap would become mind-numbingly bland, and issues of class balance would be amplified (class balance, for any game remotely decent, is much better at level cap than it is prior to it).

Christ, you have the reading comprehension of a spoon.


What the hell are you talking about?  Every MMORPG that was released before and after WoW has been a failure by your standards.  No MMORPG will ever out-WoW WoW.  So maybe, perhaps, you should learn to contextualize your understanding of 'success'.

For instance, if WAR had focused more on, well, WAR!, and less on stupid shit WoW does better, it would have better retention.  Capiche?

This hits the nail on the head. Sport-pvp scenarios are an excellent mechanic for a casual fun sidebar. Not for a core mass pvp endame.

RvR on the other hand, is gimped because of Mythic's obsession with making it not-like-daoc. I could understand if they wanted to take RvR on to the next step beyond daoc (say by doing more to encourage co-ordinated action); but to avoid daoc style deisgn entirely, just for the sake of being different until the last minute where they rushed in daoc-keeps-lite, makes no sense at all.

Using chickens instead of power-scaling also seems like a bad call.

I'm pretty sure there were some threads on a message board somewhere that discussed this issue prior to launch...

when I say "by todays standards" I'm not talking about how much cash it made, I'm talking about the laundry list of dead mechanics and bad design decisions.

Where do we find these people?

DAOC fucked up plenty.  No doubt.  But I'm not talking about the specifics, but rather the general concept.  yeah, there was AE mez, AE stun, PBAE groups, 1 shotting rangers, all of that insanely stupid unbalanced unfun shit.  In fact, we can thank DAOC for showing future games how to avoid these obvious gaffes.  But the one thing it did real well was the post 50 game ala classic and SI.  It was fun.  RvR in and of itself was fun!  And for a long time!  It built community, it wasn't overly punitive, and it was unpredictable (to an extent).  If it weren't for a terrible PvE grind and ToA, (and buffbots IMO) the game would have done even better.

Yeah, you've got me there.  I was still frothing from the absurd claim that scenarios are the devil.

DAoC did worse than Verant-era EQ. Not being able to do better than Blizzard? Fine.
Not being able to do better than an insane opium addict and his coterie of yes-men at the height of The Vision(tm)? Not so hot.

You're missing the point again.  EQ was the money-hats generator of it's time.  Things have changed.  So what?  WoW is just a better EQ. It made 10x the numbers.  Make a better DAOC, and because the MMORPG audience has widened considerable, you'll be making some money hats too.

By the way, 700k subs is pretty damn successful even today.  That's only double what DAOC had in it's peak.  That's what WAR could hit with good RvR based gameplay.  Yeah, it ain't 5 million.  No one else is getting 5 million subs for a long, long time, so you certainly can't shoot for that.

I'm glad someone brought this up. Every time someone talks about these games having a 'significant potential playerbase' or somesuch they go on to point out how DAOC or AC or SB or whatever had a moderately large percentage of the players of Everquest. They then run with this number and expect whatever new game to have 25 or 10 or whatever percent of WoW's numbers.

WOW DID NOT EXPAND THE MMO PLAYERBASE. Not by one person. There were no magic subliminal messages that rewired peoples' brains so that those who found online videogames not fun would suddenly consider them fun. The amount of people you see playing WoW today were always available and willing to play an MMO, there just wasn't an MMO they were willing to play. With the possible exception of more widespread computers and internet connections, if everquest had been as good as WoW, it would have gathered up the kinds of numbers WoW now has. And a game released to Everquest's standards would not fare any better today just because people have played WoW. Everquest was a horrible, horrible game. Saying that your pet guilty pleasure managed to only be moderately stomped by Everquest is not something to be proud of, it's something you should be in therapy for.

Wow did not expand the MMO(G) player-base? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

So I have to ask...





Still too early?  :grin:

Tee hee.

I could have sworn this was posted by one of the new Warhammer refugee posters.

If WoW did EQ right and got 10x the subs, DAOC done right would do similarly well.  By your own logic, I might add.  DAOC was shitty, EQ was shitty (they both made money though.)  Make em better, make more money in proportion to the existing fanbase for the various type of MMORPG.  The fact that DAOC pulled 2/3 of the subs that EQ did back in the day shows that a DAOC style game has exactly 2/3 of the audience by your logic.  Thus, a good DAOC game would pull in 3 million subs.  Damn, you're an optimist.  I would have never guessed it could have done so well.


you're also just plain fucking crazy. 

Maybe you should try to comprehend that WoW isn't just EQ with more polish. Well, that and that you're missing the entire point of my post.

The fact that DAOC pulled 2/3 of the subs of EQ only shows that DAOC only had 2/3 of the audience of Everquest. And that's my entire point. WoW's existence didn't increase the possible pool of MMO players, and it didn't make the number of people who would have actually enjoyed playing Everquest any higher. The 10 million people aren't just a multiple of the people who played EQ, they're an entirely different set of users. You can't extrapolate any possible guess about the percentage of WoW's numbers you'd get in a 'good DAOC' because WoW isn't just 'EQ times ten'.

But apparently you and every MMO dev on the planet can't figure this out, which is why they just assume WoW is EQ 2.0, and attempt to throw out something that looks like they were competing with EQ 2.0. Then they act all butthurt and confused when the inital rush of bored players all run screaming for the hills 2-3 months after release, and their game is left with a subscription number rivaling that of games competing against EQ 1.0, such as AOC. Why? Because WoW's existence does not increase the number of players willing to play any game other than WoW.

Are you serious? You do know who the Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard is, right? And their Lead Designer? And you do know where half (or perhaps more) of their entire development team came from, right?

And you do see what's going on with the expansions, correct? And additional content and retention? You *are* aware of these things, correct?

If so, there's no way you could possibly make that statement.

You do realize that MMOs weren't truly mainstream until I saw William fucking Shitner proclaimed he had a tauren shaman on a commercial, right?

I'd say that at least 1/10th, and thats a very low number, of the new MMO subscribers just might be bored of WoW and looking for something different. Come on, when we were MMO noobs we were all over every next great thing....at least I was. You don't think the next gen of MMO players aren't? Why are they so different?

Maybe you are just trolling or something.

Every new mmo released in the past couple years just corroborates my point. William Shatner didn't make MMO's mainstream, William Shatner made WoW mainstream. WoW's success hasn't done a goddamn thing to increase the subscription numbers of any mmo except WOW. Granted, I'm skipping over one important fact, WoW definitely has increased the box sales of recent mmos, since a lot of players are bored with WoW. But blizzard didn't increase the number of people willing to play a typical mmo, they simply made an mmo than an increased number of people were willing to play. And until other mmo's follow suite, we're just going to see the kind of population implosions we've been seeing with all recent mmo's.

I think there is definitely a segment of WoW players who will never move to another MMO---either because they're fans of the Warcraft IP, Blizzard fans in general, or are simply too invested in WoW to move on.

But for the rest of us who have been playing the game a while, still like the genre, and are looking for new content, there is definitely an opportunity.  I've played AoC, LOTRO, WAR, and Tabula Rasa, and none have managed to keep me, someone who was introduced to MMO's by WoW (though I played MUD's before).

If another MMO manages to have a friendly leveling curve, fluid combat, appealing world, and a good endgame then I think you can steal away a good segment of WoW players.

Unfortunately, I don't see anything on the horizon.

Gore, I sympathize with the idea that earlier games are shitty and that's why they were smaller.  Absolutely.  But to discount the blizzard effect, and to discount what happens when a MMORPG finally hits the mainstream, is just totally ridiculous.

And, at the very least, the raiding endgame of WoW is a 100% direct lift from EQ.

Err, I'm missing something here but don't you and Gore actually agree?

DAoC at its peak did not prove 2/3 of all MMOs were willing to play an ORVR game. I'd need to find a chart I'm too lazy to look for, but I don't actually think the RVR in DAoC was even at its best when DAoC had the numbers that made it 2/3 of EQ1. RVR had to continue improving through all subsequent launches from CoX through SWG and beyond while it shed numbers to those titles in the wake of EQ1 doing nothing but growing through 2003.

But that's not even important. What IS important something DAoC RVR fans seem to miss:

RVR was mostly viable when the levels were done, which only was worthwhile when the core group that remained was there to help sheperd players from 20 to 50 in grind groups that took a few days. That is the very essence of not mass market behavior.

This is a subset of a subset of a culture, successful by virtue of being unique. This very much does not prove the mass market viability of RVR any more than Eve having a few hundred thousand accounts proves the mass market appeal of a social political economic uniserver.

tl;dr version: DAoC RVR does not prove there's mass appeal in the concept itself.

I can't say I follow your reasoning at all.   So the fact that people were willing to grind through shitty PvE proves RvR isn't mass market?   Doesn't that just mean RvR is awesome enough that people will go through shit to get to it?  Surely no one in DAOC was happy about it.  The PvE server was a very, very strange thing that I can't say anyone I played with ever could fathom at all.

Regardless, that shit was standard behavior back then, not some subset of a subset.  Grind was customary, that thing you had to do to get to the game.  We just accepted it and dealt with it.  WoW changed everything.  No one would ever tolerate anything resembling the DAOC PvE grind today,  even those that went through it before.

Again, I don't understand your reasoning at all.  The game failed after ToA.  That's a fact.  It might have peaked in numbers during ToA (although I would guess it did right at ToA's release, not, say, 4 months after ToA), but it dropped significantly after ToA.  ToA focused on EQ-esque progression PvE and not RvR.  It seems pretty obvious to me what the appeal of DAOC was.  And to Jacobs, who has stated that ToA was a huge mistake in the past.

Ok your other stuff is meh but htis I agree with 100%.

WoW is WAY more than EQ 2.0. Blizz actually puts stuff out and tweaks it.  Then when it's out for 6 months, they tweak it again, making it easier. Then they do it again.   And that's just dungeons.  You can tell they do a ton of data mining and analysis by the quality of the new content.

Hush. You're interrupting the froth.

Agreeing on the internet doesn't preclude arguing on the internet.

mmm, froth.   So delicious, especially when irrelevant.  :heart:


This is sort of arguing semantics here.  When I say EQ 2.0 I don't mean it's a small step forward.  I simply mean that the essence of EQ was distilled into a better more accessible version.  Loot-based progression, raid progression.  Turning dungeon camping into dungeon crawling through instances.  The stuff that made people play EQ for unfathomable lengths of time.

Also, lets put WoW's rise into context here.  It certainly has grown significantly since BC came out (adding battlegrounds and sport PvP seems to be the biggest difference), but clearly at release it was even more similar to EQ than it is now...and at release, it still pulled in massive amounts of subs.

Anyways, if you boil down why people played DAOC, I'd argue it comes to semi-unpredictable open world PvP (without any major repercussions for losing).  Advancement through PvP, open field and keep sieges keeping things interesting, etc.  You could do that much better than DAOC did it, if you tried, similar to how WoW took why people were playing EQ and distilled it into ultra-smack.  Adding things like scenarios to balance out the gameplay experience was a good step forward, as was seen in the many 'WAR is robot jesus!' posts at release.  But the honeymoon was over once people found that scenarios were the only way to progress, and open RvR was pointless/not as fun as it should be.  WAR is failing because they didn't focus on making open RvR as awesome as it could be, and instead tried to out-WoW WoW and be everything to every one.

Thing is, Sony couldn't make EQ 2.0 and nor can mythic make DAOC 2.0

Face it, once blizzard announces their new mmo is world pvp oriented they will be making your robot pvp jesus.

