Before I get to that. To explain the Aion screen shot below. That was the idle animation for my character in Aion. He looks like he’s more prepared to pick out curtains than kicking ass. I didn’t bother to post the big-ass leaf that he pulls out to protect him from the rain.
Annnnyway. Onto Warhammer. Back in March, we saw a server merger and at the time I was not worried as I saw it more of a correction for believing their own hype than anything else. Well….now we may see a second round of server mergers for WAR:
Q. Have you all ever considered reworking the server populations to be relative to all servers instead of a static number? Servers like Phoenix Throne, Dark Crag, and Iron Rock would be High (though they may be far from the limit), and players would have a better idea of the mid and low servers. Also, basing it off active (past two weeks) R40’s instead of all players would get an even better snapshot to compare with.
A. That’s a great question, and that is an idea we have evaluated in the past. The concern with scaling the population display so that it is relative is that we might show a server population as “High” when it actually isn’t, because it just happens to have the highest population at that time. We do not wish these labels to be misleading in any way. That being said, we are expecting to resolve our long term population issues on our lower population servers and see high populations regularly as part and parcel of server merges that are currently in discussion.
Big question for me is whether or not this round is still correcting for over-hype or whether it’s a symptom of a larger problem with the game’s momentum in the market. From a purely anecdotal perspective, the momentum for WAR is a bit on the negative side of things…maybe even neutral after the whole Bioware partnering. I’m expecting things to start looking up for WAR in the next 6-12 months as things start to settle down….but it might be a rough go.
D out.
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July 13th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Server mergers are unnecessary if they allowed free character movement without hassle. I’m always gobsmacked at that model… “NO, you are stuck there even if you have friends over there… unless you pay our blackmail er service fee”
July 13th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Argh you posted this at the same exact time I did CURSE YOU DARREN.
As for the merges, they are needed because there are so few people actually playing at the low end the game is very boring. With no new people subbing to the game they need to pack in the servers to make the complete game fun.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:34 am
It surprises me that you would give up on Aion for such a reason. I haven’t played it yet, but surely the “girlyness” you talk about is just a small facet of the game. I have seem some pretty wicked looking things in screenshots. I guess it surprises me because you enjoy EQ2 so much and I know that it has some pretty “ghey” looking stuff in it too. … I am not judging, or trying to “pick a fight” or anything like that. I am just sayin’
I quit AOC the first time I bent over to pick up the newly detached head of my latest victim and noticed that my gruff warrior was wearing pink undies.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Forgot to mention WAR.
Have they made any changes that alleviate the ghost town that is the low end of WAR? Hell, last time I played was right after launch and even then I was finding it hard to complete many public quests. Which is a shame because the public quest system was one of my favorite things they brought to the table. I forget what they call their WoW Battleground rip off ( scenarios? ) but they were just that. I would rather play WoW battlegrounds, to be honest.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:49 am
This is the problem with holding your server population information so close to your chest. It’s possible that the initial round of merges failed to account for people who chose to go with six month subscriptions at launch (which appeared to be paid accounts that were in fact inactive) and/or players who actually decided to punt on the game rather than roll the dice on merge/transfers. I.e. the actual population of the game might not have changed, but they might not have correctly predicted what it would look like when the dust settled. With so little information known, we’re only left to dark, suspicious speculation that actually damages the game’s reputation.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:04 am
I like this comment on another gaming site:
” Thats what happens when your PvP content requires a certain number of people join an instance. If the games population continues to drop, it gets harder and harder to find enough people to fill enough instances. “
July 13th, 2009 at 11:31 am
From an architectural design perspective, I’m sure it’s too late for Warhammer to change to more of an Eve server model, but hopefully the next PvP/RvR focused game will think about the difficulties of population balance and distribution and make an extra effort to some up with a single shard design. Trying to balance player populations across servers and tiers has got to be like herding cats.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:36 am
@Rob: Mythic might have gotten the idea for scenarios from DAoC, which had them before WoW. Stupid Mythic copying DAoC, bastards…
As for WAR in general, it’s just a flat out better game on a high pop server (more so than say WoW in terms of needing high pop), so any step to get more people to see that side of the game is a good move, even at the cost of bad PR about mergers.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I’m not quite sure WAR can recover without some major overhauls… and I’m not sure EA is willing to invest any more in the game to make it happen. Forget about the endgame for a moment. What’s the early game like? If it isn’t bustling, it’s going to be pretty difficult to attract and retain new subscriptions without the critical mass throughout each tier to sustain player interest.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
[...] Warhammer Online, The Border CollieThis is a very intelligent breed, which turned out to cause some problems for Mythic. The trainer thought they could train Warhammer to be a game that prized open field RVR over all else. The problem was that the Collie was too smart, a natural bred herder, not a herd-ee. She quickly learned that scenarios offered a better ratio of treats to time than the other tricks Mythic was trying to teach her. The problem is that sheep dogs only have something to do when there are sheep and dogs around and in reasonable numbers (proper ratio of sheep dogs to sheep, etc). Mythic is apparently still working on that. [...]
July 13th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
It is busy and fun on a few servers though. And when it is, it’s absolutely a blast to play and very hard to put down. Scenarios I’m sure could be merged across servers (a la wow battlegroups). ORvR though – since T4 population isn’t the problem, Mythic just needs to remove multiple T1-3 ORvR areas and have one larger ORvR area per tier. Throw PvE dungeons and mobs into the now unused pairing ORvR maps and 2 problems solved at once.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
[...] new servers will eventually leave WAR with 9 active servers. Darren (aka The Common Sense Gamer) is wondering what a lot of us are wondering right now: Is Mythic still correcting for an overzealous server [...]
July 13th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
[...] at The Common Sense Gamer wonders if this is still an ongoing correction of pre-release over-hype or a sign that things [...]
July 14th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I think they were definitely over ambitious with the number of servers they introduced around launch. Certainly on the Euro front they had to add a ton to keep up with the initial demand. Of course then people leave and the servers empty quickly. It’s the natural ebb and flow of the genre so I’m not very worried about WARs future. It’s a tough situation to deal with.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
[...] ~ Darren [...]