Warhammer Online’s Woes

Another one of those “where Warhammer Online went wrong” articles has surfaced on the Internet, and this time it’s courtesy of Gamer Limit.

…issues with the core WAR play style began to hit home hard and hit home quickly. WAR was designed from the ground up to require significant amounts of active players to maintain realm balance. This then stemmed to every single feature in the game; from the very heavy PVP component (instanced battlegrounds, open world pvp, open quests and endgame RVR combat) to even a lot of the tougher PVE quests.

…

It was obvious that the retention rate, essentially, the amount of people staying on past the initial 30-day block, was nothing like the number Mythic had planned for. While the initial active population started around a cool million, it quickly took a tumble month after month. At the end of October, less than a month later, the base had dropped to less then 750,000, over 250,000 less than launch. The next quarter was even more devastating for WAR, with the player base halving to barely over 300,000.

This had a catastrophic effect on play. In fact, even trying to play on a balanced PVP battleground was next to impossible a month after release. Mythic noticed the dwindling player base and made an active effort to condense it, closing servers (including the much lauded local Oceanic server) and providing incentives to players for joining other Realms. Even so, the player base was still spread like thin jam across far too many servers, making it difficult to complete a lot of the gameplay objectives.