Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Mythic Shutting Down 63 Warhammer Servers 137

Posted by Soulskill 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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Mythic Shutting Down 63 Warhammer Servers More

Mythic Shutting Down 63 Warhammer Servers

Comments Filter:

  • OUCH (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SupremoMan ( 912191 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @02:18AM (#27162863)
    That has to hurt. The game was well executed, it was no Age of Conan that's for sure. I guess good question would be how many servers did they start with?

    • Re:OUCH (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dtml-try MyNick ( 453562 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @02:25AM (#27162911)

      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.

      • Re:OUCH (Score:5, Interesting)

        by RuBLed ( 995686 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @02:46AM (#27163017)

        The problems started when after a few weeks the biggest hype was over and players started going back to WOW.

        Fixed it for ya. This is what I had seen in our guild.

        • 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: (Score:1, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            I didn't go back to WoW

            The point was a holistic generalization, for which you obviously don't fit. For the majority, most likely went back to WoW given the new expansions release shortly after WAR.

            I actually think it was only second to AoC for the dodgiest game releases of late.

            Hmm... dodgiest? Hardly. Fury was head and shoulders above it. And Shadowbane was even worse. And I'm just talking about PvP games. Star Wars Galaxies was a terrible release as well, worse than WAR IMHO.

            WAR did have a relatively smooth release, but had a terrible product at release. I tried every race to try every starting zone

          • 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.

            That sounds like your computer. The game looks great to me. A lot of detail on the player models and they kept the tabletop's style. Gameplay was smooth except in huge RvR fights, which they fixed within weeks of release.

            If I A) had more time and B) all my friends hadn't stopped playing due to school (only two went back to WoW and only because they don't have to pay for it) and work eating up large portions of their time I'd probably still be playing it. Like any other MMO, its no fun alone. On the bri

        • Or even going back to Mythic's earlier title, Dark Age of Camelot. Warhammer was designed to combine WoW's questing and broadly-appealing side-games with DAoC's large-scale world PvP, and it failed on both counts.

      • Re:OUCH (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Decado ( 207907 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @03:23AM (#27163213)

        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.

        • Re:OUCH (Score:5, Interesting)

          by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @03:47AM (#27163333)

          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.

      • 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.

        Funny. WoW didn't have that problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Fross ( 83754 )

        Since the free trials started, it's brought loads of people in from WoW, but also a lot of people who had subscriptions but then cancelled.

        The response from the latter has been very strong indeed, a lot of people much happier with the state of the game, and saying they'll resubscribe.

        Certainly had a bunch of problems in the beginning, but it's picking up now. The server consolidation is harsh (though they had WAY too many to begin with), but its real purpose is to ensure everyone plays on a med-high popula

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by chonglibloodsport ( 1270740 )

      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)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @04:12AM (#27163473)

        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.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Hubbell ( 850646 )
          Without consequences to death or losing your city, what's the point other than the game being a persistant version of CS? That's just silly. Consequences, aka item loss, bring excitement to the PVP, both for the winner and the loser. I haven't had the adrenaline rush from fighting 1v4 in a game since Asheron's Call in 01-05, and even then I only lost a few items on death and none were ever of value compared to losing *everything* on my character aside from my starter knife/staff when dieing in Darkfall [darkfallonline.com].

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by zwei2stein ( 782480 )

            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:1)

              by Hubbell ( 850646 )
              Stress is only an issue if items are far more valuable than they need to be. I've died dozens of times since Darkfall's release, losing full suits of armor all the way up to banded (2 steps down from the best) and don't really care. I just slap on a suit of leather or cloth armor, and go out hunting for gold/mats to get more. This doesn't even count for all the kills I've gotten where I've looted tons of stuff. Going into a game knowing that it's full loot, you could lose everything on you whenever you

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by brkello ( 642429 )
                That's only fun for the minority of people. WoW proved if you want subscription numbers, you cater to the majority (for better or worse). I like WoW better than WAR mostly because I am more interested in PvE which WAR sorely lacked. I enjoyed the PvP, but eventually it just felt like I was paying a monthly fee to play a fantasy TF2 game that was less fun than TF2.

