Welcome again to Broken Toys, your Warhammer Online fansite. (I’m sure Mythic’s community team will GET RIGHT ON sending me the invites to fan junkets.) Oh by the way, there was also a somewhat major World of Warcraft patch this week, which broke all the servers. So, there’s your WoW news: servers fall down, go boom, and you probably lost half your mounts. ANYWAY. Enough about the game with 11 million subscribers, let’s dish about the game with .75 million! Why? Because Mark Jacobs is just so gosh darned spunky. You never see Rob Pardo give “State of the Nation” addresses, do you? Well, DAOC players became somewhat used to reading them, and now it’s Warhammer’s turn!
I’m happy to announce that in December, the Black Guard and the Knight of the Blazing Sun will officially be part of WAR. We have very special plans around their appearance and in our next newsletter we will provide full details about that exciting and rather novel event.
In other words, Order (Empire) and Destruction (Dark Elves) both get a new tanking class. Prooobably not a coincidence – trying to do a scenario without a tank is usually an exercise in frustration. Almost as much as doing a scenario without a healer. But wait, there’s more!
The Combat and Careers team has spent the last month looking at the changes that they want to make with an eye towards making improvements and buffs, not removing or weakening abilities. I won’t go into details here but the vast majority of careers all have nothing but love coming their way.
Ooh, candy! We like candy. But that’s not all!
In 1.1 (and beyond) we will be doing a myriad of things for our RvR players, including improving gear drops, increasing drop rates, and implementing an RvR-influence system to compliment the current PvE-influence system.
New stuff, always good. But wait, if you order now, you ALSO get…
We are working hard on deploying a substantially improved mail system for this patch. We will continue to enhance WAR’s mail system until it is one of the best mail systems found in any MMORPG.
Ooookay. Well, I guess that’s important, I know that a functioning communications infrastructure is key to any high fantasy army, amirite? But is that all? No, that is not!
We will also be offering the first server transfers to our players to continue to help even out the server populations. These transfers will be free of charge but they will be limited to moves off high-population servers to select mid-population servers or off of low-population servers to a selection of mid-population servers.
…you mean, Warhammer is *consolidating servers*? No, I must be reading that wrong.
“The corollary to that is if you’ve seen a game consolidate servers, you know it’s in deep, deep trouble — that’s not a healthy sign for an MMO,” he said, citing Sony’s January-released “Pirates of the Burning Sea” as a recent example. “It will be the same for ‘Warhammer.’ Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we’re not adding servers, we’re not doing well.”
According to the War Herald archives, the last servers were added on September 19, a day after the game’s official release, when 5 high-population servers were cloned to new servers. Well, to be fair, they still have a week! And, to be less snarky, in a PvP-focused game, a high population is important to a proper target-rich breakfast of eight essential dwarven vitamins and elven fibers. But still, you have to wonder if the first month’s billing cycle coming up this week is making Mythic’s CEO, Lead Designer and spokesperson somewhat uneasy.
Well, thanks everyone for having the reaction I thought you all would:
1) Trolls – OMG, is this all there is? WTF, addition of two new classes, new content, new influence system, mail system fix, class balances and more, to the game? Is that all you guys can deliver in a month? Yawn
2) Objective folks – Sounds good but still need to deliver on it as well as the other issues with the game!
3) Fans – YIPEE!
So, to the trolls, well, you’ve shown why you should continue to be ignored here. Please show me another MMORPG which has added new classes to the game without charging the players through an expansion pack.
I can’t think of one right now but even if there is one that I am forgetting, the vast majority don’t.
Take THAT, gotcha liberal blogosphere!
We’re in this for the long haul and as I said in an interview yesterday, success in the MMO world should be seen as a marathon and not a sprint. We’re off to a great start but we’re not there yet. No successful MMORPG hit its peak within the first year, let alone the first month and that’s the approach we’re taking with WAR.
I wonder if EA is hearing the same thing.
#1 by Random Poster on October 17th, 2008
“Please show me another MMORPG which has added new classes to the game without charging the players through an expansion pack. ”
They aren’t new…hell they were SUPPOSED to be in the game at release. Yanking them because you ran out of time and reintroducing them later does not get you Kudos.
#2 by Nathan on October 17th, 2008
City of Heroes added the Kheldian AT (made up of two flavors) back in Issue 3 and also the Soldiers of Archanos AT (also made up of two flavors) in Issue 12.
As far as WAR providing 2 classes for free not long after launch I see that more as providing 2 classes that they said were supposed to be at launch but had to cut due to time constraints (with the promise that they were working on them for post launch).
