Anonymous :
It is true that the wrong people are still employed at Mythic, which is why I know Warhammer will not improve. With the layoffs earlier this year, the saddest thing was that those making the horrible design and development decisions were the ones deciding who was going and who was staying.

As one of the guys still here, man do I know it. But the layoffs were weird. People I would have never thought of as at risk were let go and people that lots of us grunts thought should be canned are STILL here.
And there is the ever present risk of more layoffs hanging over the head of everyone still….

J. :
Products have life cycles. Every day DAoC remains alive is a gift.

Two and a half good years was way too short of a lifecycle for DAoC.

Current World of Warcraft players? Well, no, considering a good part of the reason why WoW is played is because Blizzard made it (thereby permitting this well-streamlined EverQuest clone to succeed beyond the wildest dreams of the original and its clones) you’re barking up the wrong tree to try to dislodge any of them unless thy name is Blizzard.

Ex-World of Warcraft players? Well, no, chances are if you left World of Warcraft you’re not pining for more of it.

Games Workshop/Warhammer players? Well, no, from what I gather Warhammer is really more of a collectible figurine game. The IP is more suited to RTS than RPG.

Casual Gamers? Well, no, the RvR end game can only intimidate them.

Hardcore Gamers? Well, no, the simplified game mechanic doesn’t leave all that much to muster a competitive edge over each other.

Overall, what we probably have here in Warhammer Online is yet another attempt to please all camps and it ends up pleasing none. And yet, it is somewhat a feather in Mythic’s cap that they managed to pull together a high-enough quality game that it pulls off a “meh” reaction instead of a full fledged “blech!”

I have tried every other major MMO and achieved top level in them (where applicable), if not very close… the first to come to mind are: (DAOC, WOW, EVE, DDO, EQ2, and WHO).

I left DAOC when the PVP server population died (many argue it was due to design and people being disinterested in PVP – not true, Mythic left it broken in too many ways for too long, and class balance was a huge issue, Catacombs directly destroyed Mordred)…

I’ll flat out say it: Warhammer Online sucks compared to DAOC… even if you compare them right now. If it was Mark Jacobs who was responsible for the design decisions in WHO, then he should never make another game. He essentially plagiarized WOW (which is almost 100% PVE focused, for a PVP game?).

So, if Mark Jacobs ever happens to read his “family” blogs and check out the comments, here’s why Warhammer failed:

1) Too WOW-like. The crowd that was going to play and make Warhammer great was the crowd who played WOW and did not like it, eagerly anticipating the next DAOC. This could have been a huge crowd.

2) System requirements. The beauty of WOW and DAOC is that you can play both of them fine on any computer. Conan essentially committed seppuku by having system requirements that a majority of people simply could not meet, on top of a strange IP and strange combat system.

3) Scenarios. Again, you stole from WOW, and, honestly, a couple of them were pretty fun, but ultimately they sucked and all become the same “all 10 guys from side A pile onto all 10 guys from side B… strategy = kill the glowing guy… too simple… capture and hold is dominated by tanks…etc”.

4) “Lake RVR” had a lot of potential… but, giving the defenders a keep full of relatively difficult, fairly quickly respawning guys, and a keep lord in a place where getting enough people on him at once to kill him requires voice communication amongst up to 30 or 40 people… really bad move. DAOC style keep guards that can be killed over a fairly long time, and a keep lord who pretty much fights alone and has a SMALL HOST of defenders and can easily be reached by the whole raid at once was much, much nicer. My friends and I GREATLY enjoyed the first lake. The battles ranged in size from 1 on 1 to 15 on 15, and at the lower end of the levels, the horrid class/gear imbalances didn’t play such an extreme part.

Ultimately, the problem Mark’s crew made was to forsake what they had right in DAOC (it’s been said before). Watching the production videos left me disappointed the entire time, as I watched designer egos fly through the roof as they happily described departures from DAOC mainstays and adherence to “world of warcraft” style gameplay. It was like watching someone who had built a really nice and unique sand castle get excited over building an indistinguishable sand pile.

WOW doesn’t have 10+ million players because it’s the ultimate game. It has 10+ million players because:

A) It is in a series of extremely popular PC games (Warcraft, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, Starcraft), DAOC did not have this legacy to start with, but Warhammer almost did.

B) The advertising for WOW was huge, stepping from game store cutouts up to television commercials, and gaining wide appeal enough to begin getting referenced in TV and movies, and to soft drinks and snack chips.

