BioWare takes WAR servers from GOA

By Robert Purchese Published 7 July, 2010

European service temporarily suspended.

As of today, the newly named BioWare Mythic will assume full control of Warhammer Online in Europe.

The MMO has been operated here by GOA since launch in September 2008.

Accounts and game worlds are to migrate to BioWare Mythic servers. These are hosted in Germany and are to be available in German, French and English languages.

The migration has been scheduled for today and means servers going offline for 48 to 72 hours.

But, as compensation, all current and former European subscribers will be offered 14 days free game time when service resumes.

Newcomers will also be able to make use of the 'endless trial' that offers a small portion of the MMO for free with the option to pay and upgrade to the full game.

There's a FAQ on the Warhammer Online website that should cover most queries.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (18) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Koozer #1 2 years ago

    Wonderful, joyous news! GOA are bloody awful. Haven't played for months and this free 2 weeks will come in handy.

  • Kazzahdrane #2 2 years ago

    Remember when the open beta went live for WAR and GOA made a massive mess of it. Terrible terrible customer service and don't think it improved much through launch.

  • Hunam #3 2 years ago

    It's not GOA who are at fault with WAR, it's Mythic and EA who left the thing to die with minimal support and constant game breaking bugs being introduced in housekeeping patches.

  • Antsy #4 2 years ago

    Poor WAR. It just didn't know what kind of game it wanted to be. They gave it a split personality trying to balance battle and more open standard rpg elements and it never gelled properly. Shame because there are so many Warhammer/GW fans who just wanted to be able to explore the Warhammer world.

    While GOA aren't to blame for WAR's ongoing problems they did create an almighty balls-up with the open beta and first week or so of the game. They couldn't even produce a decent web-page!

  • Distributor #5 2 years ago

    No publisher serious about launching an MMO should resort to using an outside company to host their game.
    Seriously. What was EA thinking at the time?

  • sneetch #6 2 years ago

    2 weeks you say? I'll give it a shot again I think, I like some of the changes they made there.

    Edit: according to the Warhammer Online account pages my account has been reactivated from 7/1/10 to 7/23/10.
    Edited by sneetch at 07/07/10 @ 17:54

  • sarcasmoidosis #7 2 years ago

    As an ex-WAR European player (9 and 1/2 months) I can only say: Thank God! and It took you long enough!

    The game had deeper issues than GOA's incompetence, probably still has them today. But server crashes and rollbacks during city sieges really turned a lot of people away.

  • Orange #8 2 years ago

    GOA were hopeless, although sums up how incompetently the game was handled that they were even given the job in the first place.

  • Vyggo #9 2 years ago

    I played this game for a long while. While definately not perfect, it did a lot of things right in my opinion.
    It made pvp/rvr something that everyone participated in, not just hardcore players. The public group/warband thing, and public quests will hopefully be used for future games.

  • Eraysor #10 2 years ago

    That 14 day compensation is suspiciously generous...

  • Inigo #11 2 years ago

    I've been thinking about giving WAR a try for a while now. It's that or Lotr.

  • Kostabi #12 2 years ago

    "Seriously. What was EA thinking at the time?"

    I think Mythic had signed the GOA deal long before they were sucked up by EA if memory serves.

  • docgunz #13 2 years ago

    Umm the story is not quite right. A copy of all the data on the euro servers was made on the 29th June, and these have been used to create copy servers under the control of Mythic, which are now fully open to everyone. There was a period between 29th and yesterday where any progress would not be transferred, but its all go now.

  • HMAN #14 2 years ago

    What the guy above me said! Sums up EG's reporting, late and often llacking correct info...

  • thefold #15 2 years ago

    I bought this game day 1 and played it for a bit. Looking forward to giving it another go for 2 weeks, my old account lets me login on the website but the game client is having none of it.

  • levitate #16 2 years ago

    After the debacle with overcharging people's credit cards I'm not very happy giving my own cc info to them and resubscribe. I do however welcome 14 days of free gametime, but it'll be a miracle if it persuaded me to resub.

  • sneetch #17 2 years ago

    Debacle? It was a mistake that was sorted out in less than 2 days.

    Anyway, I can't log in using my username and password yet, I've read that the European accounts will be coming online over the course of the next 24 or so hours. So I'll try again when I get home.

  • HMAN #18 2 years ago

    @Thefold You need to add _eur to the end of your username when entering your login details to the client