#3 by TPRJones on October 17th, 2008
“The corollary to that is if you’ve seen a game consolidate servers, you know it’s in deep, deep trouble”
Come on, Mark Jacobs, give Mark Jacobs a break. It’s only been five weeks, there’s been no sign of a horrendous launch, so see how things go.
Mark Jacobs is always so difficult and unrelenting when he’s dealing with Mark Jacobs. *sigh*
#4 by Walter Yarbrough on October 17th, 2008
“I won’t go into details here but the vast majority of careers all have nothing but love coming their way.”
This is exactly the sort of expectation setting that leads to disappointed customers.
This sort of statement gets instantly parsed as ‘All Careers will get signifantly buffed, with NO NERFS’
#5 by SSFC on October 17th, 2008
At least Blizzard was honest enough to say, “You’re right. We’re never going to give you those hero classes that we promoted to game journalists and that we promised would be in the game at launch.”
Rather than patching them in later and acting as though it was some gift.
#6 by Iconic on October 17th, 2008
Can you really take credit for adding two classes “for free” when they were supposed to be in the game at launch? I guess you can.
I can’t wait for the future patches where they add the four missing cities for free.
#7 by Montague on October 17th, 2008
So is Mark Jacobs going to appoint a hot, inexperienced booth-babe from Alaska for Vice-Designer who won’t be able to name one class in the game?
#8 by Synral on October 17th, 2008
Forgive me for being a ray of hope, but I don’t see what all of the above posters (including Lum himself) are so bitter about.
Parse the marketing speak if you will – that’s fine. However, I’m not seeing how Jacobs’ statement deserves such relentless mockery.
#9 by SSFC on October 17th, 2008
I wasn’t being bitter Synral. My sarcasm was actually directed toward Blizzard.
As for Lum, who wouldn’t take the opportunity to swipe at his old boss, especially at an ex-boss who wears goofy glasses as Jacobs does?
#10 by Iconic on October 17th, 2008
Synral: If you parse out the marketing speak there’s nothing left.
#11 by Synral on October 17th, 2008
Iconic,
Server transfers to low pop servers? Mail system improvements? Increased RVR gear drops and an influence system for it? Buff-based class balancing philosophy? Two classes by december (yes, it sucks that they were cut, but they’re being re-added).
Seems like that’s “something” – several somethings, even.
SSFC,
Point taken. Your BS detector is functional.
#12 by Brandon Reinhart on October 17th, 2008
This guy’s aggressiveness is not appealing. He does a lot more harm than good.
#13 by Walter Yarbrough on October 17th, 2008
“off of low-population servers to a selection of mid-population servers.”
Oh wow – I totally missed that on the first read.
Wow – that makes low population servers even worse . . . and implies that there will be an Andred->Mordred like ‘forced move’ in the low population server’s future.
So, yeah, that’s Consolidation – which is a good thingTM, given the game design.
#14 by Drakks on October 17th, 2008
I’ll admit to being the thick one and not getting all the hate.
I quit WoW to play WAR and have enjoyed every minute of it, with my character hitting 40 last weekend in what, and again this is solely my opinion, I felt was the least painful and most enjoyable pve treadmill I’ve experienced. Exp gains for discovery (people, places, things) scaled to appropriate exp for your current level, BGs were readily available, PQs were readily available, and after capping level there are still a buh-jillion quests I never did. I’ve taken part in several keep seiges and some attacks on the main city that failed.. I could go on, but it would just be fan-boyish so I’ll spare you. The game is just damn enjoyable, and I’ve even rolled up the army of alts just to see newbie scenarios through different eyes.
I don’t expect any game to dethrone WoW, only Blizzard has the ability to do it either through their next MMO release or by over-catering the PvP aspect as the e-sport and forgetting about the pve-base that built them.
#15 by Ryan Shwayder on October 17th, 2008
Sorry, but adding classes and cities back into the game that were supposed to be in at launch is not free content over-and-above expectations; it’s following through on your promises.
I really got irked at the self-congratulatory tone of this:
“I also said that we would not charge any additional fees for this new content or put it in a separate expansion pack; that’s not how we operate. We’ve kept to that plan and with the introduction of these two classes, Mythic shows that once again we are happy to keep giving players more value for their subscription dollars than any other MMORPG developer.”
Because you are delivering (some of the) content that was announced for release two months after release? Don’t pat yourself on the back for meeting expectations.
That said, I’m still happy to see it coming. I’m hoping I get to play on a fuller server than I’m on right now through the server transfers, and I look forward to seeing WAR move closer to the incredible polish bar WoW set (and no, I don’t fault them for not being as polished as a game that’s been out for 4 years).
