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Warhammer died for the same reason a lot of big MMOs die. Publishers wanted their WoW, but fail to remember that WoW cost a shitton of money and took just as much time. Publisher gets impatient and eventually forces the game to launch around the holiday season regardless of its current state. Players quickly get bored because there's no content, or it's buggy, or a variety of factors. Warhammer was missing a handful of classes, four capital cities, (literally 2/3s of the end game), and it was obvious they hadn't even begun balance passes for any of the classes. And with Wrath of the Lich King two months away, it's hardly surprising the game crashed and burned. poo poo, even WoW wasn't immune to this, and I think most would agree the game was launched prematurely. No PvP system, classes getting finished mere weeks prior to launch, and there'd be one raid for over half a year. WoW survived because there was nothing else like it at the time. Not to excuse Mythic entirely. They sucked at balance and their PR was like a snakeoil pitch loaded with complete lies.
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Sep 14, 2016 05:52
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The problem now is one of momentum. The only people with the capital to tie up a dev team to build a fully featured and complete WoW killer is probably Activision/Blizz themselves and they aren't going to kill the golden goose. WoW has had over a decade to polish the experience. No one can compete with that on any real level. Most non WoW mmo's are niche markets at best, and Carbine picked the wrong niche market. They had the most feature complete MMO launch I've seen in a while and had they treated endgame with more of a casual oriented bent, they'd have probably retained a small but stable playerbase. From what I've been reading Wildstar has about 3-5000 people concurrently logged in at any given moment, and about 50k total players that have logged in within the last month. The 2nd number isn't great, but it's not the worst I've seen. The first number however is absolutely crippling to an MMO. All said and done there are maybe that many hard core raiders in the world, and most of them aren't going to be pried from WoW. Why go after that market? The sad thing is, and I'll say it again. You can tell with story, art style etc, that a lot of heart and soul was poured into this game by the various art teams, and that poo poo was just squandered by some of the most crippling stupid decisions known to man. And we're not talking about "Bad decisions in retrospect" we're talking about "When this was in beta we the players of this theoretical MMO were saying this is a horrible idea, don't do it." If those decisions had been dialed back heavily, I'd still be playing this game. I liked the art style. I liked the combat. The raiding was good though a bit overtuned. I hated amps. I hated the daily zones. I hated that every little thing I did was an unmitigatable and unforgiving grind. Need runes for your gear? Grind money so you can roll them to the stats you need. Need the runes themselves? Grind vet dungeons. Doesn't matter that you are well past that content. Grind them anyways. Grind rep for ability tier/amp unlocks. That'll take a month? Well grind PVP for them! That's not fun you say? Grind money again! Grind. Grind. Grind. Grind. Want to know how long it took me to get raid ready in the last WoW expansion? About a day. How long did it take me in wildstar? We'll ignore the attunement because that took less than a day. But for ability and amps? Weeks.
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Sep 14, 2016 06:11
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Rhymenoserous posted:I hated amps.
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Sep 14, 2016 07:03
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Rhymenoserous posted:From what I've been reading Wildstar has about 3-5000 people concurrently logged in at any given moment, and about 50k total players that have logged in within the last month. The 2nd number isn't great, but it's not the worst I've seen. The first number however is absolutely crippling to an MMO. 3-5k is private wow server numbers. Hell, I've seen private ragnarok online servers with over 3k.
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Sep 14, 2016 08:09
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 Don't worry, the next big thing is on the way! The answer to how much he's paying, of course, is nothing... but you'll make tons when the game takes off and kills WoW. The "I don't read trade" addition to his C&P pitch was because Trade chat was actually helpful for once and told him all about the harsh reality of MMO development.
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Sep 14, 2016 10:21
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Why's he asking chat, Metzen is free now.
