Warhammer Online shuts down

Sucks that carrie was forced to take over a game with a maintenance mode budget. The thing she worked on (the journal) was actually pretty cool and one of the few things that actually functioned as intended. Meanwhile that fat wanker paul barnett and the ginger tosser that tagged along with him managed to worm/arse lick their war up the corporate ranks at EA. which is fucking hilarious, because they ended up doing SWTOR's Ilum...perhaps it's for the best, those two are utter poison for EA.

 

Dreaad I think its a form of cognitive dissonance? Barnett is the Scottish guy that everyone liked before launch, right?

 

I feel you bro :/

 

I had the opposite situation on my server (iron rock). It wasn't just being outnumbered by order that was such a pain in the ass, it was also the fact that most of the players consisted of bright wizards and witch hunters with the occasional warrior priest keeping them healed up from an ungodly amount of damage. One of the worst cases of bad class balance I've ever seen in a game. I just had to roll a marauder... I don't recall ever winning a single fight against a witch hunter in a 1v1 even. They'd just pop out of stealth and I'd die in literally 1-2 seconds.

 

Didn't stop people from liking guildwars which did the same thing.

 

It's a shame that WAR didn't turn out any better but I probably had my best year in any mmorpg playing WAR so... heh.

I'll have my collector's edition to remind me of the fun times though.

 

This is going to be a bigpost. I played Warhammer for many, many years and I'm just going to wordvomit out my thoughts on the game.

This was the first effort from New Mythic, I believe, or at very least some people who played important roles in class balancing in DAoC weren't responsible for Warhammer. Much to their detriment, I believe.

I played in the Dark Crag PvP server with some of my best RL friends at launch and kept playing it for many years, DAoC fanboys that we were. We got in with some of the more powerful guilds on the server, myself being quite the badass Runepriest, saw most of the content the game had to offer and witnessed how the patching cycle and class balancing unfolded over the years. The game was just broken and poorly thought out from the beginning... it honestly had nothing on the majesty of DAoC.

People will go on and on about how Order or Destruction were OP. The truth was that each realm had their moments in the sun. One thing was consistent with WAR: class balance was always completely and utterly fucked. People will often cite Bright Wizards of course, and yes they were ridiculous even after weathering several nerfs. I would often play WAR with my brother, who just happened to be a BW. There was very little that could stand up to a BW with a pocket healer. There were many times where our duo would wipe out two or three times our numbers, or that one time where we killed a trio of attacking destro while he was tanking a purple con public quest boss. Not that the Destro Sorceress equivalent was any slouch either.

Crowd Control abilities were handled terribly in WAR, and one of the big reasons a lot of people I knew ended up quitting. People don't like dying repeatedly without a chance of retaliation. DAoC had its share of CC woes initially as well, what with Pacification Healers being able to chain-mez and chain-stun large groups of people with no immunity timers to speak of, and it was always surprising to me that WAR managed to not learn from these mistakes, but implement even shittier and game-breaking forms of CC into the game.

First of all, you had 'Rift' spells, which would grab a group of enemies from the opposing faction and yank them to a single point in front of the caster. Collision detection would then prevent you from moving at all, since you were effectively standing inside 6-8 other players. Your entire group would then usually get melted in moments by two spellcasters stacking high-damage AOEs, but not before you were hit with an AOE stun, knockdown or disorient making you completely helpless to do shit. White Lions also had an unresistable 'yanking' ability through their pets that, while not an AOE, had such an absurd range that you could grab casters from someone's back ranks and murder them with impunity. Or pull them into guards that would 1-shot them.

Disorient skills were also completely broken. If you're hit with a disorient skill, it added a small delay to any action you took. So a 3-second group heal now takes 4 seconds to cast, or an instantaneous melee style now takes 1-second to use as if it's a spell. This was not so bad in itself, in fact, I thought it was a clever mechanic. Except when Mythic released a patch that completely broke disorient, and suddenly your disoriented actions can now be interrupted. Since movement also happened to interrupt casting, and disorient effected *everything*, from drinking potions to sprinting. So now, you're basically a sitting duck, any action you take will be interrupted if you so much as move and if you're being actively attacked your casting bar will keep getting reset, you more or less had to stand there and die unable to even an instant ability. This shit took months and months to fix, mind you.

