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So, Warhammer Online has released all its pre release classes. They went through patch after patch. They managed to launch some very exciting and fun events and learned from the fubar Halloween event, where lack of players sunk the event on many servers.

However, given all its myriad flaws and the major problem in its gameplay models, namely, the need for large number of players doing what the game designer wants in RVR, do you think the game is salvagable or is it due to fade away?

I canceled my Warhammer subscription and renewed my DAoC account. Having brought a guildie who never played DAoC before I was surprised to hear his first comment about this 9 year old game to be "Wow, this game is 10x better than warhammer". We haven't even gotten out of the tutorial zone yet -_-
newMythic wasted $100 million of EAs money on nothing, the only thing that can save the game is someone accidentally erasing the servers so the company can get some insurance money.

I tried Warhammer when it first came out, but then my Mom got sick before I could really get into it, and I had to shelve it for awhile. When I looked into it again, I heard it was bleeding subscribers, and servers were shutting down. Although I hear it's still in better shape than Age of Conan, which I also tried for awhile. I ended up reactivating my FFXI account, although I seldom play, usually letting my unemployed friend log on and skill up my fishing. I'm hardly an expert, but it seems like there's a new MMO coming out every month, so it's hard to imagine Warhammer going the distance.

They all suck, though. I'd love to play a decent MMO, but there just aren't any.

"New MMO coming out every month" is true if your talking casual or Korean style micro transaction style Korean MMO's. But the Blockbuster multi-million subscribers are one a year if that. The problem is MMO's outside Asia keep running into the Warcraft juggernaut and get squished.

Companies are finally getting a fucking clue that if they try to make a Fantasy MMO they are trying to target the same audience that World of Warcraft already has tied the hell up. And frankly World of Warcraft is at this point, polished to a very shinny gloss, balance is constantly going from great to bad and back again every few months.

Age of Conan and Warhammer are both trying to target the market that Warcraft holds and MMO's are typical a one per-person experience. IE if someone is playing Warcraft they are not playing Age of Conan and vis-versa. Gamers are different they might play two or even three MMO's at once, the sadistic bastards. But that's an audience of lets be generous and say 100,000 which is right around the sweet spot for profitability which means you need to get at least half of them to keep your game afloat and that's not going to work.

Maybe if an MMO came out that was not a Fantasy MMO it might you know... make money and get lots of subscribers! Like say Star Wars Online I mean Anarchy Online or The Matrix Online I mean if you game is not a giant buggy mess of course you get tons of subscribers right? Like um Planetside or how about... wait no I've got two, City of Hero's/Villains and Eve Online, two fairly successful non 3D Fantasy based MMO's. Eve is still going strong even as City of Hero's winds down but they came out, got a few hundred thousand dedicated subscribers, sold a few million copies and made good money.

War hammer and Conan? Not so much, a year from now both games will likely be on their way out the door even if War Hammer was by far the biggest !@#!# up since Anarchy... Cutting clases during the Beta? Leaving one side without a primary class like a tank? The hell were they smoking I can tell you that alone lost them their best so at making a name for themselves considering the amount of crap they got in gaming circles.

Word of mouth is still one of the most effective ways to sell anything and video-gamers more than most are free with their opinions on everything. Even if you deliver perfection someone is going to bad-mouth your product. However it does not take that much to push it over into a bad general feeling balance shifts between the fanboys and the haters. When the fanboys are up it won't mean you game will do better, but trust me when I say when the hater's are pushing the talk you game will suffer for it.

An MMO is a serious investment not only are you going to fork over 50$ but your also paying 12$-15$ up front for a month subscription, I hate a game I'll toss it in the bin to come back to it one day or give it to a friend. MMO's? Come the hell on that 50$ is a 50$ game manual you bought, not the game.

MMOs are big, complicated products that rely on getting a lot of players all at once doing things to make stuff interesting enough for each other on their own. Hitting and keeping critical mass at a time while the game Does Not Suck is imperitive, otherwise people will quit while it sucks, or they will simply get bored not finding anyone to play with. But that's obvious.

