Slashdot Log In
Mythic Shutting Down 63 Warhammer Servers
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Mar 12, 2009 01:15 AM
from the consolidation-of-quality dept.
from the consolidation-of-quality dept.
Gamasutra reports that Mythic Entertainment is consolidating a number of their Warhammer Online servers to keep population levels within an acceptable range. 43 servers are set to close in North America and Oceania, and 20 more in Europe. Mythic posted details of the character transfers at the game's website. CEO Mark Jacobs also made a "State of the Game" post, highlighting the live expansion that's currently underway, as well as the changes and updates they have planned for the near future.
Related Stories
[+]
"Live Expansion" Announced for <em>Warhammer Online</em> 170 comments
Zonk brings word that Mythic has announced their plans to expand Warhammer Online in the coming months using a series of live events that will open up new careers, gear, and zones. The first event, planned for sometime in March, will allow access to the Dwarf Slayer and the Orc Choppa, as well as a new RvR scenario. Later, players will race to unlock a massive new zone, the Lands of the Dead. The expansion itself is titled "A Call to Arms," and it will be rolled out free of charge.
[+]
The Problem of Shards, Servers, and Queues In MMOs 253 comments
An editorial at GamesIndustry takes a look at a couple of problems many MMOs have failed to solve as the genre has evolved over the last decade: log-in queues and a split player base. The most recent example is Aion, which launched in Europe and North America a few weeks ago. Players on some of the game's servers had to deal with lengthy queues until enough people left the starting areas and spread throughout the game. To NCSoft's credit, the queues are mostly gone already, and it wasn't simply launching with too few servers that was the problem (nor was simply launching more servers a perfect solution, as Warhammer proved). In fact, several servers had no queues at all, but many players had set their sights on the more popular ones — a problem facing other MMOs as well. At this point, it becomes a matter of programming — how can the developers for these MMOs build the networking aspect of the game such that more hardware can easily be allocated when it's needed, and also make it easier for people to play together without the restriction of different shards or servers? EVE Online has done well with a single game universe, but it's not clear how far that model can scale upwards.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
OUCH (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OUCH (Score:5, Insightful)
Way to many. That was their mistake.
Their goal was the smoothest launch ever, in which they actually succeeded.
To accomplish this they opened up loads and loads of servers to ensure players wouldn't end up in queue's when logging on to the game.
The problems started when after a few weeks the biggest hype was over and players started looking at their real lives again. After that the active server population declined rapidly.
I think this move to close servers was unavoidable, it's nearly impossible to keep as many active players as right after the launch period.
Parent
Re:OUCH (Score:5, Interesting)
Fixed it for ya. This is what I had seen in our guild.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't go back to WoW... there are other games out there you know.
I actually think it was only second to AoC for the dodgiest game releases of late. It looked terrible and played like old people fuck - jittery and awkward.
Re:OUCH (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they did the right thing, they started with a lot of surplus capacity and now are scaling back to what they are actually using. Unless (by some miracle) they could guess exactly what capacity would be needed then they have two options, provide too much or provide too little. From a customer service standpoint it is certainly much better to err on the side of providing too much.
I feel a bit bad for Mythic in that this will probably be spun as some sort of death knell for the game when in fact it is simply the logical outcome of the company doing the right thing at launch.
Parent
Re:OUCH (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that people hate server merges. Especially if a server needs to be split and partially merged with multiple servers. They would have been better off renting capacity but keeping it dark, and lighting it up as needed instead.
Parent
WoW didn't have that problem (Score:2)
Funny. WoW didn't have that problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, then neither did Everquest, City Of Heroes, or almost any other game, SWG included. Virtually any game's curve on MMOG Charts keeps going up for months or even years before it peaks and starts going back down. You have to fuck up pretty hard if your population curve peaks at the end of the free month.
So I don't think you can argue that the vast majority of games are the exception, and a couple of fuck-ups whose only merit was massive launch hype are the rule.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I played Warhammer for a month and change after to released. I admired the amazing artwork and character designs, definitely top notch. However, the game itself was sorely lacking.
The entire game seemed to be designed like an amusement park combined with an assembly line. Your character is basically funneled through a series of increasingly difficult areas along a linear path that left nothing to the imagination. Exploration was pointless because you knew where you came from and where you were going.
Asi
Re:OUCH (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I had more fun in War PvP than any other MMO, because of the very same reasons you hate it. Death *shouldn't* have consequences. A game is about having fun. The point of a PvP game is to kill, you shouldn't be afraid to die because it will cost you hours of time.
As for reason to help- two major reasons. One its fun. If you don't enjoy PvP, why did you buy a PvP game? Two- pride. I play to win, always. So I always try my best to further the objectives of the game, in this case its trying to move the battle forward to eventually siege the enemies city. If we do that, I win. That in and of itself is fun, there is no other reason needed.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Death *shouldn't* have consequences. ...you shouldn't be afraid to die because it will cost you hours of time
I'm sorry, what?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While in reality it makes people quit. Idea of PvP with consequences being good idea is just form of self flattery (gamer expects to be in winning side there, forgetting that each PvP encounter also produces one loser. Stress becomes issue because it makes not playing the game more enjoyable than playing).