I made me something to post every time anyone asks what went wrong with any game!

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/grouchy.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real:

Has there been a MMO studio yet who's second title is actually better than its first?

This is a serious question.

EQ2 is better than EQ. Though you could argue they are different studios.

It just had a shitty launch (like EQ). People only ignore it because WoW is exactly the same game with more polish.


EQ was flat at 400-450k subs from 2001-2004.

DAoC was flat at 200-250k subs from the beginning of 2002 to mid-04.

Both started to decline at the same point in mid 2004 in the wake of the EQ2/CoX generation, and both declined at about the same rate.

It is true to say that the best RvR design didn't kick in until mid 2004 with the launch of New Frontiers, but by that time ToA had already poisoned the game.

DaoC might have had a stronger showing, if they didn't nerf XP gain near release. I recall many people basically being duped by the Beta or the first week or so, then having all the XP/Leveling changed for the worse, with everyone slowing to a crawl and people being heavily penalized for grouping with anyone that wasn't in their exact level range. Details are sketchy, was so long ago  :|

The other thing that constantly held DaoC back, was this utter insistence on trying to get everyone to PvE. Not just the people who wanted too, but *everyone*. A lot of effort was funneled into the PvE game, where the PvP got life support attention only. It wasn't till NewFrontiers that truly new and improved systems were being put in place to fix the flaws. But as Eldaec said, it was already too late.




I can start ranting about the "style review" again if we want  :why_so_serious:

That.

And you'd think after all this time that it'd be axiom to not do a near-launch huge XP nerf.

Correct. Not anywhere near a mass market number of them. Precisely because of this. In that order :-)

That is my reasoning. I think this is more specific to the western world though.

Lineage 2 is better then Lineage... I think?

The second has way more up skirt shots of blue skinned elves, so I think that makes it better!

What made New Frontiers the best of DAoC's RvR design?

This.

+ They should have named all the head start servers "Server 1, Server 2" etc. and then gone back and renamed them later. Would have prevented the masses from rolling on the servers with 'cool' names leading to stupid server queues followed by ninja server cap raises that came exactly as people became fed up enough to stop playing.

Agreed with too many servers being #1 problem , I've never seen a game depend more on healthy populations than tihs one , for me at least

In EQ or WoW even if it was a dead server/zone/area there was at least remotely interesting and/or challening PVE to do , but in WAR the zero social aggro, crap xps for anything PVE related ,  and severe lack of mob variety makes PVE a non option for me

Last night while I was downloading WoW on another computer , I played my Tier 4 BW for 3-4 hours and Serpents Passage popped 4 times , I saw two enemy players total in open rvr across 6 Tier 4 zones , and a few Tier 3 ones even ,

Combined with zero chat , fewer guild members each night online , it's just suddenly hit that wall of , this is not really all that fun anymore , why bother

It tweaked the design to make it easier and quicker to find fights (with the battle map and teleport supply line system), and encouraged tower/keep battles over mindless 8v8 emain roaming. It also made relic raids a little more involved and less dependent on alarm clocks.


Of course every subsequent change made pandered to 8v8.

Wait, DAoC started pandering to 8x8 (http://www.onlinegametrader.net/index.php?action=disp_news&news_id=190)?  :ye_gods:

(http://www.onlinegametrader.net/~nystul/Guides/8x8/serverlinemap.gif)

Fuck WAR.

The only sad thing I have to say about this is that people are going to say PVPers are what ruined WAR, ultimately it was the developers indecisiveness on who they wanted to support that led to its current problems.

Yes, my grammar sucks, and I'm new here.  Sup.

Serious Question(s):

Why was your first post so short and on point and your second post so long and dramatic. Aren't we like 4 days past drama? Have you even read these threads?

Better?  :heartbreak:

So I did a 12 hour marathon today running keep takes and being a longtime DAOC rvr guy, here are the things I like and don't like about the ORVR....

In DAOC, you can repair doors. I haven't been able to figure out if you can in WAR. Some of the best times in keep defense was fixing a door while the enemy (for me it was Albs and Hibs) were working on the inner keep door. Then it was just getting on top of the parapat and pretty much like shooting fish in a barrel.

Siege weapons. I really like the whole raming requires 4 people to operate each trying to maximize the hit. Totally awesome. Only drawback is that you can only setup one ram. DAOC, love setting up like 4 on a keep door and watching that door go down like a cheap hooker. On the other hand, I don't understand the point of the catapults and ballistas other than taking out enemy catapults and ballistas on the keeps but you can have you range folks do that as well pretty quickly. If the cats and ballistas were for killing other players, good luck with that it was really more pyschological when I set them up. They feared them but they really didn't need too. Oil rocks.

BOs - Really like the BOs however I think that they should work the same way keeps worked with relics in DAOC. The more keeps you take the less guards you had at the relic keeps. BOs should work this way in that if we spend the time to get the BOs in the area, there should be a skeleton crew at the keep with maybe the keep lord and one bodyguard on the second level with minimal troops on the outside. This way if a raid does all the BOs, they should be able to take the keep easily even if a group shows up to defend (today 24 of us were getting pwned by 5 folks in a keep because it was just too hard to recover from trying to take the lord, his 5 bodyguards, other guard respawns and these order guys respawning quickly due to war camp being closer than ours).

Notification - In DAOC, you were notified when keeps were under attack. I don't understand why it isn't more prevelant in WAR. Especially the BOs. You can't even view them unless you in the actual zone so you can't see if the other side is making a move in that zone or whatnot. Also, notification should be relevent. I don't know how many times today I looked at the maps, saw a keep under attack, spend the time to fly there, then ride, then get there and nothing is going on; nobody is around. Doors are fine. Very frustrating.

Respawns - I mentioned this above, but some of the warcamps are really close to warkeeps while others are not. Take a look at Badlands, I think Order is almost quarter the distance to the keep than Destruction is. This really smacks as unfair.

Scenerios - agree with whats been mentioned before; However, I haven't figured out the renown point scoring. Sometimes I think it is very random. Most of my guild wonders how I average +700 renown every scenerio with only doing >11,000 in healing. I tell them I have no fucking clue.

As mentioned before, it would be cool if guilds could claim keeps. but rather than use gold, maybe use GRPs (DAOC way) or some other way to pay for the upkeep. Also make keeps claimable right off the bat so even low level guilds feel like they are making a difference in the overall war. Guilds will outlevel the keep and move on to the next.

Guild emblems was a huge thing in DAOC and really don't understand why they didn't carry it over in the same way. That should be something that guildies should be able to wear early and be proud of.

Agree with the islands, gear and other things mentioned here.

Outside of RVR and just to make a shoutout for the Shaman class, why the fuck does my AOE knockback knock myself back as well? Also why does it take me 6 secs to rez somebody? Two things that are totally bullshit in my book.

Edit: 24 not 36

Somebody played lotro too, lol. I agree with just about everything said here, and I hope god to honestly that the transfers are incoming to higher populated servers and not the reverse. If they are the reverse, I belive that alot of people will hang up their hats and call it quits.

It's an interesting question, that's for sure.

We can all say that time spent not in control of our characters (feared, mez'd, rooted) is not fun.

But does the lack of these things make the game less strategic?

Does that lack of strategy, if it exists, make the game less fun?

What is more fun? A game without strategy or a game without roots and shit?

I'm really starting to hate how appealing WoW is looking to me. What the fuck

I haven't played EQ2 since launch, but it was shittastic, ugly as fuck and unplayable for a solo player at launch. Nothing like WoW with more polish at that stage, anyway.

SOE got a good live team for EQ2, who spent the better part of two years removing as much of the original "working as designed" suck as they could get away with.

It took them a bit over a year to release the EQ2 they should have launched with, and the one that would have done much better for them. Archetypes/sub-classes bite without /level, locked encounters, call for help, being actually kinda ugly, all that noise was so contrived it was in no way a "better" EQ1 at launch. It was a hackneyed sibling of it at best.

Pub 19 changed much of that and now EQ2 is better than EQ1, and imho one of the better MMOs out there in general. Hmm, sorta like the RvR everyone talks about from DAoC vs the RvR that was in at launch...

They really really turned EQ2 around, it's arguably the best game out there right now. Unfortunately, it also shows the issue of momentum. While its a great game, it has never really been able to win back anything like serious numbers and even among people who play and love it, it still seems to be considered a "playing while waiting for..." game.

Probably not. But they will probably get closer to the lowest common denominator before Tigole fucks it all up.

I have a question that has been nagging me.  And I am not a former DAOC player so this isn't one of those the old game is always better things.

The easiest thing for Mythic would have been to completely copy the RvR mechanics of DAOC.  Yet they did not even though many people, even people who quit DAOC, say those mechanics were good.  Why is this?  Why did they throw away what works?

The BFO seem really half ass to me.  And victory points/ zone control seem kind of weak and currently insane.  It is kind of mind boggling that they threw out what works and replaced with weak mechanics.  It really should be obvious the zone mechanics are quite weak, IMO.

My theory is they purposely "dumbed it down" under the misapprehension that most WoW players are dumb and in the process just strung some things together that don't do much.  This happens a lot with computer scientists, a lot of things they make that they think are simple to use are barely comprehensible and hard to use to normal people.  Also I think they wanted to make things like BFO very "casual friendly" but in the process just made them barely important and also misunderstood that casual for PvP means getting into the action quickly and not getting utterly smashed in 5 seconds not winning some prize (other than xp and renown and therefore gear) once every 5 minutes.   I think they misunderstand that casual PvPers want to have a quick personal impact and do not really expect to take a keep or even a BFO if they only have 15 minutes to play.  You could do this in Planetside. 

So in other words BFO exist they way they are so that a "casual" can go into a RvR zone join a open party take two BFO in 10 minutes and get two whole carrots (Yay!) in 10 minutes.  But the consequences of this are that BFOs get taken quickly and cheaply and then people leave and they have no real value and do nothing to encourage RvR.  A casual PvPer in WAR would much rather be able to log in join an open party or warband and run to a fight then run some weak-ass BFO that dole out carrots.  If BFO actually inspired more fighting and more  drawn out fights they would attract more casual PvPers not less IMO.  Because PvPers want action and they want that action to reward them.  The BFO are just alternating renown farms.

They wanted to make RvR more casual. They just didn't implement all of the required features to make it so because when it came down to prioritizing stuff, they deprioritized the wrong things. And now they seem to either be incorrectly assessing the outcome (typical MMO stuff), or specifically focusing on the players they have now (typical Mythic practice).

That kind of strenuous physical labor could only be performed by a level 40 tank.

Really.

Replace "DAoC" with WAR and that sounds a lot like this launch.  Beta showcased a quick leveling, fun T1/T2, launch revealed a huge grindfest T3/T4 which is causing lots of players to reroll and go back to T1/T2 to actually play the game or quit.  Your second statement is looking ominously true too.


Blizzard is pretty fiercely protective of their name and IP.  They realize that the way they have maintained their image so far gives them the liberty to shit in a box and have it sell millions if they wanted.  They the are most likely company to cut their loses on a second MMO that is turning out bad.   They make enough money from WoW that they can afford to.  It makes more sense to milk WoW for a longer period of time and take their time with their next MMO.

