Warhammer Online State of the Game Letter

Warhammer's Mark Jacobs has penned the first 'state of the game' letter since the launch of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. He gives some hints about upcoming events as well as news about the Black Guard and the Knight of the Rising Sun. Check it all out below.

Folks,

After over three years of work and one of the smoothest launches in MMORPG history, WAR is moving quickly towards the end of its first month. This is a perfect time to take a look at where we were, where we are and where we are going. First, on behalf of everyone at Mythic, I would like to thank you for your interest in our game. While it is impossible for me to personally thank all 750K+ worldwide account holders, please know that we are grateful for your support to date and the support we hope you will show us in the future. It's been a long road to get where we are today but it has been a worthwhile journey. While I might be tempted to say that the future's so bright we have to wear shades, as you've seen from our podcasts, we'll even wear those indoors.

So, as to where we are today, WAR is doing fabulously. We are one of, if not the, fastest selling MMORPG out of the blocks and we are also one of the most highly rated MMORPGs of all time. While the game is off to a great start, we still have a long way to go before we can declare WAR a major long-term success. That success will only come by being focused on making a great game even better. How we are going to accomplish this begins with our first major patch (1.1), the subject of this State of the Game message. While WAR is truly a glorious MMORPG, it is not perfect and over the last month our primary focus has been to correct bugs and tweak a few things here and there. We've stayed away from major feature or career changes until we've had plenty of time to gather and analyze the data from our players. Having done that, we can now move on to what we are going to do over the next couple of months, culminating with the release of patch 1.1 later this Fall.

Let's start with what we know is some truly exciting news. I'm happy to announce that in December, the Black Guard and the Knight of the Blazing Sun will officially be part of WAR. We have very special plans around their appearance and in our next newsletter we will provide full details about that exciting and rather novel event. When they were cut from the game launch plans earlier this year, I said that the Black Guard and the Knight would be part of WAR only when they were great and deserved their place alongside all of WAR's other compelling classes. I also said that we would not charge any additional fees for this new content or put it in a separate expansion pack; that's not how we operate. We've kept to that plan and with the introduction of these two classes, Mythic shows that once again we are happy to keep giving players more value for their subscription dollars than any other MMORPG developer.

Creating an MMORPG, especially an RvR-focused MMORPG, which runs perfectly on all types of PCs, is one of the most challenging technical aspects of game development. While the performance of WAR is great on most higher spec machines, we know that we can improve its performance on lower spec machines. We've been working non-stop to improve that performance and we've got a number of things going into the game between now and 1.1 that we expect will help to address everything from crashes to desktops (CTDs) to stuttering. We have a number of other client changes that will improve things such as propagation and ghosting.

Thanks in part to WAR's success; our mail system that worked well in Beta has been straining to keep up with the heavy demand placed on it. It's functional and it works, but it can also be slow and cumbersome to use. In all fairness to the team, the system's problems have been magnified by the demand of having so many servers and players using it at the same time. That's not an excuse though and we are working hard on deploying a substantially improved mail system for this patch. We will continue to enhance WAR's mail system until it is one of the best mail systems found in any MMORPG.

Moving on to some more good news for our RvR players; we have brought additional resources to bear on, and augment, our RvR gear and overall itemization. In 1.1 (and beyond) we will be doing a myriad of things for our RvR players, including improving gear drops, increasing drop rates, and implementing an RvR-influence system to compliment the current PvE-influence system. We will also be giving players more incentive to engage in open RvR by improving the rewards for both assaulting and defending in RvR. WAR is an RvR-centric game and we will continue to do whatever is necessary to encourage people to join in RvR and reward them when they do so.

Other changes for 1.1 include major additions to the chat system (item linking and more) as well as continued work on our targeting system, including adding Main Assist and Target of Target. In addition to the server balancing methods that have worked so well over the last week, we will also be offering the first server transfers to our players to continue to help even out the server populations. These transfers will be free of charge but they will be limited to moves off high-population servers to select mid-population servers or off of low-population servers to a selection of mid-population servers. Much like we are doing now, we will select certain mid-population servers and let people transfer there. Once they reach a certain population level, we'll remove them from the list and give their spot to another server. We will publish the list ahead of time so players can plan their moves accordingly.