See: http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/02/19/the-mordred-problem/ [brokentoys.org]
Re: (Score:2)
It does both.
Some people actually like that sort of thing. For them, it's exciting, and it keeps them playing.
For the majority of the market, it just drives them away.
If you're aiming the game at that specific market and don't want to try and compete with WoW, it's a good way to be successful.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:OUCH (Score:4, Interesting)
According to what I've found, there's 16 servers left in North America, where I believe 40 of the 63 being shutdown are.
Just another Age of Conan, they massively overhyped to get a ton of initial box sales, and wound up with 2/3 of those people leaving in a couple of months.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It's not surprising. PVP is horribly one sided, and waiting for an RVR instance is an exercise in itself due to everyone and their dog plays destruction on most servers. numbers don't match up, skill levels don't match up, so what you are end up with, is a constant exercise in futility. The chicken thing is amusing at first but quickly turned annoying as well. Basically you have three races per faction, but in order to do the quests in other races of the same faction, you risk of accidentally turning chicke
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, The PvP is done wrong, very very wrong. There's something wrong when you have to wait over 2 hours for instance based PvP. Balancing issue is an extreme understatement. Why? Because when you lock down an account to play only order or destro, you better make sure there are even numbers of order vs. destro on the server, and even so it still can be uneven due to the fact not everybody plays PvP.
The classes are far from balanced, so what you can do tons of damage, if you die in 3 hits, your attack power me
Re: (Score:2)
Whoever says Warhammer had a smooth is at best not aware of what really happened. Many people started out at launch and many of them including me left without paying a single subscription cycle, because the game is lacking on so many levels. Let's start with the performance/visual problems. I have high-end, but mainstream hardware and I've been getting absolutely awful framera
Re: (Score:2)
The visual engine was full of bugs and design mistakes. The UI was a joke from a design perspective. The game logic suffered dozens of irritating bugs.
Well, you have just described WoW and pretty much EVERY MMORPG at launch. I don't really think it's fair to compare a game that was just launched (WAR) with a game that has been out for five years (WoW) and bemoan how it lacks polish or has bad quality compared to the other game.
At launch, WoW had horrible balance problems for Warriors, really awful pet pathing for hunters, and glitches that would cause a monster to regain full health or become unhittable. If you want to compare WAR to WoW, you're going to
It is actually much better now (Score:4, Interesting)
This problem also plagued the EU version launch: there were too many servers and the population was spreaded too thin, meaning that you would log in and find no one else but you on a certain zone.
With the new patch and the server transfers everything is much fine now: cities are quite populated and there is massive outdoors PvP going on every night :)
Then why split servers? (Score:2)
I also was on the EU servers at launch and they were splitting servers (i.e., adding new ones) like crazy for the first month. So if their problem was too few people per server, I have to wonder wtf were they _thinking_? Didn't they have a feedback loop there? You know, "how many people are average and max on this server? Do we really need to split it?"
Re: (Score:2)
There are a lot of good ideas in WAR, but the technology just doesn't back them up.
Cursed. (Score:3, Insightful)
As soon as I heard it being referred to as the "wow-killer" during development, the writing was on the wall, and it was doomed. I've come and go on WoW since launch, and every time someone talks about a "wow-killer," its like giving a college quarterback the Heisman Trophy, its a curse. ...and yes, I just used a sports reference on /.
J
You can't know their position and momentum? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Of course - when you can't beat the competition you simply redefine the category.
Kinda like in football statistics when they just HAVE to break some record every game "John, if he makes it this will be the longest field goal EVER kicked into an easterly wind in Chicago during a playoff game in the month of November in a year ending in an odd digit!"
The simple fact is that in overall categories, most people don't separate game generes to that degree. If you play online, with other people, and name a char th
Re: (Score:2)
Its like that for everyone's first MMO, and lets face it, WoW has been a lot of noobs... err, I mean peoples first MMO.
I still reactivate EQ1 every now and again and putz around for a month or 2.
Re: (Score:2)
Their fanboys didn't go along with that. There was MONTHS of this nonsense on the WoW forums about how Warhammer would destroy WoW, people playing WoW are noobs, and so on.
So a lot of WoW players take special enjoyment in watching those fanboys now backtracking, if not coming back to WoW entirely (which happened quite a lot).
No, Warhammer Online isn't dying. (Score:3, Informative)
At launch, they had *far* too many servers, they had wayyyy more servers than WoW had at launch.
Their launch went extremely smoothly, but the game population was spread so thin that people were having a hard time finding other people.
They should have done this 2 weeks after launch, not 6 months.
That said, this isn't indicative of Warhammer's impending demise, nor of a lack of players, they really did just have way too many servers and should have fixed the problem months ago.
Oh well, I'm still having fun with the game :D
(also, anyone thinking this was a WoW killer was delusional, it was never intended to be such, it's a very PvP centric game and attracts a similar, but different crowd)
Re: (Score:2)
That's just a side effect of a hype driven launch.
Most companies don't try to build MMO populations over time. They treat them like console games: sell a million copies the first week and hope those people stick around.