DAOC RVR seems more fun and better thought out than War RVR at this point. The PVE in this game is like going back in time to 2003. You can't PL your friends who fall behind, your exp is maximized by solo grinding than by actually grouping up, you can't even get a guild cloak with your emblem until guild level 20 (lol?), the PQ loot roll system is horrible, and you can't progress without the other side showing up to fight. At least in DAOC you could cap relics, towers, hell even walls could be destroyed in RVR.

They nerfed the rifts mechanic for magus/engineers but they can still pull in 9 people per time. Even more fun are teams that run multiple magus specs and you are constantly pulled from one magus to the next, knocked down by Marauders, and aoe nuked to death before you can do anything.  Destruction is easymode PVP, and on the Order side people dislike the White Lion (Marauder counter), Archmage (Shaman counter), and Engineer (Magus counter).

Even though Order guilds on our server lead in guild rankings and renown we get stopped cold due to the zone control issues, destruction boycotting, unpopular classes that could help overall pvp balance, and several other of the same issues we have repeated over and over here. There isn't another game out before 2010 that is PVP focused so we're going to stick it out but if AOC or another game provides more action then War could lose a lot of people.

It's because wow is so popular that I don't see blizzard in a rush to make a sub par mmo, they clearly have one in the works and I bet it's already a lot more finished than we think it is.  Diablo 3 is an excellent example. They could have just repackaged D2 and sold millions but they are making another quality game in the same vein but with quite a few new features and improvements.

Now I'm not going to keep fellating blizzard but they've at least shown that while they do print money hats they don't rest too much on their laurels.

Edit for Righ: Wow may appeal to the dreaded mass-market diku crowd that is so vilified but blizzard makes a lot of games that are not wow, that are also very popular and tigole doesn't work on those games. If all blizzard ever did was wow, then I would agree as to not having much faith in their second product being any different but thus far they've shown to me that can effectively produce quality products in other genre's so while they may make wow 2.0 I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

And to the graveyard it goes.  I SO love the speed at which they're getting buried.

No fucking around.  BAM! - to the back of the head.  Who's next?   :why_so_serious:

Everything about DAoC is better in my opinion.  It completely baffles me to be honest.  DAoC's combat system is one of the best I've seen with the exception of a few frustrating mechanics (one could argue the interrupt system licks donkey balls).  How does DAoC have such an awesome system while's WAR combat system is complete ass?  Don't get me wrong, I've still managed to have fun in WAR and continue to do so, but DAoC's combat system is better in every way.  It's much more responsive and visceral.  I absolutely love the animations and their variety.  When I get into melee range and start laying the hurt on someone combat just flows and is satisfying and enjoyable.  When I get into melee range in WAR I'm just mashing buttons and fighting with the system to try to kill the other guy.  I don't feel any satisfaction when I lay a big hit on someone.  Everything is just so sluggish and disconnected and what few animations there are, are uninspired drek.  If Mythic had just taken DAoC's system and maybe replaced how casting and interrupts work they would have had a real winner.

At any rate, I just hope Mark Jacobs removes the cockblock on Origins and let's the DAoC team release DAoC 1.5.

Interrupts were one of the better aspects of DAoC.  They served the purpose of keeping casters in check with melee while allowing non-dps classes to server a crucial role in pvp (cc + interrupts).  If you played a caster/healer in DAoC, you learned quickly what the ranges of your enemies were and how to properly position yourself to avoid interrupts.  If you got interrupted a lot, you weren't doing something right.  Caster dps was insane when played by a solid player.  The difference being that you had to be conscious of not only range to an enemy, positioning, but also had to be constantly panning to be effective. 

Yet another reason why DAoC >>> WAR.  Subtleties in combat.  Sandbox-like pvp.  Solo, 8v8, zergvzerg all fun and viable.  Damnit... if they had simply fixed the shortcomings of DAoC, this would have been one hell of a game.

Except for the part where they ignore pretty much every one of their players asking for less shitty PVE and more great PVP.

Interrupts were/are definitely required within DAoC's current system.  What I meant to say is that it's a very unforgiving system (along with long duration CC) that prevented it from having more mass appeal.  If I were going to redesign the system I'd probably go about it differently (were mass appeal my goal).  Origins, which I consider DAoC 1.5, will/would have retained the interrupt system, and was still something I was/am very much looking forward to.

Lvl 50 actually, but the thing was I was usually in a group with a bunch of ranged guys. So they would actually be doing the shooting.

People like to bash Blizzard for making games that make money. I don't get that.

Blizzard impressed me when they shit canned Starcraft: Ghost. They aren't afraid to dump a project that isn't good enough and judging by the success of the games they HAVE released I think they have a pretty good idea what's going to be popular and sell well.

It wasn't the first time. A while before that there was work on a 2d sidescrolling warcraft rpg type thing that got the axe.

Not many companies are in a place where they can drop a game in development and survive it.

(http://news.filefront.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/hellgate_london_burgled.jpg)

Indeed.

(http://eternallycool.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/gods-and-heroes-red.jpg)

I really didn't mind Gods and Heroes, if you looked past the huge number of bugs and stability problems in beta the gameplay itself was rather enjoyable.

Judging by my luck at most diku MMOs recently I'm sure my love would have turned to hate by the time I hit the midpoint of levelling though...

I thought G&H was completely mediocre, but with some really nice ideas. Like grapple animations, every class being a pet class, having the ear of a particular god, getting your own squad camp, etc.

You know, that's a good point - what is next?  :grin:

Why aren't we over this by now? 

How long before EA comes out with the EA All Access sub for DAOC / UO / WAR  and future ones

SOE's is life support for VG to PotBS , figure EA might as well try the same

Because despite the hate, people still want this game to do well.  The hope is still there.  Can't really say whether the death bell has rung just yet.  The only thing we know right now is that if it is succeeding, it's not doing it in a way that we would like.

Actually I want it to fail miserably.

You mean WAR or the cycle of falling in love with every game that comes out only to have our hearts broken a month later?  :heartbreak:

Because there isn't an MMO worth playing right now if PvP is your thing.  With WAR tanking, I'm left with the choice of playing DAoC again or going outside into the sun.  I'm afraid of the sun!

WTF? Why?

Because I love the Warhammer IP and the sooner this abortion gets sucked up the sooner they can do something better with it.

That's the most backwards logic I've seen in quite some time. 

"Great news guys!  WAR tanked!  Now we can snatch the license and finally work on that Warhammer date sim game!!!"

I had to pull this one out because if there is one piece of design in all of MMO-dom that I think is shitty, it is DAOC's interrupt system. It led directly to very messy class balance issues. With that interrupt system, caster per-nuke damage had to be *extremely* high, because if it wasn't they would have been totally useless. Unfortunately what that ended up meaning was that fighting a caster was a totaly binary experience. Either they nuked you to death before you got to them (usually in 2-3 shots) or you won with them having little to no chance to escape. That was maybe the single core issue that poisoned every other class design issue in the entire game, IMO.

I actually think it was worse than minute long mezzes, in terms of the systemic problems it created.

Yea.

"WAR is still limping along with 100K subs five years later! Man that IP must be a fucking cash cow, lets do something with it!" is a much more attractive situation.

At least if WAR tanks and GW throws Mythic under the bus they can save face and keep the IP attractive for potential development.

(http://www.meikathon.net/roflmao/facepalm4.jpg)

Judging by your mastery of internet meme I guess I can add you to the list of people who think lingering shitty exposure and a company letting its IP wallow in mediocrity is a good thing.

Preemptive edit: If you think WAR is the best a Warhammer MMO could be then just stop reading. Otherwise what do you think is better:

A) WAR limps along for the next 5-7 years with 100-250K players and becomes regarded as just another failed MMO, thus no other company could make a Warhammer MMO if they wanted or;

B) WAR goes the way of AoC, GW decides to pull the plug and publically shit on MJ for ruining it. They become much more selective with whom they give their license to and MAYBE someone else takes a shot at a Warhammer MMO a decade from now

Seeing that B is the only option that even allows for the POSSIBILITY of a better Warhammer MMO, that's what I pick.

(http://www.threadbombing.com/data/media/54/facepalm_statue.jpg)

See above.

If war tanks, no studio is going to touch the IP with a ten foot pole.  People will associate Warhammer with WAR, not with GW.  If you think anyone without a neckbeard gives two shits about Warhammer Fantasy IP you're diluted.  Any studio that had any passing interest in the IP is not going to come from the codex-owning fanbase, it's going to come from the executives that see that the IP has potential to be profitable.  Seeing war tank will take it right off the table. 

And letting it shit on itself for five years will be any better?

There have been non-MMO Warhammer games that have sucked some serious ass in the past but they are still getting made.

Oh and I am actually very concentrated.

man there has been tons of bad warhammer games in the past

that warhammer RTS comes to mind. It was so mediocre it passed right on over to horrible :heartbreak:

Who are they going to be more selective with that can pick it up?  One company has already failed.  This one, a major MMO company with a published game, is ultimately going to be a big 'meh'.  Blizzard?  They already did Warhammer, without the royalties.  If the game goes down, you're not getting a Warhammer MMO.

Edit: Geki made a good point, too, in regards to this.

Do want!

Will that Hag take my offer of her hated enemy's entrails?  Can I make the Orc stop bashin' da stunty long enough for him to notice my affections?  Oh!  I quiver at the thought.

Battle March? I picked it up for 360. Wasn't TERRIBLE. If you're a Warhammer fan I'm sure it's a lot easier to over look the shittier aspects but I enjoyed it.

If the game DOESN"T go down we're stuck with it.

If it does there is at least a chance someone picks it up, it's happened before.

GW won't pull the plug and Mythic/EA won't kill it.

Stop making the thread stupid.

Its to late.

Great point, if tons of shitpile games get released and dumped we'll keep getting more shitpile games until the studios just avoid the ip like the plague.  If you're looking for tons of bargain bin software then yes, cutting it off right now is a good idea. 

What I'm saying is, you aren't gonna have a choice. Wanting this game to fail is going to make it worse for the IP than making it better.  You better start spooning this game and telling it you love it because it's the best thing you're gonna get and you're fucked.

I didn't say they would or even that I expected them to.

Turn the mirror around.

Thanks for playing.

Much like WAR, it seems FellintoOblivion decided to go full retard. We know how that goes.

Thanks fallen, we are now all stupider for having read your posts.


(http://www.forumspile.com/Thread-Crap-Graph.jpg)

Wish I had scrolled down and saw Morfiend's graph before reading through all this.  :uhrr:

I ll never understand how people say this is a PVE game when I have done 2 level 26s and countless level 10-20's and I have yet to do PVE.  Granted maybe tier 4 you have to do some?  ITs all about server population..heck on a server while playing Order yesterday we had constant RvR in tier 1 and tier 2 throughout the day between the 5 min scenario pops.  If you want to RvR the issue is either you do not go find it.. or you picked a server with crap population which will be fixed by transfers in the next week or so.  You are the deciding factor in how the game is played out especially now that exp is amazing in RvR 700 for a solo kill at level 10... which is way better than PvE (at least in beta).

Shadow of the Horned Rat or something like that I believe

Little flags I remember on the screen all over and something like you had to speed click or something

It was horrible

Let me know how tier 3/4 is for you once everyone is doing nothing but scenarios and quests for scenarios because thats the only way to reasonably level

I play/ed on med-high pop and tier 3 and 4 (4 is much worse) there is very little open RvR , no PVE either , because EVERYONE is standing around doing nothing but scenarios

You've discovered what everyone else knows , tier 1 and 2 is fun , 3 is meh , and 4 is boring beyond belief

A) If you have 30 min. queues and open RvR is dead, you have little to no choice but to do PvE

B) Transfers, especially self-selecting transfers, are unlikely to fix the problem.  It's likely to make low pop servers much worse, and may imbalance some med pop servers even more.  It's possible it'll help, but it's no guarantee of changing anything.

