WAR to be released...

[Draegan]

Throughout the game you gain Ranks and Renown Ranks.  Experience from quests, npcs etc go towards your rank, which allows you to move through the tiers.

Renown rank is experience you get from PVP objectives.  You level both throughout the game as you play it.  It's strictly based on you, so it's not a warlord grind where you're competing with others.

[Ingmar]

There's a significant difference, though, in that in a RVR/Realm Points model, your advancement comes from actually doing the thing you want to be doing in the first place.

Out of mild curiosity, when was the last time you played WoW?

I apologize if you know all this, but your statement leads me to believe you do not.  There are two types of gear in WoW now, stuff you get from PvPing and stuff you get from PvEing.  The stuff you get from PvPing is heavy in resilience and penetration, two stats that do nothing in PvE but help significantly in PvP.  The gear you get from PvE has no resilience (which you need to be good at PvP) and usually has stuff like +hit, which is fairly worthless in PvP (the cap in PvP is much lower than the cap in PvE).

So, your gear advancement in WoW comes from doing the thing that you use the gear for.  If you like PvP you can do nothing but PvP and get gear advancement that will help you in PvP much more than anything you can get in PvE.  If you like PvE you can do nothing but PvE and get gear that helps much more in PvE than anything you'll get from PvP.  

Last played, just last night actually.

If I want to go out and start playing in the arenas in WoW, I first have to grind my way through a bunch of battlegrounds I don't want to do in order to get my resilience to the point where I can be anything other than a 15 second lifespan and a bloody smear in the arena. (There's also the issue that for some classes, PVP honor farming is also the easiest path to good PVE gear. Notice all that awesome DPS plate and elemental mail and feral leather that drops in Kara? Oh rite. S2 weapons are also easily achieved and outperform anything you'll see in PVE for a long time for most classes.)

In a DAOC-like game, I just head out to the frontiers and join the zerg once I've got my starter gear, the end.

That latter approach has a lot to recommend it, and I wish PVP in WoW followed or at least included that model (we shall see if Lake Wintergrasp qualifies). I <3 WoW's PVE, it is the most fun I've ever had in an MMO PVE-wise, and I am still having fun and have no intention of leaving. PVP in WoW leaves me a little flat. There's nothing that really compares to a good DAOC-style keep siege, which is the thing I miss the most about that game. I am afraid they are making so many *other* mistakes in WAR (no plan for population imbalances, PVE sounds hella boring other than maybe PQs) that I won't be able to enjoy or stick with the game, but from all indications the PVP model is right on target.

[cevik]

Last played, just last night actually.

If I want to go out and start playing in the arenas in WoW, I first have to grind my way through a bunch of battlegrounds I don't want to do in order to get my resilience to the point where I can be anything other than a 15 second lifespan and a bloody smear in the arena. (There's also the issue that for some classes, PVP honor farming is also the easiest path to good PVE gear. Notice all that awesome DPS plate and elemental mail and feral leather that drops in Kara? Oh rite. S2 weapons are also easily achieved and outperform anything you'll see in PVE for a long time for most classes.)

In a DAOC-like game, I just head out to the frontiers and join the zerg once I've got my starter gear, the end.

And eventually WAR will have been around awhile and there will again be haves and have nots, and you'll need to do some gear/realm points/whatever grinding in WAR to even remotely compete.  Everyone is pretending that WAR is going to be an even playing field for forever when we all know it's not true.  At least I hope you guys are smart enough to know it's not true.

Point being that your original statement was that in WAR you'll do thing thing you enjoy doing to increase your power at the thing you enjoy doing, then when I pointed out that's how WoW worked you call it a battleground grind for WoW.  It'll be a renown grind in WAR just as well once WAR has been released for more than a day.

The only thing I can see that is different in WAR and WoW is that WAR doesn't have anything competitive like arenas in WoW, so instead of having all the asshats segregated to some area of the game where they aren't one shotting me I get to fight along side them every night.  That is until they get bored of one shotting everyone and quit because there is nothing competitive to do except log in and do the same zerg world pvp every single night. 

