What Went Wrong With Warhammer Online?
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It is hard to understand how EA/Mythic did not see this one coming. The Destruction character models had dramatically superior art, and pretty much all the "cool" looking avatars. Order had terrible looking dwarves, bald Warrior Priests, red-headed-step-child Bright Wizards, and some very limp looking High Elves. Destruction had the incredibly impressive looking Chosen, the amazing looking Orcs, and some of the sexiest dark elves on any MMORPG. It should come as no surprise that at release, most servers were heavily dominated in population by Destruction.
Similar to class balance problems, population imbalance in a PvP/RvR MMO is ruinous. When the other side overwhelms you constantly with numbers, players are overcome with a sense of futility. Once you feel like there is no point behind any action, it is easier to quit than to keep banging your head against a wall.
Again, a third realm could have prevented this problem. In DAoC, when a server became dominated in population by one realm, the other two realms would band together to fight it. Players would either reroll new characters in another realm, or new players would join one of the less populated realms. It was self balancing.
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Mark Jacobs himself said the way to tell if Warhammer is doing well is to check a few months after release and see if they are adding servers. He said if they were removing or merging servers, that would mean the game was doing poorly. Since its release, Warhammer has had at least 4 major server merges. ** 63 ** servers have been shut down, leaving WAR with only 9 active servers. Some players are now playing on their 5th server. This is extremely disruptive to the population and culture of each server. On a game based around PvP (RvR), they are forced to merge servers. You can't have PvP/RvR if you don't have enough players around to fight.
Another way you can tell when an MMORPG is doing poorly is when the founder of the company gets fired.
