3 is the magic number

My boundless optimism took a blow over the last week or so. GOA announced that the Karak Eight Peaks (KEP) server is being closed and its players have the choice of transferring to Karak Norn or Eltharion. This closure will leave WAR with just 3 English speaking EU servers.

I was quite shocked by this, I’m sure people will have seen me state before that whenever I look at the server list the majority of servers were med/med, including KEP. I guess this just means that was a fluke and the time of night I looked were the moments of KEP’s peak server load. It must be dropping off dramatically at others. Obviously this is not a great sign for the health of the subscriber base.

I would point out that I’ve played plenty of MMOs that only had 1 or 2 English speaking servers, but I don’t think WAR’s player limit per server is anywhere near as high as those were. We can all see that subscriber levels are falling, but perhaps at a rate closer to the hate brigade’s estimations. Whatever the reality, it’s fair to say that Mythic desperately need to liven things up. Which in turn means that once again the next patch is critical for the health of the game, but this time even more desperately so. Mythic can’t afford another shockingly bad patch day. Hang on, did I say patch “day”? I mean week…. Oh wait, no not all the bugs that patch introduced have been fixed yet, so perhaps it should be patch “month”.

Other than that there’s one thing they need to do, the obvious thing that for ages now players, bloggers and anyone with an interest has been crying out for…

MYTHIC YOU NEED TO ANNOUNCE DEVELOPMENT OF A THIRD FACTION NOW!

It would sort out everything. Put aside the silly idea of not wanting to make DAoC 2, because DAoC 2 is exactly what WAR should and still could be.

Taking a more positive outlook, for my own personal gaming, I’m very pleased to see a lot of KEP guilds coming to join us on Karak Norn. On Norn Destruction have been the most powerful faction for a while, not to the city farming extent seen on other servers, but we’ve had the edge. It doesn’t help that many players suffer from a log off rather than risk losing syndrome, which with Norn's Order on the backfoot only makes things harder for them. Where as on KEP Order have been in an utterly dominant position and I imagine they’re coming here expecting to pick up where they left off.

Heh… Either Order or Destruction is in for a bit of a shock and if the Destro from KEP choose to support our well-established command set up, then I don’t think it’s going to be us ;) Whatever happens long term, Karak-Norn is going to see some serious fighting.

Pre posting update!

I wrote the above comments before yesterday’s transfers. Unfortunately the reality of the transfer has then stamped all over my positive dreams and demonstrated that the game still can’t handle a truly busy server. It was evidenced perfectly, when within 2 minutes of logging in I was subjected to a good old-fashioned zone crash. At which point I logged off with an arsehole on. Oh happy happy joy joy.

To be fair I have since heard there was some amazing fighting to be found and people had a really good time, but I was also warned of epic lag and the brutal death of small group skrimishing due to zergs EVERYWHERE.... Which would be a shame, but if Mythic wake up and sort the zones out then it could be solved.

Anyway, it’s early days and we’ll have to see how things go. It is however absolutely critical that GOA/Mythic get their code/servers/hamsters able to cope with so many people on Karak Norn crammed into 2 factions and the bottlenecks that this promotes. Otherwise this very high population server will do more harm than good.

Mythic & GOA, heads up folks, the pressure is on.