What is the compelling reason for someone to log into WAR?  The scoreboard?  Do we really think that's going to be anything more than a niche game?  Fuck there is no chance I'll ever get close to making it to a scoreboard, I'm just not one of the hardcore players that will be able to dedicate the time and energy to becoming ubar enough to score points.  I hardly see where the meta game scoreboard is going to keep people interested for very long, maybe a few guilds like SiN and the rest of the shit talking assholes, but that's hardly incentive for me to log on every night and play.

I guess I'm having a hard time understanding what's the hook, what's the draw?  If everyone is going to be basically the same every night for all time, what reason do I have to log in every night and PvP?  What do I get out of it?

[Ingmar]

Point being that your original statement was that in WAR you'll do thing thing you enjoy doing to increase your power at the thing you enjoy doing, then when I pointed out that's how WoW worked you call it a battleground grind for WoW.  It'll be a renown grind in WAR just as well once WAR has been released for more than a day.

If arenas is what I want to do, then I have to do something else to get there, was my point. If RVR is what I want to do, I'm SOL. But yes, if what you want to do is just play BGs, then you can advance the same way.

I guess I'm having a hard time understanding what's the hook, what's the draw?  If everyone is going to be basically the same every night for all time, what reason do I have to log in every night and PvP?  What do I get out of it?

If you don't enjoy playing the RvR metagame of fighting over keeps and territory and don't like zerging, probably nothing. Joy of competition and all that. It worked for a long time for DAOC. I don't expect WAR to massively improve on DAOC's numbers, 300k sounds about right given the increased size of the market these days. Once it gets a stable population, though, that population will last a long time. (Assuming that balance is reasonable and the game doesn't have some kind of massive technical failure at launch.)

[Simond]

And assuming EA isn't expecting a million subs.

[MahrinSkel]

I actually don't see any reason War couldn't do a million subs.  Remember that AOC moved nearly a million boxes, if they had better conversion rates they'd be over 500K (even if being a better game hadn't let them sell more).  Frankly, this looks very much like a repeat of history, with WoW/Blizzard taking the place of EQ1/Verant.  We've even got Funcom jumping the gun with a summer release that moves a lot of boxes but founders and retains barely enough to balance out investment costs.

Yes, I used to work for Mythic, but me and Mark haven't been each other's favorite people for years and I have no reason to carry his water.  The market has shown repeated signs of being ready for another million-player game in the US/EU, and what it's waiting for is a credible alternative to WoW.

--Dave

[Ingmar]

I actually don't see any reason War couldn't do a million subs.  Remember that AOC moved nearly a million boxes, if they had better conversion rates they'd be over 500K (even if being a better game hadn't let them sell more).  Frankly, this looks very much like a repeat of history, with WoW/Blizzard taking the place of EQ1/Verant.  We've even got Funcom jumping the gun with a summer release that moves a lot of boxes but founders and retains barely enough to balance out investment costs.

Yes, I used to work for Mythic, but me and Mark haven't been each other's favorite people for years and I have no reason to carry his water.  The market has shown repeated signs of being ready for another million-player game in the US/EU, and what it's waiting for is a credible alternative to WoW.

--Dave

By all indications this isn't credible competition from a PVE standpoint, and PVE is WoW's bread and butter, though. It could siphon off some of the PVP people certainly, but that's the same audience that Conan failed to hold. AoC looks like the ultimate loser in this deal if WAR succeeds.

[Abelian75]

Yeah, these subscriber estimates flying around here seem kinda lowball to me, at least on the moderately optimistic end.  I have a hard time believing this won't easily, easily be the second-place $15-dollar-a-month MMO, personally.  It's just soooo much more solid and content-rich than anything has been post-WoW.  It's not, like, "HOLY SHIT BEST GAME EVAR" level, but it's pretty damn solid.

Not saying that 300k isn't a possibility, but it only seems like a reasonable near-worst-case estimate to me.

And I mean, yeah, the PvE isn't incredible in the game, but it's still there, and there's lots of it.  I don't really feel like it's as utterly PvP-only as some people are making it out to be.  Clearly PvP is the central focus of the game, don't get me wrong, but the PvE is still pretty solid.

[Nebu]

The hook with WAR is the pvp.  WAR will live and die on its ability to draw uninitiated pve gamers into the pvp aspects of the game.  If it manages to do this, I believe that 500k + subs should be easily attainable.  Were I on the dev team, I'd be looking for every mechanic possible to draw pve gamers into the pvp experience of WAR.  It is very accessible and quite user-friendly relative to games of the past (SB, EvE, DAoC). 