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by Hubbell ( 850646 )
                  It's fine if you like pve etc, but we've all (pvpers) have been waiting for the PVP mmo that will bring us all together from UO, AC:DT, and SB. Darkfall currently is that game for many of us, and even with the lack of real quests and the like at the moment, noone I know has even thought about quitting. We're willing to sit through long queue times when they happen, numerous and sometimes unannounced downtimes to hotfix and perform server maintenance, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by AuMatar ( 183847 )

                    No, some pvper have been waiting for this game. There's definitely a subset of them who like consequences. The majority don't. consequences are annoying an drive people away. I have life, I have better things to do than waste hours of my time regearing after each death. Its just not fun.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Quikah ( 14419 )
                If it doesn't really matter when you lose items then what is the point of it? From your description losing items in Darkfall is merely a timesink.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Tridus ( 79566 )

              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.

        • Death *shouldn't* have consequences. ...you shouldn't be afraid to die because it will cost you hours of time

          I'm sorry, what?

      • I'm an MMO developer with quite a bit of history in the industry. A few comments stand out to me:

        It seems most of this industry is too caught up in trying to copy WoW rather than pushing the envelope with new paradigms for interactivity and gameplay.

        That would be because WoW makes a metric fuckton of cash. For some reason, companies like making money.

        Mythic's previous game, Dark Age of Camelot, was a souped-up version of the top game (EverQuest) at the time. Most of the people who talked about DAoC calle

      • Doing a little replacement game...

        Speaking of Counterstrike, the multi-player is supposed to be the central crowning jewel of the game. Problem is, there are no consequences for it: death and failure are meaningless, you do not lose money on death and the loss of a round or even an entire match are barely noticed. Within a short period of time, any weapon or equipment can be reaquired. The entire exercise quickly begins to feel repetitive and boring. You have no personal stake in saving the hostage/disarming the bomb and therefore no real incentive to help.

    • Re:OUCH (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @06:00AM (#27164021) Homepage

      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.

      • 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

        • This game is absolute junk and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone.

          I think a lot of people would say that 'absolute junk' is an extreme overstatement. It's flawed but definitely does some things correctly.

          The PvP is done right, although there were balancing issues. I don't know how this panned out at the level cap because I never made it. I wanted to play a healer and tried a Zealot but the leveling was bad - just like leveling a priest was in WoW in the beginning.

          The idea and implementation of the public quest was great, and the open parties were awesome too. Thes

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by nobodylocalhost ( 1343981 )

            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

            • 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.

              You are describing WoW before they did cross-server battlegrounds, and even since those have been in it can be a very long wait on battlegroups that are heavy for one side or another.

              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.

              I said population can be a problem, that was one of the issues on the server I was on. Eventually people switch sides and it balances out. Once again, in WoW almost all the servers were heavy Alliance when the game launched.

              The classes are far from balanced, so what you can do tons of damage, if you die in 3 hits, your attack power means nothing. And how convenient for the melees that almost every one of them got a ranged attack that can slow people down.

              I can't really discuss how balanced the game is at the level cap because I didn't get there. However,

              • "I said population can be a problem, that was one of the issues on the server I was on. Eventually people switch sides and it balances out. Once again, in WoW almost all the servers were heavy Alliance when the game launched."

                You obviously never played warhammer to any depth, once you set yourself to order, you are stuck with it on that sever, YOU CANNOT SWITCH TO DESTRO SO YOUR BALANCE THEORY DOESN'T WORK... The same goes for destro players, they cannot change to order on the very same server. Your comment

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Unoti ( 731964 )
              I agreed with most of what you said, and thought it was spot on. But this one part really caught my eye:

              The team with more money buying engine/weapon have advantage. Second, offense is a nightmare, without 18+ people you aren't going to do anything and the keep lord will slaughter your team.

              In my experience, siege weapons don't really matter much one way or the other. Quite the opposite: it's really just about who has more people. So it's not skill or levels or equipment so much as who's zerg is bigger.

    • My experience is the opposite, to the point I don't understand who, apart from the most hardcore PVP players, could like this game.

      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

      • 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

  • ...just how many MMOs are going to shutdown in the coming years. All that time and money invested into digital character that goes away with a CEO signature and never seen again.

    Guess the good news is this MMO isn't shutting down anytime soon.

  • It is actually much better now (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12, 2009 @02:31AM (#27162939)

    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 :)

    • 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?"

      • They were thinking server stability. The basic problem is that their servers were not capable of dealing with large subsets of the population localized in one area. Over the few months that I played, I don't think a single Tier 4 fortress was successfully captured, because every time one was attempted the server crashed.

        There are a lot of good ideas in WAR, but the technology just doesn't back them up.

