Warhammer Online RIP

Ko Dokomo_sl said:

You didn't learn this lesson with Star Wars Galaxies?

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Nope its a case of seeing it happen twice now is enough.

And nothing of value was lost.

Ponytail and Smed need to cut a deal with GW now and we could see how they could make a Disney version of a hellcannon.

And I bet they would.

From someone who subscribed for more than 12 months. I can say that the reason this game died was because of Mythic, class imbalance and a horrible loot system for RvR raids.

1) Mythic did not communicate for the first 4 months of the game. NOTHING. Instead of fire control and dev updates we got NOTHING.
2) Some genius decided that every class should be totally unique. The three most OP classes in the game were on the order side. They learned from their mistakes and mirrored the classes in swtor.
3) The raid loot system at the time was totally fubar. You guild could take 2 hours to take a fort and the system would randomly give your awesome set gear to any random shithead without any possibility of trading.

Swtor is a product of warhammer. The only reason swtor is still making money is because of the star wars IP and because they corrected some of their past mistakes. The reason swtor was not a success despite their 200-300 million budget was because many of the people that worked on warhammer went on to make swtor.

Here is the line up:
Mark Jacobs (the general manager of the whole project. fired. backstabbed. not doing anything major nowadays)
Jeff Hickman (this guy was the king pin, he's the one that really threw the ball in the other direction. still employed working on swtor)
Eugene Evans (director of marketing behind war. later became a vp. never really produced anything successful and was eventually let go or moved on)
Rob Denton (This guy was the COO. eventually demoted to a manager. still employed)
Sanya Weathers (this woman WAS a great community manager. She also held a ridiculous ego and was removed. some felt she RQ and abandoned. never really picked up again after that. still working in the industry)
Paul Barnett (this man was the greatest bullshitter ever. he really fooled everyone and got away with it. still employed. after a few setbacks he finally succeeded with the Ultima Forever)

Didn't Lum the Mad get a job working for Mythic? Is he one of those people listed? If not, what happened to him?

Game was a goddamned Greek tragedy. On one hand the pvp was sublime and on the other, it was a steaming pile of shit.

I loved every second of it.

/pour one out

War hammer Online failed for the same reason every modern Mmorpg fails... They tried to be everything for everybody.

Warhammer online should have been strictly a RvR game with no pve, no levels, and no instanced pvp. It should have been nothing but an open world RvR game. They could have succeed with a purely RvR setup where it's open war fighting for land was the point of the game. Make crafting ultra important, so you want to control the land where your harvestors can get the resources your crafters needed to make armor, weapons and siege equipment. Throw out the God forsaken carnival prize booth bullshit where you collect tokens from doing pvp instances and trade them in for fucking equipment.

Rhuobhe_sl said:

From someone who subscribed for more than 12 months. I can say that the reason this game died was because of Mythic, class imbalance and a horrible loot system for RvR raids.

1) Mythic did not communicate for the first 4 months of the game. NOTHING. Instead of fire control and dev updates we got NOTHING.
2) Some genius decided that every class should be totally unique. The three most OP classes in the game were on the order side. They learned from their mistakes and mirrored the classes in swtor.
3) The raid loot system at the time was totally fubar. You guild could take 2 hours to take a fort and the system would randomly give your awesome set gear to any random shithead without any possibility of trading.

Swtor is a product of warhammer. The only reason swtor is still making money is because of the star wars IP and because they corrected some of their past mistakes. The reason swtor was not a success despite their 200-300 million budget was because many of the people that worked on warhammer went on to make swtor.

