Darph said:
You mean: "Releasing a game that was marketed at PVPers, but had such poor PVP balance that they couldn"t even COPY AND PASTE classes that were supposed to be exact mirrors of each other?" Aka Bright Mages doing 2x the damage of Sorceresses?"
Don"t even get me started on the PVE.
WoW had little to do with it. I"d be back to playing right now if the game was good.
WAR"s shortcomings aside, I think they would have done much better if they delayed another 3 or 4 months. Given how devoid of endgame content WoW is currently, and the horrible state of balance, if a game that offered a whole new world and experience as well as an attempt at pvp came out, I imagine people would flock to it because WoW doesn"t have any fixes on the horizon. And even if it sucked (nevermind that thats another 4 months to work on it), people would probably stay with it to a greater extent because WoW only offers a night or two of content a week right now anyway.
Instead you get people like me who wanted WAR to be awesome, tried it, were underwhelmed and left as soon as WOTLK came out, and now just don"t care enough to reload/reactiveate/refamiliarize. I"m bored with WoW, but not bored enough to go back to WAR, whereas if WAR hit right now when WoW is at it"s weakest and just kept going from there, I"m sure a lot more people would have stuck it out a lot longer.
But what"s done is done, I guess.
I think it"s interesting that we"ve finally come to the end of "the next big thing." Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, AoC, WAR, and I"m sure a couple others I"m forgetting, all offered the biggest and baddest MMO experience, and none of them managed to gain a significant foothold (VG is good as dead, TR "is" dead, AoC, from what I hear, is good as dead, and WAR is getting by as a niche game that never quite met expectations). For the first time since EQ, there isn"t really a "next big thing" on the horizon. It"s just... WoW. And the nebulous new Blizzard MMO. It"ll be interesting to see how sick of WoW people will be in another 4 years of no alternatives. Up to Curt and crew to see how easily they can tap into that though.
Has any MMORPG done pvp balance right? Guildwars kind of got close, and WoW season 2 was pretty good as well, but PvP balance has been sort of a pipedream.
DAoC had a "post WoW, pre-completely dead" phase where they actually managed to balance things very nicely, I"d say it was as damn near balanced as any MMO can reasonably expect to achieve (well, they could have improved that by deleted stealthers, but that aside). It"s just a shame it took them losing 90% of their players to WoW to pull their shit together, and as a consequance nobody actually got to witness how well they can do.
Actually it"s a shame because it looks like the B team at Mythic are actually much better at balance than the main players. Maybe that"s why WAR suffers all of the EXACT SAME horrible balance issues that DAoC did. They need to take whoever was balancing DAoC when the main dev"s moved onto WAR, and let them go crazy on WAR for a good year or so. Whoever it was did an amazing job making DAoC go from "horrible" to "the best example of MMO balance yet" within a 12 month timeframe.