Yeah, got to agree with that. My wife and I are both avid MMO players. We're both Mac users as well (primarily, we'll load up Bootcamp if a game feels worth it, and we own all consoles). We to be honest had no interest in Warhammer anywhere around it's launch. But with the recent announcement of the beta client for Macs we figured "What the hell?" and gave the 10 day trial a shot.

Which lasted one evening, before we just deleted the game and moved on with life. Nothing about it was able to grab our attention... not the gameplay, not the early quests (My god, talk about just dropping players in with no lead in to kind of push them in the right direction), not the graphics. Nothing. The UI itself is horrible.

We have more fun going back to FFXI, WoW, or LOTRO. Though LOTRO has it's own issues that keep us from playing for more than a couple of months at a time. LOL

So meanwhile we're back to waiting for the Aion retail launch (We have been having a BLAST in beta) and someday FFXIV.

Wow, show the man some respect for christ sake! Not only did he work on the game many of us loved (albeit hated how it ended up), but he was thrown into a horrible economy without a job.

Cedric, you're a prime example of an institutionalized WoW player.

Quests? Warhammer has quests? Seriously, I'm not criticizing you for not liking the quests but the game isn't meant to be a PvE game... of course they're going to be pointless and boring. I leveled my Zealot to 40 only doing a handful or quests, probably less than 30 total. Mainly because its easier on yourself keeping your game rank and RR the same. I only did a few quests to grab that next level when I was near it so I could jump back in to an SC or do some ORvR. Even now, if I create a new character I go straight to Nordland and level to 12 strictly through the T1 RvR, as do most people.

I'm not knocking you for not liking the game, everyone has different tastes but if you only played for one evening in T1 doing quests then you didn't see the game in the way Mythic wanted us to see it.

Yes, it had quests. Which is why I expected a point to the quests. After all, I -still- after 6 years play FFXI. So believe me, I am happy to play games where the quests have no effect on my leveling and are provided for other purposes... but at least if they're there I expect a purpose and point.

And there is the point, I don't know -what- Mythic wanted me to see. But it certainly didn't provide any introduction to it. I have no trouble with PvP games either (mmmIcantwaitforAionretail), but a five second blurb on "You hate the other faction, now go fight", does not gameplay make. I've played deeper FPS's.

Now all the power to you if you love the game. But the article is about the failings of WAR to retain customers and after reading the reasons given in the article, I still feel it's missing the reality, which is that the game just isn't interesting to most. Not graphically, not lore wise, not quests, not PvP. Which I'm sure everyone that left the game had their own reasons for why it didn't grab them as customers. It still boils down to a lot more than "Wrath came out".

I'm not sure why you didn't give it more of a chance Cedric. A friend and I also gave it a shot for the first time due to the Mac beta client, and we love it. I spent most of the weekend doing Scenarios and oRvR -- honestly haven't had that much fun in an online game in years.

I had a similar experience to Cedric, though I got up to the end of the second tier before deciding to pack it in. Now, I did do quests, but I also did a lot of scenarios and open RvR, in the basins, so I figured I was seeing what the developers wanted me to see. Honestly, I didn't enjoy it that much. Some of the scenarios were cute, but they had very little variety to them and so using them to level was incredibly boring. The RvR basins were an interesting idea, but most of the time it devolved into waiting for a wargroup to form and trying to take a keep, which involved a lot of waiting around and a lot of trying to direct people to take capture points (again, waiting around) instead of just charging straight for the keep and getting slaughtered. Adding to that was how useless the buff low-level players in a tier would get, the lackluster public quest system, the "achievements" system which involved grinding against a massive amount of identical mobs, which even WoW doesn't fall for (and to my horror, LOTRO does), the poor discoverability of the battle system (a trait WoW shares) and the worthlessness of the game when no-one else was around, and it didn't seem like fun times.

There were things that WAR did right - the chief one that impressed me was how PvE abilities worked more or less the same in RvR, including things like taunts and crowd control, in ways that encouraged enemy players to act the same way mobs would. But overall it wasn't the step up above WoW that I wanted.

What baffles me is why there isn't anyone who's decided that the secret to WoW's success was that it did PvE far better than its competitors with a shiny coat of cartoon paint, and try to one-up Blizzard on that score? There's lots of people who like the idea of MMOs but are horrified at how much repetition is required to get anywhere in a genre that prides itself on its massive, everchanging worlds.

@ Zolji

"...of course [quests are] going to be pointless and boring."

Did you really mean this? And you're calling the previous poster institutionalized? Why is it a matter of course that in a PvP game, quests suck and that's that?

Maybe it's crazy, but I'd like to see quality in exchange for my money.