FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
It is perfect irony that in our haste to recreate our WAR accounts and enjoy the game's potential, oh so thoroughly unmet, that the horrible Origins interface prevents even this.
I mean it was fun for me when I was in T3 killing groups of people 5 at a time with a white lion, but I cant be sure the other side was having the same kind of fun. (hit like a truck (3 shot anything undergeared), and tankier than the tank classes... broken). T4 was a mess of lag, and still horribly unbalanced so many classes were pretty much useless compared to some other class that you would just not rather have them in scenarios.
I'm sad this game died. I was really really looking forward to it, loved the beta, and even pre-ordered the collector's edition.
I feel like this game did a lot of things right: I thought the art and world was fantastic. I loved the lower tier battlegrounds - I loved the way it seamlessly integrated the pve and pvp and how every class was fighting it out with just a couple pieces of gear but enough low level abilities to make it interesting. I liked how each class had a ton of tools and neat toys - none of them really felt boring to play. They all found exciting and well rounded. I liked the trophy system. I thought their little tome of knowledge and the public quests and the way you earned titles were all great! I thought the story and quests did a great job of bringing the warhammer world to life. I thought their attempts at RvR were promising - the idea of a long persistent campaign that would swing back and forth and eventually result in the sacking of your capital city was, I thought, quite good. I had a lot of fun moments in this game. Skirmishing in the low tier bg's was absolutely the best (as long as no one had snuck in with armor belonging to the tier above..). Using my marauder's ability that damaged people trying to run away from me was awesome. Defending a keep by myself as an engineer and throwing out all the dots than doubling their damage with the morale boost and killing an entire army of guys attacking the keep lord was amazing. The capital cities were unbelievably awesome. Altdorf was amazing. Dwarf city was amazing. Chaos city was superb. They were huge and sprawling and felt like real cities (made Camelot from DAOC feel like a glorified manor house).
And yet...the game kinda crashed and burned. It had so many problems.
It stands out as the single biggest example of a fucked up launch of an MMO that I've ever seen. I think this doomed them from the get go. They had a very complicated set of 'waves' and different people got to play in different waves, like...collectors edition/beta testers, then pre orders, then normal people. Their brilliant plan was to release new servers as the new waves came in. Well, that was clearly and obviously retarded, as guilds all went where the first members of the guilds started, which was on the first five servers they put up. So you had the ENTIRE population of the game trying to play on the same servers. Meanwhile they kept throwing up more and more and more servers in a frantic effort to alleviate the crushing strain the servers were experiencing (it was almost unplayable). Guilds would scrap their entire progress and move to a different server that wasn't constantly queued out the ass - then the other people on that server had no one to fight so THEY'd move and ... it was just terrible. Eventually they wound up with a hideously imbalanced set of servers, and far too many servers overall, and had to start merging them. I think my server got closed and merged with another 3 or 4 times, and each time it just killed the community.
Also they basically sabotaged themselves with the infamous T3 level speed fiasco. At the end of beta I thought thing were in great shape. Then they dramatically lowered levelling speed, and made T3 take freaking forever (like, 4 times as long) to get through. This was problematic as there wasn't a great deal of T3 content and I think it had some of the least good battlegrounds. You had a blast in T1 and T2, got to T3, and it was like hitting a wall. a TON of people just quit playing when they hit T3. It was a terrible decision.
They also had terrible performance issues for anything big: fortress seiges (the long looked forward too culmination of the open world RVR) were basically unplayable freeze frame lag fests. They were literally unplayable for melee classes. In fact, for most of the RvR, melee classes were boring and useless as shit. Then the actual fighting in the cities, at least the initial implementation was a terrible, buggy, unfun mess. And in the open world, what RvR there was just two blobs trading keeps, because you got mega rewards for taking a keep but none for defending them.
So people played battlegrounds a ton, which led to the rvr pools being abandoned wastelands, which led to MORE battlegrounds...a vicious circle. And the spread in the battlegrounds was a bit too great. If you had one guy with the upper tier of armor in there, he was almost literally invincible to an infinite number of dudes from the lowest range with their appropriate gear.
