Thursday, January 20, 2011

Where is Mythic?

That is a question a lot of Warhammer Online players have been asking lately.  The 1.4 patch arrived a little over two months ago and since then, communication from Mythic has dropped drastically.  This is not totally unexpected, but just how much has surprised even me.

I'm usually willing to cut Mythic a bunch of slack, it's just my nature.  After a big release like 1.4, there are bound to be people who have been putting off taking vacation.  It also happened to release before the holiday season, which in many cases means a drop in productivity.  Places I've worked have been guilty of the same, so I am not one to judge.

However, in the past 2 months we've only really had one post of substance about the overall status of the game.  Andy posted this a couple of weeks ago, which describes some of what the team is working on.  It's all well and good, but is that what a team of developers have been up to for over two months?  There have also been posts by developers in response to specific bugs and other issues.  These are sadly hidden to most due to the lack of a dev tracker.

Usually, we receive a Producer's Letter at the end of every month.  The last one sent out was in October.  November would have just been a re-hash about 1.4, so I'm not too bothered about that.  There really should have been one for December though, even if it only had sparse 'new' information.  In a post on the forums (somewhere), Andy said we will be getting one at the end of this month.

What surprises me (and bothers me) is that Mythic has to know what kind of  impression this lack of communication gives to the playerbase (well, the website/blog going part).  Yet they don't really do much about it.  If they don't know, that is worrisome.  If they do know and just have nothing to talk about, that is even worse.

I don't want to this to sound like a doom and gloom post, as I am still playing WAR and having fun.  It's just that for me, one of the big attractions of a MMO is that is grows over time.  Right now, I'm starting to lose confidence that WAR will be doing that.

I really hope that this month's Producer's Letter shows that they have been busy working on improving and expanding WAR for the last two months.