Question to veteran players

[MightyForty77]

So, 6th anniversary. Time flies when you're havin' fun, right? While reading Celebration patch notes, seeing all those numbers about players, accounts, etc. it made me wonder. But I need your input to try to find an answer, because when WAR came out I just licked it at the beginning and came back, shamefully, to WoW.

1. How different is ROR from original WAR?
2. Why WAR failed while ROR is blooming and growing?

Thoughts?

[legionarei]

I can speak to #2 a bit - bad timing. Wrath of the Lich King came out like a couple months after launch, and even though I played a frightening amount of WAR at launch, my friends played WoW so back I went.

[Akalukz]

#2

Timing for sure, splitting of the servers early on to get rid of login queues was a bust, as was not making needed changes to OP stun game. The game went downhill quickly, within say 6 months no serious effort was ever made again. I played beta to close. T2/T3 killed it for a lot of folks as well most servers were dead (because of the breaking up of the population and server splits)

[Zepheris3000]

I can answer this from my own perspective, and I know some people will argue with me over it, because I played from the beginning to the end when Warhammer Online was first released.

1. Timing wasn't the best as legionarei mentioned.

2. Class Balance was terrible, and wasn't fixed for a very long time (too long for most). Most of the servers were merged together before they finally fixed a lot of the balance issues.

A. BW/Sorc were broken in how much damage they could do with a proper party setup (I know this because I was one of those crazy Sorcs). These 6 player parties alone could devastate entire warbands on their own and there wasn't much you could do about it. Put a warband together with those parties and it just became even more ridiculous. A lot of what made the sorc/bw bomb groups so ridiculous no longer exists in the game today.

B. Certain classes were absolutely useless originally, and very far down the road were eventually fixed. Marauder was one of those, they basically only had 1 useful skill in PvP and had questionable DPS. If you think WH/WE are in a bad state right now (they are comparably good right now in Return of Reckoning to other classes if you compare what the game was like originally with class balance), you would be surprised at how many classes were just useless. Most people stayed away from marauder, black guard, black orc, squid herder, white lion, swordmaster, and shadow warrior due to other classes just being better.

C. The game didn't have exact cross-classes, they were a mixture (which created a balancing nightmare, which I am sure still is a delicate problem today). On top of that, many classes that would help that balance weren't in the game yet (KotBS, Black Guard, Choppa/Slayer)

D. Renown and Renown Points was a lot different than it is now. The method that is in effect today on Return of Reckoning wasn't implemented in the Original until very late in the game. This new system helped with some balance issues.

3. Game bugs. The game was rampant with bugs and exploits, and when one was fixed another would replace it. It was an ongoing problem. If you wonder why the Return of Reckoning devs have issues on patch days, it's because of how difficult the system is to work with. I can still list the exploits you could use to make passing the Dungeon in Land of the Dead easier and less stressful, especially since it was a dice roll after patch day that the Land of the Dead dungeon didn't suddenly have some unintended broken mechanic that would 1-shot your tank as soon as you engaged. You actually needed to know the exploits in case a patch completely broke a PvE encounter.

A. Forts were terrible in the Original Release and weren't fixed until months later. They would regularly freeze/crash because there was no cap limit, and when it was somewhat fixed it was like watching a slideshow. The Return of Reckoning devs understand this well, which is why there is a Cap on Attackers and Defenders.

B. Once Forts were fixed people quickly learned that cities weren't PvP, they were PvE, and were bugged at that. I remember being able to get full Sovereign set on my Swordmaster when I was still only RR33 and trying to wear Annihilator, but on my Sorc who was RR80 I had to grind each gear set. I still remember the Karl Franz PvE fight for my Sovereign gear. They changed cities to PvP and PvP Champions very late in the game (only 3 servers left).

4. Arguably, only 2 factions instead of 3 factions to create a realm balance mechanism. This one was a hotly debated topic, and that most people were confused about Mythic choosing to only have 2 after clearly showing 3 worked extremely well together. Though, I think the current work done by the Return of Reckoning team is well done considering the limitations.

The ones with the most impact were class balance and the forts/cities not working as intended or advertised.

[MightyPhred]

as a mostly solo player i dont see much difference at all beyond the fact that the ror devs have made a few builds viable that virtually nobody ever played in live (melee squig for instance), and the fact that we now have to drag siege equipment around instead of just magically pulling it out of our pockets

as to why live failed i can think of several reasons, perhaps the easiest one of them being that live charged you, ror is free

im not sure whos fault it was but the live game was rather poorly managed - glaringly obvious bugs lasted for years, blatantly obvious hackers didnt get banned, bots spammed up the advice chat

compare that to ror, ive seen hackers banned within minutes of being spotted (caught one or two of them myself), i dont recall ever seeing a spam bot on the chat channels, and not only do the devs actually bother to fix bugs, theyve even improved on the original in some aspects (no more rubberbanding mounts, which was always a pain in the posterior on live)

[Martok]

2. Why WAR failed while ROR is blooming and growing?

My two cents.

More thought and effort has gone into this version. The guys running the server actually care about the game. The vast majority of those playing want to be here, and also care about the game. And, for whatever faults it may still have, it remains the best PvP platform in existence.

[Draugris]

1. How different is ROR from original WAR?

It is quite different, Land of the Dead as a Zone is missing right now obviously, there are not all Dungeons from AoR available right now, and as I remember the ones that are in have different mechanics. RVR is working differently, for example you can enter T2,T3 and T4 starting with level 16 where you get bolstered in your stats until level 40. Some classes have skills removed or added so they play differently, for example, Witch Hunters have a skill here where they can vanish and increase their speed for a short period, that skill was not there in AoR. And then you have general balance between classes, which is way different than in AoR, for the better or the worse is of course always debatable. So I would say RoR is very different from the original.

[StaH84]

And among all users above stated. You Had to pay for it.

[Bloodlet]

2. Because people were still married to WoW and Wrath of the Lich King came out one month after WAR release. Also WAR rolled out servers in a stupid manner with pre-order servers first and then opened up more on full release but everyone wanted to play on the pre-order servers meaning the other ones were dead and the pre-order servers had a queue. I think both of those more than any other reason were why it failed.

[Omegus]

1. Why WAR failed while ROR is blooming and growing?

WAR ended because EA/Mythic lost the license. The final server/s were still active and there was a small but dedicated playerbase still playing and importantly, still paying their monthly. ROR is free and has one server and it has taken 5-6 years to build this player-base. It is successful in terms of how polished the game is and having active players, but it is not a "success" in terms of the scale MMO economics work at. ROR had it first MASSIVE population spike a few months ago thanks to the Lazypeon video and the player numbers have dopped off massively recently so the project is still only attracting a niche dedicated audience. Personally I'm fine with this

As for how it's different: some class changes, some dungeon/progression tweaks, far better server netcode (WAR was hell for having players teleport everywhere). Besides fortresses (which were just turned off in live) it's more a case of there being lots of small changes rather than one or two massive alterations.