Warhammer Online Subscribers Dwindle to 300,000 (Update: Rumors of New Mythic Layoffs)

Many friends of mine bought war and tried it out, then came Wotlk, so they went back..... thou only for a short while, they are back to warhammer wher they belong.
at first War was so empthy, but they made some transfers of low pop servers to more populated servers. so now, there are RvR battles everywhere. from lvl 1, the only thing you need to find one, is to use the (search for Warband & group near you) and if you dont find one (IF) u just need to take flight path to Empire, dwarf or high elf... caus theres always a battle to be fought.

I love this game, i takes me 2 min after i logg in to find a warband (warband = 24 ppl in a group) to go and siege a keep, or defending, or taking bo`s or just fighting destros in Open rvr battles!

2 bad i cant send some pictures, its really fulfilling when you running side by side with 2 or more warbands to take keeps, with rams and artilleri, or defending when destros come, its very massive battles in this game, its why i love it! Vast in numbers. when you are standing outside the keep you are about to take, and you see them defending it.... maybe 50+ ppl against eachother... its 2 awsome. :D. The most massive battle i have been in this far is 100+ against eachother... we had more then 4 wb`s, and destros had even more, so we flew from empire to dwarf to high elf claiming keeps, it went well.. when we stood in high elf tier 2 and most of us where there, and most of them...at first we just stood and looked at eachother,,, after 5 seconds all hell broke loose! the battle was about 1-2 hours ... you dont know what you are missing, if you like (as i said in a post before) BIG RVR battles you should buy the game, Caus you will not be dissapointed!
Karak - asgal is a very well populated server, and most ppl there are helpfull. Thats the server im on. and if you ever get bored of RvR you can do quests, public quests, scenarios, dungeons, instances... theres more to do then just WAR!
Maybe i see you guys ingame soon. WAAAAGH!

I can see myself going back to this game once they figure things out this game was by no means terrible just had issues with leveling.

Well when you come out and subsribers shoot through the roof cause everyone was bored of WoW TBC then the followed closely by the WOTLK expansion of course you are gonna lose a lot of people back to WoW . But im sure there ae other people like me who went back to then left that and are now back to warhammer.
Warhammer is getting set to release in Russia. I'm told the whole warhammer franchise is huge over there so that could drum up 100K more subscribers.

I've played a few MMO's, but am staying out of them until something drastically new and creative comes out in that genre. I quit playing them right before WoW came out. I'm curious now that it's been several years and it still seems that WoW is drowning everyone out. Like many posts have said, 300K subscribers isn't that bad of a base, but when your down over 50% in a couple months that sounds like it's on the way to being another Hellgate: London.
For those of you who are current MMO fans, is WoW both a blessing and a curse? It seemed to be the best implementation of the genre as it was developed over years, but now it seems to be drowning out anything new or innovative.
Just curious what the fan base thinks.

300k players that gives 15$ a month, It is probably not that bad compared to others mmos (excluding WoW)

Maybe they could get more subscribers if they did an open free trial. The days of paying $50 for a fancy box and a DVD that is a coaster after the first use are over. I refuse to pay $50 it for nothing.

They killed off my orc melee DPSer, so my preferred class didn't exist at launch (still doesn't, I think). I didn't like any of the alternatives.

They will most likely lose another 25% of that player base if they do not do some kind of server consolidation within the next couple weeks. Log on at primetime, and 90% of the servers are Low/Low for Destruction and Order. A Few might be Medium/Low.

On my server, Azazel, the situation is pretty desperate. Open RVR is nothing more than history. Order controls the keeps and objectives on each map, and if destro does field enough players to take one back, the rvr starved order flood them with 3-4x the numbers.

Since no oRVR is happening, both factions pretty much have to rely on scenario's to progress their renown rank. In short, Azazel is pretty much dead. From forum posts on the other servers, many of them are in the same boat, yet Mythic still has no paid transfer system, nor have they announced any plans to consolidate servers. Very little incentive to keep paying them to run non-stop Scenario's. I can do that in WoW...

Mythic diserves this. This is what they get for dropping the innovative game that was Imperator Online for a WoW clone.

Give me DAOC with updated graphics and not no TOA expansion and i would cancle my WOW account now. Thats all i am asking for is to update the engine and give me my realm invasion DONE.

yes it is that easy

I object to this reporting because it does not refer to Mark Jacobs as a tool.

That should be a requirement for all articles relating to Mythic.

"a lean 300,000 subscribers."

Sorry what, lean?

