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.

I never quite finished it, and it is pretty unedited. I dug it out the other day and thought it might still be an interesting read to some people. Initially, it was almost meant to sell a position on the community team, one which I, of course, would have been interested in if it ever came out.

People like Andy Belford bring a lot to the table and have helped with Warhammer’s success quite a bit by opening communication channels between the community and developers, however there still seems to still be a piece missing for keeping server communities and populations healthy.

It was projects like this that eventually led to me starting up this website.
Please let me know what you think.

Population_and_balance_issues_Warhammer_Online_2009_2010

Cheers,
Troy aka.Tyanon

I gave myself some time to process this instead of snap judging it. I am still of the same opinion though, this seems like more of a joke announcement then anything real or objectively thought out.

Here are several thoughts I have had on this changes they are hoping to put in:

1) It will reduce posts drastically, which may include a reduction in trolling type posts.

1.1) This will reduce forum bloat, possibly keep people more constructive and require less forum moderation.

2) Trolls/Forum bullys may not be reduced much at all. In my opinion, these types of people would be more protective of their character names in the game then their real names. Unless the point is they should fear reprecussions in real life. In that case, you have to almost say, wtf.

3) Harassment and very serious personal breaches will go up by many times. Just yesterday I was talking to a guild member who in past games had people track down his information and start calling his work, one time with bomb threats, another time accusing him of sending threatening emails with his work account. It is not that this stuff is impossible to find out without it being displayed, but handing them to the information ensures they dont even need to work at it to do it.

4) Privacy concerned people will simply no longer post. This means that in a base of millions of people, they will not be asking little questions and such on the forums, instead using CSR’s and other direct contact methods that won’t put their name out there.

4.1) Privacy concerned people may not understand that how exactly their name gets released, and avoid the games attached to real id altogether, just to be safe.

5) For many, games are a fantasy experience. They act and roleplay in ways that is outside of how they would act irl. Men play female characters, females play males, married people flirt with others and it is all hidden behind a seperate online persona from their personal life.

6) A lot of people do not want their gaming lives attached to their real lives. Professionals in many industries may not want to have a google of their name come up with gaming posts and opinions. Job searchers nowadays WILL google your name and look into your social networking. Looking just from a forum perspective, I assume a lot of these adult/professional people are providing the bulk of the -useful- information on forums.

6.1) Kids may not want other kids to know what games they play or how often. Their online hidden lives are now fodder for bullies.

7) While I think both males and females will have a pretty big dislike for this, I think women will tend to dislike this even more for obvious reasons.

It will be interesting to see if it ends up going through. There are already reports that there are ways to hack peoples full names from the Real ID system. With all the hate I have read so far, it must put some pressure on Blizzard to re-think this. However, if one company could just blatently ignore everyone and just stay their own course, it would probably be Blizzard.

What would be interesting is if Blizzard posted the real name of the champion of this idea. This should give them a pretty good idea of what it could be like for others that are no longer anonymous in an anonymous fantasy world.

Is the timing right though? From a business perspective I started thinking about it and I am not so sure. This post will of course be filled with assumptions and theories.

Assuming an expansion is in the works, first off, there is information out there suggesting that no box expansion can be released before the middle of next year. That does not mean there is even one in the works, it is just a note. More likely is a free expansion similar to TOVL, which could come out at any time. If a free expansion was close to being released, I am sure Mythic and/or Bioware would already be hyping it for a fall release. This would put it just before the release of the new Star Wars MMO.

If I was Mythic Bioware, I would make the assumption that regardless of what you release before SWTOR, your going to have a large number of people at least try SWTOR. Meaning if you release an expansion this fall/winter, you will bring some people back, and then take a large dip in subscribers when SWTOR comes out.

If you plan for something ~3-6 months after SWTOR then you would, assumably, have a solid update on a very solid game to draw people to that are not enjoying SWTOR. GW is also scheduled for release early on as well, so if you come out just past both of those, you can possibly grab a lot of players and in a strong marketting campaign that almost acts as a re-release of WAR, it could do very well.

