World War II Online: Battleground Europe has been greenlit by Valve. Battleground Europe joins the ranks of 25 games approved for release on September 18th, and while we won’t actually see the game show up on the Steam platform for a while, the gears are already in motion.
Thank you to all of our fans and believers, fellow steam supporters, for helping us pave the way to make this unique game come to the steam community. We’re sure you have a lot of questions and are curious to our release. We’ll keep you up to speed via announcements as this develops.
Congratulations to the Cornered Rat Software team and hopefully the release will give the game a much needed boost in population.
Welcome to another edition of Community Concerns, a weekly editorial that looks at specific issues affecting various MMOs. Most of our topics are submitted by readers and (for one reason or another) rely mainly on player testimony.
Battleground Europe continues to rage on with a small yet very passionate and vocal community. World War 2 continues to be fought on the virtual battlefields, and with a game focused on capturing territory and one based solely in player vs player combat, you’re bound to have a good deal of drama in the community. For some players, however, a recent string of incidences involving server maintenance and the capture of an important strategic point became the straw that broke the camel’s back and resulted in an unknown number of people ending their subscriptions. To make a long story short, the Axis had spent several hours attempting to capture an important area (Antwerp) when Cornered Rat Software suddenly announced the servers would be coming down for maintenance, undoing the efforts of the Axis players. This came on the heels of another important area (Aarschot) which had undergone the same treatment about a week prior. For those not familiar with World War II Online, battles can last many hours, especially when fighting over important areas.
Whenever the discussion comes down to malice vs competence as a driving force, I tend to lean towards competence being to blame. After all, from an outside perspective it makes little sense that Cornered Rat Software would intentionally risk the goodwill of half of their player base because the team they personally rooted for wasn’t winning. Rather, based on commentary by the community, the real issue comes down to the server maintenance in itself, and how the lack of proper developers has resulted in Battleground Europe degenerating into a state where emergency server resets are required just to keep the game running at a stable level. According to Cornered Rat Software, some of Battleground Europe’s tech dates back to 1999-2001, which may help explain why some of the issues with the game architecture have gone unfixed.
If the maintenance, whether emergency or simply unscheduled, stems from an inability to fix the underlying cause, or an inability to hire someone to fix the underlying cause, that doesn’t bode well for Cornered Rat Software. If certain players are correct and Cornered Rat Software is indeed using server maintenance to throw the campaign in favor of the Allies to achieve as close to an even victory rate as they can get, well that is even worse. It doesn’t help that Cornered Rat Software doesn’t have a great record for dealing with criticism in a mature or professional manner. Battleground Europe’s forums are mostly closed off from the public, even from free player accounts, and are reportedly heavily moderated with little room for criticism over Cornered Rat Software’s lack of active employees working on the title.
This isn’t the first time Cornered Rat Software has caused controversy over its relation to the community. Most recently, Community Manager Xoom caught some flak last year for referring to free players as “free loaders” which he later apologized for. But people say things a little more bluntly than they expect all the time. The dealings of CRS on the forums and over at MMORPG.com are small beans in comparison to shutting the server down unannounced and undoing hours of effort by players on a semi-regular basis.
Hey there, folks. With Steam Greenlight, Valve has opened Steam up to the community. Now, developers can pitch their games and let the players decide what is listed for sale. So if you want your favorite MMO (or non MMO, if you’re into that sort of thing), you should be pitching your favorite developers to get off of their lazy backs and start pitching!
But for now, I’ve compiled a list of games that you can vote for on Greenlight.
For those of you who haven’t heard of Battleground Europe, it is widely regarded as the first MMOFPS in history, released in 2001 and is still running to this day. As someone who played Battleground Europe back when it was still just WWII Online, I have to say the quality of the title was unmatched, both in the implementation and the sheer force that the allies and axis threw upon one another in massive fields, towns, and cities, experiencing everything from raids to enormous bombing runs.
And as any MMO goes, Battleground Europe peaked, and began its dip into the game that exists today: A game that is even more barren and lifeless than its successor in the field, Planetside. I guess you could say the main difference between Planetside and Battleground Europe at the moment is that Planetside at least was successful enough to spawn a sequel.
But this article isn’t about making fun of Cornered Rat Software, or their near-comatose game. Unbeknownst to me, and 99% of the gaming community, the guys at CRS have been upping the funding lately, with the Builder’s Program (private investment) and through the increase in the base subscription price to $17.99 a month. Sure you can subscribe for three months and bring that price down, but we’re talking about the base entrance price for a monthly fee.
There is nothing to be worried about, like the game tanking, however. If the posts on the related threads are anything to go off of, Cornered Rats has quite a number of players willing to pay for subscriptions, often on multiple accounts, as a “donation,” despite not even playing the game. That must be nice for the folks at CRS, having people who expect literally nothing out of you, and are willing to pay you for just that. I also witnessed posters claiming that they hated the change in subscription, but would continue paying the price just to stop any snowballing of people leaving.
Whether or not World War II Online is a good shooter is irrelevant to the fact that not only will free trial players be walking into a dearth of population, but then they’ll be enticed with a cost higher than any triple-a MMO on the market. And the drones on the Battleground Europe forums can throw inflation and costs of development as much as they want. $15 is less funding than $17.99, but $0 and a disgruntled customer who isn’t coming back is far, far worse.
If you’re going to ask for higher prices, you’d better have something to offer that meets that increase. Games far more successful and independent companies far smaller than Cornered Rats have gone more years without raising their subscription price, or putting payment plans into effect with termination fees. So please, don’t try to play this off as a special case. It isn’t, and you aren’t.
MMO Fallout 