Most of the issues with MMOs that failed can be traced back to Sucking. This is kinda an important thing to avoid, but they do it anyway. Star Wars Online had the possibility of being a real genre-changer product with such a big name attached to it and such an open world. Instead they just bungled it and people hated it. Warhammer fumbled things too, and had a noticable amount of Suck and some amounts of Lame from their lack of promised classes, so when the crest of the wave hit you just weren't able to get high enough. World of Warcraft isn't even a very good game, but it's relatively stable, densely populated by Shit To Do, and has a lot of people.

So let's itemize this. To make a good MMO you need:

1) People
2) Shit To Do
3) Things To Show Off

and want to avoid

1) Suck
2) Lame
3) A Lack Of People To Show Off To

This is a pretty basic formula, and it's why the Korean MMOs make money even if they're not the massive kraken that WoW is. They're basically all hamstrung by trying to follow a traditional RPG format and finding it very hard to do. I was goofing around with battlefield heroes and I think an MMO with similar principles would be clever and doable. Huge emphasis on character customization is what makes people play games, not for epic storylines. The reason WoW is popular and sucks donkey nuts is that it has nothing to do but collect useless and meaningless trinkets with nary a bit of skill attached. In BFH, your success is somewhat minorly based in a skill, so it ends up being more about how much of a badass you are on average and less about merely surviving to the end of the zone and getting a big wad of XP and gold.

Quicker feedback with more instant turnaround on your investment would make people feel better. Even if the shit you give them is nearly pointless, or entirely pointless. Make the entire thing a combination of ego trip and investment v return game. Eve's billboards with the Most Wanted and high Bounty targets was a brilliant sort of thing. BFH's Korean style of "buy shit to upgrade yourself" gives players more and more kinds of goals to seek and accomplish. Get some kills, get points. Accomplish missions, get points. Spend real money, get points! And not just points but all kinds of different points.

The same kinds of bullshit apply here as everywhere else. Give players a big focus on customization, and make them work for it. Outfits, weapons, spaceships, apartments, whatever--make all this stuff not only valuable to the player but a big part of their ego. If you do this the rest of the game is basically irrelevent so long as the basic mechanic is fun. So if you can manage to make a simple game that's not godawful terrible, and attach some sort of in-game reward structure to it, you'll be able to print money. The only barrier to the little guy doing this is sever capacity, otherwise I'd do it myself and make a hojillion dollars from Star Empire, the game of shooting things and buying ever-increasingly silly hats and vehicles and highrise apartments.

Covenant wrote:Give players a big focus on customization, and make them work for it. Outfits, weapons, spaceships, apartments, whatever--make all this stuff not only valuable to the player but a big part of their ego. If you do this the rest of the game is basically irrelevent so long as the basic mechanic is fun.

Pretty much one of the main reasons behind City of Heroes' success. Repetetiveness and a lack of Stuff to Do being some of the main reasons for its slow degradation.

LordOskuro wrote:Repetetiveness and a lack of Stuff to Do being some of the main reasons for its slow degradation.

I still find it sad that no MMORPG has usefully harnessed player-created (mission) content. There are lots of good Neverwinter Nights modules out there - lots of crap ones too, but it takes a lot less time to filter than to create from scratch. That wouldn't work so well with WOW, where there is supposedly a strong overarching plot, but it should work fine for City of Heroes. Eve only works because there is a massive player-created metagame that exists independently of the gameworld itself.

My first startup was working on a MMORPG platform that included some really exciting player-created content tools, alas, investor politicing bullshit, management inexperience and bad luck killed it.

City of Heroes just released the Mission Architecht so they're giving it a go. Granted for a while all you could find was farms, but they've cracked down on that now, and I myself am happy enough that if I can find some good story ID codes I will never again have to do the damn Atlas Park/Mercy Island missions again.

Starglider wrote:

LordOskuro wrote:Repetetiveness and a lack of Stuff to Do being some of the main reasons for its slow degradation.

I still find it sad that no MMORPG has usefully harnessed player-created (mission) content. There are lots of good Neverwinter Nights modules out there - lots of crap ones too, but it takes a lot less time to filter than to create from scratch. That wouldn't work so well with WOW, where there is supposedly a strong overarching plot, but it should work fine for City of Heroes. Eve only works because there is a massive player-created metagame that exists independently of the gameworld itself.

My first startup was working on a MMORPG platform that included some really exciting player-created content tools, alas, investor politicing bullshit, management inexperience and bad luck killed it.