#16 by Ryan Shwayder on October 17th, 2008
Drakks: “I’ll admit to being the thick one and not getting all the hate.”
Most of the uber frustrated players are on lower population servers. On my server, scenarios are not readily available, PQs in T3+ are never occupied, and we run out of quests in our race’s homeland less than halfway through the 20-30 range.
I’m hoping my server becomes like yours after the transfers become available–I loved the short period of time I got to play on a high pop server (Volkmar).
#17 by Psychochild on October 17th, 2008
Not to say that Mark doesn’t deserve a fair amount of mockery, but…. Yeah, he’s got to put a positive spin on things, and he’s eating some crow for the things he’s said in the past. Like none of the rest of us developers have said stupid things in the past that can come back to haunt us. (Some of us more than others.) The fact that he has said stupid things in the past means that he’s not a simple marketdroid who only spews BS; it’s obvious he mostly spews vitriol about other games, just like the rest of us!
Right now, he’s doing what he has to do in order to help his game thrive. Yes, that means putting news in the best possible light and hoping people less informed might take things in the most positive light possible. Yeah, easy to make fun of, but that’s essentially his job right now.
On the other hand, I find it funny that WoW is getting such an easy pass, though. People excused their launch with the tired, “There was no way they could have expected the numbers they got!” Now that they have all those people, they should probably expect that a lot of people are going to be hitting a new system in the game. What’s the excuse this time when it’s a patch making the servers cry?
(Oh, look, a statement that will come back to haunt me when one of my patches goes poorly! Damn you, internets!)
#18 by Zubon on October 17th, 2008
He announced that there will be an announcement that the new classes will be released. This is not the announcement. I’m not sure how many months that process takes of “State of the Game” -> newsletter -> implement things mentioned in the newsletter.
Another game with free class additions: City of Heroes/Villains. 4 entire classes, and adding a new primary/secondary is like adding a new class (more so for the support classes, where the different support sets are very different, as opposed to fire/ice/stone/koala melee attacks).
#19 by Trevel on October 17th, 2008
My Koala/Regen scrapper kicks ass.
#20 by Tide on October 17th, 2008
The biggest problem with WAR that MJ and co. have ignored is that it is not alt friendly.
With a concentration on RvR and a reasonably small player base all surging towards the level cap how are new players going to succeed? I mean, it’s only been a month — surely they will need new and original subs. WoW succeeds because of re-playability for its core base and its ease of play for new entrants. Not only is WAR harder to level, it will be impossible for new players since everyone will be RvR’ing at the higher tiers. And since WAR is all about RvR there’s not much point playing a game where you are either alone in a PQ or getting steamrolled repeatedly in a BG. Am I missing something?
#21 by Grimjakk on October 18th, 2008
Yes, you’re missing something. Playing the actual game, I’m thinking
Alts are actually HUGE FUN in this game. As a commenter above remarked, the levelling treadmill is “the least painful and most enjoyable pve treadmill I’ve ever experienced”, there are 10 (soon 11) unique classes per side, and there are multiple methods for advancement. That all adds up to a game that is exactly the opposite of “not alt friendly”.
As a server matures, there will naturally be few players in lower tiers… but then, thats why people join guilds.
#22 by Suraknar on October 18th, 2008
A comment on the Consolidating Servers “low blow”, from one of the gamers perception and perspective.
And because, it is all about perception and perspective now days, and because that is why supposedly “critical” sites such as this exist all over the internet, with people supposedly “expert opinions”, who most probably never made their own MMOG, and are equally clueless about the challenges involved as their target audience, in other words, us the average customers playing these games, yet still with some importance for the most part, since otherwise we would all be very gullible to believe whatever came out of the marketing departments of all these big companies that make these games.
However, in this case, it is not just a marketing ploy or indication of things going “bad” for WAR or Mythic.
The gamer perspective on the news of Transfers is rather quite honestly, perceived as a positive step that many gamers actually asked Mythic to do instead of cloning Servers left and right, to help balance the populations that in reality no one has control over.
You can put in incentives in your game to incite individual players to move to but you can never really control who goes where inspire of the incentives.
So from the player/gamer perspective, I think Server transfers are a necessary feature from the get go and launch of any Population oriented game, such as an RvR design.
WAR is first and foremost an RvR game (something I assume you know and understand perfectly), it is about the competition of the Realms, and those realms are made up (apart for their Fantasy representation) by the every day folks such as you and I that enjoy this form of entertainment over others.
The fact is that many if not all of the people who experienced the game in Preview Weekend and “Open” Beta that followed, loved this game, and the experience it offers, in spite of its polish State at the time.
