Warhammer Online on the way out?

[Gilvan Blight]

Just read this news and thought I would share as I know there are some players on here. This is usually the first indication that an MMO is on the way out.

Warhammer Online developer Mythic is to close a total of 63 servers for the massively multiplayer online game, with 43 to go in North America and Oceania and another 20 in Europe.

The closures are part of an ongoing effort to consolidate the game’s online population, which started some months ago with a free transfer offer to more popular servers. The now-compulsory moves have been completed this week and the empty servers are set to close.

Mythic was recently forced to confirm layoffs in its customer support and QA teams, although the developer insisted this was not unusual for a post-launch massively multiplayer online game.

 

[miniDrake]

It was on its way out the first day of launch, they released it a year to early and they opened to many servers the first week.Once the numbers of players started to drop most of the game was like a ghost town.

I stopped playing it about a month ago got sick of the bugs and the broken retarded endgame.Had high hopes for Warhammer but EAmythic rushed the game out and after the first free month was up hordes of people left and it got worse as the weeks went on.

 

[Baz]

I would agree. Everyone I know who played has left. i wasn\'t really into MMORPG\'s until a friend gave me a trial of WOW about 2 months back and I was hooked!

My friend really knew his stuff about games so I asked him what was best he said WOW is good and has a load of players. age of Conan is dying and has very few players and is buggy as hell.
As for WAR? He said it was the buggiest game he\'d played and that the game has all sorts of problems with compatibility.

i kept playing WOW and was really enjoying it so I thought I\'d give WAR a try anyway. it\'ll have a free trial right? Wrong!
I should have took that as a warning.

I decided to just wait and see if they were ever going to offer a free trial to new players. (nope)

About a week ago a CMON user Atacam sent me an introduce a friend offer code for it and I thought I\'d give it a try. (Thanks Atacam!)

i checked the system specs -
· 2.5 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
· 2 Gigabyte RAM
· A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
· At least 15 GB of hard drive space

Ok I\'ve got that. So I start the process to download. First I make an account. Then I have to make a game account. Then I have to make a fileshare account to download. For some reason they already have an account on my e-mail. I have to make an EA games account to ask for help. No joy.
So I have to set up a new e-mail account. and then set up a mythic acct, game acct and a fileshare acct again!

That\'s 8 accounts!!! Just to install a demo?

After all the hassle I decided to just keep going so it wouldn\'t be a waste of time.

I start the game client download. ETA for download = 16.5 hours!!!!:evil:

Warcraft took 2 hours and 1 acct to play.

i just leave it to do it\'s thing and come back in the morning. It had crashed. I set it off again and the same thing happened 4 hours in. Third Time it worked.

Then came the install.

I installed, created the directory and everything went as normal. Except when I went to play there was no program. i ran a search. No joy. No shortcut, no .exe file, no program files. There wasn\'t even a bloody .exe file in all the game data I downloaded. I started clicking on random stuff till I got to the patcher.

Turns out this is what you use to start the game. It\'s hidden in one of the data files in the original zip download.

Then it patches for about an hour and then crashes. three or four times.

By this point I\'m 3 days into a 10 day trial.

Eventually I get the \"play\" button. Joy!!!

Except not. I get to the character creation screen and the piece of junk freezes and crashes to the desktop.

I shoot a few emails off to support and they say it\'s my system. in particular Vista and my graphics card\'s compatibility.

Okay I can run WOW fine, I can run age of Conan fine, I can run most games released this week fine. But this 6 month old game won\'t run? WTF?

Lets just say that I won\'t be buying this pile of poo. That Mythic don\'t have a clue how to run an accessible game and that now it\'s starting to show.

I\'m not that bad with PC\'s and I had MAJOR issues with this game. I really couldn\'t see any casual gamer putting up with their crap just to try a demo and with the amount of players on their servers now so can they.

 

[Gilvan Blight]

I didn\'t have any issues installing or playing the game. Didn\'t actually find it that buggy either. I just found it lost it\'s fun factor in under a month. I\'ve already explained why in another thread, so I won\'t repeat here. I do agree that it was rushed. Blatantly rushed with the fact they are still \'releasing\' new classes. These were all supposed to ship with the game.

If it manages to stay around I will probably try it again in a year or so. I was a founder in Lord of the Rings and quit after a couple months. Tried it out again based on the suggestion of a few friend and now I have a lifetime membership and don\'t expect to quit playing any time soon.

