Is it possible that an MMO that depends almost entirely on PvP is doomed to be populated primarily by pre-teen griefers who can't get Mommy to pay for the game subscription every month? Perhaps that's what's wrong with Warhammer. It's a shame, too, the underlying RPG is a great conceptual core.

I find that (see above comment) unlikely. Games that place a premium on direct player-versus-player competition haven't had a hard time sustaining an audience. First-person shooters with a good multiplayer component and competitive multiplayer RTS games fare just fine, albeit they don't charge a subscription fee to play. Although, an argument might be made that Xbox Live is an analagous model. Still, these games form a solid audience that sticks with the game for a long time after release. Take a gander at the Xbox Live figures for Halo 3 and CoD 4. People are willing to stick around.

I just don't like your supposition that the only people that go in for PvP-centric titles must be immature. Beating the crap out of an actual human opponent is a thrill, regardless of age.

"Is it possible that an MMO that depends almost entirely on PvP is doomed to be populated primarily by pre-teen griefers who can't get Mommy to pay for the game subscription every month? Perhaps that's what's wrong with Warhammer. It's a shame, too, the underlying RPG is a great conceptual core."

No.

1. The players were so segregated you rarely ever had a chance to gank and/or grief. There was way, way more of that in my PvP WoW server back in the day.

2. All of the PvP in the game (well, 99% in my experience) was either in scenarios or RvR. Scenarios were fun but not noticeably more fun than TF2 or something. Or in RvR, which was pretty broken for the first few months. It was laggy, it was sparsely populated, it was more about trading objectives than fighting for them. The first few months were ALL about scenarios.

3. A ton of people left the game in the first month which left it mostly desolate. I played 2 servers, happened on both. This just made the situation worse. These servers should've been killed in mid October, seriously. But Mythic wanted to keep up this illusion of a massively successful game, which apparently they have given up (not surprised this came up after EA's announcement of 300K subs on a game that sold 800K at launch).

4.Good concept, sure! But lots of MMOs have great concepts. Where they screw up is the delivery and WAR is sadly one more, with or without kids using mom's credit card.

"I just don't like your supposition that the only people that go in for PvP-centric titles must be immature. Beating the crap out of an actual human opponent is a thrill, regardless of age."

Thank you for proving my point. Perhaps, having spent 11 years of my 23-yea Army career in the real US Army Mech Infantry, I don't find PvP compelling because "beating the crap out of an actual human opponent" doesn't strike me so much as "fun" as "necessary for survival in combat."

WTH are you talking about ?!?! 13 servers ? You are more than a little misinformed. In the URL you linked the servers on the left are being transferred to the servers on the right, the servers on the right are not ALL of the servers up and running its just a list of the ones taking the transfers.

A list of current and active servers are here: http://realmwar.warhammeronline.com/realmwar/Index.war

Do some research before writing...

Mr. Portal, I think you'll find that you'll be unable to log into 43 of those servers after today. You can check the link I posted to see which servers will be folded into the remaining 13. However, you are correct in that 13 is a slightly misleading number. I think there are also 4 Australian servers. I confess to being guilty of a certain degree of Ameri-centrism.

Charging for a multiplayer game is always a killer.Look at what happened to one of the greatest online games ever made, Air Warrior. Its the only game that i have ever seen with over 1000 people playing at the same time on the same server.Something that i have yet to see reproduced. As soon as they started charging a fee it all went downhill. The greatest multiplayer games ever were that because they didn't charge a fee.Quake,Quake 2,Quake 3,Unreal,Half-Life(one of the greatest ever),Half-Life 2, Call of Duty 4 and 5. I have never nor will i ever pay to play online.BTW i'm 46 yrs old.My first multiplayer game was Doom 2 modem to modem, before the internet ever existed.

All you listed is FPS games. Almost every MMO has a monthly fee, or optional cash items. World of Warcraft makes you purchase a game, then two expansions, while paying a monthly fee. Doesn't look like it's killed it though.

And I'm not sure about the other games you listed, but I know Half-Life and Half-Life 2 Multiplayer is run by servers not owned by Valve, and receives very few updates. MMO's receive major updates fairly often.

