State of the Chaos Address
Welcome again to Broken Toys, your Warhammer Online fansite. (I’m sure Mythic’s community team will GET RIGHT ON sending me the invites to fan junkets.) Oh by the way, there was also a somewhat major World of Warcraft patch this week, which broke all the servers. So, there’s your WoW news: servers fall down, go boom, and you probably lost half your mounts. ANYWAY. Enough about the game with 11 million subscribers, let’s dish about the game with .75 million! Why? Because Mark Jacobs is just so gosh darned spunky. You never see Rob Pardo give “State of the Nation” addresses, do you? Well, DAOC players became somewhat used to reading them, and now it’s Warhammer’s turn!
I’m happy to announce that in December, the Black Guard and the Knight of the Blazing Sun will officially be part of WAR. We have very special plans around their appearance and in our next newsletter we will provide full details about that exciting and rather novel event.
In other words, Order (Empire) and Destruction (Dark Elves) both get a new tanking class. Prooobably not a coincidence – trying to do a scenario without a tank is usually an exercise in frustration. Almost as much as doing a scenario without a healer. But wait, there’s more!
The Combat and Careers team has spent the last month looking at the changes that they want to make with an eye towards making improvements and buffs, not removing or weakening abilities. I won’t go into details here but the vast majority of careers all have nothing but love coming their way.
Ooh, candy! We like candy. But that’s not all!
In 1.1 (and beyond) we will be doing a myriad of things for our RvR players, including improving gear drops, increasing drop rates, and implementing an RvR-influence system to compliment the current PvE-influence system.
New stuff, always good. But wait, if you order now, you ALSO get…
We are working hard on deploying a substantially improved mail system for this patch. We will continue to enhance WAR’s mail system until it is one of the best mail systems found in any MMORPG.
Ooookay. Well, I guess that’s important, I know that a functioning communications infrastructure is key to any high fantasy army, amirite? But is that all? No, that is not!
We will also be offering the first server transfers to our players to continue to help even out the server populations. These transfers will be free of charge but they will be limited to moves off high-population servers to select mid-population servers or off of low-population servers to a selection of mid-population servers.
…you mean, Warhammer is *consolidating servers*? No, I must be reading that wrong.
“The corollary to that is if you’ve seen a game consolidate servers, you know it’s in deep, deep trouble — that’s not a healthy sign for an MMO,” he said, citing Sony’s January-released “Pirates of the Burning Sea” as a recent example. “It will be the same for ‘Warhammer.’ Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we’re not adding servers, we’re not doing well.”
According to the War Herald archives, the last servers were added on September 19, a day after the game’s official release, when 5 high-population servers were cloned to new servers. Well, to be fair, they still have a week! And, to be less snarky, in a PvP-focused game, a high population is important to a proper target-rich breakfast of eight essential dwarven vitamins and elven fibers. But still, you have to wonder if the first month’s billing cycle coming up this week is making Mythic’s CEO, Lead Designer and spokesperson somewhat uneasy.
Well, thanks everyone for having the reaction I thought you all would:
1) Trolls – OMG, is this all there is? WTF, addition of two new classes, new content, new influence system, mail system fix, class balances and more, to the game? Is that all you guys can deliver in a month? Yawn
2) Objective folks – Sounds good but still need to deliver on it as well as the other issues with the game!
3) Fans – YIPEE!
So, to the trolls, well, you’ve shown why you should continue to be ignored here. Please show me another MMORPG which has added new classes to the game without charging the players through an expansion pack.
I can’t think of one right now but even if there is one that I am forgetting, the vast majority don’t.
Take THAT, gotcha liberal blogosphere!
We’re in this for the long haul and as I said in an interview yesterday, success in the MMO world should be seen as a marathon and not a sprint. We’re off to a great start but we’re not there yet. No successful MMORPG hit its peak within the first year, let alone the first month and that’s the approach we’re taking with WAR.
I wonder if EA is hearing the same thing.