If you compare other MMOs to WoW, they're all lean failures. Bizarre reporting.

I honestly don't know how anyone can play any of these games (MMO's) longer than a couple of months anyway. After that amount of time you've basically seen and done everything there is to do and unless you are obsessed with leveling the whole experience becomes redundant.

Maybe I'm missing something....

I can see that the WAR people are not happy they are running low on subscribers, but delays ended up causing them to release just a short amount of time before the WOW expansion, as well as right before significant updates to EVE online and Lord of the Rings Online - hell there could have even been an Everquest II thing in there.

The reason I played WAR and stopped was because I didn't find the PvP that compelling, and the rest of their content was lackluster. If you didn't want to seige a keep, there was mostly just the battleground-type things, and besides getting experience I didn't really see any tangible benefit of doing those over and over again like all the other people seemed to want to do.

That said, I do absolutely love the Warhammer IP, and I hope this game shapes up and still lives in a year when theres more stuff to do. I'd check it out again for sure.

Although I have only just got to the end game I'm really enjoying Warhammer at moment. The changes they've made with RVR and some careers make the game a lot more fun compared to launch. It does make a huge difference if you're on a proper server though, some MMOs can handle low pop servers but WAR you need decent server pops even at off peak.

I love WAR and I'm still playing it. I think the only mistake Mythic made with WAR is they overestimated how many WoW players prefer PvP content to PvE content. From the number of servers WAR launched with you got this impression they expected this flood of millions of WoW players sick of WoW's PvP. I think if they had just stuck with fewer servers and gritted their teeth through the server queues at launch everything would have been better in the long run.... fewer empty servers, happier customers who stayed, and less up-front cash outlay for servers that weren't needed.

If subs hold at 300k this game will be around for a long time. At $15 per month that's some solid revenue.

I think the fact that WoW has brought a lot of players into the MMO genre means that there is more of a surge to check out new games just in case they are of any interest. Really boasting about getting 800,000 subs just days before WotLK came out was asking for a kicking.

A monthly income of 300,000x$15 is not exactly a terrible place to be, with about a million boxed copies sold? It's a well-built solid game by most standards, deserves to be successful, the more successful games we get in the genre the better it will be in the long run. The last thing EA want to do is undermine things that have the potential to be a success, oh wait, I remember UO2....

...yes, I'm still bitter.


Anal point:

There is one too many "the"s in the line :

"...Electronic Arts was reporting that *the* Warhammer had..."

I just finished playing the trial for this game (had a friend that gave me one) its great the Questing is better then WoWs like a improved AoC quest system and the PVP is way better then WoWs by a long shot, Open RvR is some of the most fun i had in the 7 days i played (got to rank 15 and rank 14 renouned) and the "battleground style" PVP was great too, also the amount of people was fine i was playing on a med pop server que times for "battlegrounds" are sorta long but i will still not the highest level so i was not expecting much as in really playing instanced PvP but in 7 days i got in over 50 matches lol and Warbands almost always had 15-20 people in them even at 2 am CST

I'm one of the many WoW players who hoped this would be the salvation we were looking for from the beast that is Warcraft, but after playing for about a month (+a month or two of beta) and hardly being able to play it on my computer because i have one GB of ram made things pretty painful. That, and the fact that the two classes i most wanted to play weren't in the game (Ork and Dwarf melee). Anyway, i hear they fixed most of the performance issues, and the new content/patch have me excited to start playing again, especially since blizzard did so many things wrong with Wrath (Oh, hey, the game has been out for a couple months and i've already done everything in the game :-/)

Really depends on how much they spent on development.

Sadly, I'm one of those people. Not because I had lost interest, it was simply that there was a whole load of games I got over the holidays, and I didn't think that I should pay for a game that I won't be playing. I'll start up my subscription once I'm finished a good deal of my games.

I played this for a couple weeks after launch, bot got bored pretty quickly and quit. I've been thinking of giving it another shot since they've probably ironed out alot of the problems and have apparently added a few classes since then. anyone's thoughts on whether this is worth my hard earned $13?

game is a lot of fun but there's not enough people playing in the lower levels on the server i was on :(

I probably would of played it if it was 40k.

Re-ee-post

Mythic layoffs bigger than originally thought? Including developers?

http://www.massively.com/2009/02/04/rumors-abound-of-a-massive-layoff-at-mythic-entertainment/

And semi-confirmation from Mark at Mythic in reply

It's all relative, I guess. 300k subscribers is pretty good for an MMO.