And the balance wasn't that great...warrior priests and the dark elf equivalent were basically unkillable. Shadow warriors and squig hunters were just laughably bad forever. White Lion was abysmally bad for a long time. Then they got buffed up the wazoo and got to have their unkillable kitty go fetch you from the middle of your zerg and throw you back into the middle of the Order zerg and you were totally fucked. Black guard too was terrible for ages (despite being by far the best looking class). Sword master wasn't very good either - it was all about the black orc and iron breaker. Sorcerers and bright wizards could wipe out infinite dudes in their bomb squads backed up by warrior priests - and you'd be dead before you knew what would hit you, thanks to the performance issues. Witch Hunters could insta kill any squishy target they looked at. Witch Elves were laughably overpowered and could easily melee down, out of stealth, all of the tank armored classes, because basically all their abilities ignored armor. They also destroyed casters, of course. There was always some absurdly, laughably, impossibly overpowered class out there, and balancing was pretty much just a roller coaster of ups and downs.
Eh, ultimately what killed the game for me and a lot of people was it was ugly as shit, and played like a game 5-10 years older than it actually was. WAR heralds for me the end of my real big excitement regarding MMOs. It was the game that turned me jaded I think.
The controls weren't tight and the combat wasn't very readable, so you'd spend a lot of time trying to figure out what just exploded you in a quarter second.
I always thought WAR looked head and shoulders better than WOW. WOW is still going strong, I don't think it's the graphical issues alone that did WAR in.
Okay seriously, how the fuck do I email EA/Origin about login problems, because apparently they don't want to let people contact their customer service without logging in, and I can't log in without "updating my account" which is hot bullshit because then it doesn't let me use my account name because "it's already taken" which of course it is I am already using that name but I cannot recover the password because it won't send me an email to recover the password, not even to the junk folder.
I always thought WAR looked head and shoulders better than WOW. WOW is still going strong, I don't think it's the graphical issues alone that did WAR in.
I felt WAR was better than WoW tech-wise, but the drab colours and textures made it look worse to me. WoW did more with less.
+3
Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
Yeah WAR looked like ass.
The thing that always annoyed me was that when you targeted something, there was a spot for a portrait on its unit frame but there was just some static placeholder image. I though for sure that was just a beta thing but when I saw it in live it really begged the question of 'what else did they completely half-ass?'
Yeah the textures were really muddy, and the animations were super stiff. And as @Oats mentioned, it was hard telling what the heck exactly happened in combat. The numbers for damage and healer didn't really pop up in conjunction with the animations of the attacks themselves, and so your actions ended up feeling disconnected from your input into the game. It felt very obvious that the engine was based at least in part on the decade old DAoC engine. And as @Dr_Keenbean pointed out, it's an example of half-assing it. Why build it from scratch when you can borrow bits and pieces from your decade old game.
I'm probably more critical and bitter of this than I am of other mmos that I enjoyed because the potential for WAR was soooo fucking high and it was squandered, and as a result I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see another Warhammer (either 40k or FB) in mmo form for a long long time, if ever.
The thing that bothered me about War was that I found Disiples of Khaine to be a great idea that eventually got turned into a standard healer with the introduction of the Chalice off hands. All of a sudden no one wanted you in the fray anymore.
I was playing this class to be a frontline hurt the enemy to heal character and that became something no one wanted you to do.
Seidkona on
Mostly just huntin' monsters.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
0
Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
I wouldn't say WAR was the worst. There were several epic failure MMOs early on that probably dwarf WAR's issues. That said: Mythic already had a poor track record of handling balance issues in Dark Age of Camelot, so it comes as no surprise to me that they had epicly imbalanced classes in WAR as well. They come up with some genuinely interesting ideas, but they can't play-balance a game for shit. DAOC was half-assed patch on top of bandaid fix for years ... The ToA expansion was so widely panned that they eventually made official servers without the ToA expansion loaded onto them.
Funcom as a company is pretty much epic fail lol... Anarchy Online was released in basically alpha-state and took close to 2 years before it was to what might be considered a release product -- of course everyone had quit long before then. WW2 Online around the same time was arguably even worse. Asheron's Call 2 was also horrible on launch and failed pretty quickly. Earth and Beyond was scrapped by EA after only like 1.5 years ... although I don't know if it was bad, or just that nobody was really interested in a space MMO and it had no content. I was in the Starwars Galaxies beta, and they handled it so poorly that I swore I would never buy the game ... I think I was on the correct side of history on that one
Another Funcom title: Age of Conan repeated the AO issues of unstable servers and half-finished game release -- it launched without a mailbox system, and stats on gear didn't even work at launch either. Then there is SWTOR: A game where pretty much 95% of the epic failure can be attributed to the licensing of an unreleased beta-version engine that they were warned was unfinished and unsuited to MMOs, as well as no consideration whatsoever for Post-50 or a dungeon-finder. I would also say they shot themselves in the foot by releasing the Legacy System 6 months after release -- after everyone had rolled all their alts already, or quit the game.