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Sep 14, 2016 19:05
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The straw that broke the camel's back for me on Wildstar is pretty funny/stupid. I had about 3 and half platinum to my name, which was enough to buy like half a year of game time. This was in the game's first month, dunno if the price for game item got much more expensive as time went on. Anyway, I was going around buying pieces of mount flair you could get from rep vendors, generally for around 5-10 silver, a more or less negligible amount of money. So I find another vendor and buy some unremarkable saddlebag for the right side of a mount for 3 silver. Then I try to buy the left side saddlebag, but I can't and my money has gone down to 50 gold. It turned out the saddlebag had cost 3 platinum instead of 3 silver, which I didn't notice because the icon for platinum was almost identical to the icon for silver, and all the other mount flair pieces had cost low amounts of silver. I hadn't actually used the flair yet but it only vended for something like 10 gold so I put it a support ticket to see if they could refund the item. Nope, their hands were tied. Like $70 worth of game time down the drain for some dumb, drab cosmetic item that I wouldn't be surprised if literally no one who played that game has ever used. It's been awhile so those numbers probably aren't exactly right, but I do distinctly remember it being enough money to buy half a year of game time almost all being wiped out by some saddlebag. To be fair it was as much my fault as anyone's but it sure did kill any enthusiasm I had remaining. Rorus Raz posted:Warhammer died for the same reason a lot of big MMOs die. Publishers wanted their WoW, but fail to remember that WoW cost a shitton of money and took just as much time. Publisher gets impatient and eventually forces the game to launch around the holiday season regardless of its current state. Players quickly get bored because there's no content, or it's buggy, or a variety of factors. Warhammer was missing a handful of classes, four capital cities, (literally 2/3s of the end game), and it was obvious they hadn't even begun balance passes for any of the classes. And with Wrath of the Lich King two months away, it's hardly surprising the game crashed and burned. I wonder if they would have been better off waiting 6 months for people to cool off from Lich King. Probably not Since I hear Lich King was the best expansion WoW ever did. It seems like they were kinda screwed on the launch window unless they wanted to delay the game, like, a full year. In retrospect that may have actually been the right call.
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Sep 15, 2016 01:21
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Shortly before I quit they changed the currency icons to be more distinctive (but it looked like a hell of a rush job with bad transparency and everything). I don't know if they made it look any better since then, but it wasn't just you. Who knows how many other people filed tickets and got nothing before they did that. The last straw for me was around three months in, at level 25 (it took me a while to settle on a class ok) in the second goddamn snow zone. I saw a resource node, detoured over to it, and was just a few paces away when a bot teleported in my face and stripped the mine, leaving one tap left on it. They harvested and zipped away so fast it was cartoonish. And then everywhere I went if I found a node there was just one tap left on it, making my mining laser let out a sad little fart as a single piece of whatever popped out. So crafting poo poo to make my lot nicer was suddenly out, unless I wanted to buy materials from those very botters. Carbine's official response: *shrug* A fan made their own addon to report bots, like every other addon that provided basic functionality Carbine couldn't, but it was too little too late. Somehow the enthusiasm in the thread, not even the botting, was what did it for me. Somebody said something like "come on guys, we can beat these botters, let's all help Carbine out!"  Bless those poor devoted fools. I know they're still out there, rocking back and forth as they mutter about the server statistics and the quarterly reports not showing the REAL numbers.
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Sep 15, 2016 02:04
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What I wanna know is why a space adventure MMO with robots and aliens is using D&D Currency instead of a variety of spacebucks with bright, easy to differentiate colors.
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Sep 15, 2016 02:16
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Anoia posted:
Just look at the subreddit.
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Sep 15, 2016 02:22
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Rhymenoserous posted:Just look at the subreddit. quote:CKJester• 8h The Atlas of WildStar
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Sep 15, 2016 02:37
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i am tim! posted:What I wanna know is why a space adventure MMO with robots and aliens is using D&D Currency instead of a variety of spacebucks with bright, easy to differentiate colors. I never got out of chargen. Not because of this, but because of related Warcraft-humping design. I'd spent a while making a pretty robot, picking colors and bits and stuff, muddled my way through the amazingly unhelpful class selector... and in the next second my character was covered in shapeless brown sackcloth from head to toe. It was then that I realized that I'd already wasted too much of my time, and that poo poo wasn't going to get any better. Fortunately this was long after they went F2P, so I wasn't out any actual money.
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Sep 15, 2016 02:41
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I'm the Sci-Fi setting that takes place exclusively on one planet.
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Sep 15, 2016 17:50
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Asimo posted:Basically everything related to amps should never have gotten out of the discussion phase in any sort of sane development environment, let alone being implemented into a live release game. If you look at it from the point of trying to save the game you would be right, at this point though they are in "milk the last few suckers for whatever we can" mode.
