Fallen WoW-killer could rise from the ashes

Hey folks. I know I haven't been writing a lot on my personal blog lately. Sorry about that! There are only so many hours in a day and between family, work, play, and my other writing gig, it's been a bit hard to maintain things around here. I'm still searching for that happy medium.

One of the great things about working at Massively is that on top of more traditional news commentary they also want original and interesting features. Many of the best ideas I've had for big posts that could have been written on this blog have actually become posts over at Massively lately. Here's a new one I'd like to share.

http://www.massively.com/2009/07/01/what-audiences-should-mythic-have-targeted-with-warhammer-online/

The basic idea behind it is that I believe WAR really could have done well if they focused entirely on RvR. Unfortunately, putting all their eggs in the RvR basket would have never produced an MMO capable of competing with WoW no matter how good it was (by sub numbers). There simply aren't as many of those kinds of players out there. Instead, Mythic went with the wide-appeal WoW-killer model that tried to perfectly balance PvE and RvR. Unfortunately, trying to please too many people diluted the quality of their feature set because they spread themselves too thin.

I believe WAR can be salvaged in two ways:

- Continue to strive toward the perfect balance of high quality PvE and RvR content (that doesn't mean 50/50 btw). Basically, PvE shouldn't take anything away from the RvR experience and vice versa. Depending on your mood of the evening, you should be able to focus on either aspect of the game (or maybe even both) without feeling like you're missing out. This is the hardest approach

- Totally shun PvE and focus entirely on RvR (i.e., War is everywhere - design the game like a giant WoW PvP server with several refinements). This will totally limit your audience and growth potential, but it will easily make your MMO the most badass PvP/RvR option on the market. Heck, you could even go with a six-way realm WAR model.

In both cases, Mythic should reduce the overall grind so that players don't feel completely locked in to one character. Of course, bugs, performance, blah blah blah need to be fixed too.