From today’s European Warhammer Herald:
Today we announce that GOA will cease publishing, operating and subscription services for Warhammer® Online: Age of Reckoning® (WAR) in Europe and transition the operation of the game to Mythic Entertainment.
We have enjoyed a lot of great times with you. Over the past couple of years we have fostered a fantastically vibrant and active community; we saw the world’s first Tchar’Zanek and Karl Franz kills pre 1.3.5 and hosted undeniably some of the most professional guilds to ever play WAR.
Over the next few weeks we will be working very closely with the Mythic Team to ensure you all get settled as smoothly as possible. We wish to assure you that all characters, guilds and account information will be migrated to Mythic servers and will be available to present and past players.
We will share more information on next steps, together with a FAQ, in the coming days.
Few who played on the European servers for Warhammer or Dark Age of Camelot will miss GOA terribly much, although we did get to miss the multiple billing debacle that plagued Mythic customers a few months back.
If the GOA servers are moved to sit alongside the current Mythic ones, that does present additional future opportunities for server mergers, when necessary. That may be the driving force behind this move, though relations between Mythic and GOA have reportedly been strained for a while, with DaoC already having been repatriated to Mythic earlier this year.
I’m somewhat concerned as to what this might mean for the localised servers, as I think GOA was responsible for the translated builds. It is important that US MMO companies make sure that European players do not feel they are treated worse than US players, but with the modern internet it’s not really all that necessary to have the servers physically located in Europe. It was good of Mythic to at least try to give us equal service, by employing GOA, even if it did not always work out quite as well as hoped. Hopefully that positive attitude will continue as our servers and accounts are relocated.