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 Kanluwen wrote:
Simply put, the absolute biggest reason that we saw Warhammer Online be such an abysmal failure is World of Warcraft.
Players had an expectation that WAR was going to be WoW with a Warhammer skin.
The end result game was too different to WoW to be a success in the climate of the launch, where WoW was in between expansions and had a stable game. Add to it that right as WAR launched, WoW started previewing Wrath of the Lich King and WAR never really had a chance.

At the launch of WAR, on Sept 18, 2008, WoW was two months away from releasing Wrath of the Lich King. At that point, a lot of people had been playing WoW for years and were ready for a change. Many were very excited at WAR's offer of a game based around PvP, in stark contrast to WoW's PvP system that, while treated as important, was seen as not very well supported.

Warhammer was a huge name. There was a ton of excitement and a ridiculous amount of launch hype. People played the beta and had a lot of fun and were primed for the retail launch. I didn't know much about Warhammer-non-40k at the time, but the female dwarf engineer character was amazing and quickly sold me on the game.

But then...

 Kanluwen wrote:
Of course there were other things at play but the biggest reason is simply Warcraft has too big of a stranglehold. Until Warcraft is a dead game, pretty much every fantasy MMO is going to suffer a similar fate unless they offer something radically unique and different. Loyalty to a specific IP(Conan, Warhammer, or the forthcoming Elder Scrolls Online) can keep a game afloat for a bit but it just delays the inevitable.

With respect, I think your casting of the industry here is wholly incorrect.

The core reason MMOs keep coming out and failing* is simple: they offer no significant advances over WoW, but are not as good as it, having many issues of their own and frequently refusing to learn from WoW's own mistakes, which are often corrected by the time the new MMO launches.

Let's take an example from WAR. WAR's stat system was quite flawed. It was actually very similar to the stat system in WoW's current (at the time) expansion, which was very similar to the one the game had launched with. When you have a bad stat system, you screw up the way a class scales with gear, often making many of its abilities obsolete and reducing its gameplay to a shell of the initial vision. When WAR launched, WoW was about two months away from releasing its own expansion correcting those problems and making the game much stronger.

MMOs also frequently make huge mistakes when it comes to the feel of your interaction with your character. One of WoW's biggest assets is that the way your character moves, the way the enemies move, the way the abilities work, all feel very good. It's vanishingly rare for other MMOs to capture that same feel. I don't think WAR did too badly on that score, though it was certainly suboptimal (and it had some big engine issues at release in particular; snotlings running around with two frames of animation in their walk comes to mind).

WAR itself, though. Where to begin?

The Public Quests, or PQs, were pretty fun. They were a goodly advance the game had over WoW and a big selling point at the time. They had significant flaws, though. They didn't, IIRC, scale well (or at all?) to the number of players doing them, and they became exceedingly difficult to complete after a while when the leveling pack had spread out a bit and fewer people were around, especially outside the human starting zones. They also had issues with contribution not being awarded very well and people feeling like they'd been shortchanged on loot for no reason. They were one of the game's high points overall, though.

The battlegrounds, which they called scenarios I think, were also quite fun, but they immediately started running into problems. Many of the scenarios were terribly designed, seeming to have received very little playtesting. Most of them, past tier two (or arguably even tier one) just weren't fun to play. There was also generally one that was the most rewarding. Because of the way the queue system worked, that one would be played all. the. time. Just non-stop. This one scenario. Over. And over. And over. Until you were seriously sick of seeing the inside of it and wanted to see another.

Occasionally, enough people would get frustrated simultaneously (assisted, eventually, by the multi-queue mods that came out) that you'd get to play one of the other scenarios... and you'd find out why nobody played them. They were often quite broken - completely unfun, concepts that might have been brought to life with more time and polish, but that in the event hadn't received that attention and weren't ready to be released. Not a good thing.

The class design in the area of PvP, meanwhile, was bad. It started off fun, with really engaging battles and a quite kinetic feel of push back and forth that WoW didn't really have. Tier 2 was more of the same, but around the end of the tier, something curious started happening: control abilities began to proliferate. By tier 3 this control arms race was in full swing, and that sort of thing is a war that nobody wins. As it was you got stunned, disabled, interrupted, disarmed and whatever else with increasing frequency until you found yourself reaching, in vain, for your PvP trinket, now far away in Azeroth, unable to help you.

Remember Marauders? Good times. (Oh, the class balance was awful too. Bright wizards? Marauders? Terrible. And the aura twisting thing? Terrible gameplay.)

By tier 4, people pretty much just fell over a lot of the time.

Anyway, none of us came to WAR to play battlegrounds. What about the RvR?

Well, it turns out that was terrible too. Responding to requests from players of Dark Age of Camelot (and others who'd heard about the battles over castles there), Mythic moved away from their original plans of Battlefield Objectives somewhat reminiscent of Warhammer battlefields and added keeps to the game. These were capturable fortresses that could house (and be attacked by) siege weapons and contained a loot piñata raid boss whose defeat would grant you ownership of the keep.

