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Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: Producer's Letter Assuages WAR Fears
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
Executive producer Jeff Hickman responds to the recent news of major layoffs at Mythic in a producer's letter addressed to the WAR community. Naturally many fans of the game are concerned, and Hickman writes to ease the fears centering around WAR's future due to recent developments.
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On the matter of WAR, Hickman had this to say:
-Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has had a solid first year despite some issues that we’re working to address every day. We’ve seen a great response to 1.3.2, which introduced tremendous performance improvements. A flood of new players are discovering the game every day thanks to the recently released Endless Trial and New User Journey. Moving forward we remain committed to releasing more great patches, continued performance improvements, and changes based upon your valuable feedback!
Read the full letter here.
UPDATE: WAR Producer Jeff Skalski added to Mr. Hickman's comments in a new letter published on the WAR Herald yesterday. Mr. Skalski takes some time to highlight some of WAR's more recent accomplishments such as the launch of the Mac client, the New User Journey, and the Endless Trial, while also pointing ahead to the future with an update on version 1.3.3:
1.3.3 brings with it a focus on continued polish and bug fixes, enhancements to RvR as well as other features to improve the quality and enjoyment of your experience. We’ll be sprucing up graphics with improved lighting options and bloom to make the skies pop to life and create some spectacular sights, in addition over the course of 1.3.3 you’ll get to enjoy three live events including the return of the Battlebrew Backpack in Keg End and the much beloved Night of Murder event in addition to an all new event in the new year…yarrrr. We’re anything but bored as you can see and we can’t wait to open the gates on PTS to hear your feedback. Your feedback is vital to ensuring 1.3.3 is a hit so make sure you share it!
Read Jeff Skalski's letter here.
[Thanks Comnitus!]
Comments
What was he supposed to say?
Anyone was hoping for him to say the game is on it's last breath and closing down in six months? Offcourse not, even if it is true =P
No, none of us expects the truth.
Too many of us are fine with comforting lies.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
While it is good that a company/producer takes actions to calm down any possible panic, this is nothing more than some buzzwords. Passionate, commited, exciting.... Jeff should have brought something that players can look forward to instead of promising to have exiciting plans in the future.
On a sidenote, he sure does resemble another game designer.
Looks nothing like him.
I don't see the plug being pulled from Warhammer anytime soon. As long as there are subscribers the will continue to move on.
VG has a much smaller player base than WAR and SOE hasn't pulled the plug yet.
This letter is like the great halftime speech of a football game to get your guys playing better but realizing you aren't that good at the end of the game, losing 42-0.
Looks nothing like him.
I don't see the plug being pulled from Warhammer anytime soon. As long as there are subscribers the will continue to move on.
VG has a much smaller player base than WAR and SOE hasn't pulled the plug yet.
It seems you forget that SOE has many other sources or income, EQ2, EQ, Free Realms, SWG, etc
Some of them are also on the verge of closing but still, they have more titles providing income than Mythic, i mean, only Free Realms probably generates more income than all of Mythic nowadays
What does Mythic have to do with Ultima Online aside from the fact that they were both bought by EA games?
REALITY CHECK
Just because MMORPG.com doesn't link something doesn't mean you don't have to take 5 seconds to look at the Herald.
*Ahem*:
Hey Fellow Waaaghers,
Just wanted to drop a few lines to follow up where our fearless leader, Mr. Hickman, left off reaffirm that our support and dedication to making WAR the best RvR experience in the market has not changed. We're just a few weeks past the launch of 1.3.2 and heavily testing 1.3.3 as we speak to get it ready for PTS.
1.3.3 brings with it a focus on continued polish and bug fixes, enhancements to RvR as well as other features to improve the quality and enjoyment of your experience. We’ll be sprucing up graphics with improved lighting options and bloom to make the skies pop to life and create some spectacular sights, in addition over the course of 1.3.3 you’ll get to enjoy three live events including the return of the Battlebrew Backpack in Keg End and the much beloved Night of Murder event in addition to an all new event in the new year…yarrrr. We’re anything but bored as you can see and we can’t wait to open the gates on PTS to hear your feedback. Your feedback is vital to ensuring 1.3.3 is a hit so make sure you share it!