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Sep 15, 2016 17:53
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Chomp8645 posted:I'm the Sci-Fi setting that takes place exclusively on one planet. You mean the Fifth Element? Or Blade Runner?
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Sep 15, 2016 18:55
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Probably Dune. Also, 5th Element went to that resort planet.
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Sep 15, 2016 19:33
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Unguided posted:Probably Dune. Dune doesn't start on Arrakis.
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Sep 15, 2016 20:18
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:You mean the Fifth Element? Or Blade Runner? FHLOOOOOSTON PARAAAADISE orbits the planet Fhloston.
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Sep 15, 2016 20:39
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:You mean the Fifth Element? Or Blade Runner? Exciting opportunities await for you OFF WORLD.
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Sep 15, 2016 21:35
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Note Block posted:FHLOOOOOSTON PARAAAADISE orbits the planet Fhloston. At the same time, they never go to the planet, so functionally they're spending time riding around in an arkship. Like, I think wildstar handled its story badly because of execution, but the premise was okay and even cliche at this point.
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Sep 16, 2016 01:40
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For a planet full of ancient mysteries, finding out what those mysteries were was really drat disappointing. It's pretty much just SciFi WoW Titans did it. 
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Sep 16, 2016 07:49
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The Moon Monster posted:I wonder if they would have been better off waiting 6 months for people to cool off from Lich King. Probably not Since I hear Lich King was the best expansion WoW ever did. It seems like they were kinda screwed on the launch window unless they wanted to delay the game, like, a full year. In retrospect that may have actually been the right call.
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Sep 16, 2016 17:44
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Pierson posted:Even the age of WoW having huge year-long dry spells of content is apparently over as they switch over to FF14-style smaller but more regular content drops, so now even those times where you could release an MMO and reasonably expect to attract bored WoW players might be gone. This is adorable. 
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Sep 16, 2016 20:04
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Pierson posted:Even the age of WoW having huge year-long dry spells of content is apparently over as they switch over to FF14-style smaller but more regular content drops, so now even those times where you could release an MMO and reasonably expect to attract bored WoW players might be gone. I wouldn't get too excited about this. Yeah, there's the whole shock value of "omg a raid got announced out of nowhere for this tier!" thing, but front-loading a ton of content and then petering out after a year is pretty common for Blizzard. It's happened in virtually every expansion since BC. In a year, maybe you can get hopeful.
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Sep 16, 2016 20:12
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Pierson posted:Even the age of WoW having huge year-long dry spells of content is apparently over as they switch over to FF14-style smaller but more regular content drops, so now even those times where you could release an MMO and reasonably expect to attract bored WoW players might be gone. Wasn't this the plan from like Cata forward, but they've just sucked at it? I know WoD was part of the "fewer patches, more expansions" plan.
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Sep 16, 2016 20:24
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John Dyne posted:Wasn't this the plan from like Cata forward, but they've just sucked at it? I know WoD was part of the "fewer patches, more expansions" plan. They succeeded at half the formula so I don't see how you can get too upset.
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Sep 16, 2016 21:04
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John Dyne posted:Wasn't this the plan from like Cata forward, but they've just sucked at it? I know WoD was part of the "fewer patches, more expansions" plan. Yeah, pretty much. Ever since Wrath they've been trying to do one expansion a year; except they've failed every time and so that's why every expansion past BC has had a year+ stretch of no new content. Wrath had that little one boss "hold over" raid but that was dumb, which IIRC even Blizzard agreed with and said they should have just kept working on the expansion instead. Hell, with WoD, they claimed they "doubled" the size of the WoW development team. We see how well that worked out. WoD is pretty much universally considered to be the worst expansion, and on paper has by far the least amount of content. With Legion they have finally thrown in the towel and admitted they will never be able to do one expansion a year, and are sticking to one every two years, and have sworn we won't run into 12 months of nothing again. But who knows. Maybe I'm cynical but I'm waiting until we're a year into the expansion with actual content on the horizon before I get my hopes up. 
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Sep 16, 2016 22:34
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What does Blizzard even care? They've got Hearthstone and Overwatch now.
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Sep 16, 2016 22:51
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And WoW will still have millions of subscribers, regardless.