[Kirth]

I've enjoyed WAR's pve.

[Khaldun]

The market has shown repeated signs of being ready for another million-player game in the US/EU, and what it's waiting for is a credible alternative to WoW.

--Dave

Key word: alternative.

I like Warhammer, but at best it's a mild variation on WoW. I dunno, maybe there's room for a Burger King alongside McDonalds (I like WoW, too: this is not a diss) but what I think the market is really hungry for is something completely different that has the same initial investment of resources as WoW. It will take both guts and market smarts for a big player to greenlight that, but if someone does, money hats could be in their future.

[mutantmagnet]

Fluff has always been good at making the existing sub base happy and content while they continue to enjoy the base game.  I do not expect fluff to out weigh the base game though.  If somebody finds your game unpleasant, no amount of player housing will keep them around, not on a macro scale.

If I'm dieing just as much this month as I was last month, I'm not going to be sedated by the promise of a glow stick that allows me to be killed just as easily.  Just now I'll die with FLAIR!

Games don't need rewards to have replay value. They just need to have that level of challenge and complexity that makes it fun to keep on learning the game. WAR's expansions could simply redesign how RvR works into a deeper game.

Guilds and groups could be given new items that allows them to manipulate terrain so they can build firebases from existing materials around them or set up traps or build trenches.

Naval warfare and mounted combat can be added in.

RvR could introduce targets of opportunity that are as valuable as keeps or battleground objectives that are constantly in motion instead of stationary like dragons, fell beasts or agents for powerful diseases.

New skills ranks could be given to players where the lower skill ranks only has AOEs affect friends or enemies specifically while the higher ranks affect both but use grapical effects that helps players learn how to manage their aoes so more friends than enemies gain benefits.

Still nothing Mythic said makes me believe they had this type of plan in mind so it's more likely they'll do what you think they are going to do in terms of rewarding players with gear. In fact they i mention gear of the highest quality compared to a scrub with trash gear will be at most 50% more powerful. The range of power between the average bulk of players shouldn't see no more than a 20%-30% power gap.


For the record I would like to say by 7 months after launch WAR will have over 1.6 million subs in NA and EU and may gain around 3.5 million subs in Asia after 7 months of their launch in that region.

[Slayerik]

Those are...bold numbers....but hey if you are right you can always link back and /flex

[Hawkbit]

It's a much better game than AoC and I think there's going to be a solid group of people from AoC that leave to see WAR and end up staying.  I honestly think Funcom might have a big problem on their hands in 3-6 months, to the point where they may not be able to sustain AoC as they are now.  400k sounds like a gross exageration for AoC. 

I also think the people who like WoW's BGs are likely going to go to WAR and not come back to WoW because they're treated like second class citizens by the way pvp is set up to accommodate Arenas in WoW. 

I'd expect 1 million boxes sold on WAR in the first 6 months, with a 500-750k retention.  Just a guess.  I honestly think there's enough to WAR that it's really going to occupy people's time.  I know it will with me. 

[Lakov_Sanite]

For the record I would like to say by 7 months after launch WAR will have over 1.6 million subs in NA and EU and may gain around 3.5 million subs in Asia after 7 months of their launch in that region.

You've got to be crazy to believe this.

 

Like everyone's said, it's just a more pvp-centric version of wow and I hate to dissapoint but there aren't that many people interested in a pvp game. If there were wow would have made a lot more of their content pvp oriented in the last few years.

Also one more rebuttal to the above, you can't separate battlegrounds and arenas in wow and then not separate pve dungeons and pve raiding it's the same basic concept. Saying you only want to do arenas and expect to be able to level and gear through that alone is like saying you like raid bosses and want to jump straight to them. Kind of missing the point. PVP is PVP and PVE is PVE.

[Hellinar]

I guess I'm having a hard time understanding what's the hook, what's the draw?  If everyone is going to be basically the same every night for all time, what reason do I have to log in every night and PvP?  What do I get out of it?

What does Mythic get out you logging in every night to PvP? The optimum player from a profit point of view is one who logs in maybe once a week, but keeps up their subscription. The model of constantly increasing gear drives that player away. They can’t keep up. A shallow achievement curve is much more attractive to the most profitable type of play. A casual player can log in and not feel like they are now completely outclassed.

