Also, if the reasons why there are so few people still exist (bad game balance, bugs, server problems, etc.) then the game will still have the same brutally painful issues.

As for pioneering features, the only one of those features you listed that WAR actually pioneered was public quests.

Probably the worst example was the apprentice system, which has existed in City of Heroes for over 5 years. It has also been replicated in a number of games after that, including Everquest 2, Champions Online, and more.

WAR’s problems went far beyond “over eager developers.” If anything, they were under-eager. 2 realms instead of 3 was a critical error. The entire design of Tier 4 RvR was flawed at its core. The ultimate aspect of RvR (city siege) requires that one side is absolutely dominating the other, and a successful siege leaves the losing team even weaker (stars deducted from their city).

Crowd control and Bright Wizards are still a titantic problem – now more than ever with the AP regen bug they introduced. BW and Sorcs are the only ones with a true counter to the AP regen bug. So bomb groups continue to reign supreme.

They continue to make stupid mistake after stupid mistake.

And EA has basically written the whole thing off, putting Bioware in charge of MMOs and giving WAR barely enough resources to keep running. That’s how things work with EA. EA is legendary for giving lots of resources to high performing divisions (Madden, Sims) and barely any to low performing (WAR).

That is not true.

Warhammer hs infact grown in the last few days as the aion free 30 days has expired, more people are returning to warhammer…

From there being 2 active servers at aion launch , 1 month later there are now 6 active servers and the mac version is comming out tommorrow.

This as you know there are not many br8 games for mac and therefore I suspect that all six of those severs will go high population.

As for the fact that warhammer as made mistakes, I agree but remember warhammer was the first game to ever have:

a default starting area Guild,
a leveling guild
tracking your charachters history
public quests
focussed pvp leveling
and now there latest first: the apprentaship system which allows lv 1 players to become lv 20-40 apprentasis giving them lv 40 stats…This makes them level up to 10 times as fast and able to go fight in the end game even from lv 1.

WHAT firsts does aion have..you can have ariel combat..yippeee..sigh it’s like swimming in wow.

Think about it…War will do great, it just had over eager developers and project managers that underestimated the market.

Warhammer is alive and well and infact, now growing again

Join the war WAAAAAAGGGGHHH!

When you are talking about Wall Street, a division has to do more than break even. In the eyes of Wall Street, a division that is consuming X resources and showing a small return is effectively as bad as a division losing money. Why? Because the belief is that the money, resources, staff, etc. devoted to that weak division could be dedicated somewhere else to make a larger return. When the marginal utility of keeping WAR running reaches a low enough point, it is just good business for EA to shut it down. Furthermore, Wall Street loves it when companies sack underperforming divisions.

While WAR will be a small game, it is still unique enough to attract a crowd, mainly the ones that love DAoC but can’t bear to play it after so many years and hope that Mythic will make WAR more like DAoC – so far this hope was crushed with the recent patch that removed even more oRvR in favor of 24/7 instanced city sieges that petty much avail to nothing anyway.

However I remember recently reading an interview where someone on the Warhammer team said that with the current subscriber count they are making enough to pay for the development team and keep things running.

So it sounds like they are making money at their current subscriber count, which means they could limp along for a while.

They probably are trying to pull an ‘Eve Online’ where they limp along for years, slowing gaining more and more subscribers.

That will only happen if the Warhammer developers are all dedicated to staying in it for the long haul and improving the game.

If too many developers leave the project, it simply won’t be able to survive.

Do you accept the challenge?