 

[Bigdennis52]

What turned me off to MMORPG\'s is... the amount of time they can demand from someone. I loved (and still do) the Diablo series from blizzard. I think that at times these games can demand so much of your time that for a casual gamer that has a family life and a full time job it is hard to keep up with the other players on their servers. (damn kids need to study and stay in school and get off the mmorpg servers )

 

[Aliengod3]

I have an account for Star Wars Galaxies. The one main issue I have with MMO\'s is the fact that it takes hours upon hours just to acquire the necessary attributes to do anything fun. Plus I hate grinding and doing missions. I also do not see the point in paying $15 a month to level a character that has no real value. Spend a couple hundred dollars and countless hours to have a character with a high level and good equipment... well what for? Is it going to help me get a job? Can it give me relationship advice? Will the game tell me to do my homework and show me how to do calculus? No.

Although I would not mind having a black orc and a squig herder, the time and effort necessary to do anything worthwhile in the game is just not worth it. Maybe if I were 10 yrs old I would be more available to MMO\'s.

 

[Dragonsreach]

Originally posted by Gilvan Blight
Warhammer Online on the way out?

To be Honest, I should care why?

 

[jerry kurl]

Originally posted by Dragonsreach

Originally posted by Gilvan Blight
Warhammer Online on the way out?

To be Honest, I should care why?

DR simply you shouldnt, but for alot of others out there who enjoy the game (Not myself i hasten to add it was utter trash and LOTRO isa much much better game) it could be important to them.

I have a full time job and a social life and generally im a very busy person, its taken me over a year to max out my character on LOTRO but iv enjoyed every minute of it, the social side of being in a kin is great and have made some very good friends through it. MMORPGs are not for everyone, but then is anything? I was very sceptical myself at first but it hooks you and it stops me spending £30+ a month on new games that last ten hours and get put on a shelf. WAR had so much promise and it ended up being a dud, i used my free months subcription and just uninstalled it after the first couple of hours it was bloody awful

 

[Beelzebrush]

Originally posted by Dragonsreach

Originally posted by Gilvan Blight
Warhammer Online on the way out?

To be Honest, I should care why?

To be honest, you seemed to care enough to respond...

It\'s a shame... I installed it but it didn\'t play too well on my pc so I stopped.

 

[Aliengod3]

Originally posted by Dragonsreach

Originally posted by Gilvan Blight
Warhammer Online on the way out?

To be Honest, I should care why?

You should not. You are not apart of the demographic.

 

[Kester]

I love it. WAR is great. I got very bored of LOTR very quickly. Once I found a class that I liked I was hooked. Very hooked.

 

[Dragonsreach]

Originally posted by Beelzebrush

Originally posted by Dragonsreach

Originally posted by Gilvan Blight
Warhammer Online on the way out?

To be Honest, I should care why?

To be honest, you seemed to care enough to respond...

Well I was being kinda \"Tongue in Cheek\" about this.
But in all honesty after a huge amount of investment, to see something which has a large potential target demographic being dramatically reduced, does show some serious side to the fiscal effects on the business of gaming. (Virtual or Tabletop).

Regardless of my indifference to computer gaming, I can understand the level of dissatisfaction players are experiencing.

 

[skeeve]

to see something which has a large potential target demographic being dramatically reduced, does show some serious side to the fiscal effects on the business of gaming. (Virtual or Tabletop).

Regardless of my indifference to computer gaming, I can understand the level of dissatisfaction players are experiencing.

It is not that. The game was slated for failure from the very beginning due to poor logistics, developing team reshuffling and shifts in leadership. In the end of the day the result is bloated, incredibly buggy, devoid of content but.... incredibly pretty piece of software. YEs, indeed, concept designers and artists that worked on the game are very good the rest are mediocre at best. Considering that the game was in development almost 4 years (I want to say almost 5) the final product is surprisingly immature, and behaves more like medium-to-advanced beta version.

 

[Evil Dave]

To be honest, I\'ll be a little disappointed if it fails as i was going to pick it up a while later when the bugs were worked out and all the nerfs were set in place.
I mean, come on, this is really the first time Tzeentch has gotten any love in the video game realm.

 

[Torn blue sky]

Picking up this thread (yes it is relevant and everything)

Some 5 months on from the last post it seems WAR has started to pick up the slack! I do play this and trying not to be biast, it\'s for the better.
There\'s new active content being introduced, bug fixes (which it needed...badly), and talk of other interesting gubbins.
I have to admit I was a bit dubious that it took ages for dwarf and Orc DPS classes to come out.
It does seem, however, for all intent and perpose it\'s on the up...and about damn time too!!!