C) WOW is accessible to more people because of its more simple and appealing nature. The market of people who want to play it are people who are easily attracted to eye-candy… and guess what? Almost all of them are already playing WOW and aren’t going to change for Warhammer, or likely any other non-Blizzard, non-”Warcraft”-related IP. You know what else is hugely popular? Baby clothing. Does this mean that all clothing should be designed as baby clothing in order to achieve maximum profits and “success”? No. It just means that if you want to make awesome clothing/video games, sometimes you’re gonna have to build for an awesome crowd, even if it’s not so huge you earn enough revenue to build a new cruise ship and put a huge dent in world hunger every month.

D) The Warhammer IP does not properly convert into an MMO where everyone is a hero with 50 billion artifacts, the original “Warhammer” tabletop gamers see too many differences between the source and the game, so, you lose that crowd too.

E) Realm balance mechanisms. The game simply isn’t fun for ANYONE playing an RVR game on a server where the population is heavily balanced against them. This works okay in WOW because Scenario gameplay is essentially the entirety of gameplay, but, the perception of “losing” always being thrust in the users face by the hard to read slider bar in the upper right hand corner is adding insult to injury.

Ultimately, tl;dr version:
Mark Jacobs and the designers of WHO should not make any more MMOs because they demonstrated that they were the types of developers who would throw away their own good work, and directly imitate the mediocre but better advertised work of others.

J. :

Zhar :
I’m a passionate DAoC player .
I hope MJ is the right person we all blame for.

You are very likely wrong. Mark was the studio head and thus several levels removed from actual combat and mission mechanics decisions, likely from WAR in the past year and certainly DAoC for the past five.
But, be happy being a passionate fan of an 8-year-old game!

It could be 8 years old it could be 12 years old , i dont think thats a matter -.-

Zhar :
I’m a passionate DAoC player .
I hope MJ is the right person we all blame for.

You are very likely wrong. Mark was the studio head and thus several levels removed from actual combat and mission mechanics decisions, likely from WAR in the past year and certainly DAoC for the past five.

But, be happy being a passionate fan of an 8-year-old game!

I’m a passionate DAoC player .

I hope MJ is the right person we all blame for.

If i look some important changes in DAoC especially : ToA, changes in archery dmg type, style and hot changes of some classes.

Let me begin with critic on ToA.

the introducing of Mls and Artefact and the well designed ToA area was a good idea.
But it was a big mistake that players was forced to build huge groups.

Second point the archery changes : They made the class so easy to play ,so that
everyone sucked in RvR before rolled an archer and made some parts of RvR to a
to a very frustrating place.

To the Style-and hotchanges : They made especially for reaver,valks, champs,vamps
nearly imposible to fight against more oponents.

So we can say all the changes was done to harm solo-smallman rvr.

So in generall we can say : They changes DAoC in favour of hugegroups and harmd solo-smallman rvr type, the bad thing is they forcing players to join hugegroups.
Otherwise they will get hug frustrating experience.
And really ,this changes caused many many players to leave DAoC.

I think some Mythic leader , get blended from the number of WoW subsribers and started to try forcing players to build hugegroups.
In thought we will have more success with DAoC.
But they forget that DAoC is a RvR game with very serious and honorfull aims.

So i conclude that the same man who decided to create ToA and some class changes
only to favour hugegroups and harm individuel playwise,
is the same who do that at WAR.
And MJ was the Leading head for WAR.

So i hope with fireing MJ ,the new head of Mythic will develop DAoC and War in a right not WoW oriented way.
I dont think that we can compare RvR game with a PvE game .

My 2 Cents

It’s quite possible they put pressure on Mark Jacobs to deliver, in the hope that such pressure would make him more likely to succeed. That’s manager-level thinking: “if I squeeze him hard enough, he will produce miracles! Muahaha!”

Not even sure why you’re disagreeing, in your last paragraph you admit one of the reason for dissatisfaction is likely poor return on investment. That’s what everyone else is saying.

However, there’s a difference between asking, “what if” and spinning theories versus asking “what if” and demanding a certain answer out of it. Certainty cannot truly be derived from a fantasy scenario, though it may be reassuring to believe it can.

Were the EA executives let down by Warhammer Online turning out not to be a great success? Well, sure, everybody wants to be a success. And yet… it seems to me that if they know the business at all, they know that there’s no such thing as a guaranteed success in the game industry.

My favorite theory out of this is it was one of mutual dissatisfaction. EA didn’t like Mythic much on the grounds that they’ve sunk a lot of money into them with a less satisfactory result than they were hoping for, while Jacobs didn’t like EA much as they forced them to shoulder a lot of WoW clone features to shoot for a neigh-impossible goal (NO game has been as successful as WoW) that the game would have been better off without.