C) Open RvR is nice if you can find it.  People stick to scenarios because it is reliable experience.  Solo kills are a bad metric, because players are rarely solo, and there's no way to know if you can find anyone.  If you spend an hour in an RvR lake without finding anyone you've wasted your time.

Sure it is a bad metric but that was just an example.  Most of the time it was my group of 5 working with other non warband groups taking points and what not.  It truly seems to me that the servers that have good population have good RvR even on my 2 26's (on different servers) the one on the low pop server has crap RvR but the one on High / Med has amazing RvR... the whole issue with the game is server population. 

I doubt they allow you to choose any server and will force people to certain servers to increase their pops as they know what the issues are just like we do.

If I'm honest, I'm wondering if you have you yet to experience PVE because you couldn't figure out how to leave the starter town, possibly, despite people constantly talking about PVE, maybe you just don't believe it's present in WAR.  I'm also curious how you can have countless alts in a game that's been out just over a month and that has a limited number of character slots available per account.

You must be on some magical server that has open RvR going on at all times, because unless you're doing open RvR I can't imagine how you managed to do multiple alts through the same T1 and T2 scenarios over and over and over. And if you somehow did do scenarios over and over, and enjoyed it enough to make multiple characters to do them, than congrats. Warhammer is the game for you.

My assumption was that he couldn't count very far.

By very far, I am pretty sure you mean 5.

A lot of things that dont get mentioned are the minor annoyances like not being able to alt tab without crashing, taking over 5 mins to get control of my computer back after logging off and lagging and stuttering like crazy in altdorf even at the lowest possible settings.  This on a computer that easily ran AoC on medium/high settings.

Hey!  5 is one of my favourite numbers and the other one is five, too!  Oh I love my fibs!   :yahoo:

Oh, if only I'd been around to point out that SWOR is being developed in regardless of SWG. It could have stopped the stupid.

Or that WAR40K is probably going to come out despite WAR.

Or which development studio would want to work with GW if they pull the license at the first sign of problems, 30 days post launch.

You can't stop the stupid.  That is why it is stupid.

I just had no reason to do it.. if you are on a high pop server you can do Scenarios all the time.. its what my friends and I do because we do not really like mindlessly killing mobs without reason.  Granted it is much quicker on the Order side of things as the pops are much more consistent.  Queue starting at level 1 and go .. watch movie or football or whatever between pops.

Last night on Wurtbad in Tier2 there was constant RvR including keep sieges while I was on (Dwarf area)... and between that I did scenarios that have around 5 min pops at most.. so RvR.. then scenarios and repeat. 


To the clown that insults my math skills because I do not keep count of all of my toons including ones I delete (maybe I should keep a nice excel sheet for you or write an Access database and give you OBDC link to my companies SQL Server where I will host it .. I have deleted some alts and even played a couple on my wife's account when my slots were full... I have tried nearly every class (haven't played Black Orc or White Lion (I hate pet classes but played Squig as it is amusing to run around as a squig) and played them until 10 or so to see what they are all about.  So I guess somewhere around 18 not including any that I played on my wife's account besides my 2 26 sorcs. 

Ahh! Too many parentheticals! Help!

 :grin:

Then just say that, there's nothing wrong with not being interested in PVE, but you can't just dismiss all it's problems because you are (only) level 26 and haven't been affected by them as yet.  Talking about countless alts when they are lower levels doesn't help either.

How's realm rank compare to your level when advancing purely by pvp for leveling up?  Did your realm rank stay capped most of the time?

If you are on a high pop server doing Tiers 1 and 2 for a paring that attracts attention, you are less likely to run into a lot of the major problem WAR faces: a massive world that feels empty of players. Empty world means no RvR, no PQs.

Given that large number of servers WAR has, they aren't all high pop servers. So a lot of players are experiencing the same empty world problem.

I even stated in a post above that population is the issue.. not the content.. its a PvP game anyway.. why PVE in a PVP game..its like EQ PvP..what the hell is the point?  If you want PVE there are countless games that have vastly superior PVE (WoW, EQ1, EQ2 hell even crappy games like Vanguard have amazing PVE if you can deal with the bugs.  The whole issue is population and you can always reroll on another server.. I work 40+ hours a week, married and play sports 3 nights during the week and Sunday mornings and I can get to mid 20's in a couple weeks easy.  Being bound to a server is your issue not the games.. .everyone who plays has the option to reroll to a higher pop server as the grind in this game is just as fast as AoCs and much less than true PVE based MMOs such as EQ where you were lucky to hit max level in months.

The population problems are due to the fact that the design is in direct conflict with itself.  You need high population in order to support the PvE game.  In RvR the high population surpasses the capacity of the engine due to doubling the numbers of toons on the screen at any given time.  The scale of the RvR areas does a bit to minimize clustering of players, but now you create expanses so large that travel becomes a concern.  Small areas create latency issues and large areas produce travel issues.  It's like a dog chasing its tail.  

Except it's not. The only difference between warhammer and eq/wow is that you have battlegrounds in which you can level and tiny portions of your huge pve zones where you can play back and forth in exchanging keeps.

PVP endgame? what pvp endgame? Once you unlock a capital city it's all back to pve, in fact in warhammer pvp just becomes the cockblock to the pve endgame.  Now is warhammers pvp meaningful? well of course but it's meaningful insofar as to get you to the endgame pve content.

This is exactly what people were doing in beta, kidding themselves. You're levelling up to your mid-twenties doing nothing but scenario's and RvR, great for you! Have you wondered after your 200th tor anroc match though, if maybe there's not as much pvp content as you thought? Oh and good luck in 10 level where the best pvp gear comes from pve.

Mythic made a pve game with meaningful pvp but i wouldn't say for a second warhammer is a pvp game considering the pvp content that they designed is maybe 25% of the gameworld.

The bolded portion should be carved into the forehead of someone at Mythic.  Well and a number of other MMORPGs as well.

I have discovered a new definition of what went wrong:

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/liveevents/2008WitchingNight.php

Also, because of the special nature of these Public Quests and the rewards that players can earn by participating in them, the quests will reset less frequently than you might be used to. Expect a few hours to pass after a Witching Night Public Quest is completed before you'll be able to try it again.

I have no problem with public quests in RvR zones, but why delay them?  What is Mythic afraid of?

I think they see how brilliant an idea it was in EQ to have players wait hours and even days between encounters.  It made the players feel special!

What's to get? Seems right in line with the recent "cockblock" edition ruleset.

On the other hand, you could look at it as a change mandated by PQ failure and diminishing server populations - in order to funnel enough players into the event to make it viable, they need to make it happen less frequently.

What's wrong with just letting them repeat the encounter while they have a critical mass present?  I mean, why is letting the players have fun such a bad thing to these people?

How can you possibly say that content isn't the issue when you:
1.) Haven't leveled past 26
2.) Spend ALL your time in game doing the same exact scenarios over, and over, and over again. How can that be fun?

One could argue that if you want instanced PvP, why play Warhammer? I'm pretty sure WoW's instanced BGs are at least bigger and more unique than the same small Warhammer ones. And it's not like the instances in this game even have a point. The only reason to do them is to get the most renown and experience. Thats it. Nobody really cares that much about objectives, or teamwork, or having fun. It's all about checking to see if spending the 15 minutes (or less) netted you a lot of renown and experience and once you start getting raped by 5 BWs after you get magnet'd or fetched you'll realize that everyone talking about how the endgame blows ass is actually right.

And another thing, telling people to reroll on another server is the dumbest advice I've seen. News flash buddy, some of us playing don't need to reroll new T1 and T2 characters non-stop all day like you do. Some of us like to stick with a character, level them up, and experience the 'end game'. Telling me to reroll my 33 shaman because I don't like my server? Eat shit. There is no fucking way in hell I'm grinding all those quests, PQ stages, and dog-shit-taco scenarios over and over and over to get where I'm at now just so I can play on a more populated server. And for what? So the same scenarios I hated the first 100 times I did them can pop more frequently on a new server? Yippe.

So what is the fix?  Smaller servers or more powerful comps?  PVE, while most folks here don't seem to like it, does provide a fun "venue", if you will.

1) A better game engine?  WoW doesn't seize up like WAR does in small scale.  It's downright crippling when you get a higher number on screen. 

2) Reduce the grind to 40.  The trip to 40 isn't what will retain players, it's what they get to do at 40 that will.

3) You choose: smaller RvR area or insta travel to the hot combat zones. 

4) Class balance.  Fix chaos vs order disparity.  Fix or remove magus abilities.

5) Itemization needs attention yesterday. 

Or in order to keep people from maxing their influence quickly, since the rewards for the witching event are listed as epic influence items.  While half of me thinks it's because they want people to fight in the rvr zone while waiting for the pq to start, the other half says they just want to string it out as long as possible.

Then quit and stop bitching.  I am sure when I get to T4 it will be fine because I waited for the curve to catch up ..( just like in any release (WoW, EQ1, EQ2, L2, Vanguard... the ones that outleveled everyone are the ones bitching and moaning.. you would think people would learn after a while instead of doing the same thing in every game and then bitching like 12 year old spoiled brats) .. imagine that... waiting for the average players to catch up.. what a crazy concept.  I have no idea why you play this game as you just like to bitch and you apparently have not liked any of it up to this point...

The whole point of playing these games is to... OMG HAVE FUN .. if your not having fun... hit cancel and get on with your life lol.

Also if you would read above there is RvR in this game and that is t1 to t3... its all about server populations.. maybe wait and bitch more about how you hate the game (since you pretty much summed the entire game up in your 12 year old rant) until after the server xfers.. games been out for a whopping what... 6 weeks?  Damn you fuckers are spoiled these days... back in the day EQ was a disaster and no one bitched like you kids do.

I will never understand this Order vs. Destruction disparity.. I enjoy both sides personally.

Which is what a large portion of people who bought war did/are doing. Thanks for playing.

Motherfucker, the title of this particular thread is WHAT WENT WRONG.

LALALALALALALALALA *Fingers in ears*

"You are ALL just playing it wrong".

Then quit and stop bitching.  I am sure when I get to T4 it will be fine because I waited for the curve to catch up ..( just like in any release (WoW, EQ1, EQ2, L2, Vanguard... the ones that outleveled everyone are the ones bitching and moaning.. you would think people would learn after a while instead of doing the same thing in every game and then bitching like 12 year old spoiled brats) .. imagine that... waiting for the average players to catch up.. what a crazy concept.  I have no idea why you play this game as you just like to bitch and you apparently have not liked any of it up to this point...

The whole point of playing these games is to... OMG HAVE FUN .. if your not having fun... hit cancel and get on with your life lol.

Also if you would read above there is RvR in this game and that is t1 to t3... its all about server populations.. maybe wait and bitch more about how you hate the game (since you pretty much summed the entire game up in your 12 year old rant) until after the server xfers.. games been out for a whopping what... 6 weeks?  Damn you fuckers are spoiled these days... back in the day EQ was a disaster and no one bitched like you kids do.
[/quote]

a game which endgame wasn't fun 4 weeks ago won't be fun 4 months later.