 

[Godlikebuthumble]

I had been very much looking forward to WAR. Actually, I did some modding on the old (canceled) game\'s official forums. My glee knew no bounds.
Then the game hit stores... and I could choose between shelling out 45€ in blind faith or just not playing at all, since it had no free trial option until... what, 6-7 months later? So, I passed.
Then, over Christmas, a friend going on vacation let me use his account, so I only had to download the (meanwhile available) client. Well... the game looks sweet, the classes (at the time) seem playable, only... the game is not. A couple of persistent bugs, I\'m willing to excuse (after all, it\'s \"only\" three months in). But what kills it for me is that the game just crashes (and likes to take my computer with it), without warning, every 45-120 mins. And that won\'t do. I hardly played it for that reason, and passed on a subscription... again.
Now, they\'ve been offering a free 10 day trial. I made my account, downloaded the client again and got to it.
Now I\'m angry. Half a year after release: I make a Chaos maga, walk around the Chaos starting area... and for some reason, have to listen to female half-elf soundbites all the time (For Ulthuan!). WTF? Those are bugs you patch out within the first 2 months! Oh, and the game still randomly crashes. I check: I\'m well into \"recommended\" specs, so (after a bit of googling on the matter) I find the game seems to have some unreconcilable problem with some element of my hardware configuration (It\'s a friggin\' storebought, nothing too exotic inside, believe me). And I\'m far from the only one. Now: Not properly checking for hardware compatibility is a big no-no, especially if you work with big publishers like EA (though that should have hinted me off, actually). But not hotfixing that issue ASAP, along with all the other crap, is nothing but using the customer as an extended beta, and that\'s something I\'d expect them to pay me for, not vice versa.
I really love how they handled the art and mood of the universe, the gameplay seemed accessible and fun, but I\'m not gonna pay for a broken/unfinished game, as long as I can play another, working one for the same amount of money.

/rant

 

[Aliengod3]

If you are going to pay $50 for an MMO then it should work properly at launch. When star wars galaxies came out I never had issues with it crashing. I guess I am spoiled.

WAR looked like a great game and I love that you can be a squig herder but that game just does not seem much fun. Plus MMO\'s are extremely unproductive in real life... unless you make an awesome character and then sell it on ebay for tons of money and keep doing that.

 

[NGArtStudios]

Originally posted by Aliengod3
If you are going to pay $50 for an MMO then it should work properly at launch. When star wars galaxies came out I never had issues with it crashing. I guess I am spoiled.

WAR looked like a great game and I love that you can be a squig herder but that game just does not seem much fun. Plus MMO\'s are extremely unproductive in real life... unless you make an awesome character and then sell it on ebay for tons of money and keep doing that.

I agree completely. Putting aside the fact that MMOs are very counter productive, WAR is not worth the $50 plus $15 a month. Lets not compare it to SWG though, as in my opinion nothing can compare to SWG. I have yet to find an MMO as entertaining and fun as SWG was.

 

[silverdragonn]

Plus MMO\'s are extremely unproductive in real life... unless you make an awesome character and then sell it on ebay for tons of money and keep doing that.

Curious - what do you mean by unproductive?

There are a lot of recreational activities that are \"unproductive\" and don\'t make money.
Watching TV, movies, etc. Posting on forums. Watching funny videos on Youtube. Going to Theme parks. Playing any game whatsoever, whether it be a board game, video game, word game, car game, the stock market, etc. Reading. Spending time in conversation with friends.

In fact, a lot of these activities don\'t have a discernable output at the end, and often cost money in order to engage in the activity.

So, therefore, recreation in itself is \"unproductive.\"


People play MMOs because they enjoy it. There are actually benefits that come from it - a large Guild leader in WoW got into Business school partly based on an essay he wrote descriing the leadership and problem-solving skills he developed as a guild leader. I know many romances that have developed over WoW, along with countless friendships.
Traditional videogames are probably less productive than MMO. MMO doesn\'t force someone to continually play it. If money is an issue, they have pre-paid options.

There are a lot of recreational activities that don\'t have an end product that can be sold on eBay, or even has a monetary value attached, or even HAS an end product.


Can\'t things be enjoyed for the enjoyment of it, as opposed to obtaining a material output?

 

[Aliengod3]

Originally posted by silverdragonn

Plus MMO\'s are extremely unproductive in real life... unless you make an awesome character and then sell it on ebay for tons of money and keep doing that.

So, therefore, recreation in itself is \"unproductive.\"

I think recreation is very productive. What I meant by saying that MMO\'s were not very productive is that they have no real life value. And yes, as you pointed out, this can be said about many hobbies and pass times.