Till then, we are continuing to actively monitor how the RvR campaign is playing out across the servers and making adjustments as we develop the Underdog system which we look forward to sharing the details about with you soon.
In case you haven’t heard the news we’ve now made WAR more accessible than ever! We’ve brought RvR to the Mac for the first time ever so you don’t even need Boot Camp to play (It made me a Mac user!). Additionally your friends and family can play the intense, fast paced action of Tier 1 forever with the new Endless Trial and Windows users only need a quick 1GB download to get into the action while the rest of the game downloads as you play. PQ's are full, scenarios are popping and there are plenty of players scouring the RvR lakes looking for revenge – so why are you still reading?
See you on the battlefield,
Jeff Skalski
That's certainly something we can all look forward to, right?
Edit: By the way, nice use of vocabulary in the article title, MMORPG.com. Assuage! You could've used "calms" or "alleviates", but you chose a more exotic word.
Edit 2: He doesn't look like McQuaid. He looks exactly like my Paladin from Dark Age of Camelot.
EXACTLY!
Looks nothing like him.
I don't see the plug being pulled from Warhammer anytime soon. As long as there are subscribers the will continue to move on.
VG has a much smaller player base than WAR and SOE hasn't pulled the plug yet.
How much is Sony paying for the IP rights for Vanguard? Zero, right?
How much is EA paying for the IP rights to Warhammer?
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
LOL no answer there at all. That guy has no clue whats going to happen.
Looks nothing like him.
I don't see the plug being pulled from Warhammer anytime soon. As long as there are subscribers the will continue to move on.
VG has a much smaller player base than WAR and SOE hasn't pulled the plug yet.
How much is Sony paying for the IP rights for Vanguard? Zero, right?
How much is EA paying for the IP rights to Warhammer?
EA already paid for the rights. Games Workshop gets % of the revenue. EA bought the rights to the IP for x amount of years. Thats how it works.
I had never played a Mythic game before Warhammer, but I have played many other mmos and had heard mostly good things about Mythic. Mythic did a great job of promoting WAR pre-launch and they really convinved me this was going to be something special and , just as importantly, different.
When I bought the game it did not take long to see that this was just another generic fantasy mmo, and not a very good one. All those promises about how it would not be another "kill 10 of x, collect 10 of y, escort Bob nonsense" - siezmic fail.
The lessons learned here are that there is a huge market of players craving something new and different. But if you want to capture that market, slick newsletters and videos won't do it. You have to deliver the product.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Just because MMORPG.com doesn't link something doesn't mean you don't have to take 5 seconds to look at the Herald.
I was talking about the producer letter and what was lacking in the producers letter. Not some other letter, by someone else, posted somewhere else. More people are going to see the producers letter as it will be linked and reported on by many media sites, not just this one. I doubt if any will link or report on what one of jeffs underlings post.
What I could do doesn't alter what was missing in Jeffs letter.
Thing is it isn't. Unlike other mmo's you don't have to level that way you can level almost as fast doing open rvr quests, killing people, scenerio/quests, and so on. You don't have to do any of the pve quests that involve kill 10 of x and so on.
LOL
"1.3.3 brings with it a focus on continued polish and bug fixes, enhancements to RvR as well as other features to improve the quality and enjoyment of your experience."
Yet another reason why the MMO with one of the biggest budgets of all time has done so poorly. Over a year down the road and the game is still full of bugs and shows a lack of polish.
So, so, very true. It's a shockingly amateurish production for something released more than a year ago.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
That is true. The options for leveling make it an excellent game for alts.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
This game needs a major change, a major new element in order to have a revival.
Such as
New/expanded T4 experience
3rd Faction/new races
Cleaning up the bugs and polishing is nice, making incremental changes and adding small amounts of content is good, but that is the status quo, the bare minimum. If that continues the game will fade away and even the hardcore diehard fans of this game who stay subscribed through thick and thin (and keep this game afloat) will eventually give up and more on.
This game needs an expansion, give us the bread loaf instead of a trail of stale bread crumbs. Hopefully with the performance issues being improved and the bugs being cleared up that can pave the way for some major additions that can save this game, bring people back who gave up, bring in new people.