From a profit point of view, losing the hardcore players is a benefit not a negative.

[UnSub]

I think, without ever having played the game, that WAR will probably shift around a million boxes at launch.

... but WotLK will shift around 4 million boxes without even having to wait for China.

After month 1, I think WAR could easily have around 800k players (server issues, customer service issues, acts of Chaos gods permitting).

When WotLK drops, that number could very easily halve, if not quarter.

One year after launch... over a million subs is very possible. So is just having 200k. It really depends what happens with further additions to WAR (extra classes, extra cities won't be enough based on what I've read), what happens with WoW and what happens with other MMOs.

The big losers at WAR's launch are more likely to be LOTRO and AoC than WoW (on a per capita basis).

[Musashi]

I think most of the people who would constitute the larger estimates we're seeing in this thread won't buy the game at launch due to the fact that they were all recently burned by AoC.

[UnSub]

I think most of the people who would constitute the larger estimates we're seeing in this thread won't buy the game at launch due to the fact that they were all recently burned by AoC.

If you are a MMO player, hope springs eternal.

I think a lot of people burned by AoC will have already written off that as Funcom's fault, but know that Mythic couldn't possibly steer them wrong.

[Hawkbit]

I think most of the people who would constitute the larger estimates we're seeing in this thread won't buy the game at launch due to the fact that they were all recently burned by AoC.

I don't know.  There's a different atmosphere surrounding WAR than there was for AoC.  

Before AoC's launch, most people only saw Tortage which was not even remotely a decent representation of what the actual game was like.  The NDA was lifted, what, the day of launch or something?  And even then the test center was still under NDA.  It was all so secretive.  Everyone was then waiting for the 'miracle' patch, of which never happened.  

With WAR, pretty much all the info is out there.  There's been people testing T4 gameplay for a long time, more than a year from what I hear.  All these people are talking about it a month before the game is launching.  There's no miracle patch to speak of, because the game is in damn good shape as it stands.  Sure, there's tweaking that needs to take place along with a couple helpings of class balance, but that will come in time.  

I say this as a person who bought AoC and felt burned, but know I'm going to be happy in WAR in just the little bit I played it.  It's simply a different feel of a game.

[Rasix]

Sure, there's tweaking that needs to take place along with a couple helpings of class balance, but that will come in time.   

This is what worries me probably the most.  I listened to my friends bitch for years about this in DAoC.  Their comments in WoW are mostly limited to "fucking rogues".  I suppose this may be easier for Mythic this time around with 2 realms and significant less CC to deal with.

[mutantmagnet]

For the record I would like to say by 7 months after launch WAR will have over 1.6 million subs in NA and EU and may gain around 3.5 million subs in Asia after 7 months of their launch in that region.

You've got to be crazy to believe this.

 

Like everyone's said, it's just a more pvp-centric version of wow and I hate to dissapoint but there aren't that many people interested in a pvp game. If there were wow would have made a lot more of their content pvp oriented in the last few years.

I have a lot I could say about this but I'll be curt.

WoW was never designed with pvp in mind and yet they still ended up trying to cater to pvp people to the point the game became split in half in terms of character progression and Blizzard went out of their way to try and shovel feed us WoW as an esport.
CoD4, Quake3, Unreal, NBA Jam, Starcraft are fine examples of good games where over a million western gamers played the game for atleast a year while trying to curbstomp each other. Big difference is that they don't have a subscription fee.
WAR's diversity in RvR, Scenarios and PQs seems like the right mix of elements to make subbing for a few months justifiable. Since WAR encourages grouping, social bonds will tighten among subscribers in that time frame and they'll get sucked into the game as long as they are collectively having fun.
In Asia, most of the biggest MMOs that I've heard of are games like Lineage and ZT Online where pvp is the driving force of player activity the higher you level up.
China's middle class continues to grow and the hype train in Asia for WAR has already been decent. WAR being a fresh game with overwhelming praise from the EU/NA launch and its similarity to WoW (from what I understand EA is specifically marketing to Asian players that WAR is essentially WoW 2.0 unlike Mythic out here who try their best to shed or ignore that comparison)
Lastly I was looking at the charts for WoW and DAOC and it's obvious that Dark Age would've grown far more than it did if TOA hadn't been released. The way their growth magically changed just a month prior to that expansion's release tells me that expansion was the most damaging mistake Mythic ever made.
For DAOC 2.0 to out perform WoW subs in Asia (as I assume will happen because WoW's only defining features over WAR is that it is PvE centric and has story/visual elements that are more culturally appealing) it has to beat almost 2 million subs in the same time period, so 3.5 million is being over optomistic but I'm willing to stick with that unneccessarily large projection. As long as 2 million is exceeded I'll be satisfied.   

