Folks,
Three years after our journey with Warhammer began we are ready to present our initial realization of Mythic Entertainment's latest MMORPG, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. It has been an interesting journey, full of ups and downs and moments of great joy and moments of sadness. In the end though, what we have brought forth is our vision of an epic Warhammer Fantasy world. The world you are about to enter is one full of greatness and glory but it is not the vision of one person or even of one company. It is a vision that has been brought about through the shared vision and efforts of everybody involved here at Mythic, Games Workshop and at EA. With our partner GOA in Europe, GigaMedia in Taiwan and future partners in other parts of the world, we hope to bring this vision everywhere. WAR will not teach the world to sing (or to dance) but we do hope it can teach the world to WAAAGH!
Rob and I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in making Warhammer Fantasy come alive in this game. Whether it is our partners and friends at Games Workshop, Electronic Arts or GOA, you have helped us make this game come to life. However, our greatest thanks go to our team and our studio, without whose hard work and dedication over these last few years this day would not have been possible. We thank you all very, very much.
I hope you enjoy your adventures in this world and I promise you one thing, that everyone at Mythic has worked very hard in bringing this game to you but it is simply the first step in our journey. We have a long way to go on this new road and I hope it will be one that we can take together, for a very long time.
Mark Jacobs %26amp; Rob Denton
Mythic Entertainment
%26amp;
Folks,
Well, it's less than an hour till the full launch of the game and I've got three very good bits of news to share with you.
(1) First, let's start with a change to our Code of Conduct. After reviewing the CoC, we've decided that it is not necessary to have you click through it every time you enter the game. However, you will need to continue to scroll through the EUALA for the foreseeable future. While we are making it easier to do that it will remain as it is. I'm truly sorry that it is necessary but for now, due to legal reasons, it will still need to be scrolled through and accepted when you enter the game.
(2) On a much lighter and even more important note, as you know one of main priorities for our engineering team over the last few weeks has been to reduce the number of crashes to desktop (CTDs) that are experienced by a small percentage of our players. We applied a client patch yesterday and over the last 24 hours, the aggregate number of CTDs per play hour has decreased by 50%. We are applying another patch that we hope will take the numbers down even further but for now, even with the 50% reduction, the number of CTDs is now at its lowest ever.
(3) Finally, we have some even better news for a large number of our players. Since we launched the Head Start program, we have told people that after launch we would allow them to move characters from a high population server to a low population server free of charge.
Tomorrow morning, we will begin a process to essentially clone (who says you can't mix sci-fi and fantasy) all character, Auction House and guild information of several of our high population servers to brand new servers. Players and guilds can choose which server (old, new or both!) they wish to play on. Nobody's characters will be deleted and because they are being copied to clean servers, everyone gets to keep their names and their guild names. As far as we know nobody has done this before in the MMORPG industry and we are proud to be the first to offer this to our players.
So, it is up to you, whether you are just an individual player or guild to stay on the existing server or to move to the new server. Here are the servers that are being moved and the names of their clones:
Phoenix Throne =%26gt; White Tower
Skull Throne =%26gt; Tower of Doom
Volkmar =%26gt; Magnus
Badlands =%26gt; Mordheim
Dark Crag =%26gt; Eerie Downs
Once again we have shown our commitment to make WAR the best MMORPG on the market both through our commitment to game development and customer service.
Mark