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Sep 16, 2016 23:13
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Unguided posted:What does Blizzard even care? They've got Hearthstone and Overwatch now. And everyone is just going to continue to play WoW while bitching about it.
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Sep 16, 2016 23:40
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Unguided posted:What does Blizzard even care? They've got Hearthstone and Overwatch now. Even in the worst expansion of all time there were still 4 million subscribers. And if the latest press release is to be believed, WoW is the closest it's ever been to returning to it's peak (~12 mil).So yeah, Blizzard has Hearthstone and Overwatch but it's insane to ignore the sheer volume of money that WoW still pulls in.
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Sep 16, 2016 23:54
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Unguided posted:What does Blizzard even care? They've got Hearthstone and Overwatch now. Because wow has brought and will bring more money over time. Shy fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Sep 17, 2016 |
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Sep 17, 2016 02:59
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AbrahamLincolnLog posted:Yeah, pretty much. Ever since Wrath they've been trying to do one expansion a year; except they've failed every time and so that's why every expansion past BC has had a year+ stretch of no new content. Wrath had that little one boss "hold over" raid but that was dumb, which IIRC even Blizzard agreed with and said they should have just kept working on the expansion instead. Was there even an expansion where there wasn't a yearlong drought of content before the new one? Because I am pretty sure that has never happened but people keep believing this time will be different because
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Sep 17, 2016 03:41
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Man gently caress blizzard for lying to us *gives them money* maybe... maybe this time they aren't lying *gives them money* pssh, blizzard. they neeeever stick their release dates am i right guys? heh. *gives them money* Battered Gamer Syndrome
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Sep 17, 2016 03:43
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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:Was there even an expansion where there wasn't a yearlong drought of content before the new one? Because I am pretty sure that has never happened but people keep believing this time will be different because Vanilla gave Naxx in June 2006, then BC in Jan 2007. BC gave Sunwell in March 2008; Wrath then released in November 2008. So yeah, there was a time where it was fairly reasonable. Then Wrath came along and Blizzard was totally sure they could start speeding up the expansion schedule and it's been hosed ever since.
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Sep 17, 2016 03:56
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Everquest has been trying to do it for a decade. Nobody really wants content drought though, it's not like they're tenting their fingers, smiling about not giving players content. Everyone is just bad at delivering it.
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Sep 17, 2016 05:45
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darkhand posted:Everquest has been trying to do it for a decade.
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Sep 18, 2016 06:19
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From what I understand part of the disaster of WoD was trying to integrate the remains of the titan team back into the wow setup and realising that a lot of them, due to not working on a living mmo for such a long time were hopelessly out of touch with what is expected in the current era. At the moment you are seeing a lot of high profile people involved with wow quietly retiring or moving to new roles who occupied parts of the company that directly related to why wod was so widely trashed. Things like world quests, turning dungeons into the greater rifts from diablo and normalising player stats in PvP are things that are fundamentally against how the game has worked in the past but bring a legacy product into a state where it can comfortably position itself back in a spot superior to games offering similar experiences. Fundamentally changing your design to suit the landscape is three exact opposite of what wildstar did so maybe it will work?
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Sep 18, 2016 09:48
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Asimo posted:As much as the COH fans talk up the game having a devoted fanbase and all, it was really kind of in slow decline too. Like sure it was making money, it was making a bit less every month and there wasn't really any big hope of it picking up. Even the sudden popularity of comic-themed movies and stuff probably wouldn't have helped any, judging from how DCUO and ChampO remained tepid. Eh... Shuttering an mmo is a big deal, and really should only be done in extreme cases. I can still buy a Dark Age of Camelot, Ultima Online, or Asheron's Call account. None of those games can really be said to be growing.
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Sep 18, 2016 10:41
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AbrahamLincolnLog posted:Vanilla gave Naxx in June 2006, then BC in Jan 2007. BC gave Sunwell in March 2008; Wrath then released in November 2008. So yeah, there was a time where it was fairly reasonable. Vanilla / TBC also had the advantage of not flattening the raiding tiers, so even when Sunwell was released guilds were still trying to do SSC/TK - 3 raid tiers lower; so even if they had taken 2 years to get WotLK out the majority of raiders would probably still be satisfied.
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Sep 19, 2016 03:30
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