backseatdev

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.