Warhammer is Boring: Mythic To Close 63 Servers

Warhammer was released on September 18th, 2008. It's six month anniversary is coming up next week and they just announced the closure of 40 servers. The populations from those have been spread out across the sixteen that remain (FYI these are US numbers, the Euro side is closing 20 with 23 remaining).

When Warhammer launched (smoothly I am told) the group of us who hit 40 first almost all stopped playing and went back to WoW. I joined after this in early December and caught up to the slower leveling bastages and eventually most of us were hitting 40 in late January. This is right around when Darkfall Beta opened and everybody jumped ship to try out the game we've been years and years for. I canceled my subscription last week before the 3-month period was up. Out of all of us I think there are only one or two bastages still hanging on to their subscriptions.

I wanted to like this game, and at times I had a lot of fun, especially early on. The T2 scenario (forget the name), and Tor Anroc were fun and didn't get old since you quickly out leveled them. The lava could be a bitch but you have to admit it was funny watching people get owned by it. The only really memorable RvR fight I had was also in T3 going after the keep in Saphery. A group of about 6 or 7 of us and a bunch of order fodder busted through the outer gate. There was a good number of T3 Destro and a couple of Destro in the mid-30s so we were having trouble getting through the second gate. I think we had three warrior priests and a rune priest all specced salv plus two or three bright wizards and maybe someone was there on their melee. Our squad sat in the middle of the courtyard killing Destro and trying to nuke down the door. We held our ground well but the fodder just kept dying around us. Before we knew it the gates had closed behind us and more of the fodder that died were getting stuck outside the walls. Even past that point I think we held our ground until we were the last men standing and eventually got zerged out.

After T3 the game went downhill. I really didn't care for any of the scenarios, most of them were rehashed versions of Arathi Basin from WoW. Add that to the fact that for most of the time I was playing I had to fight level 40s. I feel that RvR through the 'dominion system' was flawed as well. When given a choice, most players will take the path of least resistance. This means while Order was capturing keeps in Praag, Destruction was capturing keeps in Caledor. No one really defended since the incentives for taking a keep (phat lootz) greatly outweighed the incentives for defending (rep/influence... QQ). In the end this basically boiled down to two sides zerging essentially defenseless keeps in a race to cap two zones in order to access the fortresses and eventually the capital cities.


The few fortress fights I did were pretty boring as well. I only did one at 40 and even then I didn't have enough wards to really do much. I just followed the zerg and /random'd for some loot.

The Capital City was even worse. I was never on for a defense of Altdorf. I did siege the Inevitable City twice. What this essentially amounted to was joining a public quest instance that was heavily lopsided and ended quickly. Then not being able to get into one at all. They also had an instanced battle ground was essentially what you would get if you took Arathi Basin, Warsong Gulch, made them have a baby and beat it with a fugly stick. Not to mention the queue times were also terrabad.

How does this relate to Darkfall Online? You can almost view DF and WAR as mirror opposites. Smooth Launch vs. FUBAR Launch. Multiple servers with excess capacity vs Single Server with insufficient capacity. Zero risk (no loot / losing keeps is laughable) vs High Risk (Full loot / Player Cities can be captured). Class/Level based vs Skill based.

It remains to be seen how Darkfall will play out. I hope that six months from now I am not writing a similiar post about it...

If you do feel like playing a boring game again, Mythic is sending out messages to canceled subscribers offering 10 days free if you sign up again.

Related Posts:
Gamasutra: Mythic to Close 63 Warhammer Online Servers
Tobold's MMORPG Blog: WAR server shrinkage
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