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http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=688

I'm not a WAR player, nor an MMORPG player of any type, but this doesn't look like the product has legs to me...

Ouch. Sucks to be WAR

This doesn't mean that the end is in sight. If anything the server population will be cranked up now thankfully.

BrookM wrote:This doesn't mean that the end is in sight. If anything the server population will be cranked up now thankfully.

I agree. While i am not a fulltime WAR player, I do get on occasionally. Unlike other games, like WoW, the games works alot better when you have a dense population in each zone. Public quests don't require you to group per se, but you will need a good number of people helping you out to do them. If anything I think this will improve the quality of the game...having so many servers in the past just caused the battelines to be spread too thin.

yeah it was always a pain in the arse to get people for pq and rvr i know thats why a bunch of people i know and indeed myself left the game... its a shame really... imo its a lil to late... the game had so much promise.....

but things didn't quite click on release..

shame i loved it.....

It's not as bad as it sounds. The game lives and dies on having a high per-server population. Merging them makes the game better for those of us who play it, me included.

BrookM wrote:This doesn't mean that the end is in sight. If anything the server population will be cranked up now thankfully.

Korcheski wrote:

BrookM wrote:This doesn't mean that the end is in sight. If anything the server population will be cranked up now thankfully.

I agree. While i am not a fulltime WAR player, I do get on occasionally. Unlike other games, like WoW, the games works alot better when you have a dense population in each zone. Public quests don't require you to group per se, but you will need a good number of people helping you out to do them. If anything I think this will improve the quality of the game...having so many servers in the past just caused the battelines to be spread too thin.

GCMandrake wrote:It's not as bad as it sounds. The game lives and dies on having a high per-server population. Merging them makes the game better for those of us who play it, me included.

ITT: Painful denial.

Hmmm... this might get me to renew my account for all of the reasons above. I enjoyed the game, but hated doing quest by my lonesome.
But I think this is a bad sign for everyone who thought this is a WoW killer.
Perhaps if this game was released 5 years ago it would have had more legs to stand on.

drgabe wrote:Hmmm... this might get me to renew my account for all of the reasons above. I enjoyed the game, but hated doing quest by my lonesome.
But I think this is a bad sign for everyone who thought this is a WoW killer.
Perhaps if this game was released 5 years ago it would have had more legs to stand on.

I don't think anyone or at least anyone smart thought this would be a WoW killer. However, I do think there were those that thought it would at least be able to keep up.. It fell flat when it missed it's first 2 release dates. It fell flatter when alot of the content was pulled to make it's 3rd release date. It fell even more flat when it wasn't complete and buggy as hell. Basically, it was a lame horse out of the gate, but Mythic kept whipping it and now, they've got a horse that needs to be shot.. It's a shame too as the promise it had was very good, it just never lived up to it's overinflated hype.

I think the game has improved drastically over the past few months. My wife and I play a few times a week, and it has become much more stable and the changes to open RvR have really made it a lot of fun.
I agree that closing the servers will improve things as population density will really make open RvR, Public Quests and Scenarios a lot easier to enjoy.
I also agree this should have been done a few months ago, but considering all the servers were packed for a few weeks until the WoW expansion hit, I suspect they were hoping for the best.

I don't think this is the end either. This is perhaps the end of the Warhammer Online will kill World of Warcrack myth.

As far as I know plenty of these games make a good living at smaller (than Warcrack) scales.

*Sings* Server closure is not the end, not the end...

Typeline wrote:ITT: Painful denial.

Oh really?

WAR was dead when I saw it going for $30 barely a couple months after its release.

Then I saw it for $10 during a few amazon and other online retailers sale a few weeks back. It was funny to see it in circuit city stores for a couple bucks just a week ago too.

Incidentally DOW II is going for 42% off on Amazon.co.uk

Is that normal for a game that's been out for 2 weeks?

I admit I know nothing about the commercial cycles of computer games as I never play them. So It may be that there is always a massive hype for the first release wave, which subsides pretty quickly when the next "new shiney" comes along.

For instance the WoW Lich King expansion is going for a 28% discount on Amazon...

These look like hefty discounts to me, but they may be entirely normal. I wouldn't know.

Nah, this isn't the end for WAR.

I honestly think the game is good enough to stand on its own two legs in this oversaturated market, but this is definitely the end of the idea that WAR is an equal competitor with WoW. Surviving != competiting.

Server closure really isn't the end. Alot of games have consolidated their server pool after their 'peak' and settled into a nice, loyal customer base.

From personal observation, if a game survives past the 'drop off point', i.e. when people seem to have collectively become bored with the game in general and jump to bigger better things seemingly en masse, then it leaves a small, dedicated core of players. EQ is a good example of this, I think EQ2 has even reached this point, but I haven't been keeping track of it. Planetside and DAOC have been in almost a steady decline since their 'peak' (which was shortly before WoW, incidentally), but seem to have leveled off. They have had mass server closures (I think Planetside is down to 2 now out of the starting 6 or so, DAOC down to 4 or 5 from about 20), but they continue to survive. Barely.

'Course hard and fast data is hard to come by when it comes to MMO populations (they're so stingy with the info!), so alot of this could be conjecture and supposition.

My point is, WAR was popular enough to survive in the long run. Christ. UO is still around, and that game blows chunks.


Now for something completely different:
How I Define Irony, a prose of rational thinking.

When WAR came out I spent most of my time debating with doomsayers, who proclaimed the end had come at last for WoW! WAR would throw WoW from its throne as MMO king, and declare itself lord of all persistent worlds! My belief that WAR would do well, but not even be a contender for WoW, was decried as fanboyism.