I would say FF14 1.0 could give AO a run for the money for worst MMO launch, though...
Hm, not sure I'd agree the main problem with TOR was the engine. It was just terribly run-of-the-mill and the only real reason to play it (experience the storyline) offered little incentive to replay or keep playing.
0
Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
So what constitutes failure to you? Not beating WoW? E&B is basically the only thing you listed that was a huge failure.
AO is still kicking, AC2 came back, SWG kept along for a good many years in spite of numerous stupid decisions. AoC and SWTOR are still running (and doing well) as F2P.
WAR would probably still be alive (and F2P as well) were it not for Games Workshop.
AO lost like 90% of its subscriber-base within the first 2 months. That's pretty fail. Failure to me is launching so poorly, that you permanently sabotage the long-term prospects of the game. It may still be around -- but it's a pale shadow of launch, and will never amount to more than another also-ran with 100-300k subs or such. AC2 was brought back for F2P just recently, but it was canned after a short period of time for a reason.
SWG wasn't an epic failure, but more of a repeated string of shooting themselves in the foot -- and as I said, I was a beta tester ... their testing methods were so bad, it permanently soured my tastes for ever playing the game. 2-4 weeks before launch (unknown to us at the time that it was that close) their Oracle database was still so broken it would randomly not save items upon logout. So any progress made while playing would be lost if you logged out. They had gathering buildings in the game, but maintenance and power weren't active on them -- so people would put up 100 of them and just let them decay, because why not? So rather than fix the maintenance and power first and see how things balanced out, they added it ... nerfed extraction rates by 75% AND went from 200 lots allowed to 10. Hand surveying was actually faster than the personal extractor after that ... when they found this out ... you guessed it, they just nerfed the hand survey too. Teras Kasi Artist only had Tier1 weapons available, and Guns were stuck at Tier2 ... IF they managed to catch a ranged (who could fire while running) they would usually win the fight. Ranged people complained, so the patch they added Tier3 and Tier4 ranged guns, they also nerfed TKA by 50% ... makes sense. Lots more examples of Fucking with C before A and B were even working.
Then of course, you have the whole combat update where they scrapped the Skill-based system that actually made the game unique and fun, and tried turning it into a shitty WoW clone.
AoC was hugely anticipated, yet was so horribly managed, that the playerbase collapsed within a few months. They're F2P now and only maintain a handful of servers. They launched with unstable servers, no mailboxes, and stats on equipment didn't work for a month+ ...
SWTOR had over 2 million accounts at release. Over the next few months it plummeted after people went through a few class stories and saw how onerous the Post-50 content design was. Since going F2P, SWTOR accounts increased to "just under half a million" ... so pretty much until F2P they had lost 80-85% of their subs. SWTOR may be "profitable" in a monthly revenue sense, but it's a pale shadow of what it could have been.
As for the engine issues: The company designing the Hero Engine were still in beta, and the initial engine wasn't designed to handle an MMO. EA was warned, but they said give it to us anyways, and so they took the beta version of the engine and made some customizations. The end result being that the game has terrible framerates even on highend hardware, and lots of load screens. The only way to mitigate these performance issues was popular 3rd party tools for SWTOR popped up that made it simple for people to create a RAM disk and put the texture files for SWTOR into the RAM disk. A clunky hack, but at least you could play without stuttering around at 10fps on a $1500 gaming rig.
All I can say is ... you are mistaken The sheer fact that very early on one of the largest threads on the forums was dedicated to workarounds for the poor performance, which resulted in the creation of those 3rd party tools to launch the game via RAM disk, is testament to how much of an issue it is. I've never heard of anything like it being created for any other MMO. And it's something the developers even admitted to and continued to repeatedly patch to try to make better.
I haven't played the game in a long time though, so it's possible they've since fixed the issues, or patched to a newer version of the Hero engine that eliminates it.
Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
My PC's like 5 years old and has never had any issues running TOR maxed out and I've been playing it from beta until presently. Not that it matters.
We'll have to agree to disagree on what constitutes MMO failure.
I could go on a long diatribe about the state of the MMO market and how utterly fucked it has gotten after WoW captured lightning in a bottle and inflated expectations but who cares. I maintain that WAR only shut down because Games Workshop are greedy dicks and probably wouldn't allow it to go f2p.
