f13.net

This quote Mark had to rattle off on his retort on the MTV blog will come back to bite him I believe , bad

"“Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we’re not adding servers, we’re not doing well.”"


So what will the spin be on this , or complete silence and avoidance on it

At least they aren't merging servers.  :why_so_serious:

As I said in the other thread... offer "transfers".  It paints a less desperate picture. 

What I am curious about is would they consider letting the servers people transfer off of stay online for 5 more months just to avoid anyone bringing this up

It would be interesting to see 10 servers up with 100 or so people on them total

You don't need to wait 5 months to see that. Someone page Falc.

It's no joke.  I logged into Ulthuan and Bat Country today around noon.  I was the only BC member and I was one of roughly 40 people on Order.  Granted, noon isn't primetime.  But 40 people? 

Merges are necessary for the month three population to thrive.  Christ, we may come back from seeing WotLK only to find the game entirely empty. 

You can go kiss blizzard ass with their fucking sucky expansion seriously :o

I must be the only person on this fucking board enjoying WAR or something.
If all of you just want to see it fail, why the fuck do you play? Go play Wow already and go grind like fuck

don't think anyone wants it to fail
Mythic just went after the WOW(no offense to anyone) crowd and should have gone after the ex-WOW crowd and just not worried much PVE and made RVR the focus of the game as they claimed they would
it just seems RVR was an afterthought to the game

This is quite an ironic statement considering the leveling curve is much friendlier in WoW than it is in WAR.

And seriously, some people may want it to fail, but other people are venting and/or noting problems they think the game has. If someone sees potential in a game, but sees that it has problems would you rather they just pretend as if there's nothing wrong?

Did you ever raid end game in Wow? I'm speaking mostly about this fucking huge grind. Basically the whole game or if you prefer the "PvP" grind is valid as well

What bothers me is everyone just go "OMG!!! Mythic suck hahahah" and don't suggest anything constructive other than sarcastic crap

Well, honestly, most of it is pretty straightforward.  Shortening the grind is not a problem which requires a ten-thousand word dissertation on how to delete some zeros from a table.  More complex problems have had solutions put forward here, but really, what's the point?  Mythic isn't trawling the boards looking for great new ideas that their team of professional game designers somehow missed.

Like Cecil points out, don't make the mistake that everyone who bitches here hates the game.  I love it; I play it every night and have a ton of fun.  That doesn't mean I don't notice a number of things I'd like to see changed, though.  There just isn't as much to say about the stuff that's working.  Gold spam, for example, has been cut way down, and they aren't doing those big "By the glory of Tzeentch, the nefarious thief 'Adsadaflop' hath been strung up by his jibblies" pop-ups anymore.  But what really can you say about that?  It's not really something that's going to generate any real discussion.

Nope, I never raided nor had the desire to.  I just like leveling, doing professions, and doing the occasional five-mans.  If you want the bleeding edge content, then I understand how you might feel "forced" into raiding, but I never felt that way.  I just enjoyed the ride to 60 (or now 70), piddled around, and then created a new character to have a new experience.

And if you don't like gear grinds, I hope you don't want to participate in king encounters in WAR, because as it stands now it sounds just as onerous as the gearing process of MC to BWL ever was.

Burn the Heretic! 

The mid game in WAR is a damn grind. The end-game is a greater grind due to the apparent requirements for getting armour sets to get more armour sets to finally get armour sets that let you survive in the end-game areas i.e. hostile cities.

Scenarios, especially T3 and T4, have been indicated as a massive PvP grind of doing them over and over and over until you level because it is still the most time efficient way of character progression.

There is a tonne of constructive things in these threads, including the stuff said directly to Mark Jacobs when he posted. The hilarity is that whatever appears to be the most sensible path to improve the game, Mythic appears to have no idea about what their players want and how they behave, so go and do something completely different.