Obviously there is a pretty big risk waiting almost a year to release a large expansion. The biggest risk being keeping minimal subs and profits on a game that many would argue is dying fast due to the lack of growth in the content section. I can only imagine this must be somewhat difficult for Mythic, who are still pouring their heart and souls into this game, but in the broad company scheme, the rate in which it is shrinking and with Bioware releasing its MMO soon, Warhammer is quickly becoming unimportant.

I do like the fact that they have gotten me into a couple cool betas for being a subscriber. At $20 a year, this deal is pretty nice. I plan to extend my subscription with this deal, but I think it is only good for a couple more days.

“To kick-off the new look and feel of FilePlanet, we’re slashing the annual subscription price 50%, which will be available this week only for $19.95. As part of the overall redesign, we’re is also removing the need to register on the site for free downloads, which means faster access for non-subscribers as well. “

What is GameCrush? GameCrush is a service where you can purchase time with “PlayDates”. These “PlayDates” will play games with you on Xbox Live, classic online games and more. It looks like you have options to search for flirty and dirty women to game with you. For xbox live you connect and play over voice communications and for PC you have options for either or both of you to hook up webcams while you play. For xbox live, initial games supported will include: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Halo 3, Grand Theft Auto IV and Gears of War 2 with more coming in the future. For classic online games, players can play games like Checkers and Four Across.

It seems that starting prices will be ~$8.50 for 10 minutes and it has been rumoured that 60% will go to GameCrush and 40% to the girls. Personally, I applaud this idea and wish I had thought of it and had the drive to push it through. As a long time guild lead through many different games, a lot of times guys do have more fun when women are in the mix. (It wasn’t immediately apparent if skill was a searchable criteria for your PlayDates).

I wish them luck both with their launch and with the critism this is bound to create. I would love to hear the female perspective on this service. From a male perspective, I would love it if a service opened up that paid me to play games with people, male or female, dirty or flirty!
Website: www.gamecrush.com

It seems the policy is to remove/delete an appeal if someone is found to be offline when they reach their ticket number in the queue. Tickets I am sure are handled by priority/category and somewhat by age, but I really have no idea. Anyways, I check my email 5 days after putting in an appeal for a missing item and I get a friendly email from Mythic CS saying that they looked for me, but I was not found online at 2:30 AM thursday morning. This is of course no shock to me as I am human. The next part says that because I was not online they have cancelled my appeal and asks that I re-submit.

You have to wonder, who on earth comes up with business request processing like this? Where would this translate? In my business, a customer communicates a problem and I take 5 days to awknowledge the problem, then give them a call at their work at 2:30 am and leave a message saying I was real sorry, I tried to get a hold of them and help them but I am going to disregard their request until they call in again in the morning. I would be unavailable at that time however.

Is this really so different? I suppose some problems do go away and perhaps they simply have way more requests then they can handle, so they try to delete as many as possible and hope people either don’t bother trying again or bank on at least some of the people not logging that character on ever again.

My request did get resolved, 3 weeks after submitting the issue,  the item was mailed to me. They did not need additional information from me, I put in my second appeal and added extra notes begging them to please not delete it in the middle of the night. I suggest everyone do the same for every appeal.

A few changes went in that will improve the game, unfortunately, the key word in this statement is “few”. very little actually is being patched in, instead, existing content is just being shuffled around.

In my opinion, this patch is an indicator of how few resources are available or are being used on growing the content of the game at this point in time.

On to the point of this post. I overheard some respected and established players calling this patch the last straw for them. The were citing that Mythic was spending too much time and resources trying to spread the game to additional countries (like Korea) and not enough time appeasing existing North American subscribers with additional development.

At first thought, I was right with them. I know a decent number of people barely hanging onto their subscriptions after 1.5 years with a lot of the same iussues and very little new content or itemization. After giving it further thought, when I consider the decision as a business decision, I would probably consider that people hanging on till this point are probably not going to suddenly all disapear, but continue hanging on (for the most part) for the small new items being offered. Thinking along those lines, maybe the most intelligent course of action is to attempt to get into this new markets and take a risk to bring in large amounts of subscribers. This of course could up profits, which ups the amount that can be spent on development and perhaps even speed an expansion, which is even more money from sales and it generates new “buzz” around the game.

It is a hard call, but I think it was a reasonable decision by Mythic to push the new markets, even at the slight expense of the current one. I for one hope it works out.