It pains me no end, since I love all things Warhammer and have been playing GW games in some form for the last 23 years and having the Mythic and RvR pedigree carried so much potential since I loved the shit out of DAoC.
TOR used a different engine from WAR. It didn't run that well on my then four-year-old Dell refurb, but it still was more playable than WAR ever was in spite of the three years difference.
You can make an argument that WAR was poised to do well because it didn't try to do what WoW did, but at some point a (silly) person decided to try and do a half-assed job of aping WoW's PvE game with shitty dungeons and mediocre questing besides the publics (which had flaws of their own). The result was zones that dedicated only a small portion to actual RvR, and a bizarre endgame where you had to grind dungeons to get the armor sets required for PvP.
You didn't have to grind PvE for PvP. You needed to grind population. Your gear meant nothing for RvR compared to how many you brought with you which was another problem entirely.
True for fortresses but it was quite awhile before they were even implemented and longer before they stopped being a giant cluster fuck of almost never working and barely working when they did. The widow of overlap of gear checked lords and functional fortresses was depressingly small looking back at all those Lost Vale runs :P
Don't forget the width of the PVP brackets and how ridiculous the effectiveness difference between the two side of it were. You died to 2-3 hits at the lower end and you were a small god at the top of it.
And my god, the final bracket was just "you might as well not PVP until you cap and grind some gear, chummo".
Don't forget the width of the PVP brackets and how ridiculous the effectiveness difference between the two side of it were. You died to 2-3 hits at the lower end and you were a small god at the top of it.
And my god, the final bracket was just "you might as well not PVP until you cap and grind some gear, chummo".
The lowers tiers could definitely vary quite a bit going from the bottom to top rungs. Which is why it was really amusing to twink the shit out of low level characters with the best talismans you could find. Running around as a DPS with more armor than a tank eight levels above you was ridiculously amusing, until they rightly nerfed the shit out of that anyways.
Once you got to the top tier the difference wasn't so much gear as it was organization. Gear was nice but focus fire was how you ruined someone's day. The game did a pretty bad job of explaining that though.
Posts
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I logged in for a free t4ial a couple weeks back and it auto promoted :P
That would imply EA wants to shoulder any more of the burden of WAR than it already is.
But I can still download Hellgate: London from Origin.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I mean it was fun for me when I was in T3 killing groups of people 5 at a time with a white lion, but I cant be sure the other side was having the same kind of fun. (hit like a truck (3 shot anything undergeared), and tankier than the tank classes... broken). T4 was a mess of lag, and still horribly unbalanced so many classes were pretty much useless compared to some other class that you would just not rather have them in scenarios.
It felt T3 balanced. Playing around with different builds/characters on that PTR was one of my fondest memories of the game.
Sucks that I can't use my old characters.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I feel like this game did a lot of things right: I thought the art and world was fantastic. I loved the lower tier battlegrounds - I loved the way it seamlessly integrated the pve and pvp and how every class was fighting it out with just a couple pieces of gear but enough low level abilities to make it interesting. I liked how each class had a ton of tools and neat toys - none of them really felt boring to play. They all found exciting and well rounded. I liked the trophy system. I thought their little tome of knowledge and the public quests and the way you earned titles were all great! I thought the story and quests did a great job of bringing the warhammer world to life. I thought their attempts at RvR were promising - the idea of a long persistent campaign that would swing back and forth and eventually result in the sacking of your capital city was, I thought, quite good. I had a lot of fun moments in this game. Skirmishing in the low tier bg's was absolutely the best (as long as no one had snuck in with armor belonging to the tier above..). Using my marauder's ability that damaged people trying to run away from me was awesome. Defending a keep by myself as an engineer and throwing out all the dots than doubling their damage with the morale boost and killing an entire army of guys attacking the keep lord was amazing. The capital cities were unbelievably awesome. Altdorf was amazing. Dwarf city was amazing. Chaos city was superb. They were huge and sprawling and felt like real cities (made Camelot from DAOC feel like a glorified manor house).
And yet...the game kinda crashed and burned. It had so many problems.
