Another round of substantial server merging was initiated by Mythic last week. With just 300,000 subscribers or so, are we seeing the end of WAR?

Once again, Mythic decides to merge more of Warhammer Online's servers. It's a move that the company has caught a lot of flak for in the past, with arguments coming from both sides. Some fans were initially upset that Mythic didn't start merging servers earlier in the game, and with more frequency. They complained that the company—and its CEO at the time; Mark Jacobs—needed to swallow its pride and admit that servers were so unbalanced they were virtually unplayable.

A smaller number of people thought the MMO just needed time to flourish, and that perpetual server merges were destroying the game. They complained that the merges were breaking up guilds and making it difficult for players to stabilize on one specific server. Another complaint was that the merges looked terribly bad to the media and would-be players, who might lose faith in the game and never give it a chance.

Something I've realized since the Everquest days of gaming is that, when it comes to MMOs, the developers will never, ever be able to please everyone. In fact, I think it's quite a feat of genius when MMO developers are able to satisfy even half their players. However, you'd think that after a decade of mainstream MMO popularity, these publishers and companies—especially the larger ones—wouldn't keep making the same mistakes that proved to be the downfall of more than one title throughout the years.

The newest round of WAR server merges really panged me, because I actually love the game and hate seeing it in distress Another side of me wants to hate Mythic for ruining the game, thanks to poor planning and development. Back in junior high and early high school, I loved playing many of the Games Workshop tabletop games like Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40k and Blood Bowl. Although I never really dug the RPG books, the effort that Games Workshop put into the story and lore of the Warhammer universe always impressed me. It's an amazing assortment of fantasy and sci-fi that's entertained tens of hundreds of thousands of people since the late 70s.

You've probably already heard the story about Blizzard Entertainment's first Warcraft PC game (Warcraft: Orcs and Humans) being inspired by Warhammer, and originally developed to be a Warhammer RTS game. But Games Workshop passed on licensing the IP, and Blizzard went its own way. It's interesting to imagine that, if GW had chosen to give Blizzard the rights all those years ago, we might be playing "World of Warhammer" today. (Before anyone rises up and calls me a fanboy conspiracy theorist, I'm not insinuating that Blizzard "ripped off" Games Workshop to make Warcraft or StarCraft—if that were true, you could argue both of them "ripped off" J.R.R. Tolkien or D&D, among others.)

Apparently GW didn't have the greatest foresight back then and as we all know, Blizzard went on to dominate the industry with its own Warcraft RTS and MMO games. So when I finally heard the news that Mythic had been green-lighted to develop Warhammer Online, I thought we might have the best MMO since WoW on the way (and finally, a Warhammer universe to play it in).

If you were a GW or MMO fan back then, you might remember the excitement every time we received a new report on Warhammer Online's gameplay during its development. Things looked so promising. PvP-centric game progression? Rewarding realm vs. realm combat and zone battles? These new "Public Quests" that sounded so fantastic? Epic city and keep sieges involving hundreds of players at once?!?! Oh, man…at the time, I thought my head was going to explode with anticipation.

And to give credit where credit is due, Warhammer Online really did end up being pretty great game. It featured innovative gameplay mechanics and lofty aspirations for a new PvP/PvE hybrid of leveling and endgame content.

Unfortunately, Mythic just wasn't able to juggle all the elements of its execution. If the game's launch and first couple of months weren't plagued by so many problems at once, it might have a million subscribers right now, rather than just 300,000 or so. But there were just so many hurdles in the way of its success.

Warhammer Online was laden with an insane number of bugs right out of the starting gate. I tried to accept the fact that gameplay bugs would always be something that every MMO would suffer from at launch—but in WAR's case, it was ridiculous. If it wasn't in-game problems like combat and quest bugs, it was client problems like constant crashes, latency lag and the most un-optimized engine I'd ever played.

If you've read any of my past editorials, you might remember what a fan of accessibility I am. It's the key to almost any MMO's success; all you have to do is look at games like World of Warcraft, or the newer Free Realms, to see how powerful the "accessibility factor" can be. I'm not one of those gamers who tend to whine about low FPS if I'm playing on machine with an integrated GPU and 512MB of RAM. I agree that if you want enjoy modern PC games, you have to spend a little money on hardware. But at the same time, if I'm using a laptop with 4GB of RAM and a semi-modern GPU, I don't think I should have to deal with 20 FPS when I'm playing a game at 800x600 on low graphics settings, for God's sake.