While that might seem like a lot for a month, we're not done yet! We'll also be adding more exciting content to the game, including fourteen entirely new quest chains, two new Lairs, and many more Tome of Knowledge unlocks! This is only the first of what will be our ongoing content updates to WAR and it is a great start.

So, that about wraps it up for this first annual State of the Game, so without further ado...

Okay, so I was joking, we're still not done. Over the last month the team has been looking at all the careers and building up a list of issues/concerns to address. Almost every career is going to see some changes and love coming their way and there are very, very few changes that will be seen as reductions to a career's abilities. The Combat and Careers team has spent the last month looking at the changes that they want to make with an eye towards making improvements and buffs, not removing or weakening abilities. I won't go into details here but the vast majority of careers all have nothing but love coming their way. Of course, we will continue to monitor and track all the class data so expect, like every other MMORPG, changes to the careers to be an ongoing process.

Well, that just about wraps my first WAR State of the Game and I hope that it has given you some insight into what we are going to be doing over the next month or so. This is by no means a comprehensive list of everything we are working on and I won't go anywhere near talking about general bug fixes. The items mentioned above are just some of the highlights of our first major patch and I hope you agree that there is a ton of good stuff coming down the pipeline.

As required by lawyers everywhere, here's the usual disclaimer that this letter is a guide to what we hope to include in this upcoming patch and not a guarantee of any kind. We are working on many things right now and my letters, as always, are just the tip of the iceberg. Fellow WARriors, we have a lot more big surprises coming your way that I will address in my next State of the Game message and it's going to be a doozie.

Once again, I thank you for your support, patronage and interest in WAR.

Mark Jacobs
VP, GM Mythic Entertainment

Thoughts? Opinions? Snarky comments? Let 'em fly!

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Just to add to the subject, looks like this press release was an answer to WoW COO recent claims, and Mark Jacobs had an uncanny post made on f13.com about this topic here:

So, let me get this straight. I've got the COO of the major competitor saying things that make it *look* like 1/2 of our players have left (which is ridiculously untrue), talks about our European launch being bad (oh yeah, WoW's launch in NA and Europe was flawless right?) while his game director spins BS about how the way Blizzard runs its beta shows its confidence in the game (forgetting of course the large internal alpha with paid employees that the games goes through and only then has a short public beta) while our beta, which has the general public in it for years, shows our lack of confidence. He then goes on to say that "he's thinking of quitting our game" (and by inference, saying that other players might want to as well) and that our interface looks like his (forgetting how many interfaces were done before WoW) and generally pissing on our game and when I respond, I'm the jackass? I had the following choices:

1) Say nothing - Of course, by saying nothing I validate Paul Sams' (COO) comments about our numbers and the Internet would have been full of "Blizzard must be right, no response from Mythic" and then I would have to explain to EA why I didn't respond (which I have in a followup interview with GamesIndustry) and if its true (which its not). In terms of Kaplan's comments, sure, I could have said nothing about them but again, people would have wondered why I said nothing.

2) Come out with guns blazing - By doing so I expected to get slammed in certain places (no surprise) but at least I get to respond. Of course, the only comments I made were on the Vault and to the reporter when she called me up and asked if I wanted to comment. I did not post anything on my blog, didn't go all over the Internet posting the same stuff but simply responded to a thread on the *one* place where I'm spending my time right now.

3) Come out but a bit more gently - Possibly but I'm sorry, I care about my game and since I do admit when we screw up or something isn't working, I also feel I have the right to defend it myself. If I let a CM or PR person do that, places like this would, of course be saying, that's just the PR flack/CM doing his/her job and, probably, the same line about it being true because after all, if it wasn't true why would they send the poor CM/PR guy out to take the heat.

