In the race to see which studio is more incompetent at cash shops, Mythic surges past current champion SOE to claim the Clown Crown of Crazy (the highly coveted CCC). Congrats, let the server shutdown party commence!
Here is the best part though; let’s say you are someone rich and stupid enough to want to pay Mythic a fortune to skip all the leveling content and just get straight to the cap, guess what? You can’t! Oh, you can buy a single level for $10, which gives the sparkle pony reskin a run for its money on the silly meter, but in an effort to… I actually don’t know… Mythic says you can only buy one. That’s right, all the forum outrage without the actual profit, congrats!
The second failure is that you openly sell power (early mounts, herald), but in such a way that again, it accomplishes the outrage without being important enough to attract serious profit. Just pick one and go all out… wait, that would be very un-WAR like though. RvR busted because you wanted a 3rd faction in the canceled DAoC 2 game instead? Don’t add the 3rd faction fully, distract people with different zones and semi-factions! Keeps being traded because the reward is better than the gameplay? Don’t fix the gameplay, just give out more rewards! That crap leveling game you now have? Don’t fix it; just let players pay to skip it, but not really! On and on the fail trail goes.
At this point I honestly pity WAR players. You have been so abused since launch it’s incredible, and yet you cling on because somewhere in the utter mess that is WAR, there actually is a solid game with an amazing IP you hope one day will actually come out. Unfortunately for the ones still remaining, Mythic is hell-bend on seeing that never happens, one bad move at a time.
Hardcore Casual 
Yeah, this whole WAR turn of events makes me wonder if anybody actually read this idea out loud. Sometimes things that seem wonderful in your brain fall flat when you actually hear them said aloud.
Worst sort of compromise, won’t meet expectations and annoys your key supporters.
Of course, the way things have been going, perhaps they only have enough staff left to do this level of “enhancement.”
“Yeah, this whole WAR turn of events makes me wonder if anybody actually read this idea out loud. ”
Ha! It’s so beyond ridiculous I’m thinking they are just doing this as a ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ stunt.
Come on now, cut the two interns running WAR some slack!
I read this news today and almost burst into laughter. This game is a half a step away from going free to play with a cash shop. It’s like they are deliberately trying to see how much they can fuck up a game and abuse loyal players to see how long people will stand for it. This isn’t even a game anymore, it’s a social experiment gone horribly wrong. This company needs to go up in flames for brokering this kind of stupidity.
But it’s OK, they are “helping” Bioware on their Old Republic. Mythic is the last thing I would want near my 150+ million dollar investment of a game in production.
Only two comments? I guess WAR really has lost its relevance… A well thought-out F2P strategy might actually work for them.
As a side note, I can’t believe it’s been over two years since release and they’re still so uncertain of some key elements of the game.
Did you know that if you’re not adding new servers within 3 months from launch that your game is a failure? True story.
500k subs or bust, yo!
Didn’t some clown at Mythic say the other day that Warhammer will -NEVER- go F2P ? I assume this is their solution to that?
There’s clearly some rather stubborn people working at Mythic. How many times have the community told them what’s wrong with their game and how many times have they came out completely ignoring it and even denouncing these flaws and then they wonder why the game is circling the drain?
Because afk-macroing is sooo hardcore and the only true way to pvp. Oh wait the only way to pvp is to skill up is against a pve mob, ya that makes sense in a pvp game.
Kinda like all the other mmos out there huh?
Off Topic…
while I do appreciate the attempt at the proxy blocks sync, you have no idea how to block them properly.
I don’t block anyone buddy. If you have been tagged on other WP blogs for spam, that might be causing the issue, but I allow all non-spam comments here, no matter how stupid.
Your entire comment was off-topic.
Buying levels sounds dumb.
What they are effectively saying is “this game is so boring that is a positive bonus to skip content if you have extra money”.
A total dead end of game design, at times like this I am pleased that Everquest 2 has a seperate service (Extended) for F2P, as I expect that the malign influence of the cash shop will likely warp it into a mess like this, just like every other F2P game. As an aside whether sharing the same game as the non F2P (Live) service saves it we’ll see, but while I’m having fun I’ll just carry on paying the sub.
One day I hope people will figure out that everything has to be paid for somehow, until then this bandwagon is going to carry on rolling.
I am one of those poor abused fools who has played since release…not very much in the last year but every time they offer the “free come back and see how great we now are” I go back…..and cry. Someone said it above: there is a great game in there, somewhere. When the ORVR servers died in an ORVR game it was the end. Now its a grind fest treadmill I grow quickly tired of running on.
Meh, free level is inconsequential. Because it’s just a level. The PvE in the game has basically been acknowledged as a background noise. The have a quest that gives the same item in-game. People who were overbilled can get the item if they so choose. There’s a potential of four levels skipped if a player wants to choose to do so. Four levels of not having to grind out the end to rank 40 so you can be on relatively even ground? Most players don’t have an issue, but at the same time, I doubt many will partake.
The RMT shop does seem a strange mix of items, being that they are extremely minor in relavence to game play, particularly in comparison to the cost of the product. But that’s the goal behind a vanity item I suppose. If everyone had them, then the “special” of it would go away. I won’t buy a single item from there, but I’m a cheap bastard.