Next up, you can talk a bit more about how much WoW suck hahahaha, talk about how WAR is awesome, insult some people as being WoW lovers and then disappear in a sentence that doesn't end in a full stop

But they've already added (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=278) new servers! (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=297)

I'll be sure to follow your posts as examples of mature and constructive posts ,

Now let me know when you get about 36-40 and realize the grind for RvR ranks in WAR is worse than any grind in WoW , and then the armor grind for hoping to get a piece in a random roll gets stacked on top of it

I've suggested in other places as many others have also things they need to do , this thread was about what a bad idea it was for MJ to go on record with statements like that , it backed him into a corner that may lead to further problems with the game

I still play hoping for the small chance they realize the drastic changes they need to do to make Tier4 actually fun , (and 3 for that matter) , and lists of other problems

But of course the ,"if you dont like it go back to WoWZor" crowd like you infests the WAR and VN boards , and I didnt realize that was the more constructive way to post

Any MMO is going to have some form of "grind".  That is the "recipe for success" financially.  One person's grind may not be the same as the next person's, however.  It is all perception.  Some like raiding, I suppose.  I do not.  However, the premise is still there:  keep people hooked and they will continue to play................and pay.

Looking at the Bat Country experience in WAR, one of the biggest issues we had was how split up everyone was.  While I do think some of a grind is a sound investment strategy for a game, splitting a whole guild up across three tiers did exactly what you don't want to do:  It split the guild up entirely. 

It's too late to fix and retain their box subs, but future games could make sure their design lets all players play together at any time they wish, while making the 'grind' a different function that only minimally separates players.  For example, allowing players to get into the 35-40 game quickly (25-50 hours of gameplay) but making renown the true grind would have allowed for better player retention. 

Ideally, remake WAR by removing T1-T3 and instead of having levels 1-40, make it 1-10.  Or no levels at all... wacky, huh? 

I am positive that BC would have had more player interaction if we weren't all split up across levels. 

Although the game does have problems, and the populations on some servers are dismal, Bat Country is certainly not a good case study. After a month in WoW, Bat Country was dead, having been a guild of 100+ players and alts. The server Bat Country was on in WoW never dipped below high population and has been full for some time now. Bat Country failure tells you nothing about the game or the server.

But Ulthuan is fucked.

how bad is it? i quit ulthuan cause it's really not my time zone. i login and there's not much things to do on my own. I imagine it should be quite active during prime time right?

I stopped playing on ulthuan when bat country had 4-8 members on in prime time out of 100.  It's not good.

Skull Throne is much, much better population-wise, which instantly makes the game much, much better.

Ulthuan is pretty barren. The PVE areas in t3 (Talabecland anyway) is a ghost town. oRVR has been pretty barren as well most nights, with the exception of the Live Event last night, and 3 other times in a month. t3 scenarios are not popping, except for Tor Anroc. I've seen at most 5 BC players on at once in the last week. Mostly it's just me, Taz and Tronk at least that I've seen.

Sure, I give you that BC isn't ideal because of the nature of the guild (a guild comprised of people that bitch about video games isn't a recipe for success).  But we don't need to scientifically correlate these things to see that what happened in BC is happening to other guilds across all servers as well.  Simply read forums and anyone can see it.  All signs point to the cause being Mythic's inability to make successful, expedient changes faster than people are getting bored and leaving.  January is going to be ugly for subscriptions. 

January?  I think December will be the sharp decline.

December? I'm sure they've already got sharp decline NOW. At the very least, higher than average.

Some people are still hoping things will improve.  When they don't in November, people will flee back to WoW in droves for the expansion. That spike shows in December along with the non-renewal of the 3 month subs.

December might have its results skewed by Xmas to some extent. A little bit more free time, people buying gifts, let's see what has changed in WAR and take part in the Festival of the Pie, or something like that.

But I'm sure things aren't looking so rosy right now. AoC had 800k players that dropped to 415k, if I remember correctly. WAR has only announced 500k players to date...

If you go back and actually read some of these threads you will see tons and tons of constructive posts on what we feel would be viable ways to fix it. At this post, the forum has been invaded by idiots and there is no point any more.

I'm becoming pessimistic about WAR Christmas sales.  The buzz is out and it's not good buzz.  I'm going to bet that Christmas finds Best Buy shelves full of WAR and empty of the Lich king. 

People who will want or get this game may not be aware of the buzz.   I think the new classes are targeted as new stuff to directly compete with WoW and it will provide either a bump or less of a loss.  I believe we'll see more classes added to an existing pairing early next year to try and build a slow increase in subscribers.  We'll see.

The problem is that a game that launched in September is going to be competing with the assload of games that launched both this month and next month for gaming dollars.

Now, granted, the only significant PC releases aside from WoTLK are (as I remember) Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3, but the console games are going to take a chunk out of it as well.