Here is the line up:
Mark Jacobs (the general manager of the whole project. fired. backstabbed. not doing anything major nowadays)
Jeff Hickman (this guy was the king pin, he's the one that really threw the ball in the other direction. still employed working on swtor)
Eugene Evans (director of marketing behind war. later became a vp. never really produced anything successful and was eventually let go or moved on)
Rob Denton (This guy was the COO. eventually demoted to a manager. still employed)
Sanya Weathers (this woman WAS a great community manager. She also held a ridiculous ego and was removed. some felt she RQ and abandoned. never really picked up again after that. still working in the industry)
Paul Barnett (this man was the greatest bullshitter ever. he really fooled everyone and got away with it. still employed. after a few setbacks he finally succeeded with the Ultima Forever)

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I mish you Ruobhe, god I miss everyone from WAR, was a good group of people we brought over from SZ. Sigh... another wasted IP.

CyrusReij_sl said:

I mish you Ruobhe, god I miss everyone from WAR, was a good group of people we brought over from SZ. Sigh... another wasted IP.

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Yeah, pvping with the ole SZ crew in warhammer was the shit. Too bad the underlying loot mechanics were so bad and bugs everywhere. Had so much fun abusing the shit out of their ui mod system also. I still laugh thinking about how my ui mod deleted all of Grenig's weapons.

mkopec_sl said:

I wonder how many people are still playing this. I have not heard dick about this game in years so cant be that many.

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There were like one or two servers left. It only had the small handful of weirdos who will play even the most hopelessly terrible game just because it's associated with something they like; Warhammer, in this case.

mkopec_sl said:

There was also no endgame other than the keeps which were a massive zerg and lag fest. Did they even have any dungeons in this game? I cannot remember ever stepping foot in one.

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I believe there were four dungeons or something, and they were extremely basic. Like they were maybe as interesting and complex as WoW's Deadmines or something. Just crap PvE content and broken PvP content, that's why almost everybody quit.


WAR was part of the first generation of MMORPGs that really fucked people over, along with AoC and a few other DOA titles. It was when the genre started to buckle and began its downward spiral. The game was so flawed and so amateurishly developed that it never stood a chance, and I missed out on WotLK's launch for this garbage. I'll forever hate WAR for that.

The developers, led by Mark Jacobs, were so arrogant and indifferent that the game's failure was simply guaranteed. It was clear that Jacobs believed he knew better than everyone else and wasn't capable of acknowledging that his ideas weren't perfect, so he completely ignored all the beta feedback. Mythic CSR were even banning people from the forum for saying anything negative about the game.

Then the game launched and the leveling experience wasn't actually that terrible. It was fairly average and the early PvP scenarios were fun because the stupid shit that comes later wasn't part of the classes yet. Then you hit level 40 and suddenly it was a retarded AoE-fest where you just got killed immediately by layers upon layers of Bright Wizard or Sorceress AoE, and if you tried to avoid it by moving to the edges of a fight, some Witch-Elf would pop out of stalth and burst you down in one and a half seconds. Just terrible, wildly unbalanced PvP combat.

Outside of instanced gameplay, the engine just couldn't handle any more than like 50 players being near eachother. Battles were a joke due to lag, zone crashes, 5+ second delays on abilities, spell effects and character models getting culled, and all the other shit that makes large-scale PvP unplayable. Just a complete disaster that was clearly never tested -- city sieges had been given one day of beta testing, most of which was wasted because people couldn't get in, so they just launched with an untested endgame. It turned out to be utter shit.

Then came all the little failures, like the fact that the best cape in the game was obtained from a 1-week event so that you could never get the BiS cape if you didn't get it then. The contribution-based loot system didn't work properly and some classes basically couldn't get loot because of it. Also the class balance was hilariously awful and they never even really tried to fix this. They'd also contracted GOA to handle the EU servers, which was such a catastrophic failure that they had to cancel the contract and move the EU servers elsewhere. Twist: Mythic had done the exact same fucking thing with DAoC, hiring GOA to handle their EU servers which they couldn't do properly.