I don't think any company is willing to have its servers cluttered with the multitude of player created content.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Starglider wrote:There are lots of good Neverwinter Nights modules out there - lots of crap ones too, but it takes a lot less time to filter than to create from scratch.

I don't think any company is willing to have its servers cluttered with the multitude of player created content.

You don't automatically put player generated content in the main game world. That would just produce Second Life (though hopefully with better graphics). You allow them to develop it in private instances, submit it, and if it's decent quality an employee adds it to the main world. You'll probably only use 10% of what is submitted for the main world, but the rest will still be available to people willing to go to the appropriate private instance (i.e. the developer's friends).

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:I don't think any company is willing to have its servers cluttered with the multitude of player created content.

Despite its flaws, Second Life works pretty well as a content-creation toolbox, and during my limited time there (about half an hour) I managed to find some very interesting areas, wich would inevitably have adverts for online escorts, but that's besides the point.

Other non-MMO games do the whole user-created content thing in new and interesting ways. I haven't tried Little Big Planet myself, but I'm pretty much in love with Trackmania's content model, in wich the community itself filters the good from the bad (also, fuck realistic driving when I can do a sideways corckscrew looping at 600 km/h).

Of course, there's always the bad side to user-created content, as Yatzhee points out in his LBP review, most users are not professionals, and an alarming majority of the user created content out there is no more than depictions of penises and farming missions.

Man, the problem is not necessarily the devs, it's the fucking Gamers. The only thing that we latch on to is LOL FANTASY DRAGONSWORDMAGIC GOBLIN SLAYER. There have been countless attempts to move away from that formula - most notably, Games like Auto Assault (Lame, though it was), Tabula Rasa, AC, etc. but the game developers either keep pumping money into dead concepts (As in Auto Assault) or they don't invest enough into advertising for exposure. I was particularly sad to see Tabula Rasa Fail I was in the beta and it had a LOT of potential, but no one knew what it was about, so no one signed up and it died.

So don't blast just game companies - blast the idiot myopic gamers who want nothing but games featuring nekkid elves, fire-breathing dragonz, or whatever. How about a Halo MMO? Or Terminator? how about moving away from a levelling system and go pure skill-based? Or how about a game where you don't allocate skill points at all, but simply get better at shit by doing it (As in UO but definitely not THE SAME as UO - because that's just stupid and it's still LOLDRAGONZ) IMHO - as played out as it is, DaoC is about the closest to a really GOOD MMO that is loldragonz based - the levelling is well done, the PvP is well balanced and it's huge scale makes it loads of fun. the crafting system is amazing as well. You could potentially be the greatest armorer in all of Albion and be level 1 as far as combat skills.

Maybe...Maybe Aion will get it right - though I am not hopeful. and it's STILL just LOLDRAGONZ. I blame the same drooling knuckle-draggers who keep forcing developers to shovelout FPS after FPS after FPS. it's ridiculous - we KNOW what makes an awesome game - the best, most fun games ever made seem to have all come out in the mid to late 90's then just stagnated from there since everyone just wanted the next doom-clone. we know what works - THEY know what works; it's just that what works doesn't sell because gamers are fucking morons.

I found WHO to be pretty much complete shit. I first suspected that the game wasn't as polished as it could be right after I installed it. There was no way to start the game. I had to download a functional executable to get the thing to run. Off to a good start then.

Finally got in and made my first character, a Witch Hunter. Got my first couple of quests and went out to kill things, building up combo poi, I mean Accusations so I could unleash my executi.. wait, I do mean executions. It really was playing a less polished, and somehow less interesting version of WOW.

Anywhere but the pvp instances were pretty much empty, no one would group, in fact virtually no one was even saying anything. Even at launch it felt pretty much dead.

I think I used 5 or 6 days of my included month play time. I played Conan more. Fuck, I played GUILD WARS more, and I fucking hate guild wars.

Starglider wrote:You don't automatically put player generated content in the main game world. That would just produce Second Life (though hopefully with better graphics). You allow them to develop it in private instances, submit it, and if it's decent quality an employee adds it to the main world. You'll probably only use 10% of what is submitted for the main world, but the rest will still be available to people willing to go to the appropriate private instance (i.e. the developer's friends).

That might work. Though it then raises the question of whether some gamers would cry foul over a lack of a level playing field. Like say someone managed to hack the game and have that instance drop off some of the rarest items in the game.