It stands out as the single biggest example of a fucked up launch of an MMO that I've ever seen. I think this doomed them from the get go. They had a very complicated set of 'waves' and different people got to play in different waves, like...collectors edition/beta testers, then pre orders, then normal people. Their brilliant plan was to release new servers as the new waves came in. Well, that was clearly and obviously retarded, as guilds all went where the first members of the guilds started, which was on the first five servers they put up. So you had the ENTIRE population of the game trying to play on the same servers. Meanwhile they kept throwing up more and more and more servers in a frantic effort to alleviate the crushing strain the servers were experiencing (it was almost unplayable). Guilds would scrap their entire progress and move to a different server that wasn't constantly queued out the ass - then the other people on that server had no one to fight so THEY'd move and ... it was just terrible. Eventually they wound up with a hideously imbalanced set of servers, and far too many servers overall, and had to start merging them. I think my server got closed and merged with another 3 or 4 times, and each time it just killed the community.
Also they basically sabotaged themselves with the infamous T3 level speed fiasco. At the end of beta I thought thing were in great shape. Then they dramatically lowered levelling speed, and made T3 take freaking forever (like, 4 times as long) to get through. This was problematic as there wasn't a great deal of T3 content and I think it had some of the least good battlegrounds. You had a blast in T1 and T2, got to T3, and it was like hitting a wall. a TON of people just quit playing when they hit T3. It was a terrible decision.
They also had terrible performance issues for anything big: fortress seiges (the long looked forward too culmination of the open world RVR) were basically unplayable freeze frame lag fests. They were literally unplayable for melee classes. In fact, for most of the RvR, melee classes were boring and useless as shit. Then the actual fighting in the cities, at least the initial implementation was a terrible, buggy, unfun mess. And in the open world, what RvR there was just two blobs trading keeps, because you got mega rewards for taking a keep but none for defending them.
So people played battlegrounds a ton, which led to the rvr pools being abandoned wastelands, which led to MORE battlegrounds...a vicious circle. And the spread in the battlegrounds was a bit too great. If you had one guy with the upper tier of armor in there, he was almost literally invincible to an infinite number of dudes from the lowest range with their appropriate gear.
And the balance wasn't that great...warrior priests and the dark elf equivalent were basically unkillable. Shadow warriors and squig hunters were just laughably bad forever. White Lion was abysmally bad for a long time. Then they got buffed up the wazoo and got to have their unkillable kitty go fetch you from the middle of your zerg and throw you back into the middle of the Order zerg and you were totally fucked. Black guard too was terrible for ages (despite being by far the best looking class). Sword master wasn't very good either - it was all about the black orc and iron breaker. Sorcerers and bright wizards could wipe out infinite dudes in their bomb squads backed up by warrior priests - and you'd be dead before you knew what would hit you, thanks to the performance issues. Witch Hunters could insta kill any squishy target they looked at. Witch Elves were laughably overpowered and could easily melee down, out of stealth, all of the tank armored classes, because basically all their abilities ignored armor. They also destroyed casters, of course. There was always some absurdly, laughably, impossibly overpowered class out there, and balancing was pretty much just a roller coaster of ups and downs.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
Pop out of stealth, melt three healers and either burn every cooldown to barely escape, or die as my DoTs finished off the fourth.
Respawn and do it again.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
The thing that always annoyed me was that when you targeted something, there was a spot for a portrait on its unit frame but there was just some static placeholder image. I though for sure that was just a beta thing but when I saw it in live it really begged the question of 'what else did they completely half-ass?'
A lot.
The answer was a lot.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
I'm probably more critical and bitter of this than I am of other mmos that I enjoyed because the potential for WAR was soooo fucking high and it was squandered, and as a result I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see another Warhammer (either 40k or FB) in mmo form for a long long time, if ever.
I was playing this class to be a frontline hurt the enemy to heal character and that became something no one wanted you to do.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
Funcom as a company is pretty much epic fail lol... Anarchy Online was released in basically alpha-state and took close to 2 years before it was to what might be considered a release product -- of course everyone had quit long before then. WW2 Online around the same time was arguably even worse. Asheron's Call 2 was also horrible on launch and failed pretty quickly. Earth and Beyond was scrapped by EA after only like 1.5 years ... although I don't know if it was bad, or just that nobody was really interested in a space MMO and it had no content. I was in the Starwars Galaxies beta, and they handled it so poorly that I swore I would never buy the game ... I think I was on the correct side of history on that one
Another Funcom title: Age of Conan repeated the AO issues of unstable servers and half-finished game release -- it launched without a mailbox system, and stats on gear didn't even work at launch either. Then there is SWTOR: A game where pretty much 95% of the epic failure can be attributed to the licensing of an unreleased beta-version engine that they were warned was unfinished and unsuited to MMOs, as well as no consideration whatsoever for Post-50 or a dungeon-finder. I would also say they shot themselves in the foot by releasing the Legacy System 6 months after release -- after everyone had rolled all their alts already, or quit the game.