  • Cursed. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by drik00 ( 526104 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @03:08AM (#27163141) Homepage

    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

      • No, no, that's the Heisenberg Trophy. We keep giving that one to people, and they put it on a shelf, and can never find it again.

    • I have a saying, one that I've used since Guild Wars became the first game to be touted as a 'WoW killer'. That saying is "they'll come crawling back!" So far it's held true for Guild Wars, Hellgate: London (although that's not directly competing with WoW I guess), AoC, WAR... every time, if people are still playing one MMO after moving to the new game, they'll be playing WoW. :P It was funniest for the original Guild Wars launch because people were posting "so long, suckers" and "lol kiddies, im gonna go p

      • None of those games are remotely like WoW (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Guild Wars is a fully instanced, PvP-oriented game with some MMO elements (I don't know anyone who's played it that considers it a true MMO).
        Hellgate: London was a fully instanced hack-and-slash game.
        Age of Conan was (originally advertised) as a PvP MMO. Now it's just a pile of fail.
        WAR is a PvP MMO.

        Of course they aren't WoW-killers: They're nothing like WoW!
        To be a WoW-killer you have to be a mostly non-instanced, PvE oriented MMORPG... which none of the aforementioned games are.

        • You're 100% right - none of them are direct competition for a PvE open-world MMO (although say 70% of PvE and 90%+ of PvP in WoW these days occurs inside instances, but that's another story). That said, all of the titles I mentioned were touted by rabid fanboys on the WoW forums as "WoW killers" for months or years before their release. And all of them have failed to grab any appreciable share of the 'fantasy based rpg-style online game' supergenre off WoW .

        • 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

        • Guild Wars is a fully instanced, PvP-oriented game with some MMO elements (I don't know anyone who's played it that considers it a true MMO).

          Most of the dungeons in WoW are instanced, and you never really interact with anyone outside your group or guild anyway so what's the difference?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Barny ( 103770 )

      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.

    • well, in all fairness, all new MMO's are being called 'the WOW-killer' by the gaming-media.
      Mythic was fairly quick to say that they didn't see it as that,
      but being no. 2 would be fine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tridus ( 79566 )

        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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12, 2009 @03:29AM (#27163245)

    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:1)

      by Ultra64 ( 318705 )

      Too many servers at launch? What warhammer are you talking about?

      For the first month there were queues every time I tried to login.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tridus ( 79566 )

        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.

    • At launch, they had *far* too many servers, they had wayyyy more servers than WoW had at launch.

      The pre-sale numbers, which I think were reported as the best for any MMO ever, dictated that they'd need that many servers. WoW had way too few servers at launch only because they underestimated. They were forced to stop selling the game for 3 or 4 months so that their infrastructure could catch up. They weren't ready for success and it nearly crushed them.

      With WoW, I purchased one of the last boxes of the game which I called around to every store in the area I was living just over 2 months after laun

  • WAR REQUIRES high population levels (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    WAR is unlike any other MMO currently on the market in its focus on PVP. Much of the game content really requires other players - I know because I play late at night. Populations have to be high, and balanced on both factions so there's plenty of chances for PVP. There's great "solo" content in that you can do so without a scheduled group, but most content is best with a high population of players. More scenarios popping, more RVR in lakes, and so forth. WAR is absolutely doing the right thing so that pl

  • Someone at Mythic must be biting his own tongue... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by acid06 ( 917409 ) * on Thursday March 12, 2009 @04:25AM (#27163555)
    About 6 months ago, during this interview [mtv.com], Mythic VP and lead Warhammer Online designer Mark Jacobs said some interesting things regarding MMO development, including their own game. In particular:

    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.

    • Wow. Great find. I wonder what spin he would put on it, if someone reminded him of that quote now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      LOL, reminds me of an old Robot Chicken episode from a couple of years back. It features a "flashback" skit where we see Ang Lee being interviewed before "The Hulk" came out. At the interview, he says something along the lines of "The movie will be like a pretty flower. Surely it won't be a complete flop that destroys my career. Surely."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Clomer ( 644284 )
      It's an interesting contrast when compared to WoW. WoW has over 100 realms in North America alone, and they are still adding more. Maybe not on the same pace as when it first launched, but there have been 4 new realms opened just since the beginning of the year. Source [wowwiki.com]

      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
    • They should have seen this coming. 1 month after launch I'm hitting an attack, seeing a number on the screen, and then watching the animation 2 seconds later. What is this 1998? Bye.