With WoTLK and the obvious impact it will have on the playerbase plus all the "big" games coming out during the holiday season, I just don't see WAR having that great of a Christmas season as it is----

Unless, that is, the improvements that they make by December improve the game a lot.  That may help somewhat with retention and with word of mouth.

Did Warhammer Online really screw itself by being another gaming company that does not regulate Faction balance. Being so many more Destruction than Order?

Yeah, they probably underestimated the negative effect splitting the "tiers" would have on the game. 

This, in and of itself, may be a "game killer" when it comes to interaction.

There's less then 2 weeks before the guts of the game are torn out.  :-P

With the craptastic quarter Electronic Arts just put up I suspect that Mythic got a nice gun to the head to release early cause EA needed the box sales. Without WAR box sales they would have had some god aweful numbers. This explains a lot to me like the cutting of the class's, cities, and the still beta verison of the game we are currently playing. EA has the touch of death when it comes to MMO's. I believe Mythic needed and would have taken 3 more months of time to get this game ready for release given an option.  MJ would never admit this of course even if he wanted to cause he would get fired.



 

Well, I'm still pretty much having fun with WAR but to tell the truth, it's mostly in scenarios, and unfortunately, it's all Nordenwatch so far. I rerolled on Skull Throne (Destro - Rhuwynne - Sorc) based on the mention above and so far, RvR and PQ's seem about the same as the other servers I've rolled on (i.e. non-existent). Scenario time isn't bad I guess (I still have yet to see what Gates of Ecklund is like) and it's fun in a UT sort of way. But I can see it growing old if I'm continually behind the level curve and have few people to play with outside the scenarios. I saw one general chat shout last night that probably sums up the general audience's reaction to WAR: "This is gay. I'm going back to WoW.".  Without the RvR, WAR isn't much better than any number of free but mindless KMMOs out there. The creature A.I. is non-existent. I can pretty much attack a mob group and pick them off one by one. Apparently when your buddy gets smacked with a bolt of chaotic energy it's just all part of a standard day and you stand there munching your sandwich and swigging your coffee waiting for your turn to get smacked by a bolt of chaotic energy. The PvE world has no life or believability to it at all. So far WAR is doing almost nothing right in grabbing and holding the newbie. The only thing playable is their updated version of Legends of Might and Magic and that gets old. My advice on scenarios would be to have a rotating exp or loot bonus amongst the scenarios so that the monkeys click on something other than what ever the tier favorite is. Nordenwatch is fine the first 500 times, but that 501st time... Actually, I'm close to hitting T2 so I'll soon get to see whatever the community favorite is there. And I got one of the Halloween masks during one of the Nordens so I guess I can't complain too much.

Azazel is so dead in T4 RVR that we have started up a Destruction component on Skull Throne because its the only server where Order is Strong, and has a Destruction element willing to fight. Its sad but strategic server clustering or full out mergers are the only way to create the populations needed, and then they've got to make RVR worth it.

For some reason the player mass seems to be stuck in T3 and doing a lot of rerolling.  If they ever get their ass to T4 is should be fun.  I have been playing Fallout ect. while waiting for them.  Server merges would do this game some good.  Everything in this game hinges on getting a critical mass of players together.  When that happens it is great, it is constantly failing to happen.

Almost like there was some sort of cock blocking grind  :oh_i_see:

Or maybe T1&2 RVR is better than T3/T4 where you get instagibbed by magnet+AOE and RDPS/AOE in general, and in T1/2 you can play any class and feel like you're contributing.

Maybe anyways, I wouldn't know I just said fuck it I'm not making an alt and unsubbed.   :grin:

I think the decision to decrease levelling speed just before release hurt the game more than anything else.  They did exactly the same thing at DAoC's release, even narrowed the exp range for grouping then. 

I like the Warhammer IP but this PVE grind is intensely boring.

Yeah I remember that. On Merlin there were several level 50's and the largest bulk of competitive guilds had people in their 30's when Mythic did that. The result was that it was very hard to defend our relics for the first 3 months, and it was only due to the level difference.

I have looked at a lot of server discussion boards, and there does seem to be some merit to the statement that people are rerolling T1-T2 alts instead of dealing with the T3/T4 grind.

Things Mythic should notice:

1) T1 is fun.  Capture that for the entirety of the 1-40 trip.