[Tarami]

CoD4, Quake3, Unreal, NBA Jam, Starcraft are fine examples of good games where over a million western gamers played the game for atleast a year while trying to curbstomp each other. Big difference is that they don't have a subscription fee.

No, the big difference is that in all of those games you can theoretically (if you want - LAN, private server) play a match without getting curbstomped by totally unknown fucking people. If I play against my office colleagues I know I'm in for a pretty tight game as we all come from that kind of (competetive, multiplayer) games. The full game can be enjoyed with less than ten friends. I can pick and choose among opponents and find some bunch that challenges ME, not that happens to be the best and therefore show up everywhere and melt my face beyond my conception of "having fun".

In an MMO you're potentially always facing people that have played ten times as much as you have with no chance of avoiding them. Having a Lakerman or Fatality on every Quake 3 server would suck ass, but they'll be there in WAR. Why? Because it doesn't matter if you suck or not, you're still worth the same renown. In games without these artificial rewards better players go for fresh pastures (most really good players rarely turn up on the public servers) every once in a while, as the only lasting satisfaction is from beating continously better opponents. They don't revolve around poopsocking for a metapoint collection game.

WAR may do well on its own merits, but diku PvP is not shoot'em'up PvP and the only thing they really share is "killing other people".

[HRose]

After month 1, I think WAR could easily have around 800k players (server issues, customer service issues, acts of Chaos gods permitting).

Not even WoW had 800k in 1 month.

[mutantmagnet]

You're exagerrating the amount of times people meet uber players in MMOs over other games.

I play random frequently in SC and get curbstopmed a lot more than I win and I don't care too much because the game is fun and I learn. When fighting games and arcades were the shiznit in the mid 90s noone gave a damn they lost $5 in quarters to the same handful of guys with the +10 win streaks. Heck my first week of Planetside I encountered more scrubs who were worse than me far more frequently than should be possible consdering I just started back then.

Sure people don't like to lose and a game is more enjoyable whe both sides are more even but as long as a game's mechanics make the game fun and they get a occassional win, consistently losing is tolerable.

[Venkman]

At this point in the genre, you can get a million subs for people who want a credible PvP alternative to WoW with enough of them and a few more who find PvE just fine enough to support the PvP.

No MMO launching this year or next is going to have WoW's level of PvE endgame completeness, nor the built-in subscriber base that by sheer inertia and nostalgia alone will stick around through that endgame. Nah, when I consider a "viable alternative to WoW", I look at where WoW is weak, and where no other game is really all that strong as an alternative.

It's not like the masses that want some type of approachable PvP in WoW are going to SB or DAoC. Those were for the EQ1 player seeking PvP. To be an alternative to WoW is to be more like WoW but different in important ways. If AoC could be very different and still sell almost a million boxes, I'd guess WAR breaks that handily.

@Khaldun: you mentioned earlier that Blizzard waited on WotLK to let AoC run its course and will do so to see what happens with WAR. I really don't believe Blizzard thinks this way. Competition has proven to be largely irrelevant to them, so they'll launch when they launch. The Elephant in the room is the only elephant in the room.

And due to that, it requires everyone else launch not near a Blizzard game. I would reverse your thought and say that it was Funcom that a) needed to not be near WotLK and b) be sometime this year

[amiable]

For the "300,000" folks...  (notably Cevik).  There are over 800,000 folks signed up for Beta.  Are you suggesting significantly less than half of those people are going to buy this game?  Word of mouth so far has been pretty good (outside of hardcore MMORPG enthusiasts who quite frankly will never be satisified unless the game teabags them while they are playing).  It meets the "it it fun?" test in spades.

I think a half million boxes sold is the lower limit of how well this game is going to do at launch. 

[Trippy]

I'm not going to buy it.