  • Heres an idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @05:03AM (#27163749)
    Stop segmenting your playing population into multiple independent copies of the universe.

    Instead, segment your universe.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Firkragg14 ( 992271 )
      Check out eve online thats been doing the one universe thing for years. The universe isnt seamless since its split into a number of seperate systems but the entire population exists and plays within the same universe.
      • Check out eve online thats been doing the one universe thing for years. The universe isnt seamless since its split into a number of seperate systems but the entire population exists and plays within the same universe.

        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:1)

          by Hubbell ( 850646 )
          There have been numerous 200+ person fights since release for Darkfall, and almost noone suffered any lag other than graphical. I'm on east coast USA, on a shitty dsl line, the game servers are in germany, and I get a 90-130 ping almost always, once in a while a spike to 200,b ut that's about it

        • 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)

        by brkello ( 642429 )
        Advantages: everyone on one shard (no need to figure out which ones your friends play on and how they are spread out), large scale battles, bragging rights that you have one shard.

        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

        • There are games that take both strategies, such as City of Heroes. Zones can "become full", causing a new instance of that zone to be created, presumably handled by a different piece of hardware. But also, City of Heroes has several entirely different servers.

          Even WoW evolved a compromise: instances. And part of why the newer "cities" in WoW don't have auction houses is to spread the pain a bit. (I'm on a low-pop server, and I cringe to think what Dalaran is like on a high-pop server...)

          In the same way,

    • Re:Heres an idea (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Thursday March 12, 2009 @07:54AM (#27164707) Homepage

      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.

      • Just spawn those giant demon-golems from BC. I loved those things.

      • 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.

      • There are ways to deal with this kind of thing and to make the game a bit more interesting at the same time. Make it so that players can do quests to get keys that will poof them directly into an instance so they don't have to hang out in front - like attunement but that actually gives you a benefit beyond just letting you inside.

        For quests in general, make more instanced versions of quests. I *really* hate having to wait for one mob that's on a 5 minute timer that is being camped by 100 other players looki

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Cloud K ( 125581 )

      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

      • Rotting content is everywhere. Run through any of the low level WoW zones, and it's not different from visiting Kunark. No one there but a few twinks grinding out progression. WoW went so far as letting the new DK class start at level 58 in full blue gear (after a 2-4 h intro)as to not repopulate those areas.
        The only way you could get around that is semi-instanced content, where the mob is automatically adjusted in level to your toon. What in turn would eliminate farming in lower level zones for easy tr

    • Stop segmenting your playing population into multiple independent copies of the universe.

      Instead, segment your universe.

      I don't think that word means what you think it means. I know of no games (whose internals I know/have heard anything about) that can handle their entire player facing universe on a single machine, even if they do hand off the background processing. Being able to do so means you either have a very small playerbase or a very small/simple game.

      Even games that segment their universe

      • But if you are the devs then you get to decide what 'desirable' things stay and what 'desirable' things go.

        If you take away some significant reward bonus from the people who hang out in one area, then most people will travel.

        • Yep, people will travel - and a new area becomes laggy while the old becomes a ghost town.

          It's also worth pointing out that some areas are crowded because they are central hubs or traditional meeting areas. Something the Devs can do very little about.

  • 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.

  • A few other people here have noted that Warhammer's population is spread very thin. A game like WoW will suffer from a low population server. However, it is not its undoing. A WoW server can thrive despite its low population. You can do raids on a low population server. For Warhammer, low population ruins the game, and I'm not entirely positive that they realized this in the beginning. Everything in the game depends on there being a constant avalanche of people doing things. This way you have people

  • 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

  • Although not the worst MMO I've ever played, I tired of WAR pretty quickly. Kept my subscription going for 1 month after the free one and found that I logged in only twice that month. I think I just got burned out on MMO's, went from WoW in 2004 to LoTRO, to EVE, to AOC and finally to WAR.

    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
  • Many players that left Warhammer did indeed play it for 3-6 months before leaving. If they had fun during that time, I disagree with them calling Warhammer a failure. Most non-MMORPG will not keep people entertained this long. There are just some exceptations that every new MMORPG will be a failure unless they can keep most players for years. I am gonna tell you that this is probably not going to happen ever again for a MMORPG. Today there is simply so many MMORPG out there and some very specialized and man

Slashdot Top Deals

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz

Close