The client and optimization problems—coupled with the endless array of gameplay bugs and imbalances—seriously made me feel like I was shelling out $15 per month to play an MMO that was still in beta. I actually took a two-month break from the game in late November because I didn't want to keep paying for a game I couldn't enjoy until all the "wrinkles" were ironed out.

Speaking of November, launching a new game two months before the release of the world's most popular MMO expansion probably wasn't the brightest idea Mythic ever had, either. Wrath of the Lich King's release dominated the market and stole away thousands of Warhammer subscribers. I remember guilds looking back and referring to it as "the mass exodus," when huge groups of players ditched WAR to focus their efforts (and money) on facing Arthas in Northrend.

In fact, most of the problems that ended up driving WAR's subscribers away (or lulled into indifference) could probably have been avoided if Mythic had just waited a few more months before it launched the game. Of course you never would have heard me suggesting anything like that at the time; I was Jonesing for the MMO like a chain smoker living in California.

But such things are ultimately the developer's responsibility, and it's tough to wonder if this newest round of server merges is just another final, wheezing attempt at drawing a breath of air before the game's inevitable and untimely end. It's easy to understand why Mark Jacobs and Co. were always so hesitant to merge servers, and why many of the early merges were weakly disguised as "open character transfers." Hell, this editorial itself reinforces the notion that server mergers just don't inspire a lot of faith in a game's longevity in the eyes of many fans and media outlets.

The most painful part of it is that throughout the last six months, Mythic has been doing a much better job of fixing those lingering bugs, balancing class combat and improving client issues, although I'm sure there are more than a couple Magi or White Lions who would disagree with me. My main is Magus, so I probably know more than most WAR players about how frustrating it can be to feel that you're playing a class that the developers don't care about.

But ever since patch 1.1—and the subsequent patches 1.2 and 1.3—Mythic has considerably increased the pace of bug fixes and the introduction of new classes and content. We've received four new classes and the launch of Mythic's ambitious Land of the Dead event (featuring a new zone with more public quests and a cool PvP-influenced endgame dungeon). However, all the bug fixes and new content in the world don't matter if there's no one left to enjoy it.

An unfortunate—yet inherent—"Catch 22" of Warhammer Online is that the game is much more fun to play when it's doing well. A larger subscriber base obviously means more players—and in WAR, more players means the MMO is performing as it was meant to. The PvP-driven elements of the game grossly overshadow its PvE content. It's a lot harder to enjoy the crowning achievements and best features of WAR if you don't have anyone to play them with.

This concept isn't limited to just group-based gameplay, either. Gaining experience and leveling your character via "Scenarios" (instanced PvP) or trying to engage in keep sieges in zone battles is almost impossible if you're stuck on a low-pop realm. Players could literally join a Scenario queue during peak times and wait hours before a game was finally initialized. Taking zone objectives and keeps could prove even more difficult; by nature, they require a substantial number of players to accomplish.

From a customer's standpoint, it seemed like Mythic didn't recognize problems like these until they were already a problem. There were way too many servers available to choose from at launch, and the company appeared to be more interested in saving face than swallowing its pride and merging the actual number of servers it needed to, until it was too late. But that's just the customer viewpoint; I'm sure Mythic did foresee problems like these before launch—it's not exactly a newcomer to the MMO business. Why it chose not to make the right choices at the right times is anyone's guess.

In all sincerity, I really do hope the company's mistakes don't end up costing it the game. I had such high hopes for WAR—and in reality, the game is probably just one or two more patches away from being what it was designed to be. It raises the question; could all the choices we have in today's MMO market have been one of the big reasons why people didn't stick around long enough to let it mature through its "growing pains" stage?

Back when WoW launched, we didn't have as many quality MMOs to choose from as we have now. Could many of the same arguments have been made against WoW during its first year? Did millions of players hang on through both the good and bad times because they didn't have much of a choice? If so, that's a pretty tough "consumer issue" for modern MMOs to contend with. It means many of the future's potentially epic MMOs could be launched, played, dismissed and thrown away just because the publishers miscalculated a game's "optimal" release schedule.

Whether you sympathize with publishers like Mythic or not, it's become vital that the MMO industry starts to retain the lessons it learns from its mistakes. As consumers, we don't want to miss out on an MMO with great potential just because its publisher didn't give it the chance it needed to grow into its own. Even worse, no one wants to be left holding the bag, paying a monthly subscription with the hope that other subscribers will come back and join their favorite MMO; eventually providing it with the customer base it needed to be successful in the first place.