English Warhammer Servers

[ford prefect]

With the announcement in October that Warhammer would be delayed until April 2008, it occured to me that GoA should take this opportunity to rethink thier strategy in reguards to the english launguage Warhammer servers.

It has been quite apparent that in the last few years, (and I am sure GoA would agree), that mistakes have been made with Dark Age of Camelots english speaking servers. GoA's speciality seems to revolve around porting an english launguage game into German and French. When you consider the amount of content in DAOC, I think you will agree that this in and of itself is quite a demanding technical exercise, which seems to have taken up a large amount of resources and money to achieve for the past six years, and as a result, the UK marketing campaign has been sadly neglected.

Equally the customer service has been somewhat short of satisfactory, and is still quite a long winded process compared directly to Mythic DAoC servers.

The figures comparing the Dyvet Cluster (english speaking DAoC Cluster) to the French and German servers speak for themselves.

Which leads me to wonder if it wouyld be better to avoid a similar situation a few years down the line in Warhammer, by letting GoA continue to focus on the area they seem most comfortable with (translating the Warhammer client for German and French subcribers), and actually allowing Mythic to take control of the EU English servers, which would simply entail employing Community Managers to be online inline with GMT. They could then liaiase with GoA about UK marketing strategies, providing a set budget and ensuring that GoA would have more resources free to ensure that appropriate marketing went ahead. They could also provide a UK friendly payment option which supports debit cards directly.

Some people will argue that this would mean having a US server which would be laggy, but I play on the DAoC US servers presently from the UK, and get less lag than I did from GoA servers.

Just a thought...

 

[Mabs]

to give goa their due, and no im not their biggest fan boy.
daoc was released in US. until GOA said they would do it there were, afaik, ZERO plans for an outside-US release of it. mythic arent interested, they run their own bit and do the dev work. having to employ people half way round the world is a pita

so while goa may not be gods gift to intermediary hosting, its a shit lot better than nothing at all

as for population probs and so forth, warhammer will sell itself, games workshop will be peddling it in their shops, magazine, etc, etc. it wont need a big advertising campaign, word of mouth will do that for it.
i still reckon it will suprise people with its number of players, it wont hit WoWs much vaunted "8 mill" subscribers, but i wouldnt be suprised if it didnt hit 1.5-2

 

[Oskorei]

I'm not really sure what you're saying. I hear UK this and UK that, while obviously alot more countries play on English speaking servers. Scandinavia, (Dutch speaking) Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and so on and so forth.

Let Mythic take over all this? They cba, and they shouldn't, let them just dev. the game. Takes them long enough as it is.

 

[Rubric]

I can understand your sentiments.

If people really don't like GOA or think they will be able to handle it why not just roll US from the start?

 

[IainC]

I'm not going to get drawn into a long and ultimately pointless point by point discussion but in general I will say this.

Our situation with regard to WAR is entirely different to how it was with DAoC. Many of the operational constraints that we had with DAoC will not be present for WAR - both in regard to our operation and our relationship with EA Mythic. The set up that we will have is not going to be the same structure that we had for DAoC with more people and better support, it's an entirely new organisation. We will be able to do things with WAR that we could never have done with DAoC (and in fact things that most publishers still won't be able to do).

I will respond to one specific point though. It's a commonly held fallacy that there was no English marketing for DAoC or that the budget was low compared to France and Germany. Back in the day when we ran the game in three languages, there were three separate marketing budgets - a French one, a German one and an English one. The English one was the largest.

I was the guy who got sent to the UK a couple of times a year to show the new expansions to the press and to our PR partners, I know how hard our marketing team worked. Sadly not all of that work was reflected in tangible results. Many print magazines didn't like covering MMOs (even after WoW launched) and most wouldn't cover expansions for any type of game so a lot of the marketing budget fell on stony ground - I remember the difficulty we had in getting one major UK publication to even review Catacombs, we had to promise them the moon on a stick (in terms of advertising spend and exclusive assets) before they even gave us half a page of editorial content. Internet advertising was also trickier because most of the English language sites we'd have liked to advertise on were American and thus fell within Mythic's territory. Obviously French and German sites tend not to have that problem.

While we will still have some issues with English language sites, Warhammer has a very large installed European fanbase, many of which are English speakers. We fully intend to leverage that as well as the more traditional gamer markets which isn't something that was open to us with DAoC (Norse historians aren't a big market to work on). We also have a much better position to make the marketing budget work harder for us given the unprecedented interest in MMOs generally and WAR specifically.

Tl;dr version:
Goa is not running WAR in the same way that we ran DAoC.

