Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Status Update

[GameBanshee News]

Crispy Gamer offers more expansive coverage of the status update conference call held by EA Mythic, including a flurry of quotes.

Game Balance

In a realm-vs.-realm game, balance is always a potential issue. If one side continues to dominate the other, it can lead to high levels of frustration for the losing faction. If the orcs are continually being beaten down by the dwarfs, that has the potential to throw the entire balance off-kilter.

Adam Gershowitz, the "careers lead" on the game, addressed this. "One of the things we're doing is that you get rewards for winning, but the longer a zone is under the control of the winning side we start doing little things to bring the 'losers' up to par. Things like slowly expanding the number of guards that they have, slowly taking the winning side's advantage away. We're not trying to punish you for being successful; we're trying to make sure you get the feeling that the competition is always lively and interesting, and there are things we'll do to try and encourage population and class balance."

Barnett offered up more on the class balance. "People always say, 'What if everyone decides to play one side?' In every trial we've done, it's balanced out. It's frightening. It's almost as though we have made all of the sides compelling and interesting and we have made the combat and RvR so good and so balanced that people have said it doesn't really matter ... I'll just go slaughter people, kill a king, get a new hat, get a pig hat! Ride around on my wolf! [everyone howls] Which is awesome! Then we send all of these reams of data to Adam and say it's not balanced, and he rebalances it."

[Xandax]

Balance for this game will indeed be monumentally important.
One can only hope that they learned from their experiences with DAOC which suffered badly from imbalance, both classwise and populationwise.