So far in this thread , Korrowan is a database admin to prove he's smarter than anyone , married and playing sports 4 nights/days out the week to prove he's super busy and still leveling fine and at the same time more macho than anyone else

Next step , is either he's a ninja or maybe just a black belt that teaches homeless kids karate

Yep that is it.. my whole point is .. leveling in this game is super easy... thats it.  Time invested in comparison to other games is NIL.

The fun factor is not determined by the difficulty of leveling.

Classic EQ was hard as fuck, but it was fun.

WAR is easy as fuck, but mostly not fun.

I've never felt more like I was playing a Korean MMO in an American game than WAR.

When I started on Ulthuan, it was a high population server. It still felt empty.

But yes, under the right conditions - that you play under the right period of time in the day, on the right side, on the right server, in the right Tier, on the right class - I'm sure you can have a great experience. As for all the people who didn't do this because they bought at launch when such things aren't clearly defined, it is obviously their fault and they should be lucky that Mythic lets them start again on another server.

Also, at six weeks out, there really shouldn't be so many people going, "I had fun up to Tier 3, but then it sucked". People appear to have burned out in the free month. While Jacobs is right in that MMOs are a marathon, not a sprint, the start counts for a lot.

Finally: you said you've got 2 lvl 26 sorcs. Any particular reason you got to lvl 26 with the same class twice, then stopped?

Just because the game doesn't require a massive time investment, doesn't mean it's not hard to level.  Currently, one has to be able to bring oneself to play the exact same mini-game 750 times to get out of a tier, or run 2500 brainless, unscripted PvE quests (not to mention there aren't even that many, but hey).  That makes the game boring, forcing oneself to play a game when it's boring is hard.  Something we play as entertainment or a hobby should not be boring, ever.

You shouldn't 'feel the grind', there should be a smooth progression which funnels you via quests, PvP and other in game mechanics towards your next level.  That's the problem - you start feeling the grind the minute you hit 21ish or so, and you're not running Tor Anroc for the 687th time because you want to play that map, you're doing it so you can level up and be done with it.

One of the biggest things I miss from DAoC:

Running around the world, exploring, and finding mobs that are weak to your damage type, who you're resistant to, and who are abundent, give decent faction, and drop decent items.

That shit was cool.

Or how about playing with a friend and saying "Lets go into so and so dungeon, the mobs in there give real good dungeon-bonus experience and drop some pretty sweet items, plus, there is a lot of them and I have a quest to go in there for a kick-ass weapon!  And if we get some loot nobody can use I can just salvage it to help get my weaponskill up so I can make myself a badass new weapon! Also, the mobs are werewolf monsters so they're weak to fire and they give a nice faction bonus for so and so mobs, who give pretty good quests once they're neutral"

I mean shit, yeah, you're grinding mobs more than WAR, but fuck, that shit was fun and exciting. You did that for awhile with your bro, then your realm gets darkness falls and you and your friend go into there and hang out on the steps with all the 50s and shit, and you all (lowbies and high-levels) make a push down and wipe the defending force, getting some nice RPs and having fun. Then, you're rewarded with the DF so you and your bro kill some mobs getting seals for pretty good leveling armor.

Thinking about that now makes me smile and also pisses me off. It was so fun, exciting, and unique. It worked so well and I just get so pisses off that Mythic didn't do something similar with Warhammer. Fuck.

I don't think it's as simple as that. If the PQ were to play out like other PQs, then it would do exactly that- play out like other PQs.

You go it, you repeat it, get your elite reward, leave. Chances are, you never come back unless a friend really really wants you to. Recipe for failure. We know because this is what we're already seeing.

IF they set the restart times to something like every 30-60 minutes, I think they'll be on to something here. With Keep and BO warfare in between respawn times, something that I would have finished in 25 minutes (and left) is now something that I'm enjoying possibly for several hours.

WoW figured it out that leaving these things open on a 24 hour basis makes it less fun for everyone. The current design supports me flying by, grabbing my nodes/grinding my influence, and leaving. It's a funnel in and and funnel out. What they're proposing is a funnel in and something to make me want to stay in.

Edit:
DAMN YOU MYTHIC

Too many nested and unclosed parentheticals.

Hope he's not a coder.

By the gods this is like watching a soap opera - with new people!

Just wanted to chime in with some information on levels in (MMO)RPG's...

Not many people know this, but ArenaNet (specifically Mike O'B, as I remember) really wanted to ditch levels altogether for Guild Wars. The premise was that leveling was just a block for actually playing the game, and early-mid alpha a few of the builds tried had levels and xp completely removed.

It didn't work - without such a basic metric for character progression, a lot of players got freaked out. Perhaps that's a bit strong - there was a vibe of something missing from the game, but you couldn't put your finger on it. I think it had to do with certain RPG expectations as much as anything else - but then I look at games like Call of Duty and BF2, where there is also a level progression alongside the standard game - instead of just allowing people to unlock whatever they want, they need to work towards it.

As you guys know, GW ended up allowing people to create max-level characters for play as a solution, while still giving people the option of levelling up normally. It does make me wonder though whether it's players as much as developers who 'refuse' to embrace new ideas...

This is a really good point - players often say they want innovation and new things, then run away screaming back to the safety of sequel-land and known IPs when they appear.

Play experiences become genres because there's always a business opportunity to offer an improvement on success.

Even closer to home is how you get WoW sucking in even so many veteran MMO players. It's EQ1 on easymode and is a success because it's an improvement on the familiar.

I took a lot of heat rounds from certain Arenanet devs and the PVE community for trying to push that issue hard in GW alpha/beta and early retail. When GW launched even the veterans needed 650 hours of solid PVE to get to the end game to have access to all the skills and gear to create 1 solid PVP character. Prior to release we were all thinking we'd have to invest about 40 hours in character development, and IMHO that's still acceptable.

By the time GW released PVP characters and unlocks though, most of the quality PVP community had moved on to other games. What was left was a Diablo II type player and type of guild. I have no doubt those who still play and win their championships know how to play the game, but unfortunately there's virtually no worthwhile PVP community to attract or retain quality players. GW is just a prettier version of the Diablo/battlenet community, and maybe their next game will show some improvements.

Ah. Sadly, I had to duck out before the game launched - I enjoy alpha tests for a few reasons, but you'd need to pay me well to get me to beta test a game. I had assumed that most of the template mechanic had carried to retail, though, from what I saw of GW post-launch. Shame that it didn't.

For me the concept of Guild Wars worked, but the loot lost me.  I guess that shows I'm more of a DiabloII fan than anything else.  I was hoping for D2 with quality PvP ... I don't want to craft my stuff!   :oh_i_see:

Quality PvP with Diablo like loot is probably not possible.  Almost certainly not to the quality that Guild Wars has.

I think that a line has to be drawn during the development process with games.  Either you decide that the game is about loot and progression (a la WoW) or that the game is about skill and player versus player interaction.  Mixing the two into some sort of bastard hybrid seems to be where games run into trouble.  Trying to find the magic combination that appeals to many usually results in a combination that appeals to few.  It's like pickles and strawberries.  I love them both, just not together. 

I don't think it's that simple, it's all about not minding twinking and fotm classes. 

AC1 had a near perfect loot system, the WAR system is a bad copy of WoW, the WoW system has never appealed to me.  If I'm level 9 in WAR and I get a purple sword, that's nice but useless to me at level 40. 

In AC1 it was possible to get good, even excellent, items from low level mobs thanks to the random nature of abilities and damage range.  The bell curve nature of character/skill and level advancement tied to a random loot system, meant that sometimes you would discover an item that actually made you consider rerolling just to use it.  Supporting alt characters maintains the health of your game, AC1 did it with the loot system and fotm classes, WoW does it with all sorts of exp speed ups.  WAR actively discourages alt play because of the grind and the importance of other players being in your level range.

I agree that I grossly oversimplified things.  I just think there comes a fundamental point in game design where you decide what the target audience is for your game.  It's similar to the movie industry.  You don't make an action flick to appeal to people that enjoy dialogue-rich coming of age films.  If you want to target the achiever mentality, then build a core game with that in mind as the primary focus.  If you wish to appeal to the pvp crowd, appeal to that audience.  Trying to be everything to everyone is where many games fall flat.  They will inevitably piss off all factions in the process.

One thing I have noticed is MJ has decided to not post any more at all anywhere , since about the armor grind announcement

No more MTV blog interviews of "look at us in six weeks" stuff , no VN lovefests of we love you MJ , nadda

He decide he had done enough damage and toned himself down , or someone higher up at EA decided to tell him to keep quiet ?

Actually, didn't he say he was going on vacation? 

Maybe he reread his comments on why AoC failed and decided that he should just shut up and produce a good game before becoming an expert on the failure of others.  

Just a guess.

No one is a fan of being told they're wrong, but it counts 900x so when it's a lead designer. Now imagine if thousands of people are telling you you're wrong.

No doubt he's angrier than hell and pissed off that his baby isn't doing that well. He may keep getting some new players just because the box is on the shelf, but it's an ignorance is bliss case. At this point, he needs to figure out how to snap his fingers and MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. /shrug, doesn't really matter though, MMOGs don't really get second chances.

http://www.eve-online.com/


 :why_so_serious:

EQ2 and EvE did recover... but you're generally correct.  

I'd really like to see Mark turn the ship around.  I want this game to succeed... but am losing hope.

EQ2 and Eve are the ONLY examples. To be fair, Eve didn't really "recover" so much as it had the slowest ramp up in the history of MMORPGs - but it seems they're hellbent on destroying that due to Iceland shitting the bed. Also, Eve appeals to a subset NO other RPG appeals to. And it would seem that the population for such an RPG is apparently 200-300k worldwide.

EQ2 had people that cared, but more than that, they didn't really "turn it around," they just made it successful. It's still not any sort of goto game for new players or anything like that. Hartsman and Co did a great job getting rid of all the problems that came with the original launch, and good for them, unfortunately, even in terms of Massive Success, it was an inevitable failure. Like I said, no second chances. Eve and EQ2 realized they never got a first chance.

But that's mostly spin. I know exactly what you're saying and I've used the argument before. It just seems that Mark just doesn't give a fuck, which is strange, because he has a company at steak. That ship just ain't sailing.

If I remember my Micheal Ray Richardson correctly, I think the quote is "The ship be sinking."

That's not really fair.  Eve has all sorts of issues that limit it's population besides it's world pvp model.  Eve done better would certainly get more subs.  Not sure how many, and probably a very small % compared to the diku portion of the pie, but bigger than 300k at least.


It could just be fatigue.  If Mark is on vacation, perhaps when he gets back he will be willing to make some necessary changes instead of 'baby steps'.  Or the company is just sitting in 2002 'you have time, people will grind for 6 months' mode.  However, this is really strange considering AoC's massive population drop was staring them right in the face, proving, hey, guess what, it's not 2002 anymore.

In the end though, what's even more likely is that ego is getting in the way of things.  I don't mean this as an insult, I believe it's just human nature.  As a poker player, you constantly see people applying failing strategies over and over again because they are so personally invested in the correctness of their strategy.  They believe they are winning players.  Sometimes it takes going broke 3 or 4 times before they hit 'rock bottom' and admit things are going wrong.  I think this applies best to the situation at hand.  The 'baby step' argument is something that assumes their current model is great and just needs tweaks.  This is the sign of a long commitment to their game...working on it for years, the designers hashing out these various systems and believing, truly, that what they have will work.

The biggest problem in this case is that finding an unbiased source of information about what is going wrong is really tough.  And finding the correct type of gameplay to focus on is going to have to be a biased decision.