 

[ford prefect]

I will respond to one specific point though. It's a commonly held fallacy that there was no English marketing for DAoC or that the budget was low compared to France and Germany. Back in the day when we ran the game in three languages, there were three separate marketing budgets - a French one, a German one and an English one. The English one was the largest.

Goa is not running WAR in the same way that we ran DAoC.

Fair comment.

I would say however, that if GoA want the Warhammer English Speaking servers to be a success, GoA need a rethink on the way they deal with their subscribers.

I don't wish for a debate, as it has all been said before on numerous threads, but I would express the hope that GoA will be more candid with Warhammer subcribers, more open to constructive critism, and listen much more closely to its playerbase, especially minorities like the english speaking community, than it has done previously. I understand that historically, agreements and licencing issues with mythic may well have held GoA back.

As end users, we can't be expected to know, or really understand why Mythic would restrain a licencee so much. If all this had been explained in some considerable detail, perhaps the UK playerbase for DAoC would be in a better position, and many long standing and experienced players, who currently feel alienated, would be prepared to give Warhammer a go in the EU.

Without pointing fingers ect, it is GoA that is in the unfortunate position where many of its UK subscribers feel let down, not mythic. Therefore it is up to GoA to address the critisms, and to open up as much communication between yourselves and your playerbase, so that Warhammer doesn't find itself in a similar position in a few years time.

I would suggest that each community manager on Warhammer, be given a personal blog to go along with the inevitable weekly news. That would allow them to address players concerns, specific community and server related issues, and a medium to organise in game events ect., in an organsied and well constructed manner. Obviously this wouldn't be a replacement for the in game support, but it would give a more personalised approach to comuninty management on each server.

 

[Oskorei]

I don't really see what was wrong with the way DAoC was run by GOA. I've been a happy gamer on excal. There were a few problems here and there, but I knew where they came from, or could extrapolate them.

Since I don't really see anything wrong with the way DAoC was run by GOA, and since you say you will do it differently this time, I really wonder what the changes will be. I guess my biggest fear is the changes are for the worst.

 

[Mabs]

2 things im going to add here for general consumption:

1- DAOC was killed almost entirely by the "i want to 8v8 " and "dont add" kiddies, NOT goa. sorry, no, your wrong, it was.

2- bear in mind, IainC and the others are the monkeys, not the organ grinders, if you want them to go on giving out information, dont kill the messanger
(and no im not saying you are, i just know how these threads tend to go )

 

[Oskorei]

<snip> IainC and the others are the monkeys <snip>

IainC can be a funny guy, but calling him a monkey might be a bit strong.

 

[ford prefect]

1- DAOC was killed almost entirely by the "i want to 8v8 " and "dont add" kiddies, NOT goa. sorry, no, your wrong

I did not state that GoA killed off DAoC, I simply said that GoA are now in a postion, fairly or unfairly (it doesn't really matter anymore), where they will have to work hard to win back the trust of many UK Players.

At this point, whoever or whatever is the cause of the DAoC demise on Dyvet and is irrelevent to the discussion.

I was nodding at the fact that mistakes have been made with reguard to DAoC and expressing my hope that GoA would learn from those mistakes, becoming much more involved with the communities they are responsible for.

 

[Mabs]

IainC can be a funny guy, but calling him a monkey might be a bit strong.

dont take it out of context go look up "organ grinder + monkey"

I did not state that GoA killed off DAoC, I simply said that GoA are now in a postion, fairly or unfairly (it doesn't really matter anymore), where they will have to work hard to win back the trust of many UK Players.

At this point, whoever or whatever is the cause of the DAoC demise on Dyvet and is irrelevent to the discussion.

I was nodding at the fact that mistakes have been made with reguard to DAoC and expressing my hope that GoA would learn from those mistakes, becoming much more involved with the communities they are responsible for.

well i would say the demise of DAOC is still relevant cos people wrongly thing GOA caused it, and it is an oft-cited reason for why people want to play WAR in USA not EU

i also wasnt having a go at you, i was trying to pre-empt all the nay-sayers who usually turn up spouting the same old rubbish

and yes your right overall

 

[IainC]

I was nodding at the fact that mistakes have been made with reguard to DAoC and expressing my hope that GoA would learn from those mistakes, becoming much more involved with the communities they are responsible for.

Well that's what I do and that's one of the differences in how we will be working with WAR compared to DAoC. When I worked for DAoC, I was responsible for customer service and a degree of community management. My job title said community manager but in reality I was the CS coordinator who also used to pop onto forums from time to time. This time around we have a dedicated community management department who are entirely separate from CS. All that my colleagues and I do is to deal with the WAR community, our customers, potential customers and press. At the moment all the news is coming from EA Mythic so most of my work right now is spent in compiling reports going inwards - feedback from the community to Goa and EA Mythic - rather than out*wards to you. That will change a lot though once release is closer and we make operational details available.

