As many other sites/blogs have reported, the Warhammer Online beta has been suspended for two months, and instantly rumors sprang up as to why this happened. Some people took the now usual ‘doom and gloom’ perspective and assumed the game was in trouble, while a few made some attempts to put the delay as a positive. I’m somewhat on the fence, for the following reasons.

As Mythic has indicated before and now, WAR went into beta much earlier than most MMOs, and I think the reason for this is somewhat obvious. When you are making a PvP focused game, one factor above all else will make or break your game, balance. If you release a game that has broken and overpowered aspects, the player community will attach themselves to this, and when you go to fix it, you will get flamed eternally for ‘destroying my favorite class’. And before you are able to get things back in balance, many of your players might be upset that they picked a weaker class, and leave even before you have a chance to fix it, spreading negative word of mouth in the process. As we have learned from other MMOs, once negative word of mouth is out, it becomes VERY difficult to reverse that line of thinking. One look at Vanguard should make that very clear.

Now, like Mark from Mythic recently stated, they have a LOT of data from the last beta, enough to make changes to the game that they believe will be positive. Filtering data and making sure you address the most important issues is always a problem when you have a rabid fanbase that will harp on the most obscure and random things, often times enough so to skew the perception of the overall fan base. Look at WoW and the massive focus on raiding, due in part to the small but very vocal forum posters that always demanded more content. This skewed the perception so much that TBC had a massively ridiculous end game, full of progression barriers. Only after release did Blizzard realize this was a mistake and dumbed down the raiding, removing many of the previous requirements. Even so, you still have the guild destroying Karazhan to deal with. And as expected, the forums exploded again with raiders complaining that Blizzard tricked them and that they had to work harder for their epics. If nothing else, Mythic is making an attempt to avoid this, by taking the data they have and putting it into focus.

Somewhat related to the point above, Mark made the point that if they allowed more testers in now, they would very likely get a re-hash of the issues raised by the current testers. As they stated, they have enough data to refine the game for the next two months before they will need more data from the testers, and by that point the previous issues should be resolved.

Now all that said it is very possible WAR might not be shaping up as well as Mythic had hoped. It is entirely possible that the feedback from the beta test was so negative they realized they need to re-work a great deal of things, and rather than shock the testers each week, they instead pulled the test down and are going to privately make the changes. We really won’t know until at least the next phase of beta, when those that have seen the current build will be able to compare it with the one coming in two months.

Mythic has also not announced a delay for the game, and while many think it is coming, until it does it leaves the possibility that a beta shutdown was part of Mythic’s plan all along. Again I’m on the fence about the whole issue, but I could see it going either way. I ‘hope’ that the delay is all part of the plan, as I personally have high hopes for WAR being the next ‘it’ game.