Most of the CC fuckery largely favored Destro. They had numerous melee classes that could AOE knockdown and AOE disorient, whereas most Order classes had single-target variations on one or two classes at most. The Magus class got the ridiculous Rift ability, and while the class was fairly unimpressive aside from that, Maguses also flew around on an awesome flying disc which making them common as shit, so every PvP instance is suddenly a CC nightmare. Order's Engineer equivalent by comparison was somewhat a novelty, at least on my server, and their Rift was part of a really shitty unused skill tree. So when I hear a lot of Destruction players go on and on about how Order was so broken, it doesn't garner much sympathy.

Then I try to set my biases aside and think about what happened to the Destro on Dark Crag...

There was just no failsafe for population imbalance. DAoC handled this brilliantly by having three factions to war with. If one faction (usually Albion) became too overpopulated or too powerful, the two other factions would often work together to dethrone them. I think eventually there was even server clustering. You'd think Mythic might learn from past experience but Warhammer had none of this. You had two factions and if one side had population issues, tough titties. Dark Crag suffered from this to the extreme when the ultra-casual zerg guild, Ruin, moved to our server. They would invite anyone and everyone, and faceroll PvP objectives and keeps with absurd numbers that the opposition could never hope to field or oppose. But it was always entertaining watching Ruin get smashed in PvP instances with limited player caps.

So at this point my server is pretty much dominated by Order and I happen to play the winning side. Realm versus Realm was always touted as the central focus and end game for Warhammer: Online. Once you've taken all of your enemies keeps it's time to march on their Capital City! This should be the most exciting part of the game, right? The culmination of all our efforts should be one final RvR smorgasborg.

Let me try to explain just how shitty this implementation is. Once the enemies capital is breached, control of the city is decided through a number of large-scale PvP instances that you queue up for. These were actually pretty fun, they were these epic, objective-based 24v24 battles that take place within the city walls. If the opposing side wins enough of these instances, they successfully defend against the siege and all is well.

But what about when the attacker wins? They invade the Capital City for 24 hours. Cool, so now open world-PvP will take place within the Capital? Nowhere is safe! Right?

...Right?

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

NOPE

During this 24-hour period:
* The losing side cannot enter their capital at all. Instead they get a shitty refugee camp.
* No PvP instances can be queued up whatsoever. This is a huge, many people would log on simply to play these instances.
* There is no open world 'hotspot' to even find any PvP, since there are no meaningful objectives being taken. The winning side is now only interested in sacking the capital, which is now instanced, and the losing side can't enter.

In other words, for a full 24 hours, the losing side is punished and stuck twiddling their thumbs, with nothing to do and no game to play. It was fucking absurd. If you were in-the-know you might stumble onto Fight Clubs while this is going down where you can duel with some people, but that was about it. On Dark Crag the Destro capital city would often get sacked every day, meaning the losing side never had anything to fucking do and no recourse at all. People were quitting in droves, and RvR games are so much fun without players to fight. How does Mythic handle this? Shorten the lock-out period to 12 hours and introduce a free PvE expansion!

So what does the 'winning' side do once you've crashed the gates and unlocked the capital city, if not PvP? PvE raid content, of course! You and 47 of your closest buddies form a warband and spend the entire day tackling mulitple poorly-designed raid bosses with stupid gimmicks, culminating in a showdown with the Emperor himself. If you manage to win this buggy encounter your realm 'wins' and the Emperor is caged in your capital city, and everyone gets to throw tomatoes at him!!!! But at least you get some epic boss loot! Unless you're a healer, because all gear that drops in PvP is tailored to DPS spec for some reason.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I don't want to give the impression it was irredeemable or anything. Warhammer was a lot of fun and I played it for years, it was just poorly implemented in important, unfortunate ways. I really liked that you could take your character from level 1 to max doing nothing but PvP. Enemy players would drop loot, higher ranking players could even drop some nice stuff on occasion. The game was a lot better balanced at lower levels, and Tier1-Tier3 was an absolute blast. I loved the PvP instances, they were like an MMO version of team deathmatch, complete with scoreboards showing rankings of deathblows, hitpoints healed, damage dealt, etc. I thought the 'tactic slots' that modified your abilities, like making critical heals give the recipient bladeturn or give you back mana were a brilliant feature. And the Runepriest was an immensely fun class... truly one of the most satisfying and mobile healers I've ever played, even if 'pure healers' like the Runepriest paled in healing effectiveness compared to hybrids like Warrior Priests.