Mostly the changes we are making are due to the bigger scales we can work with and the much more favourable partnership agreement that we have with EA Mythic this time around. Things that we couldn't do before are now possible and so we've expanded our scope to take advantage of those.

Edit - bizarrely the word o u t w a r d s is filtered.

 

[ford prefect]

Mostly the changes we are making are due to the bigger scales we can work with and the much more favourable partnership agreement that we have with EA Mythic this time around. Things that we couldn't do before are now possible and so we've expanded our scope to take advantage of those.

It is good to know that the community managers will have a little more freedom to interact with their communities.

I do think it is important for community managers to have a medium outside of the game to arrange in game events specific to their community, and to address any recent concerns that are brought up by the playerbase. It would give the CM a means of addressing concerns (patch problems, bugs, community issues, ect.) quickly and easily, and would also give the playerbase a chance to see that any concerns are being listened to.

It would also give CM's a means of advertising any server specific events that are in the pipeline, and indeed any events they wish to arrange themselves.... A kind of CM Grab Bag to give a Mythic analogy.

 

[Talivar]

I noticed alot of old daoc players used to blame GOA for a lot of Mythic only stuff aswell like overpowered classes and nerfs ect. So my point is in some cases the GOA attacks where 100% unjustified. Remove all the whines and times when it was all out of GOAs hands and im pretty sure this anti GOA feeling you speak of would be much lighter.

 

[Ctuchik]

I noticed alot of old daoc players used to blame GOA for a lot of Mythic only stuff aswell like overpowered classes and nerfs ect.

they only wanted to whine on GOA. they didnt really care about overpowered classes and stuff. they just wanted reasons to complain at GOA. granted i've done this myself but atleast i tried to keep it to things they actually had something to do with


90% of the other DAoC players didnt bother with that.

 

[Umilard]

Will the warhammer EU-servers be hosted at Opentransit or are GOA looking into other alternatives?

 

[Ctuchik]

Will the warhammer EU-servers be hosted at Opentransit or are GOA looking into other alternatives?

well its france telecom that owns(?) GOA so chances are it will be OT again.

 

[Marc]

GOA did an ok job on DAoC considering MMORPG's back then where still in their infancy.

It was just the spoilt kids whining about stuff.

There will be a whole generation of greasy, spotty metalica fans ready to whine at whoever when WAR comes out.

 

[rynnor]

Fundamentally the biggest reason to go direct to Mythic rather than via GOA is that GOA are an un-neccesary middleman.

With the greatest will in the world Mythic will always listen most strongly to its own subscribers - if you want any real input on the game and its development then subscribe via Mythic.

This is a good general rule for MMO's - I'm not just picking on the Mythic/GOA relationship they are just a good example of it.

GOA can be as great as you want but your still adding an extra party into the equation which is just another point of failure no matter how good they are.

Someone may trot out the usual chestnuts about ping but these are pretty academic these days - my ping to one place or another is not purely a factor of distance

For these reasons I would suggest going direct to Mythic.

 

[Case]

I think everyone needs to bear in mind the difference in scale with WAR compared to DAoC. With DAoC on the UK servers we had at most 3 servers including camlann with maybe a maximum of 5000 players. With WAR there`s every indication that the playerbase will hit 100000+ in europe alone with the US already having nearly 500000 beta registrations.

Clearly thats a totally new level of scale with totally different problems, GOA have improved in service and support continuously over the past 5 years+ and there's no reason to beleive that won`t continue.

 

[Mabs]

Fundamentally the biggest reason to go direct to Mythic rather than via GOA is that GOA are an un-neccesary middleman.

With the greatest will in the world Mythic will always listen most strongly to its own subscribers - if you want any real input on the game and its development then subscribe via Mythic.

This is a good general rule for MMO's - I'm not just picking on the Mythic/GOA relationship they are just a good example of it.

GOA can be as great as you want but your still adding an extra party into the equation which is just another point of failure no matter how good they are.

Someone may trot out the usual chestnuts about ping but these are pretty academic these days - my ping to one place or another is not purely a factor of distance

For these reasons I would suggest going direct to Mythic.

bear in mind the delay/middleman is a double edged sword

did you see the state TOA was in when the US basically beta tested it for us, so we got TOA+3 patches

 

[Fafnir]

I just hope they have a new payment system. Their old one was buggered to hell. I mean getting billed for 1 month, almost a year after the last time you paid and played. And finding the auto renewal was again active.

