Overly Positive

There's more people here - honest!

So in yet another shift on the forums for WAR for which I am a moderator, I came upon, among all the wonderfully positive threads declaring the death of the game, a thread regarding the mass exodus (“mass” being, certainly, the always reliable statistic of mass of forum posters”) of the game. In it was a quote from VP GM Mark Jacobs of Mythic Entertainment, WAR’s developer, about how if they aren’t adding servers six weeks in, they’re “not doing well”.

Obviously no servers have been added – in fact, they were added at the beginning of course, so all the doom and gloomers are having a field day.

Here’s the reply I posted below, which in short, is really – the game is neither doing hugely successful things nor is it completely failing. For right now, it’s pretty much right on tack with what I was thinking, which isn’t a bad thing. So pick up those chins, WAR players!

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MMO developers need to stop overpromising and underdelivering. They need to understate their goals to set realistic expectations for an increasingly impatient player base.

I would argue that “how an MMO works” has changed a hell of a damn lot since the release of the current gorilla in the market, WoW. And that’s not just because of WoW, but because of releases than came after it.

How an MMO works has been completely changed by the idea of success being “millions” of subscribers and a carrot on a stick grind to appeal to players (WoW).

How an MMO works has changed by having created the idea that players want things and want them right away, with little tolerance for downtime or bugs or “we’re working on it” awful launch issues (Vanguard).

How an MMO works has changed in that you can’t release something based solely upon equity built upon previous work – the “hey, we did x game, but we left and are doing it OUR way now” (Hellgate: London)

I could go on.

All of this stuff aggregates into current development and release philosophies for MMOs. The problem is, people’s memories are shorter than a kid looking at shiny toys in the store, and when comparing to other products on the market, can only compare to the current state of the product as opposed to the product when released. That’s a bit unfair, but totally understandable.

This all boils down to expectations. If you expected WAR to be something and it wasn’t, then of course there was disappointment, and sometimes anger. I close unproductive goodbye threads every day from people who say things that would make their mother wash their mouth out with soap and a detergent brand, if you could do that without being sued or arrested. They’re mad because they didn’t get what they thought they would.

Many people, mostly late adopters, who subscribed to WAR expected the “WoW killer”. WAR was never meant to be that game. A lot of people like to say that WAR tried to be “WoW lite with PvP”, but all that was done was something done in lots of MMOs – taking successful elements from other games and giving it your own flavor, something Blizzard does extremely well.

This only accounts for some of the people who left, but the real key is whether or not Mythic expected the loss they are experiencing. You’d have to be foolish to think Mythic didn’t know they were going to take a subscriber hit with WoTLK. The degree of that hit is unknown, but the real, true test is how WAR does through the next two or three months. If they can’t maintain the subscriber target they’ve set (a number we’ll never know), they will have real problems. But I don’t think they have unexpected issues regarding subscriptions now.

That being said, the article quoted is another in the long line of developer quotes that later end up creating foot in mouth syndrome. I’m certain Mark knows this too, but as a developer or member of the development company, you need to only rarely introduce concrete statements or numbers unless you’re near 100% certain. The reason being, is that the community will crucify you for your words later if you don’t deliver. That quote, along with another quote regarding GOA’s level of service and the “deal is off” if it isn’t, are two such quotes.

Seeing that quote, however, you can see why the decision was made to open more servers. The game’s biggest issue in my eyes, its population spread, is the result of a decision made by the company to either have an awful launch with overpacked servers and long queues, or to launch with more than enough servers to handle the load but suffer problems from people leaving off of underpopulated servers, or leaving the game entirely due to no “massive multiplayer” in MMO. Clearly, with the bad history of launches like AoC and Vanguard had, the latter was chosen – totally understandable. But it created a problem that still exists now, and I’m curious to see how Mythic approaches it.

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