And then came the scandals. Several different billing fuck-ups, one of which was so bad that it fucked people over in RL by billing them 30+ times in one go and emptying their bank accounts right up to a weekend. People stuck on vacation unable to get home, parents unable to buy food and diapers for their babies, banks closing accounts and charging people hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees, etc. I've never seen anything like it. And you couldn't remove your credit card information from their database. Eventually Mark Jacobs was fired and the game basically went to the retirement home and died.

RIP Warhammer Online, you were my first big MMORPG burn.

This might have been the only game where I was really impressed by the artwork and the way the characters looked. Once you got over that, then there wasn't much left in the game.

However the fun I would have playing the game capped at level 10 was good for a weekend.

RIP Warham's

McCheese_sl said:

Didn't Lum the Mad get a job working for Mythic? Is he one of those people listed? If not, what happened to him?

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He left them donkeys years ago and worked for ncsoft on a project that was shitcanned when they lost millions on the Tabula Rasa fiasco. He left and worked on a couple of other projects before rejoining Ncsoft again for a while.

A quick google just now shows that hilariously he is now working for Mr Garriott onhttps://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/

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As for Warhammer, wasn't this the shitpile that gave birth to "Mythic seconds" because their engine was too fucked up initially to be fast enough for their own combat design cooldowns etc?

The worst of the several Warhammer Online billing scandals even made it toCNN.

The game that burned me so badly I stopped buying MMOs at launch.

T1 was actually fun, it was pretty obvious that they needed to ditch the 20+ buttons per class badly. GW2 mechanics with Warhammer world would give me a boner.

khalid_sl said:

Yeah, pvping with the ole SZ crew in warhammer was the shit. Too bad the underlying loot mechanics were so bad and bugs everywhere. Had so much fun abusing the shit out of their ui mod system also. I still laugh thinking about how my ui mod deleted all of Grenig's weapons.

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Those were interesting times. Who were you guys on warhammer?

I remember having a ton of fun with Hate up until the end. I am still waiting for the right moment to exact my revenge on Fistlin.

Rhuobhe_sl said:

Those were interesting times. Who were you guys on warhammer?

I remember having a ton of fun with Hate up until the end. I am still waiting for the right moment to exact my revenge on Fistlin.

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Bright Wizard, I think the Warhammer name was just Cyrus or Cyrus Reij, I don't even remember if we could have last names in Warhammer. Was Cirus a good team cleric on SZ.

The lesson for other developers should be, if you include PVP in your game, do not make one class strictly better than another. Sides or no sides.

Anyone with eyes to read the spell list could tell wizards were strictly superior to sorcerers, i was one of the unfortunate to be on the wrong side of that for way too long.

Eventually after months of no change i rerolled to BW like everyone else and had an easy time.. and then lost interrest.

As i remember it near launch the classes were essentially the same, except one had a stun, a heal debuff, slightly more damage and could cast while moving. The other one looked less gay.

Soo much failed balance in that game, but also fun the first month or two till you figured out how broken some classes were.

I will say the end game gear looked fucking incredible, and I've seen several of the items ripped off in other games.

WAR didnt close down because of class imbalance, it closed down because in the end, running in the same stupid rvr zones month after month, year after year, got really really really utter and really shit boring.

Everytime I went back, they game mechanics of the game has changed drastically also and why the fuck did they do land of the dead anyway? It was supposed to be a Rvr game, anything new to that game should have been pure Rvr zones, maybe adding
Dwarf and Elves capitols instead of only Altdorf and the Endless? City?

Skavens... Yeah, transforming into one and fighting as one on certain occassions was fun, not... It should have been a 3rd faction.

What amazes me is that the game has survived for so long?

This game died for me when they removed all servers with open Rvr, where the hardest battles actually took place in Tier 2 and 3...

CyrusReij_sl said:

Bright Wizard, I think the Warhammer name was just Cyrus or Cyrus Reij, I don't even remember if we could have last names in Warhammer. Was Cirus a good team cleric on SZ.

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Ah yes I remember now. I loved my Swordmaster.