It's been fairly quiet from the lads and lasses over in Virginia and you wonder what's going on behind closed doors. Paul Barnett is noticeably silent. Mark Jacobs pops up every now and then to say "This is coming soon! (tm)" and the odd dev makes an appearance on the Oboards to give a response of very little substance. No news is good news they say, but in an MMO it's concerning.
Class imbalances are worse than they were upon release. End game is still horribly broken and bugged. Lag has pretty much killed our servers evening game play, we can't even do LV these days since IC is constantly under siege and the lag from that gives us +6 second cast timers on everything. The campaign is now dictated by the side which has the most people that can play in off peak times due to the dominance system. Apathy has set in with many players, I checked the number of players defending IC last night.. Order 301, Destro 146. Tonight was Order 273, Destro 110.
Do Mythic have a plan, or are they currently scrabbling around thinking "WTF do we do?". They can't respond to issues quick enough and severely lack in communicating to the players what they will be doing to resolve the worries and problems the players have with WAR. Can Mythic afford to let the game break apart through not being able to react quick enough. With WoW's 3. 1 patch, a new raid instance and class re-evaluations coming in a week or two, can WAR still hold onto people who are starting to feel jaded with the game in its current state.
Mythic. You NEED to get out there and start saying "This is where we are, this is what we know is not working and THIS is how we aim to fix it".
I really enjoy so much of this game, but still so much makes me able to switch the game off without a good thought. I tend to log off now thinking "That's pi**ed me off" rather than "That was cool". I WANT to keep playing this game, you're not making it easy to enjoy it though Mythic.
Speak to us.
Come now, we know what Mythic is working on.
ReplyDeleteThere's many different factions of a company like this. They have a server group dedicated to constantly improving lag and crashes. They have a dev team constantly working on new content to placate the mass of "Poo-end-game!" cries. They have a reduced staff of CSR's that run around like ants under a magnifying glass doing anything they can to make people happy.
I've noticed a cycle actually, tis a bit like major patch -> people rejoice -> people angry -> bug fix -> people rejoice -> live event -> people rejoice -> major patch -> etc and so on. Its a constant cycle, and if you're waiting for the next thing to roll down the pipes instead of bitching about the last turd that fell on you, there's happiness to be had.
Go crush some stunty skulls. I'm ready to bathe in Witch Elf blood myself.
Here's my take:
ReplyDeleteThey are in scramble mode. I don't think their original concepts for RvR were nearly as great as they could have been.
I believe Mythic are great thinkers but mediocre doers. So many of WAR's concepts are amazing but there are so many examples of poor execution. Class balance. Server balance. Game performance (e.g., lagging, hitching, crashing, etc.). Open RvR. Scenarios. Keep siege. City siege. Blah blah blah.
All these features sound amazing in a production podcast but fail to impress in a live environment.
Each and every patch breaks the game more and more. I just don't understand how such an experienced company with the bank of EA behind them keeps making brutal mistakes like this.
WAR was supposed to take on WoW. Mark said it himself that any company trying to compete with WoW is competing with WoW in 2009, not WoW at release. You simply can't make these kinds of huge mistakes. People aren't buying into it like they used to.
Get your **** together, Mythic. Geez.
I think this comment from Rob Pardo at the current GDC sums it up nicely.
ReplyDelete"I think we sometimes value innovation too highly," said Pardo of the game development community. "We really don't teach lessons of execution enough. It's not necessarily that there are a lot of fantasy games. I don’t think that's so much the problem as that there are a lot of bad fantasy games."
Pardo pointed to Nintendo as a company that is “always nailing the execution” -- something Blizzard holds at its core, with obviously lucrative results.
“You get rewarded for that,” he concluded.
I agree Blizzard aren't perfect, but it's the right mantra.
Well theres no chance i would go back to wow, and yes i dont enjoy war that much as i did before 1.2, it makes me feel tired in many ways, you can say it lag, or you can say that i dinged 40 my zealot and i only got to go into 1 run cause of the evening ic attacks, well is very annoying and inbalanced.But guess every start for every game has this shit, guess im gonna give it a month or two before i decide if im gonna abandon warhammer or not. Till then.. we are all waiting!
ReplyDelete