Eve done better would probably not have the inaccessible appeal that keeps morons out or have the certain strangeness required to appeal to mathspergers/armchair economist types. In other words, it wouldn't be Eve done better, it would be Eve done stupid. Eve is a singular thing and will set it's own glass ceiling, or at least they're hoping it's made of glass. At this point it doesn't matter if they keep trying to appeal to tiny subsets of their playerbase.

Technically, AO also recovered, but I'm not sure if their max players around Shadowlands compared to launch is significant enough to count because I can't remember what their peak was before they shot themselves in the foot repeatedly.  But they did manage to bounce back for a while at least.

Perhaps you're right about that.  Perhaps not.  Honestly, the more I think about it, working in the Eve model is probably kind of like a fractal...change a small bit of your base design and you could have massive repercussions in the end.  Very hard to guess what will happen when players are your content, your systems of gameplay enabling them.  Point is, who knows?  

Maybe I'm wrong about that.  Maybe player-based content and player-system interaction are easy to predict.  Right now I'm think otherwise though, and I would at least argue that we don't have enough data points to make a conclusion.

That's a big derail, so I'm going to be crazy and try to relate it to the discussion at hand.  Eve was not very predictable at first, but at this point has balanced out.  It still relies on player zeitgeist, metagame forum warrioring, etc, and I think none of us would be shocked to see Eve all of the sudden lose half of their population due simply to their model.  WoW is extremely predictable, probably more predictable in what exactly the players will do than any MMORPG out there before it, and this sort of predictability allowed the designer to make the perfect skinner box.  WoW is never going to lose tons of players quickly unless they really fuck up.

WAR has a problem because WoW has the whole predictable MMO gameplay thing thoroughly owned.  Ex-WoW players probably aren't looking for the same amount of predictability.  So WAR went with a hybrid between player-based content, (although ala DAOC not EVE) and WoW solo-ease (scenarios and WoW PvE questing).  But the player-as-content model can then crumble in horrific fashion if the systems are off.  Especially in WAR when you are trying to balance between half-assed WoW rip off game play and this player-based model.  In WAR, there is clearly a problem of incentive and player conditioning.  If your content is based on player interaction, you simply don't have the time to wait and see if you are a developer, If your system fails it can fail catastrophically.  When the players have the option between solo gameplay and a terrible inter-player experience, which will they pick?  And when your solo gameplay isn't nearly as good as WoW's, your players are grinding instead of having fun, and grinding to what exactly?

WAR incentivization failures seem mind-bogglingly obvious, but at the same time, it would have been extremely difficult to hybridize and balance the predictable WoW model and the unpredictable player-interaction based model in the first place.  

I'm pretty sure the EVE newbie experience is keeping enough mathspergers out to at least double the playerbase.

I know for a fact we'd have more people in the f13 EVE non-retard gang if it weren't for the large numbers of people here who are still mentally scarred after trying it at a point when Bat Country wasn't able to lavish isk, advice, and pew pew on new players.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15037.0

If Warhammer can stay above 200k subscribers, fix the core issues we've all beat to death here, keep getting some positive press, and get an xpack out the door it can still get a good second wind. Yes its one chance to get a million subs quickly and be the next WoW money hat machine didn't happen, but it can still pull itself out of a ditch.

Now if Mark doesn't improve RVR by making it more rewarding with gear and exp, reduce the number of RVR lakes, fix itemization, use the transfer service to fix population imbalances, etc then yeah this game will be pushing Ultima Online numbers within a year.

To me its the baby steps that show they see a problem but give us a half ass solution that piss me off worse than anything. Since 1.04 went in we have captured our zones, queued like the newsletter said, Destruction won't defend/que, and we still can't flip the fucking zone. Its beyond insane.

I'm starting to wonder if WAR can recover with the current engine.  It's one thing to do a gameplay alteration, but they're stuck with the engine.  An engine that can't seem to cope with largescale warfare. 

Clearly the beta didn't work.  For something as complex as the interactions in WAR are they should have had a real beta with people playing the real game.  Not set up situations.  The psychology involved in why people do things is very complex, and you are right-  a small switch here or there can really screw up things and then your first impression goes down the shitter. 

The reason WOW is predictable?  Intermittent and unpredictable rewards.  You don't know if you are going to get that drop.......and then it doesn't come this time.  But it will next time, right?  Wrong.  Well, maybe the time after that.

This is what gets gamblers hooked. 

We are looking for something different in WAR, and it truly is different.  They underestimated the psychology of why people will do mass/open PVP.  Maybe it is rewards, maybe not, but in the end there has to be a "hook" and it has to be fun long term.  I don't think they can get there with it without massive and sweeping changes in the way ORvR works, and not just changing the reward structure.

The engine shits me. Random crashes, visual glitches, massive synchronisation problems. The second most irritating thing is the way it tends to skip spell effects when you cannot see the source of the spell - but this pales in comparison to the problems caused (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtpSyhDgjYs) by WAR's buggy collision detection.

Annnnyway...

While I don't know if WAR can ever truly recover, I do think it has a lot riding on its 1.1 patch. My personal belief is that EA was losing money, and needed sales before its quarterly report. WAR had to release, and my guess is that a lot of final work didn't quite make it in - I *think* that the 1.1 changes will be pretty big, judging by MJ's comments scattered around the internet. There is mention that elements are being recoded for this, but... I don't know. I guess I just want this to succeed, and my hope and naïvety are blinding me to way things are probably headed.

But then, being Australian, I have a vested interest in WAR succeeding, because it could help make Oceanic servers a reality for future games, too.


Anyway, at the least, there needs to be some sort of communication as to what's down the track.

Werd. 

Echo what's been said here. Game needs to consolidate players. I wouldn't mind seeing server merges -- even if it meant the occasional login queue on a weekend night.

Compared to the first couple of weeks, when players were everywhere and all the systems -- PQs, oRvR and Scenarios -- were all viable choices. Now the population is simply spread too thin -- it is spread out across servers, across tiers, across scenarios/PQs/RvR Lakes.

It's also possible people could be suffering mild burnout. I know I binged on WAR and played way too many hours for my own good during the first month. I'm feeling a little of the post-binge/burnout "blahs".

When WOW was relased, WOW had massive server crashes, queues that lasted hours long before you could even log in, and a whole shit load more problems than WAR ever had. And they responded a lot slower than the devs at WAR do to problems.

It's a new game, so there are bound to be problems. But do you like the concept of the game, do you like open rvr?

I don't know how any of you could possibly go back to WOW. If you do, you're just looking for a completely different game than I am. F*** WOW pvp, it's not fun. We've been doing the same 4 crappy battlegrounds for years now. They are still meaningless and with cross servers BGs, even the players are meaningless, you're just a number, a one-serving friend, never to be seen again.

You know what? I can name you at least 10 destruction players on my server and I recognize most playes names now. That's what makes the game fun, the rivalries, known enemies, being a known person yourself. Meaningful wins and loses (if they ever fix zone control). That's what makes games fun.

But do whatever, it's your time. I know I'm going to give WAR a chance. I'll be really disappointed if they don't make the game more fun in the next month or two, but I am going to give them that time to adjust.

I'd love to give WAR a chance.  I'm just not going to pay them $15 a month while they get their act together.  After 10+ years with MMO's I'm just not willing to pay to play yet another MMO beta. 

Fuck man, have you really been playing computer games that long?

Yes, have you? If you can remember back, the first 3 months of WOW were horrible in so many ways. Each patch day there was almost no point in even trying to login, it would just be one server crash after another.

WAR is so close to getting it right. They need to act fast but if they do, their playerbase will continue to grow. But they need open rvr to work.

I think they can get it right, I hope so anyway. Going back to WOW is not an option. I can't believe people are not bored of raiding already.

this thread needs more green.  Fish green.

Shit , you can't expect him or many of us to remember back THAT far

In my case, I blame the early onset of senility.

I quit war.

I'm playing WoW for the first time since 3 months after release.

WAR was good enough to revive the DIKU bug within me, but certainly not good enough to keep that bug fed.


Let me know when they merge all of the open rvr servers into a single one, because that's the population density that is required in order for this game to actually be fun. When that happens it'll be worth revisiting.

Technical stability does not a good game make. There are so many design flaws in WAR at the moment, you can easily consider it Open Beta. Nay, Alpha. Compare that to WoW, which had a lot of server problems at the start (actually a couple of months after the start, when their subscription numbers skyrocketed), yet had their game perfectly designed. And they had their endgame in place - even if at that stage it meant gearing up to do UBRS.

I just.. these forums are awesome.

Seen this argument so many times. WoW had server stability problems largely because they massively underestimated the popularity of the game, it had been perfectly stable during the large scale beta. This was a time when 400k online was the juggernaut and not even the WoW developers really expected that much more than that. They were wrong, but justifiably wrong.

I think open RvR will always be scuppered by population imbalance and ultimately repetitive. I've seen nothing in War to convince me this is not the case.

I think a small number of well balanced battlegrounds focuses players... Since they're probably going to funnel themselves into what is perceived as the best battlegrounds anyway. No point in a game investing a lot of development effort in dead space.

Cross server battlegrounds mean that smaller population servers can still get regular battleground instances starting which is good design they should have had in at launch. Personal ties to fellow players are much better formed in a PvE environment or amongst frequent allies, which is generally friends or guild.

Keep ranting though, watching fanboys in denial is one of my innocent pleasures.

Thars gold in them thar hills son.

Yeah, but when WoW released the impression was that of a complete thought-out game that was just getting buried under an order of magnitude more players than anyone could have expected. The systems in WAR are inscrutable to the observer and the developers appear to be scrambling to deal with basic design issues.

EQ II never recovered. The game is better but they are still below the number of servers they launched with. I don't consider EVE such a game either since it was so under the radar to begin with. Even though it was supposedly a very crappy game/launch in the beginning it was more like the old-school EQ-model where it started small and grew.

AO is the only game I can think of that people knew about, was horrible at the beginning, but managed to improve things enough that they picked up a decent number of subs before falling back down again.

You are kinda overblowing the problems WOW had. Believe it or not, and yes I am a stud, but I was there too. Some queues, some loot lag problems, some servers were fucked. I was still extremely hooked. Can the same be said for most people one month into WAR?

Guess they shoulda beta tested the thing before launching it.

No it wasn't perfectly stable in open beta. Things like loot lag in beta meant they knew their backend infrastructure was insufficient to handle the load even back then and it just got worse when it launched. But they had to launch when they did cause Vivendi said so, so they didn't have time to get in all the extra hardware they were going to throw at the problem until months after the launch.

Fully deserving of  :awesome_for_real:

 

Hey Geldon, how you been?

As an Australian, I also appreciated the Oceanic servers on launch. But I watched them empty pretty quickly too.

They should have probably postponed the game a few months (until after WoTLK  :awesome_for_real:) and worked out the itemization and RvR issues, while also finishing the four missing classes.

I think that would have been better.

Probably.  But as mentioned above, this is EA we are talking about.  EA has been a slave to their quarterly results for years now, and they had to push the game out to meet their Earnings per Share targets.   EA just isn't set up do deal with the long term process that is required to launch a successfull MMORPG. 

My guild has over 300 members tonight 9 were online at peak Euro time.  I'm starting to get AC2 flashbacks.

Are you sure that is a good thing ?