 

[ford prefect]

I think everyone needs to bear in mind the difference in scale with WAR compared to DAoC. With DAoC on the UK servers we had at most 3 servers including camlann with maybe a maximum of 5000 players. With WAR there`s every indication that the playerbase will hit 100000+ in europe alone with the US already having nearly 500000 beta registrations.

That of course is true, but it does lead to the obvious question; Does GoA have the resources to manage such a large community?

Using DAoC as an example, support staff appear to be available more or less 24/7 in game on mythic servers via /appeal. GoA never implemented the /appeal system, relying largely on Rightnow instead. This may well be something to do with the licence that GoA has, I don't know, but it is a rather long winded approach to customer support.

In the last year I have contacted Mythic directly via email reguarding a few issues, and each time despite the timezone differences, Mythic has gotten back to me within 90 minutes. Any in-game issues I have had, have generally been resolved in 20 minutes.

With well over four years playing GoA servers, questions submitted to rightnow in the past have taken anything from 5 hours to several days to be replied to (Thats my experience anyway). This never bothered me as such, and I have always assumed that these responce times are down to the GoA support team being somewhat under resourced.

EA will undoubtedly throw a lot of resources at Mythic to make Warhammer a success, but will they give a licencee like GoA the same opportunites?

 

[Rubric]

EA will undoubtedly throw a lot of resources at Mythic to make Warhammer a success, but will they give a licencee like GoA the same opportunites?

As i said. If your not sure roll US.

 

[IainC]

That of course is true, but it does lead to the obvious question; Does GoA have the resources to manage such a large community?

Using DAoC as an example, support staff appear to be available more or less 24/7 in game on mythic servers via /appeal. GoA never implemented the /appeal system, relying largely on Rightnow instead. This may well be something to do with the licence that GoA has, I don't know, but it is a rather long winded approach to customer support.

In the last year I have contacted Mythic directly via email reguarding a few issues, and each time despite the timezone differences, Mythic has gotten back to me within 90 minutes. Any in-game issues I have had, have generally been resolved in 20 minutes.

With well over four years playing GoA servers, questions submitted to rightnow in the past have taken anything from 5 hours to several days to be replied to (Thats my experience anyway). This never bothered me as such, and I have always assumed that these responce times are down to the GoA support team being somewhat under resourced.

EA will undoubtedly throw a lot of resources at Mythic to make Warhammer a success, but will they give a licencee like GoA the same opportunites?

At its height, the English DAoC team was four people. The French and German teams had 5 or so each. For WAR, we are hiring about 300 people for CS. There will be exactly the same ingame support in Europe using the same tools and the same resources as on the US servers.

 

[Nate]

Internet advertising was also trickier because most of the English language sites we'd have liked to advertise on were American and thus fell within Mythic's territory

This is a very important point, and I really really really really really hope you get this ironed out. Mythic need to at least mention that you exist on the US English speaking sites, otherwise I foresee people getting very confused and playing on US servers without realising there is infact a seperate company with servers in EU.

They don't even mention you on the EA Mythic - Warhammer Online site. Top right has companies involved and there is no GOA.

 

[rynnor]

At its height, the English DAoC team was four people. The French and German teams had 5 or so each. For WAR, we are hiring about 300 people for CS. There will be exactly the same ingame support in Europe using the same tools and the same resources as on the US servers.

300? Seems a lot especially in France where its difficult to get rid of staff.

Especially, hiring on a demand that is currently hypothetical - is the CS to be run from India by any chance?

 

[Mabs]

300? Seems a lot especially in France where its difficult to get rid of staff.

Especially, hiring on a demand that is currently hypothetical - is the CS to be run from India by any chance?

or if you paid attention you would of noticed the jobs they were offering for people for WAR were in Ireland not France.

 

[rynnor]

or if you paid attention you would of noticed the jobs they were offering for people for WAR were in Ireland not France.

Paid attention to what? I have better things to do than read every thread here and it seems my guess was pretty accurate in terms of outsourced customer services.

I dont think this is a great thing either tbh - you can either

* sub with Mythic and get your CS direct from the company that wrote the game.

* sub with GOA and get your CS from an Irish call centre setup by a French comms/hosting company who provide services on behalf of Mythic.

Which one sounds better to you

 

[Aqe]

Paid attention to what? I have better things to do than read every thread here and it seems my guess was pretty accurate in terms of outsourced customer services.

I dont think this is a great thing either tbh - you can either

* sub with Mythic and get your CS direct from the company that wrote the game.

* sub with GOA and get your CS from an Irish call centre setup by a French comms/hosting company who provide services on behalf of Mythic.

Which one sounds better to you

What can be done fast will be just as good. Any updates will be at the same time on EU and US servers. So far it felt that EU players had just as much to say about the game as US.

But no point arguing with you really. Obvious you just want to down talk goa whatever is said.