Nov
4

WAR is everywhere…

6 Comments

…except where the players aren’t.

What happens when your play experience is largely dependent on other people, but nobody shows up? If the premise for your game is that “War is everywhere”, then one would think that you take every step possible to make sure that the one essential ingredient to making this happen was present…an population across all tiers. Ahhhh…but getting an even population assume that player “bubbles” move at the same pace across the content, which they don’t. The vast majority of the population in WAR right now is either just hitting tier 3 or well into it…leaving tiers 1 and 2 pretty empty and giving you the feeling that War is somewhere, but not where you are.

Something has to be done to get the players who “must get to the top”, to revisit then other zones. Couple good solutions:
1) Get rid of the chicken. This from a conversation that was brought up off air on SUWT 36 by John….and it’s an excellent idea. It was mentioned that maybe having higher players turning into chickens was a funny idea, but maybe a level-down system would have been better.
2) Move the carrot. If you want players to experience War everywhere, then you’ve got to put goals for all levels everywhere as well. You can’t just take a tiered approach and continually put the carrot in front of the player. Put it behind them. To the right. Upside down. Move the target all over the place….and purposely put those goals in an RvR zone so that those players just moving up can experience some kind of resistance to their RvR content.

War has got a problem right now and although I’m very confident that they are going to fix it in short order, I see some larger than “normal” growing pains for them in the meantime.

D out.

Posted in Warhammer
6 Comments Posted by Darren

6 Responses to "WAR is everywhere…"

  • Matt says:
    November 5, 2008 at 12:38 am

    Basically that’s the reason I cancelled. The zones where i was questing around were dead. For all I could tell I was playing a single player game over 75%+ of my time online. And when I actually did see other people they sure as heck weren’t about to do some rvr or anything like that. In my opinion they have wayyy wayyy too many servers up with the population too low on most of them.

  • Draekas says:
    November 5, 2008 at 2:33 am

    I think its silly that new games do NOT have mentoring AND sidekick type systems from the get go. Being able to play with your friends, anytime, anywhere, should be the number one goal of MMOs. That’s why so many people play and keep subscribing to these games. Anything that gets in the way of that, is bad game design. Heck, I’d go so far as to suggest just removing leveling.. just add tons and tons of acheivements instead for those types of folks. Or possibly add a new server type.. Endgame servers.. everyone starts at level 40, 100% of all the content is retuned to level 40.. you never have to leave your friends or content behind.

  • SmakenDahed says:
    November 5, 2008 at 8:12 am

    Not to be too harsh, but the theory of “players being the content” was a premise of AC2. WAR didn’t take it quite that far though.

    Reducing someone in level (to the bolstered level) is probably a good idea instead of the chicken. They have an idea of what HPs and armor and such a player should have at that level because they boost people to it… dropping down to it shouldn’t be that hard. The question that raises is, what happens to the abilities a character gained above that tier? They keep it? Lose it?

    To be fair, they get dropped below the tier cap so I don’t see why they wouldn’t keep the abilities. When bolstering, you’re not gaining abilities so why lose them? (aside from some of them being pretty powerful and having counters that require enemies to have about the same level :) )

  • Yeebo says:
    November 5, 2008 at 10:39 am

    Color me crazy, but things seem to be hopping in teir one on the destination servers right now. I had a bunch of destruction toons that i had to abandon near launch because their server was dead as a doornail. After moving them, I’m finding quite a bit of action on my new server. I’m even running into the enemy when I’m out doing the RvR scouting quests in the wee hours, which would almost never happen on the medium pop server I was playing order on before. Of course a side effect of this is that the chat in the teir one chaos area has gotten to be nearly as bad as the Barrens. Not sure how long this will last, but taking the free server transfers helped things out a lot for the time being (if you take advantage of them).

    I also think it’s pretty crystal clear that WAR launched with too many servers. It wouldn’t surprise me if we start seeing some consolidations soon.

  • Rog says:
    November 5, 2008 at 6:11 pm

    I completely agree with Draekas. There are already good systems in place working well in other games, mentoring / sidekicking works exceptionally well when done right.

    MMORPGs need to get past the make-friends-at-your-level and start catering to the players who already have friends. If anything, most players are migrating from other MMOs, often along with their existing guilds. Multi-game guilds are commonplace now.

    It’s like they think they’re catering to some nerd-with-no-social-life cliche. It’s way off the mark IMHO.

  • Dear MMO Developers: I have friends | NecroRogIcon says:
    November 5, 2008 at 8:06 pm

    [...] games even require a large diverse population for the content to work correctly. WAR is the biggest example so far: if players aren’t active and working together in any given area, the content just doesn’t [...]

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