[Dren]

For the "300,000" folks...  (notably Cevik).  There are over 800,000 folks signed up for Beta.  Are you suggesting significantly less than half of those people are going to buy this game?  Word of mouth so far has been pretty good (outside of hardcore MMORPG enthusiasts who quite frankly will never be satisified unless the game teabags them while they are playing).  It meets the "it it fun?" test in spades.

I think a half million boxes sold is the lower limit of how well this game is going to do at launch. 

Hey, all the luck in the world to them.  However, that entire statement looks exactly the same as what I heard about AoC.

[Draegan]

You can't compare WAR to AOC.  It's apples and oranges when you compare completeness, buggyness, state of the game, the way beta was run even QA departments.

I got a really fun month out of AOC, thats more than I can say about most other games.

WAR will do well.

[amiable]

Hey, all the luck in the world to them.  However, that entire statement looks exactly the same as what I heard about AoC.

And they sold over 700,000 boxes...

[cevik]

For the "300,000" folks...  (notably Cevik).  There are over 800,000 folks signed up for Beta.  Are you suggesting significantly less than half of those people are going to buy this game?  Word of mouth so far has been pretty good (outside of hardcore MMORPG enthusiasts who quite frankly will never be satisified unless the game teabags them while they are playing).  It meets the "it it fun?" test in spades.

I think a half million boxes sold is the lower limit of how well this game is going to do at launch. 

Signing up for beta is free and effortless.  I sign up for every beta ever.  Playing a mmog is neither free nor effortless.

Here's the rub.  The guild I'm in in WoW is pretty big (usually at least a couple of dozen people online).  I have a smaller subset of people that I raid with, but the guild is giant and full of random people that I don't know.  I haven't heard the word Warhammer mentioned in /g in weeks.  Now I fully expected that the pre-order CE guys wouldn't be online to talk about it when the servers were up, I know several people had talked about pre-ordering the box and were excited about the beta a month ago.  I even heard a few of them mention they were invited when the CE invites went out.  However, even when the CE servers shut down there wasn't a single bit of WAR buzz in /g.  Not one person showed up to the whole "where have you been?!"  "ohh I've been playing WAR and it rocks."  The guys that were talking about getting in the beta two weeks ago were all running heroics last night.

I know that is entirely anecdotal, but aside from here I'm just not seeing a lot of buzz, and even here it seems pretty neutral.  Most of what you see in this thread ranges from "it's boring" to "it's not that bad" to "it's not that bad with great PvP".  I just keep getting a feeling that a lot of people are out there saying "meh".

Of course, the nice thing about the discussion is that we will likely have verifiable proof in just a few weeks.

[fuser]

For the "300,000" folks...  (notably Cevik).  There are over 800,000 folks signed up for Beta.  Are you suggesting significantly less than half of those people are going to buy this game?  Word of mouth so far has been pretty good (outside of hardcore MMORPG enthusiasts who quite frankly will never be satisified unless the game teabags them while they are playing).  It meets the "it it fun?" test in spades.

I think a half million boxes sold is the lower limit of how well this game is going to do at launch. 

Signing up for beta is free and effortless.  I sign up for every beta ever.  Playing a mmog is neither free nor effortless.

That's the point the beta signup counter is going to be spammed by everyone and their dog. I'd say some better numbers are 60k CE sold, the preview weekend (50k of which are preorders besides the CE's) so that's 110k in north america alone without counting and PE's that missed the beta weekend cutoff etc.

Game will probably do 400k, the retention? Probably better then AoC's numbers...

[cevik]

That's the point the beta signup counter is going to be spammed by everyone and their dog. I'd say some better numbers are 60k CE sold

Actually, right now there are 0 CEs sold.  They may have pre-orders for 60k CEs, but pre-ordering is only slightly more difficult than signing up for beta, it's free and close to, but not quite, effortless (you actually have to enter the CC number).  When you consider the "Free Trial" phase of the game (sorry I meant "Open Beta") is gated on the pre-order of the CE, I bet a lot of people, like me, saw a big value in entering their CC info so they could see the game then canceled if they didn't like it/wanted to wait.

[Slayerik]

Noone at my work is trying WAR (and I work in desktop support). Most everyone tried AoC.

Why this is, I have no idea. Half of them just went back to WoW and can't be arsed to try another MMO ATM I guess.