Unfortunately, this had a variety of problems.

Firstly, the keep battles were, well, bad. They started off okay, when nobody knew how to play and they were new and exciting (though IIRC they had huge problems with framerate lag in particular). But all the keeps had one peculiar feature: they only had one internal staircase heading to the second floor, where the Keep Lord lived. This is a game that has some extremely powerful ground-targeted AoE. With the right combination of players, a quite small group could hold off more or less unlimited numbers of enemies, because they could AoE the staircase and the attackers had no way to respond. They had to move up that one path... and die.

So that was a big problem with making the battles fun, but there was another problem: faction balance. Because the game had two factions, the one with fewer players would often find itself on the back foot, getting pushed back to its invincible, camp-based static defenses until the other side got bored and enough drifted away that the defenders could push out again, crushing the attackers with superior numbers and pushing them back to their camp, where they would become the new defenders. It turns out this is really unsatisfying and boring.

But fortunately, salvation was available in a third problem. It turned out that the best rewards came from capturing keeps. What did you get from defending keeps? Well, not a lot, really. Eventually players caught on to this and stopped fighting, instead opting to both attack each others' keeps at the same time while nobody defended, taking them with ease and reaping the rewards. Then, when they could, they would attack each others' keeps again, never fighting, just picking up the rewards.

It turned out that this was not good gameplay.

What did the game offer in PvE? Well, it had some dungeons, but they were quite wild and wooly, a far cry from the much more polished experience that was about to be unleashed in Wrath of the Lich King. The questing was okay, but probably not why anyone was playing the game. WotLK, meanwhile, despite the penny arcade comic, had comparatively advanced and interesting quest lines and design, including some cool new stuff like vehicles.

And so, suffering from design flaws, technical issues, poor balance, lacking RvR, unfinished scenarios and humdrum PvE, the game sank quickly into obscurity and everyone played Wrath and lived happily ever after. Once you got past the (quite fun) first tier PvP, pretty much all aspects of the game had horrible flaws.

WAR had a lot of promise. Its art design was incredibly well done, with great art direction, which is an aspect WoW also benefits greatly from and isn't generally credited enough for. It also had a huge brand name to help it break into the market, and it worked: WoW players defected in droves. But they didn't stay, because it was a bad game. Not because they're too wedded to WoW, but because WAR was, despite all the promise I and you and many others saw in it, bad. It's a tragedy that potential was never realised, but there it is.

On the subject of players who don't want to switch from WoW because they're too invested, I don't think there are actually very many. A while back, Blizzard stated that vastly more people have quit the game than played it - I believe the number at the time was over 26 million who had quit, and that was back when the game had over 10 million subscribers, so there are probably over 40 million people who have played the game in total now. Only ~8 million of those are still playing, but of those who have quit, most of the ones I know are still interested in MMOs in concept at least, even if they aren't interested in playing WoW again.

WoW certainly started with a really unique confluence of events, but there's nothing stopping anyone from succeeding in its niche. They just have to make a game that's actually as good as it, and it turns out that's pretty hard.

 dementedwombat wrote:
Question: why is a free to play model such a good thing?

What's really powerful about the f2p model is the realisation (and this applies to meatspace FLGS too, interestingly) that people playing the game is, itself, valuable. A multiplayer game is pointless without others to play with. f2p provides a great bounty of free players who make the game fun and worthwhile for the people who actually will spend money, even if those free players never end up spending money themselves.

Planetside 2 was brought up, and that's a good example. As someone who's spent money on Planetside 2, I've benefited from the people who haven't, since they provide me with teammates and opponents that I wouldn't have otherwise.

On the flip side of the equation, you have the little indieish games on Steam that have a lot of trouble maintaining a multiplayer community in part because you have to buy into them.

f2p also makes people more likely to try the game out. That's helpful, especially when you want your friends to give the game a try. Then those players might go on to spend money as well.

It also kinda makes you less in direct competition with other subscription titles. Having subscriptions to multiple games feels wasteful, and people don't like to do it.

Regarding EVE vs WAR, they were really different games. EVE is a terrible game, but it's a great MMO. WoW is a good game but a pretty bad MMO. WAR was probably a slightly better MMO than WoW, but it was a worse game, and it had aspects like scenarios that undermined the MMO elements, and the MMO elements were badly flawed to begin with (like that huge spiel I wrote about keeps earlier).

It's hard to overstate how bad WoW is at being an MMO, though. For the most part, it just isn't - it's a small group dungeon crawler with a ridiculously elaborate lobby. Exploiting that weakness would definitely be a good way of differentiating your MMO, though it turns out making a good MMO is surprisingly hard and it's easy to throw pie in the sky ideas around that wouldn't necessarily work well when you tried to implement them.