In terms of whether I should be doing this or not, or how EA feels, well, since I talked to them before I responded, I know that they are fine with it. This gets back to the whole "Shouldn't a CM do this stuff" stuff and no, I don't think so. Our CMs are already doing more on WAR than they did at launch but when it comes to stuff like this, I expect to take the lead and the heat for it if I screw up. I'm not going to throw Bob or Missy out there to respond to this type of stuff because I don't want them to have to take the heat if something goes wrong or have abuse heaped on them because they couldn't say much without risk. I could frankly care less about the publicity since I'm neither a conference-whore (I barely go to one a year anymore and at most ever went to 3 a year) or press-whore and as the development of WAR has shown, guys like Paul, Jeff and Josh have spent like 10x the time I have in the spotlight. And if you go back to DAoC, well, this is the exact opposite of how things were then in terms of publicity as Matt and I and Sanya really did almost all of the press stuff. And certainly if you go back to my older posts early in the DAoC days, I was more outspoken, vocal and absolutely was willing to get into a tussle with people but how often have I done that in the last say, 5 years?

And for those that say I should always just keep my mouth shut, even when competitors (or people) say things that are wrong about us. Ask yourself how you would feel if you or something you cared about was getting attacked unfairly? Would you sit back and never say anything about it? Would you simply ignore it and move on? Maybe some of you would but that's not how I am. I usually go out of my way to praise most other games and developers (with a few well known exceptions) as I did today in 2 separate interviews.

In terms of me having a thin skin, LOL. In the 20+ years I've been making games, I've been called more obscene things, accused of being responsible for every thing that went wrong in DAoC (even when I wasn't involved in the game at all after a few years because of Imperator or WAR), blamed for the state UO is in (except thatEA wanted to shut down UO when they gave it to us but I convinced them to spend more money on the game), gotten death threats (and had to call in the FBI), told that I should "shut up and die" more times than I can remember, criticized because I want to start a blog, had someone wish that my son and I should die in a car accident because we changed how one of the classes in DAOC worked, get hate mail on said blog (I know, I expected it) and my personal email constantly and generally blamed whenever possible for everything that is wrong in Mythic, Imperator, WAR, DAoC, UO, etc. and I almost always (especially nowadays) ignore them. I'm not saying this to be whiny or complain but simply to point out that when some people say I have a thin skin that I ignore 99% of the things that are said about me and Mythic especially when they are said by anonymous posters on the Internet so my skin can't be that thin. And BTW, when things did go wrong with those games, I took full responsibility for it because as CEO/GM both externally and internally at EA as well, because I consider it part of my job (even if I had nothing to do with the decision at any level like changes to classes past a certain point or statements made by Mythic guys) unlike many both in our industry and in our world who never take responsibility. And somehow, some say I should say nothing ever in response and that I have a thin skin when I respond once in a blue moon. I'm not expecting one iota of pity or sympathy for that stuff because I know as the frontman for Mythic, I'm going to take the heat but not being able to say anything, ever? That's not fair and it is a double-standard.

So, I'm sure I'm going to get flamed here by some of you as well. But I'll say the same thing I said years ago and that is why is it okay when everyone else can say whatever they want here and in other places (no matter how untrue, vulgar or rude) about me, Mythic, WAR, DAoC, life, etc. without consequence but when I express an opinion or respond in any way, I get flamed for it. And before anyone says "Because you're GM of EA" the same thing held true when I was head of a company that had a few employees and I was probably making less than the a assistant manager at a fast food restaurant.

Mark

P.S. And in terms of the added classes to a couple of other games, I honestly didn't know that and nobody pointed that out to me either unfortunately. I'll correct the SoG because if it's more than one, which it certainly appears to be, then I really should change my statement even though I had a bit of a disclaimer on purpose in regards to that statement itself. As to whether they were cut and should have been added, well, my point was that when we cut them, there were a lot of posts on the WHA and Vault that we were going to save them for an expansion and then charge for them "because that's what Mythic does!!!" and "Mythic is greedy!" were the standard lines. I think I was well within my rights to be proud that we didn't do that.

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! :)

It's like watching two drunkards fighting for a beer bottle, which contents have been replaced with a similarly looking liquid over the course of clumsy swings and nonsensical insults.

Can't wait for the MMO industry to break through these dark times.

Internet forum mentality for the higher classes :P
Altough these things know no winners