"BTW i'm 46 yrs old.My first multiplayer game was Doom 2 modem to modem, before the internet ever existed."

Not sure that's something to brag about.

"BTW i'm 46 yrs old.My first multiplayer game was Doom 2 modem to modem, before the internet ever existed."

Doom 2 was released in 1994, and the internet was certainly alive, well, and available at that time. I had access to it via dialup on a 28.8 modem.

Ahhh come on now, leave the 46 year old fps guy alone... I think the game failed because Warcraft Online somehow captured and brainwashed the entire mmo community....

Well not all of them... just not enough to make running any competing mmo's profitable.

Then again im an idiot.

Warhammer could have made it, yes this game is doomed, if they would have given out that 10 day free trial 5 or more months ago. Frankly when the game came out I was excited to try it but didn't want to shell out my cash.

In this market-place if you want to survive against an established force (world of warcraft) you have to be smarter than to wait nearly 1/2 a year before letting peopling invite their friends to play for free.

@Rod: Eve has recently had player battles with 1200+ in the same system, i.e. the same physical computer, not some hand-wavy "all players are in the same game world" crap (which Eve also has, to the tune of 50k+).

Well IMO a lot of MMO's are prone to fail nowadays a lot of them try to copy World of warcraft or other previous successful mmo's ( yes there have been others other then Wow)

I forone stared playing mmorpg's about 10 years ago with the very successful everquest which to this day still has a large player base. I think the biggest problem with warhammer and a lot of the other failing mmo's is content that was in beta and was promised never made it to live a good example of this is vanguard saga of heroes really nice game nice graphics but was rushed out to compete with Warcraft first expansion i believe

I think a major problem with absolutely every mmo released after warcraft is that they not necessarily try to copy wow, but that they suck. I mean seriously. I hate WoW, but i can't deny the pick-up-and-playability that game has. It's bound to get a huge player base just from that. It doesn't really do anything great, but it does everything decently. It's got pvp and dungeons and lots of gear that keep people thinking "if i just grind a bit more i'll pwn everyone.." but you never do. And until people spot that carrot for what it really is, a big pile of bullcrap, people will contine playing it.

Most other mmo's don't go out of their way to trick people into playing just a little bit more to get that epic chestpiece. Like Lotro, you really don't play the game for gear or to kick everyones ass. Same with Warhammer, the gear there is pretty basic.

The PVP in WoW is broken beyond repair, and so is the PVE. But people still play it like eager little beavers. Why? cause they think the next tier gear is going to be absolutely fantabulous. It's not. Just lets you grind the next instance for the next tier gear. And the next.. and the next..

There are a few mmo's, in my opinion, that have done stuff right, and pushed the envelope. Dungeons & Dragons Online for their absolutely amazing party play and dungeons. Planetside for being a grind-free fantastic pvp war of epic proportions (in its heyday) and EvE as well, for just being unbelievably complex and deep, which is also it's fault in many peoples eyes. Not mine.

There are a few other mmo's that are great as well, but anything released after WoW is just destined to fail unless they have some sort of totally different spin on things. The WoW players who exiled from the world of loot are waiting for something that's not WoW.. We're not waiting for WoW2.. It's like when microsoft thought they'd snag the iPod market from apple by making the Zune.. Guess what.. FAIL.

Sorry about the length of this.. Just had to get it out.

And btw. WoW is crap!

-shrugs- Gear is fine, but to write that off as the one big carrot WoW has to offer is to vastly underrate the game and Blizzard's accomplishments in designing it. I have almost no interest in loot rewards. Never have. It's why even though I basically enjoy the Diablo formula, I've never managed to muster the interest in running through any of those games more than once to try other classes or, more crucially, higher difficulties with the same character. And EVE did nothing for me for the same reason. WoW still captivates me - for months at launch, and now for my second month running on a complete (from scratch) restart now that Wrath of the Lich King is out (albeit sped through the original game content with 3x exp from Recruit-a-Friend). They've built a huge, colorful, engaging world to explore and quest in, classes with a wide array of neat toys to play with (especially the Death Knight class introduced in WotLK), and very cool scripted instances both 5-man dungeon and raid. Heck, as they've gone on, even the day to day quests are starting to show a great deal of imagination and fun. I -adored- the starting DK area. The step-by-step dismantling of an entire region at the behest of the undead Scourge, filled with a great deal of varied and creative quests, and plenty of good old-fashioned war crimes.

