In my opinion however, you are absolutely right, but you didn’t go far enough, in critisizing WAR’s lack of diversity.

Warhammer sold themselves out as a slash and burn PVP game, period. LOTRO on the other hand, sold themselves on their narrative strength. Both are equally one-dimensional though, and given their relative lack of *overwhelming* success, I think we can deduce the gaming community at large, wants more than just one dimension in order to subscribe.

Clearly Warhammer, greatly over estimated the interest in their game, which is why we’re seeing so many servers coalescing, creating “virtual retirement” for over half the servers the game launched with.

When the game has a full set of races, classes, more diversity in the builds; better emotes, better RP tools, and becomes a “real boy” (instead of a PVP-based wooden puppet), I will return. Until then, there are too many other games, on a variety of platforms that I can choose from.

But as others have said, many people would actually prefer lateral expansions in an MMO. Having a new area to fight over, or new classes to group with, mixes up PvP enough to make it seem new, without resetting everything you have previously done. The worst thing to ever happen to DAoC was ToA, and that was literally a pure “further along” expansion.

http://img383.imageshack.us/img383/8924/playswythm004sf9.jpg

Cheers!

I’ve never been a believer that PvP and RPGs even work — at least not the vertically scaled MMORPGs we currently play that use levels and gear with stats.

Story-wise, did WoW ever have one? Or EQ2? Or…? They had small stories if you gave a crap to read the quest text, but nothing really had a continuing storyline other than Guild Wars and now LOTRO — both games where you *CAN* reach the end of any of the stories without needing to be part of some uber raiding guild.

While I’m enjoying Moria, I remain disappointed that it continued the vertical climb by raising the level cap. But then I’ve always been more a fan of having a lateral expansion with perhaps only a very gradual vertical gradient. Guild Wars did this masterfully — it was a shame the game even had those 20 “tutorial levels” at all because the rest of the *real* game was all lateral content at level cap but it managed to continue the challenges without needing to fool with outdated systems like levels, level caps, etc.