I think Mythic always knew they were building a heavy PvP succesor to DAoC. I would hope that most of them realized that while a highly succesful product and playstyle, it is a niche one. Concentrating on it is a great way to make a succesful and profitable game leveraging that smaller niche playerbase (which is probably somewhere comfortably in the 500k range based on DAoC AoC and Shadowbanes population arcs). Mythic did a bang up job of building a good game for these types of players.

But you have to think that EA never really understould this, and really wanted to take a run at the 800 pound gorilla in the room. based on some of the conflicting statements from EA people and Mythic people just before release, it becomes clear. Mythic knew what they had and who they were targeting. EA was looking for WoW numbers. And marketing had drummed up axpectations of a WoW killer in the fanbase.

You know it has to be absolutely honking off a few EA execs that WoW has appeared to grow more paid subscriptions the WAR in the time period since WAR’s release.

There are a ton of quests, you just have to do a lot of running around looking, and flight paths are limited to 1 per zone so…

i’m starting to turn into a fanboi here about WAR but many people just seem to have the wrong perception. Yeah the grind is here, but the pvp is tops if you roll with friends and not PUG, the content is decent, they seem to actually be TRYING to get stuff done like gold spammers and bugs, just had a server move for low pops… they are trying.

Tier 3 was an absolutely mob grindfest devoid of quests after level 25.

You know, if you actually *go* to the T3 camps in the T3 zones you’ll find you don’t ever run out of quests. I hit 40 and still do quest for the money gain and title unlocks.

While I agree WAR does have issues of merit, I’d suggest highlighting them instead of, you know, making new ones up.

And if that is true then it really is ugly. 40% os shipped product converting to a recurring subscription for just the forst billing cycle.

And is it just me, or is EA really opening themselves up to consumer fraud lawsuits with that forums policy. It may be one thing to ban a player from a recurring subscription service game such as a MMO, based on forum behavior. But to ban them from a web enabled single player game, that really only requires the internet access because of the DRM? Such as Spore or C&C 3? Ummm? And to have the power to basically disable the paid for product with no refund vested in their comunity reps and message board mods. Does anyone see that they may have finally crossed the line in gaming customer abuse that a State AG could finally understand, and would probably be willing to act on?

Quote didn’t work correctly…

Which was retracted here
http://forums.ea.com/mboards/thread.jspa?threadID=457006

And it’s just as well too – because the feedback to the original statement found here http://forums.ea.com/mboards/thread.jspa?threadID=449687&tstart=0&start=0
gave a pretty clear indication of the sort of customer reaction they could expect.

I found it interesting because the idea of linking forum and game accounts was mentioned by a poster on Raph Koster’s site about 6 months ago and it was suggested by that poster that this was a way to ease the pressure on forum moderation.

In a way it’s kind of disappointing that EA does not intend to make this policy… the resulting test cases would help to resolve a few outstanding issues with regard to EULAs and ToS I think?