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It seems the doomsday prophets who yelled that it was too much untested contest while banging the Drum of Doom was right. Read for yourselves.

Jon Wood reports that the game will be implementing Punkbuster and cutting four capital cities and four careers from the launch features of the game.

As Deekin would have said "doom doom doom doom!!!!"

Update.

Apparently, only the Empire capital Altdorf and the Chaos capital Inevitable City will be in the game at launch. While all this is a bit disappointing, there are still good things about the decision.
First of all, the cities will be very polished, or as Jacobs say "Not good, not great, but fabulous."
Second, all mistakes they make with the starting cities, as they see how they work out, won't have to be fixed in four other cities, hopefully meaning faster fixes of bigger issues.
And third, just having two capitals will give a single battlefront instead of three. Having three at the launch of the game would probably mean that each battlefront would be sparsly populated, or some more populated than others. And by having only one, all players on the server come together in the same fight instead of three different in the world, hopefully leading to a better community.

The four careers that will be left out at launch is

• Choppa (Greenskin)
• Hammerer (Dwarf)
• Blackguard (Dark Elf)
• Knight of the Blazing Sun (Empire)

Meaning two melee dps and two tanks. While all this have to do with polish and quality, I wonder about what impact the lack of two of the tanking careers will have on the game. Sure, WAR is mostly about PvP, but there is still a PvE aspect, and for that you will need tanks. Not having two of the six tank careers at launch means most of the subscribers from launch and probably a month forward will miss out on the chance of rolling one, probably picking another class as their main and won't switch back very soon. Time will tell.
Well, at least I didn't plan to play any of the classes seriously, but I feel for you guys who just had your main career removed. Ouch.

All of the changes are about quality and not announcing features on the box that isn't properly implemented, the very things I wrote about in the How AoC's failure can help WAR post I wrote about a day ago. It's nice to see that Mythic is firm in their decision to deliver a awesome game, from day one.

And to further hammer that point, we have the following quote.

"This has nothing to do with EA,” he said, pointing out that this was entirely a Mythic decision, and it isn’t a directive from the company which many MMO players feel has a dubious history in our genre. “they had zero input in this. This is not something we went to them with and said ‘hey guys, we need an extra few months…’ and they said ‘no, you must ship on this day’. They don’t even know about it. It’s not a discussion we would have with them."

Beautiful. There just might be hope in this world of evil mass producers after all.