 :awesome_for_real: :rimshot:  :awesome_for_real:

Random, but the problems WoW had early on were just plain much better problems to have. The perception that your game is so packed with people who want to play it that nobody else can fit is infinitely superior from a PR perspective than the perception that your game is ill-designed and underpopulated.

We started with around 100 members. Pretty active. Usually even 15+ on in major off hours. Currently we are lucky to have 2 online, and after removing all the people who havent logged in in 3 weeks, we have 30 members left.

I thought that when Mythic mirrored some servers early on so that there was no / little queuing they could be making a mistake. Retroactively it would have been better to see if that level of demand continued and to point out that queuing meant WAR was popular and full of people. Now, with a lot of servers empty (or feeling empty, thanks to Mythic's world / game design) those extra servers have gone to waste and are just going to add to the embarrassment when servers start closing.

That server capacity was increased on top of adding extra servers is another situation where I wonder if Mythic's right hand knows what its left hand is doing. Queues on launch? Tell the players server capacity will be increased in 2 weeks since the game is really popular which will fix a lot of problems with queues.

Come on now, Ironclaw and Darklands are hardly empty.

On the original subject of what went wrong ...

Any problem that was in DAoC and is now fixed in DAoC, but is now in WAR, indicates that nothing was learned or knowledge was not transferred from one team to the other.  How can this happen?

The design philosophy of WAR seems to be not to improve on past games, but throw in everything from WoW to DAOC haphazardly, say WAR is everywhere (but really all they mean is you can level from battlegrounds) add PQs and call it a day (or a few years).

There's never been a game better than WAR to point out the fact that you need to focus on doing one thing well, and not try to be everything to everyone.  WoW, even 4 years after release, is still only a carebear diku/sport PvP game.  And the sport PvP was added long after launch.  Extremely simple in scope, but extremely effective in delivery. 

One nice thing about WAR, is that if they focus on improving one section of the game extensively, it actually might end up quite good, with some balance and variety thrown in for good measure.  That is going to have to take a while, unfortunately.

I could easily seeing myself playing a PvE version of WAR that takes the PQ concept and expands it to the whole game.  In fact, I wouldn't be suprised if this isn't the next WoW expansion.

I am by far more hooked on War than I was at WoW at the beginning.  My group of friends server transferred to Monolith and we are having tons of fun in RvR and Scenarios with the medium / medium + pops .. even a queue on Saturday night... IMO server population is all that is wrong with this game... granted the PQ helped get people into the RvR lakes.. but it was crazy fun and we had keep siege and were juggling keeps for hours and hours... maybe that will help spur and make people realize RvR is fun!

RvR is fun at first.  Do you think the RvR that you're doing now will still be fun in 6 months?

In its current state, it just doesn't have the hook or the depth to remain fun for the long haul.  Hell... I'll bet that most people don't even understand the goal of pvp in WAR (which is another serious error in implementation).  If your players don't even know the point of what they're doing, you've done something pretty seriously wrong.

Rose colored glasses. I still remember having to get free time from Blizzard because Wow was nearly unplayable with its issues at launch. I also remember furious fights on the forums about "this game wasn't ready, it needed more beta testing!" And "can Blizzard fix the game before it's too late?"

The IP saved WOW. I'm sorry but it did. The game was well designed in most ways but they made serious mistakes that nearly cost them everything in the launch. I played the game for about a year and a half but I almost didn't make it past launch because the game was in such bad shape.

It depended a lot on what server you were on.  Some servers were hammered hard early on, but the one I played on didn't have very many problems.  Still got the free time, though!  :grin:

I'm probably just regurgitating stuff people have said before, but heres my two cents:

- Three "XP" bars to fill.
This is the first thing that jumped at me as I logged in... wtf? Isn't one enough to start with?

- Tome of Silliness
Was it supposed to be useful? I couldn't find any information on anything I needed in there, just some silly titles and statistics.

- Open Party/PQs
The PQs worked a few times for me, when we got enough people together, but what prevented this from being exceptional is that there is NO incentive, bar grinding from gear, to do these PQs. Sure I don't read EVERYTHING, but I have nothing invested in this quest except some extra XP bar. And noone chats... EVER

- Bland Gameplay
The classes felt somewhat unique, but it was just Tank-DPS-Heal setup (basically). Essentially all classes boiled down into: "Use A,B and C to fill X with Y to be able to use Z, W or Q". No mana bar just means: SPAM AWAY! I seldom had to carefully think how I should layer my skills, just spam spam spam. (I didn't try ALL the classes, but got a WP to 10 and a Black Orc to 11), aswell as minor testing with other classes.

- Jerky and floaty
The game didn't feel finished at all. The animation is terrible, characters float around and don't seem solid at all. It might be the netcode or just people with "Three start ability and FIVE STAR DRIVE!!!! :drill: ".

- Horrid and Bland Art
Yes, it looks.... GRAY AND BROWN. And animation is so deeply entrenched in the uncanny valley that I never ever want to go there again.

In short; this game wasn't really up to scratch, much like AoC, and deserved somewhat to fail.

Even though, in many ways, they tried to innovate, they didn't really pull the right punches, and the Core of their game was simply to broken or to weak.

I hope they get more fleshed out in six months time, when it would be fun to take another look at them.

Seems to me that there is a huge difference in the development approach to pve and pvp titles.  Pve are all about content and AI.  PvP are far more concerned with mechanics and performance. 

You could strip WAR down to an open battlefield and interesting player classes with solid combat mechanics and the game would still be fun.  My real issue with the game was that they spent such a large amount of their time/budget on content and missed the boat on mechanics/performance.  Had they streamlined mechanics, classes, population balance, and pvp incentives, the subscriber base would have forgiven a lack of pvp and world content.  Contraction is a much harder goal than expansion and this is being clearly illustrated. 

Quite possibly the worst review of WH I have ever seen, did you even play the game?   Your comparison of WH to AOC which was a massive dismal failure isnt even close to a usable comparison.  Please stick to your day job, although based on this review you probably dont do very well either. 

Have you played the Witching Night PQs?  Because that is basically what the PQ was-  an open battlefield.

it wasn't fun.

I have had some fun with the WNPQ, but it suffers population problems that everything else does.  Still no reason for the losing team to stick around. In fact it continues the best defense: leave and deny the enemy rp/kills.

Yeah, but my god man.  Is that what the end game is?  Really? 

There is absolutely no skill involved with this and it turns into the biggest grindfest ever, particularly with the diminishing rr and XP rewards with recently killed people.

Ya, the victory point system is completely broken.  If they are going to make it work, they need to get a professional mathematician in there to help.  It is crucial yet they don't have a clue.

You know, this will sound weird, but I think part of the problem is that so many damned things are linked together in this game.  All of this is supposed to spit out VPs or whatever, but nobody has any clue how it works.  I don't even think Mythic fully knows due to the complexity. 

Anyway, now that WH PQ is done it is back to gank and spank.  Yee haw.

In theory, skill will come from organizing zergs and enforcing tactical positiong for maximum advantage.

In practice, the vast majority will go "fuck this, lets zerg".

They needed solid mechanics and a really good game underlying their PvP play. Everything else would have been gravy - the PvE content a bonus.

Sadly, it seems they've tried to split their attention, do everything, and succeed at nothing. The PvP often strikes me as overwhelmingly mediocre - occasionally you can see flashes of brilliance, but they're buried under piles of shit.

As a result, what should be the most important part of the game often feels clunky and aimless...

One thing I wasn't as worried about before was the city siege, as that was supposed to be the ultimate carrot for working hard to control the other faction's city.  But from what I've heard about Volkmar Order's lockdown of Inevitable City, it sounds like there are some serious flaws in the way it was implemented.

It took a dedicated alliance of Order most of two days just to get to the point of being able to lock down IC, which included controlling every T3 and T4 zone, having groups constantly in PQ's and in scenarios and defending keeps all over the place  Furthermore, the way the content works is that when the zone before the fortress falls, you have one hour to take it.  And then, all the steps after that are timed for directly afterwards---6 hours to do PQ's to lock down the city---2 hours to finish two difficult PQ's (which apparently have huge gear checks built into them)---and surely some after that, though this group didn't get that far.  Which means that if you want to take a city you had better be prepared to both grind PQ's as well as stick with it for a long number of hours.

It just sounds grueling in a way that doesn't sound fun--not just because of the gear check, but because of the time limits built in that don't allow people to take breaks. 

i already discovered how to win as destro. but nobody would listen.

Have all the rank 35 and above chosens in the server gather together within 30 ft of each other. Have them equip the following tactics: Dire Shielding, Baneful Shielding and Focused offense. Turn on the Discordant Fluctuation Aura. When you see a zerg, turn on Baneshield. Stand still and watch the BW kill themselves with detonate.

I believe that the biggest thing that hits me as I continue to play is that this game is not sufficiently different from WoW for them to have learned or tried to refine so few things.  They refined the finding a group mechanic, they added the que from anywhere scenario and the developed the PQ idea.  Just about everything else though seems to be a growth out of even older games.  Games that WoW has already stolen from and refined.  I look at the WotLK focus on raid wide things and I wonder why Warhammer does not have a similar focus.  Everything out there is telling you to get into a warband and yet, once you are in it you are still just a group within a larger group that you can't really affect with your abilities.

I remember I went to this restaurant and the line was wrapped around the building three times, and I said to my date, this wait is totally unacceptable when I could walk into McDonald's and eat in five minutes, I bet this restaurant is doomed.

Incorrect. Neither I nor any of my friends really cared about warcraft past WC2. We played EQ1, and the comparison, especially to Gates of Discord-Era EQ, even with WoW's launch instability was much more flattering to WoW than to EQ.

I think the only people who say Warcraft's launch was worse are people who weren't there or are filled with Warcraft-hate.

I don't even play the game anymore but I know first hand it wasn't as bad as people say. Even if it was, I still wanted to login every day and don't remember any problems except for loot lag.  Well, I also didn't pick one of those crash daily high population servers either.

I've played on Earthen Ring since launch.  Highest population RP server, major problems all around.  The fact is, it was nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.  Sure, there were nights (even a 36 hour period) where the server was down.  Blizzard compensated us more often than not, and sure, I was often bummed to not be able to play my game.  But it really wasn't as bad as some make it out to be. 

MJ keeps saying they chose the better option of opening too many servers to avoid queues , he acts like queues to login are the worst possible thing that could happen ,

Yes , its far better to be allowed to immediately login to a barren wasteland and realize there's not a damn thing to do

So far , post launch , MJ and Mythic are approaching , maybe even surpassing , Funcom level stupidity as far as post launch decisions/comments  go

Which I just didnt think possible , I thought for sure they would have learned lessons from recent past mistakes of other companies

But , yeah , just wait , as Mythic says , in a year look at them because they'll be HUGE then , after all , mmorpg gamers today are so forgiving and flock to a game a year after launch

Actually, when I looked at the numbers for MMO subscriptions (yeah, yeah - SirBruce, but where else you going to go?)  is that there is a bump about 3 to 6 months after launch. By that point all the early people have blew through it and decided to stay or not, the community has stabilised somewhat and new people are checking out things once most of the launch bugs have been ironed out.

But after that point, it is generally a slow decline.

I play on Volkmar. I didn't do the invasion, as it put me in a queue for IC, which still hadn't popped 30 mins later, so binned it. However - I was listening to others in my guild do it on vent - apparently contribution from the PQs was purely on when you zoned in. In other words, first person in placed 1st for contribution until then left, second placed second etc. People were listing their contribution rankings, and they were moving up steadily as people left.

