Hades

I've been the leader of my guild since 1995 (Lords of the Dead), but I was briefly overthrown for a few months back in 1998. I came back and cleaned house, and haven't had issues since. Most of my senior leaders have been with me for over 12 years.

Cryptic has gotten a reputation for releasing rushed games that are buggy, lacking good content, horribly repetitive content, and that rely too heavily on instancing.

If Cryptic is the developer, then there is no way I'm going to even consider that game unless it is launched as a F2P. If it is F2P then I will at least check it out, but unless they change their pattern then it will just be another shallow Cryptic made game.

I might be wrong but I did a quick glance of the level breakdowns on the servers, and I didn't find a single server where the population had more than 50% of its players above that 10-20 range. There seems to be a good 60-65% of the playerbase is still between levels 10-20, and 4 months after release that's pretty bad.

I picked up DDO about a week ago, and I have to say it is a much better game than I thought. I even lured a few guildmates with me who weren't playing anything else, and we are all enjoying the game.

I think DDO going F2P and then surviving off microtransactions with an optional subscription model was probably the best thing they ever did.

When I first started playing MMO's back in 1993 there weren't a lot of choices. Ultima Online starting in 97 set a trend until about 2005 where games had about a 1 year "fix it" level of patience from the customers.

But since AOC we have seen games do massive amounts of sales ( War 800k, AOC 1 million, AION 900k) but they ultimately fail to retain the customer. AOC and Warhammer both lost 70% or more of their initial customers within the first 4 months, and although AION has sold well its grind and problematic end game are causing it to follow a similar path.

So I would say that games have about 90 days to make it right or lose a huge portion of their initial customer base. If things don't improve between 90 and 180 days, they stand to lose half of those who remained 90+ days.

AOC/War/AION show that there is a customer base of around 1 million people who are looking for a game with good PVE, PVP, and sense of community. The problem is that none of them have gotten even one of those things right, and until someone does I doubt any North American release is going to stay over the 500k mark.

He released a game at a time when most people had P4 or early C2D PC's, and the thing required a monster rig and monster video card to play. The most successful games are the ones where people can play on modern PC's or PC's within the last five years.

Vanguard, AOC, and War all ran horribly on PC's that even met their recommended settings, and how many folks are willing to blow 3,000 on a new gaming rig for 1 game when they run everything else just dandy?

Bad gaming performance = bad word of mouth = few friend referrals = low subs.

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=298283

Warhammer alliance and other locations mostly confirm that Land of the Dead has had a negative impact on RVR. The side not in Land of the Dead is mostly doing RVE (realm vs environment) instead of PVP, then you go in to Land of the Dead for 15 mins of PVP to slaughter people killing mobs, and then the rest of your time you PVE until the other side takes control.

Mythic should have focused on the core issues of the game instead of adding new content. You don't put a band aid on a wound that needs stitches, and that is what Mythic has been doing for the past 10 months.

T4 PVP is horribly broken
Crowd control is out of control
AOE is out of control
Skill balance is too extreme patch to patch
RVR tokens and supply lines (pop caps) backfired
and the list goes on.

AION is getting huge word of mouth in the player community, and guilds are preparing to jump ship. The Fall of 09 is going to be hard for Mythic because they simply can't fix their game by the time other MMO's start coming out.

That's my perspective as the leader of a Rank 40 guild, and over 225 million renown points earned over the past 10 months.

Land of the Dead really didn't change things on the North American Servers. All it did was throw more content around for people to grind while continuing to ignore the core things that have caused people to quit.

1. Bad client performance
2. Slow and boring leveling
3. Too much PVE
4. End game RVR is fundamentally broken
5. Population imbalances

Over half the US servers have low populations for at least one realm in prime time, and at best 5 servers have medium populations. All in all the Land of the Dead expansion has failed to motivate people to want to stick around, and instead AION is betting huge buzz in the Warhammer player community.

Increasingly Warhammer is moving into a niche game market as the North American and Euro server clusters bleed players, and adding new regions isn't bringing in more people to fight. Its just creating more regional hubs that will suffer from the same issues dragging down the US and Euro hubs.

Good article. I have a few comments.

1. RVR Tokens and Pricing

Tokens still drop less frequently, and token prices are still high. For instance and Invader piece is 300+ officer tokens and several invader tokens. Well if you aren't doing scenario premades, or running with an organized guild in RVR you aren't going to amass that many tokens anytime soon.

The problem with this is that gear has such an impact on PVP power that someone in green gear isn't going to compete well against someone in Invader or Warlord gear. So either speed up the tokens, reduce the price, or lessen the power variance between gear.

2.
For the short term, I think that people will fight over Land of the Dead and abandon city sieges. City sieges just aren't fun because too much emphasis is placed on killing PQ mobs instead of players. Until that system is reworked, expect Land of the Dead to become the main RVR focus of the game.

3.
Lastly, all these things are good but client performance really needs to get improved. Other than the unfun T4 RVR that many players experienced the first 6 months of War, the client performance on decent gaming machines is probably what cost Mythic the most people.

This game should be playable with Geforce 7 cards and a single core CPU, or a C2D CPU with a Geforce 8 card. Those are the most common pc systems of the last 4 years, but in zone combat Warhammer stutters or turns into a slideshow for most players even on minimum settings. WoW has 11 million people because the game is fun, but also you don't have to have a modern PC to play it.

Great write up, and I look foward to seeing future improvements.

The worst thing about this is that mid June is a month away!