Attn: Mark Jacobs and Mythic – Merge the Low Pop Warhammer Online Servers Already!

Posted on February 4, 2009
Filed Under Games, News, Rambling, Warhammer Online

To whom it may concern over at Mythic,

As current subscriber of Warhammer Online, an avid player, a big fan, a earnest mmorpger, and someone who really wants this game to succeed. Please, for the love and future success of this game, merge the servers asap. Judging from the server population ratios, that mythic posted a few weeks earlier regarding populations, I don’t think you took the numbers of active T4 Order/Destro during the server primetime.

On our server of Azazel for the past few months, we have been running an average med/med server. In the more recent days Low destro/Med order or Low/Low. The bulk of destro plays actively plays in lower tiers. We’re pretty much the opposite of the most lopsided Monolith server as we have more Order than Destro. In the recent weeks Order has pushed to The Inevitable City multiple times. Combine that with our mass exodus of disgruntled Destruction players leaving the game/server our server has basically become a ghost server.

The number of people re-rolling to successful servers like Dark Crag is climbing. Our server doesn’t need new characters, rather we need an option to either move to a more populated server or, have a few (not just 1 or 2) servers merged together to become an upper tier Medium population server. According to the census mods that we’ve been using we’ve only had about at most 400ish people online at a time. With only about 100-150 Order players on. Destro tier 4 is about half of that currently active after them re-rolling or unsubscribing the game. The successful servers such as Dark Crag have active primetime populations of 2,000 players per faction when using the same tools to check census populations.

Mark has mentioned this before as mentioned here:

A quick post and then I have to head out. This latest round of transfers is, in most cases, not an attempt to move low pop servers but rather an attempt to build higher pop servers from med/med pop servers. What we’re hoping will happen is that with these moves the oRvR opportunities on those servers will be even better and more plentiful than they currently have on those servers. The servers that people we are asking people to move from have the lowest population of their type.

As I’ve said before, we recognize the importance of oRvR to our game and this is just one of the steps we are taking to try to encourage more people to partake in it.

However in a more recent post by a WHA staff, who is hopefully wrong about it, they mentioned that paid transfers won’t be coming till late 2009. If the later is true then I’m not sure how many players will be sticking around till then. Order side has probably lost a good 25-33% of the player base this past month on our server alone, and Destro numbers are even worse off. (they haven’t left the game mind you, they moved to a more active server).

There are plenty more on the server who love the game, but don’t want to lose all that they have invested into their characters and guilds. So the only solution for us is to stick it out until our populations become low/low so we can move to a better server. Or that Mythic realizes they made WAY too many servers still, and merges about 3 low pop servers together.

The people who play the game love it, and many people have come back to it. However they don’t like 3 major things right now with it, and if they can get fixed. You’ll have a gold mine. The current free transfer system isn’t working anymore, and I’m not the only one who thinks WAR has problems with underpopulated servers.

Fix population imbalances – While the herald mentioned that populations aren’t imbalanced, if you break them down into Tiers and time that the factions are active you’ll notice quite a big difference. Mythic needs to take a deeper look at this if they want their players to be happier on some servers. IE: Merge Azazel (order dominated) with Monolith(destro dominated).
Too much crowd control abilities in Tier 4 – Reduce them, fix them, or flat out remove them, but DO something about it soon. For a game that promoted itself as one without having much crowd control. The end game is nothing but that. Its aoe stun/disorient/root/knock down/knock back/silence galore. Immunities need to be applied sooner, grouped together (ie have knockback/knockdown on same timer), remove the aoe aspect of them, or have them not all able to be chained one after another. Testing on the test servers need to be on a larger scale for them to realize, hey when we introduce lag to something that is already somewhat broken, it makes it 10x worse.
Low Population servers – This game I think will go the distance. It has its niche, its market, its playerbase. However, it needs to take a look at how many people are leaving due to the not enough activity on the lower population servers. Every day, someone else in the guild or alliance stops logging in to our server, or the game entirely. People we recruit a friend we tell them to go roll on more active servers because they won’t have fun on ours. Waiting an hour during primetime for a scenario to pop with NO open RvR just isn’t fun.

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3 Responses to “Attn: Mark Jacobs and Mythic – Merge the Low Pop Warhammer Online Servers Already!”

free online mmorpg (1 comments.) on February 5th, 2009 2:52 am

The population of Warhammer Online has dwindled to 300,000 subscribers, a loss of 500,000 since November… 500k players :O Age of conan is at the same situation but they are actually doing the merge and offering the transfer chars service…
Setai (2 comments.) on February 9th, 2009 3:51 am

Half a million less? How’s that? I thought the number of players constantly goes up.
Our Azazel Server is Moving. I’m Off to Volkmar. : Money News on February 20th, 2009 6:00 am

[...] of Mythic regarding our horribly unbalanced low pop server Azazel. I mean its pretty bad if I blog about it, and I haven’t been very active recently about blogging. To be honest, with the lack of [...]