Awesome.

It's about 3-6 months in that everyone decides they need a buffbot/pet healer/cyno alt/relic keep spy/whatever.

Some games keep growing (EVE, EQ), most don't.

  You guys are both turkeys.  Wait until you see the sub numbers explode once players start filling in Tier 5:

   http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=187723

   http://realmwar.warhammeronline.com/realmwar/CharacterInfo.war?id=62058&server=229

Utter, utter lack of testing pvp really is beginning to shine through. At least with DAoC they had the excuse that they were new to the genre, but at this point it's embarrassing that they pass off a bunch of pve-centric skills in a pvp setting. For better or worse the massive number of classes in DAoC diluted skills enough that you didn't have anything ridiculous. WHO though? You have a bunch of completely ridiculous setups that becomes extremely obvious that no one actually tried pvp'ing in beta for any length of time. I'm just sort of twiddling my thumbs waiting for the game to finish imploding -- I guess WoW will do it this week.

3 gold bag change for keeps turned destro warband into trading caps with Order.

There is now zero incentive to defend.  :grin:

Clearly Mythic have everything under control.

That dude beat the game.  :grin:

Level 41 dude takes 1st in a keep siege by pecking doors for 1 damage, dying repeatedly.

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=188631

This sums up the game perfectly.

He pulls 6th place... as a chicken.

You can't make that shit up.

6th place I could see. Bonuses could get you there. But first place? Har.

I linked it elsewhere, but players suspect a bug that sees the loot order for keeps awarded in reverse contribution order. So the less you contribute, the better your chance of getting a gold bag.

There's maybe a bug but it's not a simple reverse order thing.  I did 6 keeps last night, did slightly more damage each time and moved up the rankings before the dice roll each time to finally finish 3rd.

They really try hard to copy that crap, called open PvP system, from WoW. More and more it appears to me, that the glorious RvR system in DAoC wasn't developed on purpose...it just happened through accident.
Or they do still feel, that the WoW players do need to have all the fucked up WoW mechanics as well in WAR.

Don't forget the bonus for NOT getting loot the last time, i think its +100 each time you participate, and get no loot. Get no loot 5 times, and you automatically have 500 before contribution.

Um, Six different keeps...

That bonus doesn't actually occur with keep sieges.

More Mythic shit-ass programming exposed:
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=190135

Basically, your contribution for taking a keep is already determined as soon as you zone. Jawesome!

Highly unlikely that's the case. Much more likely is the random roll when the objective is taken "overwhelms" whatever other calculations they are doing to determine the final ranking value. People don't understand statistics well enough to realize that with large enough populations highly unlikely events become likely. So even though it sounds highly unlikely that a single person would randomly roll well twice in a row, given enough people or enough opportunities it *will* happen.

To give a more practical example of how this works look at state lotteries. The odds that you or I will win the lottery *twice* is incredibly small. And yet every few years somebody will in fact win it twice. That's because a large enough population of people play it regularly that almost certainly *somebody* in that pool will win it twice within a given timeframe.

Did you check the screenshots that have been posted on that thread?

Same people, same warband, two different keeps in the same zone, same people on the top 10 contribution EXCEPT for the one guy that relogged. Didn't matter what either of the people 'did' during the keep takes, they their contribution was already determined.

It's broken and has nothing to do with what you do during a keep. I noticed it on about 6~ keep takes tonight. What I and a friend did didn't matter, it was always the same for every keep in the zone.

Christ, one keep I zoned in, ran to the keep, noticed both doors were down, made it to get on the keep lord ramp when the lord died and got +200 contribution. The next keep in the zone I did nothing again and got +200 again.

Order wasn't exactly the same though. If all of them (not including the adds) were in the exact same order both times I might buy into the theory but even then that's not proof. Some of the ordering could be contribution related while others are strictly based on a really really good roll.

If they had, say, 3 people who did nothing that all placed 1,2,3 two or more times in a row then I would start to believe something other than a random roll for each capture (plus their contribution) was in effect.

They are saying the ordering is adjusted by new players leaving or entering the zone. Would that account for the discrepancy?

No cause Eiak, Zeta, Fluxx and Mesail and Arxtar are in different relative orders.

Just looking at the common list of players you get:

First reward table
1. Gomez
2. Setsu
3. Fingol
4. Eiak
5. Zetx
6. Masail
7. Fluxx
8. Arxtar

Second reward table
1. Gomez
2. Setsu
3. Fingol
4. Zetx
5. Fluxx
6. Eiak
7. Masail
8. Arxtar

The first 3 are actually in the same order both times but Gomez was the only one not doing anything at the second keep so Setsu and Fingol may have been 2nd and 3rd simply cause their non-random part of their contribution was the same relative ranking as the first keep and their random rolls (if they in fact are rolled each time) wasn't enough to switch that order.

If Setsu and Fingol also didn't do anything in the second keep, then I would be suspicious.

Interesting Blizzard interview (http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/11/13/interview_jeff_kaplan/)


I checked my old WoW account, I thought I had played it for about six months, turns out it was ten.  Never thought I'd be tempted to play WoW again, but now after only 2 months in WAR, it's very weird that I'm actually considering it.

It's also strange that Blizzard can see potential for improvements in some of the best features of WAR, while Mythic is dicking about with class balance and new classes while trying to add even more grind.

No it's not. We're a forum of unpaid amateurs and we see the potential for improvement.

The only people that don't are at Mythic, really. I'm sure every major (and maybe minor) game dev studio in the world is like "Wow, now that, that right there, that's a train wreck." I know of at least 3 or 4 that are in fact doing that.

They probably do see things they could improve it's just they have more pressing things to fix first.

I don't agree with whatever list they have of what's most important. 

Class balance for example, they intend nerfing melee classes & healers, when people are already showing signs of being reluctant to log in, nobody likes nerfs.  That's exactly what they did in AC2.

Scenarios, fixing the queuing system to make more than one pop at each tier should have been a top priority, while boosting the other scenarios to reward similar exp/realm points for time taken to play so people don't mind being forced out of the most rewarding ones.

Just minor shit that annoys me, ignore me I'm just venting.

Scenarios
Serpents Passage
Why do I have to jump off the boat?  We've been stuck on that island for weeks now, put a bloody ram down, how about spawning me facing the down ramp just so I don't have to turn around and then change direction to avoid that rope thing.
Grovod Caverns
Put a longer tunnel in and get rid of the spawn barrier, its annoying, clicking it sometimes does nothing.  While we are on the subject, which idiot decided it would be fun to put a trench under the spawn barrier?  Also what's up with those little steps you get stuck on all over the place?  Is having to jump over annoying 4 inch ledges meant to be fun?

Key binding
Is it really that difficult to group the key bindings into sections instead of one big ass list that you have to scroll through?
Get rid of the annoying "respawning" box on death, it means you can't change key bindings while waiting to respawn.

Quests
Why have I completed over 1000 quests?   I actually got an achievement unlock for it.  I've had to do about 40 of the chapters out of 66 just to level up, how many quests did you think I would need?  How about you up the exp value for quests so I'll actually consider rolling an alt.  Do you know it's depressing to arrive at a new area and see 10 new quest givers?  Also boring, I should have been able to level up purely in my own pairing.  Is it any surprise that people don't read quest text, 1000 quests, really, sometimes less is more, I think I read 4.

From what I've seen they like to do the "easy" stuff first (stuff that can be done in a relatively short amount of time) and postpone the "hard" stuff (stuff that takes a comparatively long time) till later. Unfortunately their list of easy stuff is apparently so long they haven't gotten around to the hard stuff yet.

So, I gave up and went back to WoW.  I was struck by how WoW just works.  No little annoying bugs.

Getting stuck on some piece of geography requires something really bizarre, like finding the narrow slot that lets me in behind some piece of terrain that is clearly supposed to be wall decoration instead of a fence you are walking by out in the middle of a plain and decide to try to jump over just because its a game and jumping fences is what you do. 

If I am in a party and I want to know where Bob is, I can click on him and get a mouse over of his location instead of a "Bob's too far away to be targeted" or I can open the map and see Bob's little blip anywhere on Azeroth or even another planet.  For that matter, I can tell what Bob is by his unit frame instead of having to guess what those tiny buff icons mean.

Getting things out of the mail are a couple of easy clicks without any waiting.  I can actually mouse anywhere over a buff on a player, enemy player or NPC and see what it does instead of hoping that my pointer found the sweet spot and my mouse did not move a fraction of a centimeter. 

I can target moving PCs and NPCs with a single click instead of clicking repeatedly and hoping. 

Starting the game is a 20-30 second process instead of 2-3 minutes.  Ending the game is nearly instantaneous, 5-10 seconds from "Exit Game" to desktop.  No pointless 20 seconds to logout process.

I believe one of the biggest problems Warhammer faced is the fact that so many little things just don't work or work right.

I did find myself missing three Warhammer mechanics that did just work.  Que anywhere for a scenario is really, really nice and it needs to be in WoW.  Short scenarios that have a guaranteed 15 minute time limit have really ruined me for hour plus Warsongs.  Complete aside, I do like the fact that no one really explodes in Warhammer.  I took my brand new, well geared Deathknight into a BG and no kidding, I routinely died in 5 seconds max if I got focused by two or more people.  The last thing I miss is the quest map.  That is really excellent and only let me down once or twice.

Edit - One additional thing they did right.  Lvl 11 in Scenarios.  For a very brief moment, everyone gets the opportunity to be a god on the battlefield.  No gearing necessary really, just be level 11 and you are an unstopable force in the T1 scenario.  And the thing is that everyone gets this brief experience.  Not just the hardcore or the dedicated, everyone.  There is really something to be said for that.  I think you can make a good argument that that brief experience carried many people for a longer time that makes any sense trying to recapture it.

Uninstalling it today - look at the addons I used just to make the game playable:

Mouse button targeting fix:  Select a target in PvP upon pressing down on the mouse button, not upon releasing the mouse button.  I will never understand how Mythic got this backwards.
LoyalPet:  To fix my stupid broken pet.
BuffThrottle:  Stops my computer from exploding due to Mythic's default buff updating method.
Join All Scenarios:  Join all scenarios with one button, instead of scrolling and joining them all individually.
Join Selected Scenarios:  After Mythic added a way to join all scenarios, I needed a way to skip Tor Anroc/Basin but join the rest with one button.  Crazy talk, I know.
WindowCleaner:  Removed the 9800 buffs under my health bar which would cover up my pet's health bar.  Hides the unhideable group buffs.  Makes pancakes.
AutoDismount:  Click on an ability to dismount.  You know, how things should work by default.
AutoLoot:  One-click auto looting at release.  Groundbreaking concept.  Also helps fix looting after random patches break it.
Preciousss:  Compare jewelry items all at once.  How is this not in the game.
*I think Squared should be on here, but non-healers can skip it although it is better than the default group/warband layout.

I will not repeat the problems this game has that everyone but Mythic seems to clearly understand.  Leaving a game with great potential is hard to do, but that decision is made easier when a company repeatedly ignores its problems and refuses to correct course.  I won't be back.

Now I shall take the $15 I had set aside for a second month and rescue the economy with it.

The most amusing current hope/blind faith/delusion I see on the various boards at this moment is

"Just wait till Xmas , lots are going to be getting it and the population will explode then"

Yes , I'm sure gamers from 10-60 have WAR on the top of their Xmas list and that the servers will magically fill up Dec 25th