Mythic & WARs Mistakes

[Mangala]

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25285

Good read so far.  Shame they seemingly didnt see these a year ago on launch.

Despite having a successful MMO in the form of Dark Age of Camelot, Hickman says there were "mistakes we made with Warhammer that we should not have made." He described them as "three things have haunted us for a year with Warhammer," and later acknowledged a lot of effort has been put into dealing with them in patches -- sometimes subtly, as they're fundamental and systemic.

Challenge of play was a problem for Warhammer that the team is still untangling, says Hickman. "There's a big difference between easy play and ease of use. And one of the lessons that we thought we learned from ourselves and other games, was that it's important to have ease of use, and it's also important to hit the right balance between easy gameplay, challenging gameplay, and too difficult. We thought we hit that, but Warhammer, in PVE, in the beginning, is too easy. It doesn't make you thrilled to do it."?

What effect has this had? Says Hickman, "The game has suffered immensely for it."

When asked if feedback from beta players could have helped head off this problem before the game launched, Hickman said that player feedback isn't always reliable or easy to interpret. "We did get feedback from players -- it was very mixed. We got feedback from people saying, 'Hey, great, I can solo; I don't have to group!' so that hit one of our checkboxes. We got a small subset who said it was too easy. I think it was one of the insidious things. I'm not sure how many of our players would say it's too easy; it's not something they think about. There are a lot of things they point at and say are the problems, but [actually] it's that."

The social nature of online games can confound even experienced developers, Hickman argues. The team built "social tools" but the game gave players "little reason to socialize." Says Hickman, "We all talk about online gaming as 'social'. It's a thing we'd call probably foundationally the most important thing about these games. It's fun to play these games with friends."

However, he says, "We had great ideas for all of these really cool social tools, and we built them into the game. But the game doesn't require friends. Part of it is that it's too easy." You can design in the need for players to have to work together, but Hickman warns that "you shouldn't force friendship, but it's important, and there's a balance there. You can do so many things solo, that friendship, at least in the beginning levels, is not necessary, and it's super dangerous for your games."

Economic models are its third biggest problem, which Hickman acknowledged are going steady overhauls to make them more relevant. "Our economy... we just missed the mark. If you look at the reasoning behind the economy, you'll see things like, 'Hey, we're not going to let gold farmers in our game.' 'We're going to try to make sure we have controlled inflation.' We had all the best reasons in our game, but what it caused us to do was build a game where economy is not important enough. Economy brings people together."

[Jarkko]

Errr... Wut? The main problem of WAR is that the initial PvE quests are too easy?

Ok. I have to admit I am out of words, I just can't think of anything to comment on that...

Who cares about the PvE in early levels? PvE becomes important in T4, where the game changes from a PvP game to a PvE fest. *That* is the problem with the game, PvP in T4 is boring, dull, frustrating and boring.

But perhaps that is fixed if those level 1 PvE marauders in Nordland would spawn in groups of three instead of groups of two, who knows?

[Taith]

Surely the initial PvE quests have to be too easy, to let you figure out how to play your character.

Although I agree that as far as I played, up to about level 13, there was no real game incentive to become part of a guild. Public Quests aside, you could do everything solo.

As for the Public Quests themselves, the only thing I would add is the ability to queue for it. That would allow you to see that there are a number of people ready to go for it, and you could tell it to start a countdown, giving people time to zoom across the zone to it. Wandering over to the PQ area and hoping there were enough people to start it wasn't really good enough, and asking in the zone's general channel only tells other people that one person is interested in doing it.

[peo]

Well, just shows they have little clue.

Easy? well yes, the pve is easy. Isn't it a pvp game??
PvP isn't easy. PvP needs groups (well it should if it wasn't only do 5 trillion battlegrounds where everyone is automagically in one group).
Their problem lies in that the pvp in the end game isn't pvp but pve. It isn't even the "raid grind" of wow but "lets play musical keeps until one of the mega guilds find it fun to lock a zone"

Quite frankly what they failed at wasn't "social" or "ease" or anything else like that, they failed at the basic idea of the game namely RvR.

[Mangala]

Heh, that article is really telling. It pretty much shows what the biggest problem with WAR is hands down. Mythic. Their inability to either see, or admit to the games cluster fuck failings is why the game is a train wreck only heading one direction. I truly feel sorry for them if ANYONE over at Mythic honestly believes "easy pve" was even in the top 20 reasons the game ended up the way it did. Being blind to why your game is failing, or refusing to admit publicly that half your fucking ideas were terrible is THE problem here.

They don't seem to grasp that playing ignorant to the horrific fucking design choices they made only makes future customers and fans alike hesitant to touch their next product. No one wants to play DAoC 2 or whatever if they think stupid shit like "Mythic Seconds" will be making a comeback. Seriously, it's like complaining about a stain on the carpet when the fucking house is on fire. Fix the real problems, and worry about the petty shit later.


Borrowed from other forum, but pretty much on the ball, a start at a top 10 real worst reasons:

1. Horrible performance even on good computers(mostly caused by the bug in their UI code that lasted months into release, but a freakin MOD was made days into live that fixed it).

2. Generally poor classbalance, with one mirror class being overpowered, the other being mediocre(WE/WH, BW/sorc).

3. "Contribution system" that was supposed to keep track of how much people helped during a Keep siege, actually being determined by a random diceroll when you zoned in.

4. Mythic seconds, and how all abilities were lagged and not synced to caster animations.

5. Broken CC immunity that meant you could be CCed for long long periods of time, in a game absolutely chock full of large AE cc.

6. No mechanics in place to deal with one-sided servers, way too many servers started.

7. Very boring endgame RVR revovling around Keep swapping.

8. Extremely buggy pve endgame, also requiring you to get a complete set of ward gear before moving on to the next instance.