Im afraid that even a letter from GOD would not save this title. Be that Mork or Gork or whatever.
Polish... Thats ppl from Poland right ? At least it seems like Mythic doesn't know of any other polish stuff - Not for the past year at least.
A solid year? C'mon, man - words mean things. A game that went from 50+ NA servers down to 6 medium and low pop servers is a "solid year"? Only in the Bizarro-world of Mythic's reality, perhaps....
And a few of those last remaining servers are ghost towns. I also loved the excellent customer service comment which is blatantly untrue. One of the biggest complains with WAR was the nonexistant CSRs, plus they had no power to do anything really. This is the THIRD round of layoffs for WAR and the word is WAR will be going into "maitenance mode".
I'm sorry, I can't take anything from Mythic seriously unless it comes out of the mouth of an obnoxious British guy with WAR crap air-brushed on his pants, while he prances around like some half-assed wanna-be rockstar.
*just found this again*
"its not a computer game, it's a TOTAL HOBBY EXPERIENCE! We want you to buy this game, and never buy another one"
www.youtube.com/watch
Katsma is Lithuanian for 'he who drinks used douche fluid'.
Anyone else think they should get rid of t1-t3 zones for the DE's, Greenskins, Dwarfs and Elf's and instead focus the player leveling in the Empire/Chaos zones? Very few people level up in these zones and the content goes to waste, especially the RVR and Public Quest content which very few people do in non-Chaos/Empire zones.
After removing these zones they can work on giving reasons as to why these races have appeared in these zones. After all they already butchered Warhammer lore to begin with so why not go further and actually do so in order to enhance the player experience?? Hell they already have players starting off in these 2 zones (Empire/Chaos) to begin with anyways now. Might as well go full blast and ensure people are playing together and not further spread out and that they are not wasting content and server bandwidth keeping dead zones alive.
Games I've played/tried out:WAR, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, AoC, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, Vangaurd, FFXI, D&DO, Lineage 2, Saga Of Ryzom, EvE Online, DAoC, Guild Wars,Star Wars Galaxies, Hell Gate London, Auto Assault, Grando Espada ( AKA SoTNW ), Archlord, CoV/H, Star Trek Online, APB, Champions Online, FFXIV, Rift Online, GW2.
Game(s) I Am Currently Playing:
GW2 (+LoL and BF3)
beta tester.. player.. officer...guild leader.. left - pitty the game I've loved and so much longed for since 2006 went to the sleazey motörbreath gutter. Which I could still conitnue bashing hippie Empire heads - went to RR 73... oh wait insatnce City in Altforf? oh nvm.. we can go past the 2nd stage - oh wait some other guys in some shitty overcroweded server did... hey..... bet your mom's ass it was bugged"
Oh wait the didin't even got the title for it?!
Oh problem was "solved"... yeah candy for your nerd leprichaun...
sorry to be harsh but I just won't buy it .. not anymore... it's actually sad.....
Ex-stupid fan-boi that's what I was.... still a fan from RPG, TT, etc.. GW never failed me at least...
Sorry double psting.. make it 3 factions
Chaos Vs Order
Neutral-> Fimirslizard men Vs wood elves (they don't even getalong with High elves) well something like that - upons up the IP world of Warhammer.. got better? Post it - just what I could remember..
Dieing race Femirs with Wood Elves-> Vs <-Skavens
basically 3 factions like DAoC.... it's limited but might bring something new and it's something in par with the IP
Cheers Mythic... no seriously.. . you're the men and women.. but please do something clever...
PS - ooh yeah this might be bringing some flame (thing is don't bother coz most sure thing I won't even care and come back to this "democracy" of foolishness - let us be honest with this w.g.a.f. about what we might say here? - wel about the flames, dunno about you US guys, I actually never had (actually found it to be weird) any complain about CSR - what we call another name is here for no matter and irrelevent - always got my stuff answered...
It's like being an IT proffesional.. most problems aren't drom the applications but from the users... can we deal with the uber awefull reality that we're just humans and that we suck - without being too much misanthropic?
Yes, indeed - why not ?
Nice post, might have been too hasty on my last two....
Cheers mate
(funny bit of nothingness - was actually listening to "Walk Among Us")