I find myself not even a year later defending WAR from doomsayers who shout that the sky is falling, and WAR has been ground to dust under the grinding gears of the almighty, infallable machine that is WoW. My belief is the same now, as it was then!

Thus: Irony.

tl,dr: I was right, everyone else was wrong, as always.

Edit: PS. I just noticed, WAR seems to have an excessive amount of servers. I think they were a little overly ambitious... This thing was BOUND to happen.

sillys its not the end is just them revamping there servers so it wont cost them as much on a daily bases.

Contracting the server pool could be a good thing. It may just mean the game had too many servers on launch and is now settling down to a sustainable size.

Like it or not, any MMO (and, really, most other games) currently has to deal with Not Being World of Warcraft.

Osbad wrote:Incidentally DOW II is going for 42% off on Amazon.co.uk

Is that normal for a game that's been out for 2 weeks?

I admit I know nothing about the commercial cycles of computer games as I never play them. So It may be that there is always a massive hype for the first release wave, which subsides pretty quickly when the next "new shiney" comes along.

For instance the WoW Lich King expansion is going for a 28% discount on Amazon...

These look like hefty discounts to me, but they may be entirely normal. I wouldn't know.

Not normal for a game not even a month old. Usually you get prices like that for AAA titles in maybe ~3 months down the road and then periodically after that, but not for 2 weeks. Hey, it could just be a case of overstock but despite the way reviews were going for DOW2 (85% metacritic score), gamers weren't happy from what I've read.

I wonder if the high specification required (DoW II) did the game any harm. I would have bought it if it ran at a reasonable speed on my machine.

Everquest turns 10 this year. Star Wars Galaxies is still running. Any game with a dedicated core of players will survive. WAR is sitting at 300k players, it'll be fine.

In all honesty this is not indicative of WAR's impending demise. I can't stress this strongly enough.

When the game launched, it went very smooth but they had far too many servers, many more than WoW did at launch. It has been a huge problem with the game with too many low population servers, they simply made too many and forcibly spread the playerbase over too much area, which lead to many of the games initial problems.

This is a change that should have happened last October.

That they are now doing it is good, but much later than it should have been done.


That said, I'm still having fun with it.

Well, I saw WAR on a shelf in some store a couple of weeks after the release of WotLK. It had droped in price with 60%. So, I am not surprised something like this occured.

I think a nelson HAA HAA is in order.

HAA HAA.

However the Devs at WAR do make me wonder why you have to unlock the ability to play the two newest classes that should have been in initial release!!!!

As someone who could never get into the grinding and big group raids of WoW, I'll ask here, how is WAR? And can I play Skaven, Bretonnian or Tomb Kings characters?

Those being my old WFB/WM armies.

Typeline wrote:

BrookM wrote:This doesn't mean that the end is in sight. If anything the server population will be cranked up now thankfully.

Korcheski wrote:

BrookM wrote:This doesn't mean that the end is in sight. If anything the server population will be cranked up now thankfully.

I agree. While i am not a fulltime WAR player, I do get on occasionally. Unlike other games, like WoW, the games works alot better when you have a dense population in each zone. Public quests don't require you to group per se, but you will need a good number of people helping you out to do them. If anything I think this will improve the quality of the game...having so many servers in the past just caused the battelines to be spread too thin.

GCMandrake wrote:It's not as bad as it sounds. The game lives and dies on having a high per-server population. Merging them makes the game better for those of us who play it, me included.

ITT: Painful denial.

So you think it would be best for WAR if the number of servers stayed the same while the number of players decreased? Seriously? Have you ever played an mmo? Most things in WAR depend on groups, like the public quests and world pvp. Having less players per sever would be horrible for the game.

You don't need to unlock them to play, you need to unlock them to play them a week before they are officially released. Minor detail, but in a week I will have my Choppa, without unlocking anything.

I like WAR a good bit, but mostly for the PvP. It is varied and fun (as opposed to WoW which got really stale after 4+ years). The PvE is less varied and interesting, but there is enough PvP that you have to consciously decide "Nah, I am going to kill a mob instead" as opposed to WoW which is a sprinkle of PvP over a PvE cake.

Now, I haven't done any of the level 20+ instances or raides in WAR, so they might be perfectly fine. And you can just run PvE too. It just wasn't as indepth as WoW it seems to me, and certainly not as fun as the scads of PvP there is to have.

Also, the three armies you listed, Tomb Kings, Skaven and Bretonians are not present. It looks like Skaven or TK might be in an expansion though. They keep hinting about them.

Oh well, I really like PvE, so I guess I won't be doing WAR

http://kotaku.com/5168085/warhammer-online-massively-merges-servers

This isn't the end of WAR, they still have 300,000+ players. They just don't have the 750,000 they had shortly after launch so they don't need as many servers. That and they were probably overly ambitious with the roll out of new servers.

With as much as I've heard of WAR not having enough players on any given server this is probably a really good thing for the hundreds of thousands of players it does have.

Yeah, server closures are always bad for PR but they improve the game substantially. They're past the explosive growth phase and now their settling into a more longterm and sustainable practice. Depending on who you ask they are still the second or third largest MMO on the market. 300,000 is hardly a small number, it just doesn't look that big compared to world of warcraft.

After playing wow for 3 years, and getting totally burned out I gave war a try, alas I was not to thrilled with the game, it was not much of a leap from wow, In fact, wow is still a better game even though it is a boring grindfest. my .02c