Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I don't know if it is ok to post this here

http://www.polygon.com/2013/2/27/4037906/warhammer-online-wrath-of-heroes-shutting-down-due-to-financial

Mythic Entertainment will shut down free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena game Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes due to its inability to meet financial goals, the studio announced.

Anyone Who plays this here?

Played WAR which had potential but released too early etc though I did really enjoy the first month. I'm surprised this spinoff lasted as long as it did since the engine was pretty poor.

Pretty unsurprising imo

Why play a game like that when theres plenty of other well established mobas that arent "lets try to recoup our losses from a failed mmo by reusing half the stuff we have"

 kenshin620 wrote:
Pretty unsurprising imo

Why play a game like that when theres plenty of other well established mobas that arent "lets try to recoup our losses from a failed mmo by reusing half the stuff we have"

Cause it's fun? And it's not really at all like other MOBAs - it's basically the scenarios from WAR (or WoW) but with 3 teams.

I've been playing it pretty casually since like Nov. I still managed to earn enough coins to have 5 heroes unlocked, and well on my way to a 6th.

The gold prices for heroes/etc were actually pretty fair IMO. But the Gem (read - real money) prices for things were correspondingly ridiculous. And well past the realm of Micro-transactions IMO. ($5 worth of gems couldn't buy squat) .

That - and the usual "no way to seperate the really good pre-made teams from the random casual pugs" (so most of the new players don't stick aroud after getting curbstomped all the time) is what did it in IMO.

I had fun with it, sad to see it go.

Is the subscription Warhammer Online still in existence?
I loved the game and can recommend it to anyone interested in the background of Warhammer Fantasy.

 Kroothawk wrote:
Is the subscription Warhammer Online still in existence?
I loved the game and can recommend it to anyone interested in the background of Warhammer Fantasy.

It's still up, actually for those who played like the last month on Wrath of Heroes you got a free Wrath Chest to play one month free on there with a buncha other bonuses.

They are pretty damn returded not having WAR made F2P a long time ago. A 12 year old could market WAR better than EA.

It was ok. Nothing special. It was rushed out to try and compete in the MOBA genre, but wasn't very well designed.
I still pop onto WAR from time to time. Love my Black Orc.

They have free to play, the problem with it is its some horrible ill-conceived idea which doesn't really help the game.

It shoe horns you into the Human/Chaos zone no matter the race, and as a side effect it was so badly coded they couldn't make engine see the difference between accounts so now everyone has to start there, so you have to go to a Flight master to get to you own starting zone if a subscriber.
Also you can't reactivate an old account for it, new ones only, so if you played back at launch and want to come back try out those characters, its tough.

Also the final nail right now is there is only two servers, a NA one and a European one. To stop RVR issues they have put in a 8hr lock on the account if you play a faction. So unless you are happy to have one of your factions on a permanent lag by playing across the pond, you can't play a Dwarf for an hour, then think Hmm, actually would rather have a go at my Druchii.

I re-subbed a couple of days back just to take a look, and its not looking good. The only good thing is somehow the Eu server is the same one I started Order on at launch, so I still have the names Griff and Valen, so once I hit level 20 they can get their Oberwald and Swift surnames.

 Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:

It shoe horns you into the Human/Chaos zone no matter the race, and as a side effect it was so badly coded they couldn't make engine see the difference between accounts so now everyone has to start there, so you have to go to a Flight master to get to you own starting zone if a subscriber.

That was actually done on purpose - at one point they revamped the Empire/Chaos starting zones to make them more streamlined/new player friendly. (It also had the effect of putting them in the well-populated zone, thanks to the free trial players). Subscribers could teleport to their own starting area (the orc one was the best!) if they wanted to proceed without the hand-holding, get the rep/inf rewards from them or whatever. Unfortunately, WAR was designed to basically require large populations of players, as things started to fall apart the lack of players made a lot of problems a whole lot worse.

WAR had a lot of things going for it. It was just badly mis-managed. I've played for a few months here, few there over the last few years. It's basically remained unchanged from where it was the first time I quit in 2009. It's sad, especially in light of WoH's premature closing, all the time spent on WoH could have been used to try to fix WAR's problems.

It's surprising though, that they never made any attempts to turn things around for WoH. I could think of a half-dozen small changes that would make the game much more newbie friendly and help it get it's legs underneath it. But I guess it's cheaper/easier to just close it instead.

Wouldn't "badly mis-managed" imply that it was well managed?

 Sigvatr wrote:
They are pretty damn returded not having WAR made F2P a long time ago. A 12 year old could market WAR better than EA.

I heard that their contract with GW included a per-player royalty that would make it extremely difficult to switch from a subscription model, but all that is just rumors and hearsay.

It could be that a switch to F2P would require approval from GW, and GW shot it down for reasons.


I'd play the game if it was F2P and had a decent population, I love RvR, but the game entered maintenance mode long ago and will never recover.

 Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:
They have free to play, the problem with it is its some horrible ill-conceived idea which doesn't really help the game.

They do not. They have a trial version that goes up to tier 1 which is not (!) F2P.

Ask Turbine how LotR going F2P worked out for them. Herp derp. I also doubt that it's GW blocking F2P on their own. Just check DAoC.

WAR was my favorite MMO ever, up until everyone left.. I think all of us who played became armchair game designers at some point in there..

Proposed Solutions:

Bright Wizards lay waste to everyone in their past, tone that down just a little?
Give mirror classes the exact same abilities with graphics changes because having a faction that is all buffs will always win out over a faction that is all debuffs (Chosen vs KOTBS for example)

In all seriousness, if they went F2P and got the number of players back up in all tiers, I would give them money no matter what the imbalances are but I just can't pay to be there all alone.

Hammerer nuf said

Give mirror classes the exact same abilities with graphics changes because having a faction that is all buffs will always win out over a faction that is all debuffs (Chosen vs KOTBS for example)

Funnily enough that was never the issue (Maybe it is now, I havn't played in a long time). The two major issue's for a quite some time were.

Bombing/Burning Squads (Bright Wizard/Sorceress based burn units that killed a TON in AoE). These ran rampant for the longest time, and were the primary meta because of just how powerful it was. Being a melee killer was worthless against this, tanks would protect the AoE burners, and healers would concentrate on healing the wizards.


The power of the melee healers (Priest of Sigmar, Cannot remember the Dark Elf one). These not only were more tanky, but managed to outheal the dedicated healers due in part to the power of their AoE heals, even the zealot/rune priest dedicated to AoE couldn't outheal these guys.

Melee heroes could not outmatch the burning squads, so being one was pretty useless for a while, tanks were okay between each other. (They actually each had their own niche, so they were not invalidated between each other at the least.)

It was during this long period between balancing that I knew alotta people left the game.

 Sigvatr wrote:

 Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:
They have free to play, the problem with it is its some horrible ill-conceived idea which doesn't really help the game.

They do not. They have a trial version that goes up to tier 1 which is not (!) F2P.

Ask Turbine how LotR going F2P worked out for them. Herp derp. I also doubt that it's GW blocking F2P on their own. Just check DAoC.

Ah, my bad, they way MMO champion covered it a while back I assumed it was proper F2P, if its just a trial.. well more fool them, also explains why it was so awful, so they broke the feeling of the game for anyone playing the other four races forced into Human/Chaos zone, for a trial.. nice work Mythic. I actually re-subbed just to have a look in the door last week, hoping the lure to play Druchii would be strong enough.. and yeah, its not really changed much.

Going to give it a few hours, but its not looking hopeful.

Yup. Checked back to roll a Goblin, suddenly was in the Chaos starting area, checked the forums, confirmed it, logged out, uninstalled.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Wouldn't "badly mis-managed" imply that it was well managed?

badly as in severely, extremely.

not badly as in poorly.

Bizarrely, this thread is making me want to play WAR again.

Of course, in my mind, what they'd need to do with Warhammer Online is just turn it into a normal single player game, sort of like the reverse of Kingdoms of Amalur

Screw the MMOness, I loved just wandering round Ulthuan and the Old World.

 Compel wrote:
Of course, in my mind, what they'd need to do with Warhammer Online is just turn it into a normal single player game, sort of like the reverse of Kingdoms of Amalur

Screw the MMOness, I loved just wandering round Ulthuan and the Old World.

Yeah. WAR looked wonderful. Really hit all the imagery right on the head. I loved how my Knight looked and my alt Chosen looked.

They made so many mistakes, though. *sigh* And then that billing snafu they had (charging people a random number of times one month, from 1 to 99) just killed any trust I had for them and I got out.

I think some of you dudes are confused. They're saying that Wrath of Heroes is shutting down.

Wrath of Heroes was a dumb F2P play2win MOBA clone with an MMO combat system /third person freecam.

This article is not talking about the MMO (Age of Reckoning) shutting down, as far as I know.

Wrath of Heroes was kind of rubbish anyway.

Warhammer Online itself was pretty good, but I think they shot themselves in the foot (or head, possibly) when they released Land of the Dead instead of balancing classes; that should've been their top priority. I remember being a Blackguard, which was supposed to be an antimagic tank, but getting steamrolled by Warrior Priests, Bright Wizards, and Ironbreakers (who were supposed to be my mirror class, but seemed to be truckloads better). The only OP thing Destruction had, IIRC, was the Disciple of Khaine, and the Chosen was better than its mirror.

Played WAR and LOVED it. Was a great game.
That said, it was released too early, and had some bad direction during development. They made the mistake of going more WoW like instead of DAoC like, and that's what killed them.
WoH was a good concept that just bombed for me because of all the face rolling.
I'm sad to see it go anyway, because it was still a pretty damn good looking game and playing Orks always makes me happy. Even if the game is a bit bad.

Hated the game due to the crappy voice acting by the same person