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.