To be slightly more on topic - WAR manages some of this, but not with sufficient scope, in large part because it's ultimately not PvE-focused. If I'd wound up enjoying PvP I expect I'd still be there (and happy that they'd merged servers so that there were players to kill), but I didn't.

I don't think it's really as bad as it looks, though it certainly looks bad. WAR is very dependent on high server populations per server in order to have enough PvP to make the game fun. A PvE game like WoW can have a low population server and do just fine, WAR can't.

Therefore, Mythic has sensibly condensed the servers to give them all high populations. If the game played differently than it does they might have consolidated to 26 servers instead, but very clearly WAR needs as many people packed onto each server as possible.

During Beta Mythic was not sure how many servers they'd need, or how many people they could support per server, or how many people would be optimum per server to keep things fun. Sadly they overestimated the servers they'd need while underestimating the number of players per server they could support and the number of players per server needed for fun. The end result was far more servers being created than were needed. I have a feeling that even if WAR's population hadn't decreased dramatically when Wrath of the Lich King came out they'd be condensing some servers to improve gameplay.

WAR has not done anywhere near as well as Mark Jacobs (and EA) hoped it would, but it's still one of the top MMOs on the market after WoW.

What hogwash. Warhammer opened up more servers than they needed at release, because they were afraid that otherwise there would be queues and people would get pissed off. They're consolidating now that they have a more balanced understanding of how many people are actually playing.

They are having population issues, but are far from doomed. I'm sure many people have canceled their subscriptions: I canceled mine for a while because I was sick of the bugs - but the most recent patch has fixed SO many of the issues with the game and I hope more people will realize so and come back for some of the best PvP action around.

>>Thank you for proving my point....I don't find PvP compelling because "beating the crap out of an actual human opponent" doesn't strike me so much as "fun" as "necessary for survival in combat.">>

Playing against a human will always be infinitely more challenging then playing against a scripted encounter, because once you have the details of the encounter, it's a matter of pressing the right key at the right time.

Playing against a player, there is no script, and thus requires more interaction [not reaction as with a script] on your part.

Perhaps the phrase "beating the crap...human player" may have been a poor choice, but just because your military experience precludes you from enjoying PvP, does not make all PvP'rs immature. Your point was not proven and to some degree your obvious bias against PvP based your life experience invalidates your "point proven" comment as well.

Competition is at the heart of all PvP-centric games. It's not all about griefing people. And I'd hardly say that combat should serve as a proper analogy for competitive multiplayer titles. Sure you may use a gun, but no one actually dies. It's a game, and regardless of how technically sophisticated the graphical representations of combat may be, it's still a far cry from actual, life-threatening combat itself.

Playing competitive multiplayer games is more akin to playing other competitive games (i.e., basketball, chess, poker, etc). And you don't have to be immature to enjoy any of those.

This is complete bullshit, all the active players were transfered off those servers to active servers to boost population weeks ago. This is just housecleaning and nothing more. Not only that, but there is MORE THAN 13 SERVERS ONLINE AND ACTIVE. Get your facts right.

As Garth said, Warhammer is having population issues, but is *far* from dying. Subscriber numbers are actually increasing, - for instance they just added another Russian server, and they're soon going to launch in China/Taiwan/SE Asia.

Warhammer isn't perfect, but it has come a heck of a long way since it's launch and is now a better game than it ever was. People should come and try it out.

I agree that WAR has horrific at launch due to Mythic's rush to get the game out. Soooo many bugs and lag issues undoubtedly caused the majority of the cancellations. I will however note that I tried the 10 day trial that was emailed to me last week, and in only a few days I've found it to be an ENTIRELY different game. They've fixed pretty much everything - No lag, no bugs, classes are more balanced, RvR queues are almost instant - I'll be re-activating my subscription after this 10 day trial expires for sure.

While their initial failures have hurt the game SO MUCH, they're doing a pretty good job turning it around.