A Look At the Warhammer Community 169
Gamasutra is running a story examining the development of the Warhammer Online community since its recent launch. The author explains how the gameplay and rules tend to affect social interaction. GamerDNA has a related piece looking at numbers for actual players involved with Warhammer's launch, and how it's affecting populations in other MMOs.
"Getting on the computer to play WAR apparently reminded the WAR fanatics that they had a computer, because overall, their gameplay went up as a whole. They logged in more often to titles like COD4, Oblivion, and even AOC. But the MMO bug bit hard, and logins to LOTRO and EVE more than doubled after the launch of WAR."
Re:ok, its not wow (Score:5, Insightful)
It does not sound like it. WoW did not take a hit and WAR appears to be off to a nice start. More like two different games for two different kinds of people.
There's speculation in one of TFAs that WAR grew the market for MMOs by drawing people back in who were bored with everything.
Community? (Score:4, Insightful)
In what, 2 or 3 weeks? Isn't that a bit premature?
Re:ok, its not wow (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll throw my opinion on the table--it's better than WoW. The game is full of "why didn't someone think of this before" ideas, which was the same impression WoW used to give. There's always something to do, which is really nice. However, if you are really into the EverQuest formula of raiding for gear, it is not for you. It's a large-scale PvP game.
More importantly, there's no Arena. This makes class balancing easier because the PvP is designed for group play, and you rarely come across people alone. There's also no downtime as you wait in a queue. Scenarios have queues, but you can enter those queues anywhere, so you just quest and do other things until a queue pops up. All of these things are giving you experience and renown, so you don't feel like you're wasting your time.
The Arena is Blizzard's attempt to turn WoW into Starcraft and get on Korean television. It's really affected the game in drastic ways. The criticisms have been listed countless times before, and there's no need for me to recite them. This thread on the official forums, which reached its post limit, sums it up well: Goblin In The Tuxedo [worldofwarcraft.com] (and here is a second thread [worldofwarcraft.com] that continued the discussion).
Keen and Graev [keenandgraev.com] have been describing their Warhammer experience as their guild hits the tier 4 content.
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have any idea how silly it is to use Age of Conan as a comparison? I mean seriously, are you informed -at all-?
Age of Conan is a bigger flop than Star Wars Galaxies. It was a buggy, incomplete pile of rubbish. And still is.
WAR however is a quality game.
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting that you'd use "imcomplete" as a contrast between AoC and WAR, given that WAR had to drop four (of six) capital cities and four (including two of six heavy tanks) classes from the game at the last minute.
Mind you, I've not played either. AoC looked to be interesting till the reports from the beta testers reached the public, then it looked to suck big time. WAR seems to be well adapted to the current market, but I like to solo in PvP from time to time, so my interest in it is limited, at best.
Re:ok, its not wow (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't seen this argument since 2001, and it's just as wrong now as it was then. First, the market is not saturated by any means.
Second, looking at WoW's numbers as a benchmark is lunacy. The average subscription-based MMO has between 100,000 and 300,000 subscribers, not the flat millions that WoW does. An MMO can survive with a player base in the tens of thousands, handily.
Third, MMO subscriptions are not utilities-- there is nothing stopping anyone from subscribing to multiple games simultaneously, and many players do so. Even with the economy tanking, two $15 subscriptions is a better deal than going to the movies a few times a month, and it's discretionary expenses like movies (or going out to dinner, or what have you) that usually get cut before quietly repeating ones like cable bills or MMO subs get canceled.
WoW is a prodigy. Treating it as competition is foolish-- it's too big to notice the smaller games, and its sheer popularity has secured the whole goddamn industry a space in the pop culture landscape. It hasn't cannibalized other games, it's singlehandedly expanded the whole damn hobby by orders of magnitude, and continues to draw in people who wouldn't have touched Asheron's Call, WAR, City of Heroes or anything else.
Re:ok, its not wow (Score:2, Insightful)
All excellent points. I'll only comment on one.
Third, MMO subscriptions are not utilities-- there is nothing stopping anyone from subscribing to multiple games simultaneously, and many players do so. Even with the economy tanking, two $15 subscriptions is a better deal than going to the movies a few times a month, and it's discretionary expenses like movies (or going out to dinner, or what have you) that usually get cut before quietly repeating ones like cable bills or MMO subs get canceled.
With the 6 month perpetual renewable plan, it's under US$12/month per player. Probably the best entertainment deal I've ever gotten in my life, given how much we've loved the game. And even better, since we're on a server that covers the Pacific Rim, we can do in game chats for free which beats the living daylights out of international long distance telephone calls or Yahoo! messenger which crashes constantly.
Re:ok, its not wow (Score:5, Insightful)
For one, MMO's take time as well as money, and there's only so much of that too.
Secondly, personally, I'm much more likely to cancel a second MMO than I am to skip going out to the movies because going out to the movies is a different form of entertainment.
I only have the room in my time/money budget for one MMO, and I don't think I'm alone.
True, this probably isn't the case for single folks with no lives, or whose entire social network plays the game with them, but those people aren't the bread and butter of what makes WoW what it is. Most of the difference between WoW and everyone else is that WoW works for the people who wouldn't play anything else.
Those are the people that the company that's going to finance/publish your MMO want, because they want that gigantic pot of money. Creating a new MMO that'll appeal to a couple of hundred thousand people world wide and pay for itself is fairly easy, even Sony can do it, but that's not what the publishers want.
If nothing competes with WoW the MMO industry will languish because why bother, there are plenty of ways to make money with less risk, and less up-front cost. Everyone will play WoW(or WoW 2) and nothing will ever change.
The industry needs a WoW killer, because the industry needs to feel that they have a chance at some of that money.
Based on what they charge folks in the western world, Blizzard has got to be pulling in over 150 million dollars a month in subscription fees, that's more than a billion dollars a year, most of which, realistically, is pure profit. Everyone wants a piece of that, and despite your "$15 isn't an awful lot of money to pay twice" almost no one is getting it. There's some folks out there who will subscribe to multiple MMO's, and there's another 9-10 million who won't.
Re:ok, its not wow (Score:3, Insightful)
That had more to do with arenas no longer having any reward for lower ranked players then it did Warhammer. There was simply no point in playing anymore, so they stopped.
Re:It's the poor interface (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ok, its not wow (Score:3, Insightful)
WAR in some ways is more casual than WoW. You can log in, queue up for a BG anywhere, and start playing. Flight paths are a short cut scene rather than a 10 minute flight. You can be a low level and still participate in BG or RvR objectives because your level gets buffed to something reasonable when you enter those areas. All improvements over WoW in terms of playability.
I don't think this will be a WoW killer...but I do think it will take some people away. Enough that it will be highly profitable.
The key here is how well they support it and how they can generate content. The game currently has many bugs and lacks a bit of polish (some of the animal running animations are horrible...never thought I would complain about something like that). In any case, I think it is a strong contender for 2nd place. It is hard to imagine anything that can dethrone WoW. At this point it is so polished it is nearly blinding. Going to any other MMO that is new will leave most people with the impression that they have no idea how to code since there are so many bugs when these things start out.