However, it was experienced in the limited number of deployed servers at the time, at High to Medium populations.
Come release the available Servers tripled of quadrupled in numbers and that spread the initial population in a wide manner, which resulted in some servers being a constant low, my guild and myself started in such a server and played in it for the first two weeks, before we took the decision to abandon our characters and their advancement, and collectively move on to a medium populated server in order to be able to have fun with all the features of the game and enjoy the complete experience it was designed to offer, were we had to start from scratch.
As players, (and customers) we would have preferred transferring our characters to another server, rather than restarting from scratch.
It so happens that my guild and I, have also beta tested Pirates of the Burning Sea, for several months before its release, and subscribed to it for several months after its release, and can attest that the situation there is actually a Consolidation, and is very far from the situation in WAR, which only is, (in our eyes) recognizing the wishes of its Customers, and in spite of the danger to be “Criticized” with opinions such as the ones expressed here, is nevertheless moving forward to offer this convenient and user friendly feature to its customers.
Consolidation of servers consists of Forced Transfers and Servers becoming inactive. not quite the same things as offering a Transfer Service.
Mythic should be praised for that not condemned or seeded with negativity and uncertainty.
Just the gamers perspective FYI.
#23 by sardokar on October 18th, 2008
“Consolidation of servers consists of Forced Transfers and Servers becoming inactive. not quite the same things as offering a Transfer Service.
Mythic should be praised for that not condemned or seeded with negativity and uncertainty.”
Isn’t providing free transfers to get people off low servers to mid servers consolidation though?
What happens after they offer this to the people that do not transfer off low? Do they allow those servers to exist? Or do they, as Walt suggests, perform an Andred on them?
The biggest issue with this is, as Scott pointed out in his blog, that Mark Jacobs himself (yet another foot in mouth moment by that guy) said if you’re not creating new servers in the first 6 weeks/months you’re not doing well.
Looks like WAR overshot their subscriber base substantially and thanks to their head ego are going to be eating crow over it.
And that’s fine, everyone can be wrong, I would just hope it would clue the guy in to think before speaking for a change
#24 by Igniferroque on October 18th, 2008
Do we have any ideas on what the ratios are between Order and Destruction? I think that’s what is going to doom the game more than anything else.
I there’s a site – forget where I saw it – that tracks who controls what keeps and objectives. I wonder if they would be able to compile stats on the ratio of time Destruction holds keeps versus Order.
#25 by Athryn on October 19th, 2008
Did Suraknar just imply that Lum hasn’t worked on MMOs? Cause if he doesn’t know that Lum has, then I dunno what to say.
#26 by Sheepherder on October 19th, 2008
Obviously Lum is a nobody.
#27 by Octopaganini on October 19th, 2008
Suraknar, you are far worse than the empty headed critic. You are the apologist who defends bad decisions simply because they come from behind the development curtain. You and all apologists are an anathema to this industry and are truly holding back progress by feeding the Lucasian egos of digital Napoleons like Brad McQuaid and Mark Jacobs.
#28 by Random Poster on October 19th, 2008
“, there are 10 (soon 11) unique classes per side”
This is not entirely true. They are not Unique, every class has an exact opposite that plays with the same basic mechanic. A Swordmaster uses “balanced moves” a Black Orc uses “plans” different names…same mechanic.
#29 by Artheos on October 20th, 2008
“…every class has an exact opposite that plays with the same basic mechanic.”
Also not entirely true. Squig Herders used ranged and have multiple pet types. White Lions have one pet type and are melee.
#30 by isildur on October 20th, 2008
Suraknar,
It’s identical to what we did. The only difference is that Mythic hasn’t told you they’re planning to close the low-pop servers yet.
Just like we did, they feared the bad press you get when you launch with not enough server capacity to handle your initial rush. Just like we did, they overcompensated for that fear, and just like we did, they are moving people together. Just like our game, they have mechanics that work best with a high player density, and they’re trying to ensure everyone gets that density.
There really isn’t any other way to spin one-way transfers from low pop to high pop servers. It’s purely an overestimation of required capacity.
#31 by Iconic on October 20th, 2008
”
Also not entirely true. Squig Herders used ranged and have multiple pet types. White Lions have one pet type and are melee.
”
Squig herders are the destruction equivalent of Shadow Warriors. Their pets are equivalent to the shadow warrior stances.
#32 by Cougar on October 20th, 2008
There are role matches and mechanic matches. In many cases they are the same. However, the Shadow Warrior has the same role as the Squig Herder, yet the Shadow Warrior mechanic matches the Marauder. Whereas the White Lion shares the same mechanic as the Squig Herder but shares the role of the Marauder.
~C~