I'm looking forward to Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning. The only reason I'm not writing about it is that I'm not in any beta for it, and can only report second-hand news. But if I had to place bets on the most successful MMORPGs coming out in 2007, WAR would come right behind LotRO. Only that I'm not 100% convinced yet that the WAR release date won't be delayed into 2008.
Anyway, to feed you at least with the above-mentioned second-hand news, MMOG Nation has a nice interview with Mark Jacobs on WAR and other subjects. Quote: "Question: What do you think Warhammer does 100% better than anything else?
Mark: Oh, our RvR. That’s something we did obviously quite successfully with Dark Age of Camelot. If you talk to our players, even players of other games, they think that Camelot’s implimentation of RvR and PvP was the best in any MMO."
And yes, it was. DAoC had by far the best PvP around. Too bad I hate PvP, and even the best PvP isn't terribly attractive to me. But as there are a lot of people that do like PvP, I can see how WAR could become quite a big success. Personally what I always liked about RvR was how optional it was, you could keep out of it if you wanted to, or just participate when you felt like it. Nevertheless that system doesn't solve the principal problem of how to balance classes to be equally strong in PvP, but different as well as equally interesting in PvE.
I must admit that I'm not a big Mark Jacobs fan, because in the past he has said some very stupid things about RMT, basically blaming evil players of trying to destroy his perfectly designed game worlds. I have always believed that RMT should be considered as unintended consequence of bad game design, and that the game developers are at least as much responsible for it as the gold farmers are. And apparently Mark is now at least recognizing that the only way to keep the gold farmers away is to have a different game design. He says "A guiding principle is something like, in this case, design the systems to discourage farming, and limit impact that gold farming companies can have on the game.", but refuses to go into the details of how such a system could work. I'm quite interested with what he comes up, and whether it works.
But the guy still has some very unrealistic views, based on a "developers are the new gods" attitude which often ends up clashing with what the players believe. He says: "I’m a real big believer in EULAs. EULAs are what help keep these games online. The day that developers in the United States lose the ability to enforce our own EULAs, is the day that MMOs will start to dissappear. These companies are breaking our EULAs, they’re flouting them in our face, their behavior’s in our face, saying “we can do whatever we want”, and I’m sorry, that’s just wrong." Well, if it's "just wrong", then why doesn't he go and sue IGE and all the other gold farming companies? It seems to me that the developers lost the ability to enforce their EULAs long ago. And that is because they wrote things into these EULAs that try to extend the rights of the developers and limit the rights of the players to an extent which is not compatible with the US legislation. They can't enforce their EULAs for the simple reason that these EULAs wouldn't hold up in court. It would take a brave soul and a huge amount of money to clear the question of virtual property rights in US courts far enough to enable writing enforcable EULAs.
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