I would say FF14 1.0 could give AO a run for the money for worst MMO launch, though...
AO is still kicking, AC2 came back, SWG kept along for a good many years in spite of numerous stupid decisions. AoC and SWTOR are still running (and doing well) as F2P.
WAR would probably still be alive (and F2P as well) were it not for Games Workshop.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
SWG wasn't an epic failure, but more of a repeated string of shooting themselves in the foot -- and as I said, I was a beta tester ... their testing methods were so bad, it permanently soured my tastes for ever playing the game. 2-4 weeks before launch (unknown to us at the time that it was that close) their Oracle database was still so broken it would randomly not save items upon logout. So any progress made while playing would be lost if you logged out. They had gathering buildings in the game, but maintenance and power weren't active on them -- so people would put up 100 of them and just let them decay, because why not? So rather than fix the maintenance and power first and see how things balanced out, they added it ... nerfed extraction rates by 75% AND went from 200 lots allowed to 10. Hand surveying was actually faster than the personal extractor after that ... when they found this out ... you guessed it, they just nerfed the hand survey too. Teras Kasi Artist only had Tier1 weapons available, and Guns were stuck at Tier2 ... IF they managed to catch a ranged (who could fire while running) they would usually win the fight. Ranged people complained, so the patch they added Tier3 and Tier4 ranged guns, they also nerfed TKA by 50% ... makes sense. Lots more examples of Fucking with C before A and B were even working.
Then of course, you have the whole combat update where they scrapped the Skill-based system that actually made the game unique and fun, and tried turning it into a shitty WoW clone.
AoC was hugely anticipated, yet was so horribly managed, that the playerbase collapsed within a few months. They're F2P now and only maintain a handful of servers. They launched with unstable servers, no mailboxes, and stats on equipment didn't work for a month+ ...
SWTOR had over 2 million accounts at release. Over the next few months it plummeted after people went through a few class stories and saw how onerous the Post-50 content design was. Since going F2P, SWTOR accounts increased to "just under half a million" ... so pretty much until F2P they had lost 80-85% of their subs. SWTOR may be "profitable" in a monthly revenue sense, but it's a pale shadow of what it could have been.
As for the engine issues: The company designing the Hero Engine were still in beta, and the initial engine wasn't designed to handle an MMO. EA was warned, but they said give it to us anyways, and so they took the beta version of the engine and made some customizations. The end result being that the game has terrible framerates even on highend hardware, and lots of load screens. The only way to mitigate these performance issues was popular 3rd party tools for SWTOR popped up that made it simple for people to create a RAM disk and put the texture files for SWTOR into the RAM disk. A clunky hack, but at least you could play without stuttering around at 10fps on a $1500 gaming rig.
I haven't played the game in a long time though, so it's possible they've since fixed the issues, or patched to a newer version of the Hero engine that eliminates it.
We'll have to agree to disagree on what constitutes MMO failure.
I could go on a long diatribe about the state of the MMO market and how utterly fucked it has gotten after WoW captured lightning in a bottle and inflated expectations but who cares. I maintain that WAR only shut down because Games Workshop are greedy dicks and probably wouldn't allow it to go f2p.
It pains me no end, since I love all things Warhammer and have been playing GW games in some form for the last 23 years and having the Mythic and RvR pedigree carried so much potential since I loved the shit out of DAoC.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
You can make an argument that WAR was poised to do well because it didn't try to do what WoW did, but at some point a (silly) person decided to try and do a half-assed job of aping WoW's PvE game with shitty dungeons and mediocre questing besides the publics (which had flaws of their own). The result was zones that dedicated only a small portion to actual RvR, and a bizarre endgame where you had to grind dungeons to get the armor sets required for PvP.
Eventually they made it so you didn't need the gear equipped but still had to grind dungeons to get it.
And my god, the final bracket was just "you might as well not PVP until you cap and grind some gear, chummo".
The lowers tiers could definitely vary quite a bit going from the bottom to top rungs. Which is why it was really amusing to twink the shit out of low level characters with the best talismans you could find. Running around as a DPS with more armor than a tank eight levels above you was ridiculously amusing, until they rightly nerfed the shit out of that anyways.
Once you got to the top tier the difference wasn't so much gear as it was organization. Gear was nice but focus fire was how you ruined someone's day. The game did a pretty bad job of explaining that though.
The Squig one was amazing.