Of course, more then half of them didn't. So you have 750k people in Month 1, and 300k three months later. That gives you both queues in the first month, and deserted wastelands today.
Someone at Mythic must be biting his own tongue... (Score:5, Interesting)
According to Jacobs, another way to measure success is to look at the number of servers a game has added in a six-month period. "The corollary to that is if you've seen a game consolidate servers, you know it's in deep, deep trouble -- that's not a healthy sign for an MMO," he said, citing Sony's January-released "Pirates of the Burning Sea" as a recent example. "It will be the same for 'Warhammer.' Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we're not adding servers, we're not doing well."
Looks like they're not doing that well - according to their own standards.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm reminded of a comment I saw a few months ago by a Blizzard exec (I don't have the source and don't feel sufficiently motivated to look it up) that basically said that most of the people that had canceled their WoW account indicating
Heres an idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, segment your universe.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
That only works for universes where one part of the game world is identical to nearly every other location in the game. Which, except for Jita CNAP 4-4, pretty much covers much of EVE's universe. It also helps that star systems in EVE Online are vast, so you could conceivably split a single
Re: (Score:2)
So do what Asheron's Call did. When the city of Arwic became the de facto center of their world, and a huge, laggy population settled there...the devs blew it up. Blew up the whole town. Nothing left but a crater. And IIRC they created a few new towns to give the players more options. But the message was clear -- don't cluster together, or the enemy will find you.
Re: (Score:2)
Disadvantages: you can't help that people want to be together - the server can't handle too many people in one place, creates a hard cap on the number of people that can be on your shard since just adding more space doesn't really mean people will go there, dev cheating and hacking damages the whole game.
The only thing compelli
Re:Heres an idea (Score:4, Insightful)
That'll work really well when a new WoW raid comes out and a million players are all milling around outside using the summoning stones and dueling.
Hell, Naxx's entrance is crowded on most nights right now, and that's with hundreds of servers. It'd be unplayable to put them all together.
This single universe thing doesn't scale beyond a certain point when the players all have a reason to be in the same place.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
In AO it was a common tactic in PvP to send all your people to the zone to crash it, if you couldn't actually win the fight. Segmenting your universe only works if all your people can't mob a single area.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you do segment your universe then please, please adjust it accordingly when it quietens down again.
In Everquest they did both. And they made the world so bloody HUGE (with a capital HUGE) that no matter how many server merges they do, it feels utterly empty. Half the problem of course is that they neglected the older 'segments' and left them to rot, despite actually being fairly important to the universe they've created.
Server merges are easy enough, but what do you do when your universe is too big? C
Bye Bye Warhammer (Score:2)
Been so nice to know you, and glad you proved me right when all those people who left WoW told me Warhammer was the next "it" game.
Sorry, but Blizzard announcing opening of servers, not closing them. You need to be moving in that direction if you expect to beat them.
I feel a little ripped off (Score:2)
I paid the $50 for the game (a few weeks after it had come out) and while there are a lot of good things to say about it, I felt really disappointed. Compared to wow, the performance is a lot crappier for graphics that are just not as nice to look at. And the game takes 1gig instead of wow's 512M (approximate), and probably because of that on my 2Gram machine, it would take FOREVER to alt-tab in and out of the game.
Then, there were never enough people on my server to make it fun. Completing the public quest
Got bored quickly (Score:2, Informative)
What killed the game for me were a few factors:
1) Everyone who came into the game came with at least a couple of friends/family, who then proceeded to grind quests and mobs at lightning pace all the while ignoring my a
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
LOTRO, Eve, probably WoW, there's quite a few out there that have been around for a while (or even not that long) and have a strong community with strong backing from the devs.
It's only when a game lacks massively (Tabula Rasa, AoC, WAR) that things start to go pear shaped.
Unfortunately Mythic made the biggest mistake MMOs seem to be making of late - emulating WoW, poorly.
If people wanted to play WoW, they'd have a subscription. I don't, anymore, but I do have a sub for Eve and I do have a lifetime membersh
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Saying that it's emulating WoW poorly is a bit harsh, considering that the large scale PvP or RvR side of it is more emulating their previous MMO more than WoW. Which is what attracted me (and still does) to this game as I personally find WoW dull in this respect.
I do personally prefer DAoC's RvR though.
Re: (Score:2)
I miss DAoC's RvR too, which is why I was initially looking forward to WAR.
Sadly, DAoC's biggest problem with RvR (realm balance) was completely botched in WAR.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
WoW is the first game to "do it right" with Wintergrasp.
It's a territory that constantly flip flops. The winner of it gives players of that faction a bonus for the next 2 to 3 hours. There are daily quests to be done there to entice people to at least show up once a day. It requires the defending team to actually attack to win.
Asheron's Call's combat system sucked for most of its thriving life. It was dominated by the ability to cast Drain Health at instant speed and quickly apply healing kits to yourse
So did WoW back then (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely you realize that the same could be said -- and back then it _had_ been said -- about WoW and EQ. They too were going against the single most profitable game ever made, who had had years to refine its gameplay, bla, bla, bla.