Ea talks about warhammer fail

[Aoann]

I am thinking this guy is pretty much a complete boob.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?u...m=email&bhcp=1

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

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."

Hickman later acknowledged that fixing the game economy is essential to the game's upcoming South Korean launch and that these fixes will propagate globally. When entering that market, "We want to identify the big things that are important and change them. Economy specifically -- it's one of our weaknesses, and it has to be a big strength when we hit Korea. And it's a focus that pours over into North America."


[Gisli]

While I don't understand why he thinks economy is important, his other points are right even if he got them backward. I've been pointing to the lack of need to socialize as one of the major failures in the game (along with the inadequate game engine, the bad end game, and only 2 factions). The "too easy" PvE is a big contributor to why the game fails on the social aspects. He said it exactly: "the game doesn't require friends."

[Warseth]

wow talk aobut stuck on stupid... laying it alll on too easy pve content...socializing structure not having incentive...and economy tied to socializing network.

Yeah ok..... jackasses. So I guess the boards full of "End game sucks"..."Classes are not mirrored well"... "WTF is with these nerfs across the board".. have nothing to do with the exodus as of late.

Dumbasses... PVP game ...blaming pve content and lack of social network incentives...alrighty...

[Eder]

Damn, instead of drawing the correct reasons for failure, they are coming to the wrong conclusions and perpetuating myths that will shape MMO execs' misconceptions in the future.... such as the need for more gold and equipment and crap.... sigh.

Why don't they understand that fair and balanced fights, a REASON to fight, a mechanic that perpetuates a good old tug of war, and the ability to handle epic battles as well as small group battles, were the winning formulas for DAoC?

[Drakhon]

They're apparently not willing to admit that they screwed up RvR and that is the reason for the game's failure. I can't decide if it's that they just don't see it somehow or if it's because they can't say it because they built themselves up with all that "we're the founders of RvR" and "we do it the best" stuff.

[Gutzntoez]

meh, this guy is paid to be a bs artist, and when it looks like you are trying to admit your weaknesses and or mistakes, as a bs artist, you scratch the surface like he has.

i can't deny the fact that easy leveling or socialization of people is a big problem, but it is a root problem to the game dying faster because people didn't have time to settle in and enjoy it and become attatched. This is their problem mainly, not ours.

but, the glaring issue was the end game, which they remain bull headed about. Their intentions on the direction they are headed in are vague, and people who have already gone through Mythic mistakes don't wait around to see if they are just going to magically fix it on their own, without the help of the people who play the game.

the one thing they could have done to help save the game, and not because of its specific content, but the time they spent on it, was LoTD. It is true the way they split up RvR into a waiting game of empty keeps and the like did negetively effect the populations, as this was a 2 factioned game and not a 3. DF was a great addition to DAoC, and LoTD would have worked alot better, had there been 3 realms. They thought of this as their 'go to guy' and boy were they obviously wrong. If they had never gone into production of LoTD on the other hand we would have had alot more attention.

anyways, i could rant about this all day, but the plain fact is, we're done, on to the next.

p.s. i'm especially disgruntled because they screwed over Black Orcs for little to no reason at all, except for Da Biggest war below

[Drakhon]

Nobody would have cared about the soloing to 40 "problem" (quotes because it's a highly debated issue and there are good arguments on both sides) if the RvR at 40 was compelling and, well, RvR.

While lack of a need for socialization is certainly an issue, again compelling RvR would have fixed this at the "end game" level and maybe even at lower levels due to RvR from level 1 (which was an excellent idea).

If you're going to have an economy, it should be a good one. However, a bad economy is not really a point of game failure when it's caused by there not being much reason to participate in it.

What it comes down to, in my opinion, is that if they didn't have the client/server performance issues and had a better RvR design, the other problems wouldn't have occurred (socialization), people wouldn't have cared about them (easy leveling) or they would have stuck with the game until they could be fixed (balance).

[Vasan]

Hickman seems to be carefully crafting a reply on how the game was broken beyond repair before he got to it, and he, nearly singlehandedly, tried to repair it himself, most likely keeping the game running far long than it would have.

It's a better story than the truth, in that his (and others) neglect and dare I say his outright stupidity stifled the game's potential. I think he's trying to pull a Bill Roper where you screw up in a horrible fashion then try to talk yourself out of it by blaming others, all the while taking credit for other people's efforts.

Still I agree with everyone in so much as he seems a very clueless sort (witch elfs and zealots are fine!), but I suspect most of the leads in warhammer were to have developed such a hostile anti-player feed back environment, along with we won't support the product in any meaningful way sort of fashion. He's such an ass to lie through his teeth and say player feedback was mixed, player feedback was always postive on how to improve the game, the leads just stubbornly didn't want to go in that direction.

Honestly I've heard some people say War never really left beta, and in sum I agree with that due to the lack of polish, balance, server capacity and of course the end game.

On a postive note, it's nice to see Aion listening to players about how to improve the game in a meaningful fashion. They are trying to take your play experience and improve upon it, not just let the game waste away while adding extremely minor and generally unrequested additions.

[Chaelyn]

*snort* considering leads can't do jack unless the bosses say "ok yeah implement this", how can you try to shove the blame off on leads and devs?

WAR made bad decsisions from the getgo- having too many servers at launch, unwise investments or whatever the hell led to them having to kill a chunk of their work force. Granted most of that was EA's decisions across the board but still.. I'm not one for shifting blame.

Hey, bad choices, screw ups, you're human, we get it.


Admitting you have a problem is the first step...

[Scarr]

Well, the excuses will be put on the table. However they will NEVER address things that they will not be able to "FIX" prior to the Korean launch. We all know why the game failed. Yes, some of it was based upon the reasons he gave, however that was nowhere close to being the major issues.

That is the problem with this statement. If he told the full and most applicable truth in the matter of hey, our game failed because:

1) We screwed up and only had 2 realms, we should have known 3 realms was the gold standard for "RVR". We changed it and broke it. However, we cannot implement a 3rd faction into the game without scrubbing everything, halting all updates to the servers and relaunching in 12 months.

-This would effectively KILL the other regional launches. Right now EA wants to milk every cent it can from WAR before it pulls the plug. There is no recovering any sales in North America or Europe, they will apply band-aids, make the PVE near impossible, give huge EXP loss death penalties and send it off to Asia. They'll make huge bank with this new level grinding MMO, probably add micro transactions into it to offer direct gold sales, since death will cost you 50 gold to remove 2 hour long stats loss.

I have never heard of an MMO reclaiming memberships once it "jumps the shark". Hell Age of Conan is supposed to be awesome now, but no one will go back to it. Same with happen with WAR. I dunno, maybe Mythic can salvage something from it. Maybe take the game, delete the classes, add a 3rd faction and call it Dark Age of the Roman Empire!

Europe (Knights Templar/Byzantia) Vs Arabia (Turks/Persians) Vs Africans (Egypt)

Say instead of technology, magic was discovered and evolved from religions. Mysticism, witch craft, shamanic powers were found from ancient scrolls across the ruins of the Roman empire.

I could see all the religious fanatics attacking this one before it went alpha.