Another one bites the dust: Warhammer Online shuts down another server

@Quidveritas

EA mate. that's how they roll, they'll bleed you dry any way they can.

Sucked in to all those chumps who continue to pay them money.
Sorry but the penny dropped for me and i realised the whole set up is; ship crap half finished product after product and the dumb trend based consumer will continue to pay.

@Quidveritas
Actually if it turns a profit that should be reason enough to continue it. Because unless I missed something profit means you get all the money you put in back and some extra i.e. you put 10 units of money in and you get 11 units of money out. Profit. Thus you could argue that they should invest that money somewhere else but they still technically can because they didn't 'lose' any money they put in.
The only issue that does however come up is the matter of time, it might take a while before you see a return on your investment potentially losing out on being able to invest somewhere else. But this is only an issue if all your money is tied up in your first investment and physically have no other capital laying around.

@syklonis Agree!

@syklonis

You forget, it's EA. They'd rather let it die than admit the game isn't worth free-to-play. Besides, I learned real quick not to play games based on existing IPs. They tend to die the fastest because royalties and whatnot have to be paid, contracts continually renegotiated... it's just a nightmare to imagine.

@syklonis

Too late. They should have done that a year ago and they might have had a chance to squeeze out a few more years or maybe even clean up the game and actually increase their playerbase.

I had such high hopes for this game...

@ShivanSwordsman

It's simple don't buy any EA affiliated product what so ever, your only perpetuating the fraud if you do.

EA sucks balls.

@henbot

Who said I was still buying EA games at all? I swore off EA after I bought the Dragon Age: Origin Ultimate Edition (this was after finding out about the Day 1 DLC with Dragon Age 2), and the last Activision product I purchased was Call of Duty: Black Ops, and I skipped Modern Warfare 2 after the dedicated server debacle. I was one of the few who actually STOOD by my words of boycotting.

Sadly, it's done nothing to deter what they do, and you know they won't fix it. They'll just drag it into the ground, and when people speak with their wallets, they'll toss the series or the team (or both) onto the scrap heap and keep business as usual. The only thing that could make EA pay is something like what happened with Squeenix and FFXIV, which sobered them up real quick about paying to play an MMO with stamina (IE, can't EXP past a certain point in a week's time).

Still, I'm sticking to my guns. The only game I MIGHT purchase is Kingdoms of Amalur, and that's only because that game doesn't have giant chunks of the game missing at launch and then penned as Day 1 DLC, like it's oh so special...

@Saker
From what my brother told me, he heard their licensing deal with Games Workshop gives GW a cut per subscriber, so switching to a F2P setup would be an accounting nightmare.

Which is annoying, since if any fanbase has the "whales" F2P games make their money on, it's the GW fanbase.

@Thestache

When I played it, I actually enjoyed it. Only reason i quit is that all my friends who got it , quit within two months. They came back at one point and played Order instead of Chaos for another month. But like I said, they all quit to go stroll around Northrend when it came out.

@Tezcatli Agree!

@Tezcatli

because it's EA, and even if they are making no money from it they would never risk someone else making money off it either.

and the reason why they won't go F2P is because they have sacrificed many a sheep and pig in order to convince their investors that F2P is a dysfunctional system and isn't working, going back on it now would make them look like asses and show how inept they are at the MMO market when they themselves essentially initiated it and everyone else can turn bazzillions off of crap games that were developed on cracker jack budgets.

the catch that EA finds hard to swallow (after even NCsoft had to cave on their "P2P is the boss" stance) is that F2P gives a majority of control of the game to the player since they are now "free to play" without the hovering blackmail of "pay up or you can't log into the game even though you bought the box not to mention we will delete you characters if you stop subbing for more than 2 months."

@Fakeassname
Partly, but it is also likely that their licensing agreement with Games Workshop might complicate or prohibit it.

@Fakeassname EA does in fact have F2P games like Battlefield Heroes and some Iphone games, but yet. I believe it's not going F2P because EA is just full of morons that are pro at making all the wrong decisions.

@hami83

BFH is more akin to CS2 than a F2P MMO, I don't count hat shops attached to online arena shooters to be F2P .... it's one of those things that gets shoveled in where it doesn't belong simply for being close to another market.

.... like how Capcom is trying to shoehorn Resident evil into the Action genera.

@(Unverified)

This is an excellent point, it is definitely possible the license originaly bought by Mythic prevents EA from turning the game free to play.

The other thing about free to play is, it's not just a switch, it takes time and money to convert a subscription game to f2p and that doesn't gurantee your income will increase enough to offset the cost of the conversion, especialy when the game is already seeing vastly dwindling numbers.