2) If you're boosting players to level 8 for PvP, then there's no point to having a level 1-7.  This game could be simplified to 12 levels (3 levels per tier).  Giving players 40 levels to grind through when they are essentially only 12 different levels in scenarios means that the other levels are in place to serve as nothing but a roadblock.

3) Fix the endgame fast.  If players are rolling alts to have fun, then the fun you meant them to have at the end of the treadmill isn't. 

4) I still content that giving players their abilities based on xp is moronic.  Abilities and skill tree points shoudl be awarded with reknown rank.  It adds the kind of incentive to pvp that players want.  See: DAoC.  How long would DAoC have lasted with no rp incentive like it had at release?

Actually, that brings it almost more in line with CoD4.  WAR is already almost there given the scenarios as is.  And with more FPS games going with leveling type schemes coming up, I'm wondering if WAR is really mostly just a dinosaur at this point.  Levels are more feeling like they were a mistake in WAR now that I've hit the wall.

QFT and that is the problem. Its WoWLite, not the next big thing we all thought it was going to be. Its just kind of a flashier and slightly more fun alternative. Nothing ground breaking yet. I hope they just scrap their ORVR and PQ builds for something more streamlined. As is both just work to spread out the player base instead of uniting them to an objective.

Just yesterday, like I am sure many folks here, I went to a friends house for Thanksgiving. The topic is almost always MMOs when we get together. We watched the fanfest videos from Eve, chatted about other games, etc... the main sticking point to WAR was 'it's lame, I went back to WoW, everything in WAR I can do in WoW to some extent so why bother?'. Sure we had one guy defending WAR to the hilt, but we just ignored him and talked about Eve mostly.

EA pushed Mythic to get it out of the door. Marketing sucked. There are classes in the opening movie that aren't even in the game, Slayer anyone? Mythic released minus an Order tank, a DE tank, an Order mdps, and another Orc class. Despite what people think, that hurt. Mythic cut major cities that people were really wanting to see. Servers are a clusterfuck. Seven different iterations of transfers? Holy fuck... I have never seen something that bad. I didnt play Vanguard, I didnt play AoC so I heard they were bad, but cant speak first hand on it.

Bottom line, the game might turn around, but it will be no where near what expectations thought it would be. Mark said he wanted a solid second place game, I doubt he makes it in the top 5 by the time it's all said and done. I have stopped bitching with people about it, I want to see numbers. I know their population has shit the bed hardcore, if I see yet another server transfer message I'm past the point of laughing about it, I just say "dear baby jeebus, that's sad" and forget about it.

One side note, the vitriolic nature of most of the Mythic fanbois is also leading many folks to find more and more reasons to hate WAR and pick away at them if for nothing else just to piss them off and watch them spin.

I've rolled 3 ALT's, and I haven't gotten a single one of them above level 15 via PVP only. I sit in T1 and T2 queues for 30+ minutes, get bored to death, and log out. I get on my level 40, crush Destruction, and get bored trying to lock zones when they won't come out to fight. All around Order, on my server, seems to really lack for T4 healers and it limits what can be done without a lot of pre-planning.

They've got to cluster servers, cluster scenarios, merge servers more, or cluster scenarios and merge servers to keep a critical mass of players. The slower PVP gets, the less people log on, the more bored everyone else gets, and the cycle just keeps going downward.

This game is getting blasted in the press, the blogs, the fansites, and going down the same exact path as AOC. Mythic better hope the 1.1 patch is a miracle patch to keep folks interested while they figure out how to merge servers.  If 1.1 doesn't radically change things, then the general buzz is that mass cancellations will soon follow.

I'm torn myself because I don't like giving games more than 90 days to get their shit straight, but I don't want to play WotlK and nothing else is on the market right now. Overall I am just disappointed in Mythic because they didn't learn anything from DAOC or if they did, they didn't apply it to Warhammer. With the game hurting this bad 6 weeks post release, imagine what its going to look like 6 months post release without a significant overhaul to PVP, PVE, and the other core issues.

So, does DAoC have more subs than WAR by now?

lol NEWSFLASH:  Darklands fortress crash within 5 mins.

No, DAOC has around 75k total active subs, if that... at peak they were around 250k. If DAOC releases Origins I bet WAR takes it's final shit... which is probably why they keep pushing it back or say nothing about it at all.

Darklands, Volkmar, everything is crashing when they push the Fortresses. Volkmar Order crashed when they had both gates down and everything reset on them.