Of course, that could be controlled but it seems some companies are quite anal over the issue of level playing field.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Though it then raises the question of whether some gamers would cry foul over a lack of a level playing field. Like say someone managed to hack the game and have that instance drop off some of the rarest items in the game.

Experience, items and other changes to character state made in a development instance would be reverted (removed) on returning to the main game world. This is basically essential to allow useful development and testing to take place.

Starglider wrote:Experience, items and other changes to character state made in a development instance would be reverted (removed) on returning to the main game world. This is basically essential to allow useful development and testing to take place.

That might kill some impetus to creating these instances, and also limit it to the few diehards who actually want to do something else in the game. That is unless it becomes such a popular mod that people don't play the main game at all. That might be problematic for a developer that invested a lot into a team to develop the game itself.

Flash wrote:It really was playing a less polished, and somehow less interesting version of WOW.

This is what I've heard as it's primary problem.

Hey, anybody heard about WH40k Online lately? I'm sure they must be reassessing that by now...

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Starglider wrote:Experience, items and other changes to character state made in a development instance would be reverted (removed) on returning to the main game world. This is basically essential to allow useful development and testing to take place.

That might kill some impetus to creating these instances

It only kills the idea of using them to munchkin the main game. Well designed or appropriately adjusted content (that does not upset balance) would be accepted and directly integrated. Only 'unapproved' user-made content suffers from the reset-on-rejoin effect. At my company we were planning to make some tools that could assess balance issues semi-automatically (by scanning and tallying the items and effects playing through a quest was likely to produce), which would have helped with this.

That is unless it becomes such a popular mod that people don't play the main game at all. That might be problematic for a developer that invested a lot into a team to develop the game itself.

I don't see why, it means you can repurpose those artists to doing something more useful (e.g. creating a game world with a different genre/gimmick to pull in more new users).

Or what about a GTA-style open environment, where players are free to roam, or engage in factional warfare to defeat the evil forces of the Decepticons?! A Transformers MMO could be so awesome. But they'd screw it if they tried, of course.

LordOskuro wrote:Or what about a GTA-style open environment, where players are free to roam, or engage in factional warfare to defeat the evil forces of the Decepticons?! A Transformers MMO could be so awesome. But they'd screw it if they tried, of course.

Is it going to have the same boring "point-and-click" interface where nothing you do in the world actually matters because its going to get reset for the next batch of players who come through? If so then it doesn't really matter what kind of fluff you throw in it.

I'd like a Dr. Who MMO

You start off on Galifrey and complete the preliminary missions as a student, then you graduate and are put on a TARDIS with about a dozen fellow time lords. Once your skill sets are high enough, you may be able to snag a private TARDIS and go rogue ala The Master or The Doctor. Your Tardis (private or team owned) is customizable with various rooms and such.

Zoom around time and space solving problems or creating mayhem, fighting Daleks, cybermen, etc...

Hey, I can dream.

Realtime Worlds are working on an MMO called All Points Bulletin. It's essentially going go to be Cops and Robbers. Scuttlebutt had it for a while they were trying to sell the rights to Take Two so it could be rebranded as GTA Online. All I've seen of it so far is the character creator - but my god what a character creator. There isn't much info out about but it should be coming out late this year.

Also, it occurs to me that Dawn of War II could easily be converted to an MMO

newMythic pretty much lacks any professional credibility now. I think I lost all trust in the company when the guy in charge of it was on the Vault Network forums complaining about his EA stock values and getting into arguments with forum trolls. Yes, Mark Jacobs, the guy EA has in charge of its MMO division.
Sanya Weathers (formerly Sanya Thomas "Tweety") posted in her blog a hint-hint nudge-nudge about the original design of an MMO being developed where she worked at the time *cough* and how in the original design meetings the devs had to be a member of a particular WoW guild.

The game is pretty fun up until you hit the endgame and I submit my formal apology to whoever it was here that I had given the refer a friend code to that had actually signed up for the game. Honestly the game seems to take the worst of DAoC and WoW and throw them together at high speed. The resulting mess was dumped into the servers.
There is no way the current crew can turn that game around, the only hope is that EA gives control to someone else but since EA now has newMythic making an expansion pack for Ultima Online it doesn't seem likely they will be sweeping the dirt out anytime soon.