It's all just kind of a shame. WAR soured me on MMOs forever... haven't played one since. so much potential and so much time invested only for it all to amount to nothing.

fuck

 

I kinda wish I had been able to play it longer. And Chosen punt-ability was as good as the dwarf tank one.

 

Good read, thanks.

I strongly agree on CC and balance part. I had an Ironbreaker at start, he was both fun and unfunny to play . A heavy defensive character with slows, stuns and unholy knocbacks. Also that damned skill bleeds runners. And self heal. And friend protection with buff sharing...
For a long time me and my warrior priest buddy just wiped clean of chaos scum even 2vs6-7. Most of them don't even stood a chance on lower tiers.
And then we reached them higher tiers , with mega pullers and crazy AOEs from so called "backleashed" sorcerors/wizards who always had 2 healers to negate all backfire damage. White lions pulling a poor souls to oblivion for minutes.

I had such high hopes for this game so my fall was even greater...

"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment!"


Some good memories...








Last one was a glorious last stand. Held that tavern against 12-15 chaos scum. Noone can get between a dwarf and his ale!

 

Called sunk cost fallacy, think Vietnam/Iraq war.

Yea and well that is the VG industry consumer base as companies like Ea/Activision would have died a long time ago if it weren't for the mass drones throwing their money at these companies.


It is a pity that the RvR system was poorly implemented and there was a lack of competence on the behalf of the studio as I like the concept. Is there any other games that are in development that is implementing a competent RvR system like Daoc or what war could have been?

 

It'd be interesting if this was what they needed to get their players to log back in. A shoutout to GW where you didn't need to grind for a month to reach max level and spam eleventy skills.

 

I remember anticipating WAR for so long. I had some fun with it. It's too bad that the game has to be shut down, but thats the ultimate fate of every MMO. Kind of sucks to think about.

Nice pics Cyberarmy, I love a fellow Dwarf enthusiast.

 

Not even close.

 

I had been tempted by Warhammer when it first came out, but upon hearing all the negative press (and that $60 initial cost), like that 'emptying bank account' goof, I did not. I also had a pretty healthy dislike of WoW, and Warhammer looked too much like it aesthetically.

EVE Online with more action-y mechanics and s medieval/fantasy atmosphere would probably "dethrone" WoW. But alas, the closest you'll get to that sort of experience are either dead, or text-based.

 

Re-watch the CGI trailers (with the two 1 VS 1 battles and the siege narrated by who I still to this day believe to be Kreia) and you have a more enjoyable experience.

 

Incredible trailers. And OMG that does sound like Kreia... Hmm..

 

WAR was so much fun at the beginning. With massive battles hordes of players running around and each doing something. All Mythic haveto do is to quickly fix major bugs, like horrible stuttering and such. Yet they abandoned patching completely. And soon people got fed with "Fuck off!" dev attitude and started leaving in thousands. So much lost potential, so much for awful management and retarded community interaction. No wonder Mythic failed all their projects. And in the end, they started to cater to the most idiotic and degenerade members of the community. People often argued that BSN's biowhore section is a paragon of faggotry and retardation - they had not seen WAR.
Well, rest in peace.

 

How was the Orc Choppa class?

 

Choppas/slayers required to be in a group to unleash their full potantial. They had good spikey, damage. Slayers were a bit better at AoE damage and survival. And they got bonus points for being dwarven punks.

 

That's not why people like GW though.

 

I bought this at release, money badly spent, i played less than a month and then gave up never to return. Not sorry to see it go.