If you can find a PQ and a kill collector aligned it’s a faming dream. There’s a PQ stage 1 in the Shadowlands (Tier 2 Order/Elf) that’s kill 100+ skeletons and the kill collector at the camp is for skeletons. A group of three of us couldn’t finish stage 2 in time but by completing stage 1 twice we got the second influence reward and capped the kill collector at +10k experience bonus.
Wow, that’s one hell of a drop. Even after all the layoffs, EA must be riding mythic like a horse.
Huh? You can be T3 in T2 or T4 in T3 without being a chicken–or at least, you could before the last patch (I haven’t tried it since then). We would fight level 31s all the time in T2.
Impossible. I was in T3 fighting in a keep defence. I levelled from 31 to 32 and turned into a chicken.
If you arent turning into a chicken going into lower tier RvR, something is broken. In fact, just queuing for a scenario in a lower tier will turn you into a chicken.
On an open RvR server? I’m on Praag; on ORvR you can go one tier down with no problems. Trust me, fighting 40s at level 22 is no fun.
A few hours of grinding? That would make me want to kill myself.
I found most of the solo questing in this game godawful boring. I’m not sure why exactly. I wish they’d cut out about half of the PvE and spent the dev resources on making more scenarios. Ah well. Hopefully these server closures will keep the game alive long enough that they can spiff it up. It had some good ideas, and being able to pop into PvP and start leveling seconds after creating a new character was great.
Yeah, the grinding part is hard. I think all the previous hours of grinding in previous MMOs carries over to a new MMO. Now, one hour of grinding seems unbearable. One hour of anything that seems grindy and I have to log.
I just think the number is amazing. Is there even a MMO other than WoW with more than 43 servers ?
I guess EA really hoped WAR to be their WoW.
A design so fragile to population is risky and to think EA puts so much on stake of it puzzles me, is the management misled or EA was simply gambling?
That must represent a staggering amount of hardware. I suppose EA has other things cooking that could absorb that, but still. Maybe they can sell it to Blizzard.
Unless they were very confident of the game’s success, those servers were probably leased. At least that’s the impression I’ve gotten in the past from MMO launches, that they lease up front and only buy if they see long-term demand that will justify owning the servers. Since most MMO’s have high demand at the start that levels off, it’s smarter to lease most of the servers at first.
Hey, I’ll actually reply seriously to this.
What confusion? Warhammer had 300k subs with the end of the year. Activity has slowly died throughout January and February.
My guess on current sub count should be around 250k. In the next couple of weeks harder to judge because they are doing all kinds of promotions to keep the boat afloat.
Those servers they are closing were already written off long ago. Partially hidden in the UI. Removing them now only means that they don’t justify anymore the costs to keep the hardware online.
If you read the interviews you’d know that they expected to launch NEW servers regularly.
It didn’t quite go the way they thought.
As soon as an MMO starts to get grindy I look at my single player gaming backlog and say to myself;“Hey, I could log off and play Single-Player GameX and actually have fun”.
Warhammer Online is not a “shitty” game. However, Mythic seems to have failed to figure out what makes a game compelling. Grinding, slow travel times, mediocre PvE, and so-so PvP when the populations is balanced does not make a compelling game. Setting themselves up in a server based format, which is vulnerable to population fluctuations, in a PvP based game where population balance is critical, may not have been the best move.
Well, you have to consider that many of the later development items were performance enhancements. Maybe they thought they’d end up with server software capable of handling 30% more load it ended up being able to.
Warhammer seemed pretty fun when a server was 90-100+% full. The sweet spot is very small, and makes population issues quite fragile. If they could handle 30% more load, then Warhammer would have been fun as long as a server was at least 2/3rds full.
Software is always a gamble. Maybe they just got to the end and found out the foundation they had architected upon was not as firm as expected.
Meh. There’s already not enough PvE content to have kept me around. If they jettisoned half they might as well dump all of it and put all their eggs in the PvP basket. (Which wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world.)
In some ways I really wish people would quit trying to hybridize PvE and PvP - the balance and content requirements for both are very different, and it really blows as a PvE player to have favorite skills nerfed because they’re broken in PvP, or having things clogged up with PvP-oriented skills that are of little to no use in PvE.
But then, I appear to be in a minority of people who just don’t ever want to PvP.
You’re right that mixing PvE and PvP is difficult. Maybe impossible to do perfectly, I dunno. But my problem is, I don’t want a Guild Wars type PvP-only game, or a LOTRO PvE only game (no, Monster Play doesn’t count). I want a game with EQ/WoW style PvE mechanics that plays out in a competitive, faction-based PvP environment, preferrably one where you cannot advance in PvE without PvP, through having all the questing and raiding stuff in contested areas.
Given how hard it is to make this work, I should probably just go back to playing cards.
I don’t think you are in a minority, Malkev. I think the evidence points to most people wanting to spend most of their time in PvE in MMOs. I think the popularity of PvP is more about players wanting that as an optional activity rather than a focus.
One of the reasons Eve works so well for PvP is the huge server size. When ALL of your players are on the same server it’s so much easier to guarantee compelling content. Warhammer on the other hand has to micro-manage their server count because both too few and too many have serious gameplay problems.
When you design a server with a max concurrent of a few thousand (like WoW and Warhammer), you severely limit your options when it comes to things like PvP and so forth. Of course, getting large number of concurrent players per server is an extremely difficult technical challenge and requires some serious database work (either super-optimized SQL with insane hardware like Eve does, or some sort of actually scaleable database).
I suspect EVE can do what it does in part because the “world” is mostly black space. I’d be surprised if they could put 300,000 players in one server at one time in a game world made up of land mass, trees, rocks, buildings, water, thousands of NPC monsters, etc., at one time.
Think how much easier it is to create a playing area that is mostly empty of everything, including color, than it is to create one that is supposed to replicate a living, breathing world.
It makes sense, though. MMORPGs are sort of supposed to be all games to all people, with a big enough variety of things to do that people won’t get bored and stop giving you money. I think the problem is with games making it all but required to engage in every facet of the game (In WoW before WotLK, you could generally make it to PvE endgame without doing PvP or crafting, but those often are huge shortcuts to reaching new content). But then if you keep everything completely separate and optional, it gives everything but the main focus a bland, tacked-on feeling (see crafting in Warhammer), and that’s not much fun either.
Imo, Eve Online does the best job of blending these disparate aspects, but that may just be because in one world you can stick with pure PvE, pure PvP, or pure crafting and still have thousands of people to play with. If you’re not having the majority of your playerbase doing PvP in a game like WoW or Warhammer, it’s going to feel kind of barren.