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Archive for January, 2011

warhammer online – don’t turn out the lights!

28 Jan

Alright, told you guys I would balance this out. In my opinion the game is unquestionably dying but that doesn’t mean it can’t hang on a bit longer or even be saved. Here are some of my thoughts.

What can a small development team do to prolong things?

  • Manage the damn servers. Whatever server metrics telling you that the servers are fine, they have not been working. Find a different way to view these stats. May try logging onto the servers at various times manually.
  • Tanks guarding a dps get the same renown as the dps (unsplit)
  • Let healers clease their target. Up AP a lot if need be, but implement a system where if you case cleanse multiple times, the person has debuffs removed, regardless of type, especially the important ones like heal debuff, movement impairing etc..
  • Keep seiges are terribly boring. (wish I had something more to post on that)




Scenerios

  • Add scenerio variants that change the number of people. 6v6 Calendor, 12v12 Caledor etc..
  • Reduce scenerio length drastically when one sided.
  • Add focus to the objectives in the scenerio, have that be the place to be to gain renown and have finishing the scenerio be more rewarding then trying to kill people in the middle of spawn guards. (maybe reduce, heavily, renown from killing people, increase for objective holding and winning.)
  • Increase renown gain in scenerios by A LOT!
  • Show stats on the scoreboard relevent to tank classes. Guard damage, damage taken etc..



It is time for a new way to make a profit
It really is time to start the switch to a different model. This game needs to be free to play by summer in my opinion. The general consensus from people is that WAR is a good game. Class balance is not bad at all and combat is fun in balanced and populated situations. A lot of work went into WAR and it is finally where it should have been around release. The trouble is it isn’t release, its 2+ years in and with so few changes it would be a pretty big understatement to call the game stale.

If people could play when they wanted, instead of worrying about the monthly fee going to waste, they would most likely end up giving a lot more back to the game in micro-transactions or gold accounts etc… all the normal ways the industry examples structure the games. More importantly, you become an excellent free to play game instead of a terrible subscription based mmo. Combined with actually managing the servers, the game could very well become healthy and successful.

My last post highlighted a bit further why a subscription fee based model no longer seems to fit, at least not at the $15 per month currently charged.

 
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Posted in Bioware, Business, EA, Gaming, Mythic, Online Gaming

 

Warhammer Online – Managing Expectations and Subscriptions

25 Jan

Been a while and I have been meaning to write more posts, but I really like to bounce back and forth between positive and negative discussions about games and that has become very difficult lately. This one will probably fall a bit towards the negative, but my next post will contain some positive suggestions.

Todays topic is about the subscription fee in Warhammer Online.
I understand the subscription fee is charged by MMOs because the game is constantly growing in content, updates/fixes are provided in a timely fashion and the game experience is monitored and managed in an ongoing way. There are also additional server fees and customer service staff that need to be taken into account.

If I apply this to Warhammer Online, it no longer seems to fit.

The game no longer appears to be growing in content and hasn’t really in a long time. Very small updates released many months apart are mainly just fixes and everything seems to point towards nothing even remotely subtantial in the works.

I also expect that my sub fee is going towards monitoring and managing the server balance so that people have the best chance to have the game experience the game was built for. This has not been the case for a long time, in fact it completely and utterly baffles me how many people Mythic/Bioware are willing to lose because of their inability or unwillingness to create proper population environments for the people that still pay them month to month. From what I have seen, I would wager that far more people have left the game due to that than almost any other reason. Something that should be completely controllable and easily fixable!

Server fees and customer service rep fees are valid, but with so few servers and people left these fees cannot take up a lot of the subscription fee.

I don’t know what Mythic’s answer will be, but as a player, I feel like I need to help manage their expectations that people will keep paying subscription fees for a game that isn’t living up to a subscription fee model. Hands up, how many people feel like they got a full $45 boxed games worth of features every 3 months from Warhammer Online? It is time for a change.

 
3 Comments

Posted in Bioware, EA, Gaming, Mythic, Online Gaming