Why Warhammer Online is on its Deathbed
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The biggest problem is they forgot the lesson of their greatest design triumph: DAOC's 3-faction system. Warhammer uses a 2 faction system, like WoW. And, like WoW, this led to horrendous amounts of problems with population imbalances that got ever worse because the side with the most soldiers would win, and winning sides would attract more players while losing sides would lose players faster. Thus, the 2-faction RvR paradigm is doomed the moment one side starts to eke wins over the other. Conversely, the DAOC 3-faction RvR paradigm is self balancing rather than self-imbalancing. In the 3 faction system of DAOC, it was shown that when one faction started to gain dominance over a server, the other two factions would almost always call a "truce" with each other and focus their efforts on bringing down the top dog of the moment. The effect wasn't immediate, but it was much more balanced.
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Yet another reason for Warhammer Online's troubles has been the absolute abandonment of the player economy and the crafting sector. In DAOC, mythic created a very robust and versatile crafting system which, when taken to its very end, produced the best gear in the game, absolutely customizable to your needs and your playing style in a straightforward (if time consuming) manner. It wasn't perfect, but it existed. In Warhammer, Crafting is the unwanted stepchild of the game. The methods of crafting items was intended to be new and original, but worked out being arcane and unintuitive as well as largely unhelpful. There is no way to craft one's own armor or weapons, though you can craft items that enhance dropped or quested items to a degree. Consumables are also craftable, but investment in creating them seldom matches return and most players consider the process to be more trouble than it is worth. Add into this problem that there is no real money sink in this game (the last major investment you make in Warhammer is at level 20, when you buy your mount for a paltry 15 gold which is easily earned before you need it), and you are also presented with hyperinflation combined with oligarchism - the longer you have played, the more money you have lying around doing nothing, which causes the price for higher end items to skyrocket because money becomes more and more meaningless... but meanwhile, the newer players who have not yet hit the point where their money is growing faster than the US federal debt find themselves unable to meet the ever-multiplying asking prices for the gear that is considered "standard minimum" at the upper levels.
