Most of those server problems were not because of overcrowding, the servors were just bad. That's the reason why they started to virtually rebuild and upgrade everyone about 8 months later. Actually the reverse is true. One of the reasons for the initial server server crashes was because they literally had to double the number of servers overnight at launch to match demand. Anytime you have that many servers with little to no testing them in advance there are gonna be issues. And then when they started to upgrade the existing servers to allow more capacity, they in turn had issues related to the upgrades. Haven't heard anyone mention the Mage blink bug, blink and fall through the world and die. Happened often and was around for about 5 months. Major bug, a Mage had a choice, stand and die or blink and possibly die. I played a mage. Played a Mage from release and never once had this happen to me. I don't even remember it being talked about by anyone. Must have been very rare. Paladin reckoning bomb was a serious bug, ask any Horde who went up against a Pally. Also the Crusader seal bug, increased damage over time instead of diminishing returns. I played a Paladin. I remember it being a problem, but was not all that familiar with it since I played Alliance. If I recall correctly it was fixed fairly quickly. Warriors were so upset from the nerfs they got in the first few months making them easy targets that they staged a warrior event and crashed one of the servers. Class balance was a major issue. Warrior were indeed pretty unbalanced to begin with, but that's not really a bug, it's a balance issue that had to be worked out. If you are gonna call balance issues bugs then Warhammer was one of the buggiest games at release I've ever seen because the balance in that game was/is terrible. Balance issues take a while to be identified and corrected. That's normal. Actually for the first few days on Illidan about all that worked was fishing. If you say so. You could die and not rez at the spirit healer, had to reboot. Was very rare. Never happened to me. The ship would disappear in the middle of the voyage and you would drown. Was very rare. Never happened to me. Hunter pets were bugged, virtually useless. In what way? Never had a problem with my Hunter pet. Server rollbacks, servers down for days. Still happened years later on some servers. CTD's, disconnects were not uncommon Disconnects were pretty common, but not CTD. Only time I ever had problems with CTD's were right after patches from time to time. And for disconnects it was really hard to make the determination if the problem was on Blizzard's end or on your end. I get disconnected from a lot of online games on a fairly regular basis. I contribute that mostly to just general internet problems. Surely some of that was Blizzard's fault, but not all of it. World server crashes after every patch, unable to log in. Uusally took a couple of weeks to straighten them out. Seems like this just happened with the recent patch last month also. You are so exxagerating it's unbelievable. Every patch? I think not. Couple of weeks? Sorry, every once in a while they'd have to hotfix like a day later. Patch day just recently was pretty bad, but everything was pretty much back to normal by the next day. In my first half year of play I received close to 20 free days becuase of playability issues. Me too and I thought that was extremely generous of Blizzard. I probably missed no more than a day or 2 of play time total in that first 6 months. I could go on and on. Many of these were major issues. See line above on free days. Like I said, they were very generous. They gave everyone several days whenever there was a major issue even if it only effected a small percentage of the population. And you are talking about over the first 6 to 12 months of the game, not the launch which is the issue here. You are talking about bugs that have crept into the game over a 4 year period, not just the launch. If you played from launch and don't remember some of these, I don't know what to say to you. I played on 5 servers and these problems were present on all of them. I remember most of them and they were very rare in most cases. Only a few of them were repeatable types of things and were major problems and they were fixed quickly in most cases. LIke I have said before, the biggest bug I ran into was the mining node problem and yes it did take them a long time to figure that one out. That's one major problem that effected only 1 profession and only certain nodes that people learned to avoid. The only other thing that I really even remember causing me any frustration was the loot lag issue and it was more an annoyance than anything else. I don't even know if I would call that a bug, it just needed to be improved. Kinda like the mail issue that Warhammer had at launch. Wow's launch was not that pretty, but after time things got slowly better, not in the first month as some have indicated, but over time. It was not one of the better launches. Every game has issues at launch. That's not the issue. The issue is does it affect your enjoyment of the game and does it cause you to quit playing? Very few people quit playing WoW at launch because of the issues. In fact the game became a huge sensation and most people told their friends to go get the game. This is surprising for a game with so many issues according to you. Compare that to Vanguard and AoC. The problems those games had caused many people to quit playing. I played Wow for 3 and a half years, just got WOW'ed out. So obviously things weren't so bad that you quit.
Just because it didn't Hapen to you, does not make it Rare. People I played with or myself had the majority of those issues. they were wide spread. I'm glad you didn't have them.
I think his point is, There were major Issues and they worked through them and made a Great game. People don't give other games the same chance.
I've played the game non stop for 4 years. I was in the beta. I have played with hundreds if not thousands of people over that time. Many of them I have spoke at length with on Ventrilo. The issues that I said were rare were NEVER thought to be major by ANYONE that I have known. Most of them were well known because it happened to a few people here or there, maybe once or twice, but it was certainly not a big issue. There's a few people that have a cow anytime ANYTHING happens no matter how small or insignificant and blow it way out of proportion. Those issues that were brought up that I said were rare, fall into that category.
There were a few issues that effected everyone. Lag. A few bugs. CTD's on occasion. Disconnects. Balance issues. These things every single release has had to deal with and correct. They are normal for a release and every release has had them. Some not as bad as others, but all have been affected by them.
Then there are issues that effect only a very small percentage of the people. These are large games. There are literally billions of possible combinations, that in some instances things can go wrong. These are minor issues. Again, every release has this things.
The one big thing that WoW had to deal with that no other game has had to deal with since then is the amazing popularity. Blizzard was not prepared for it. Because of that issue, queues were a MAJOR problem for people and rightfully so. You couldn't log into the game and play it. When you did get into the game, there was a large amount of lag because of the high population on the server. This was a HUGE problem. However, there was a VERY simple way to fix the problem yourself. All you had to do was choose another server and the problem was solved. My guild did it. We simply decided to switch servers and we never saw another queue. End of the problem. MANY wouldn't do that. That's their choice and they waited a couple weeks for Blizzard to turn up a bunch of new servers to alleviate some of the overcrowding. That was their choice. They had an alternative which they did not want to take, so while I sympathize with those people, I also know that Blizzard did everything they could to rectify the problem as quickly as they could. Had Blizzard known they would have had record numbers of customers, perhaps they could have avoided the problem altogether, but NOBODY suspected that would happen....except maybe a few fanboys.
You have your opinion and your welcome to it. I have mine.
Here's a link back to November 2004. If these bugs were such a problem at release, then there should have been some comments in these forums about them. Please point them out, because I can't seem to find them.
Edit: Ok, one last note. Here is the link and contents of one poster that I found back in November of 2004. This seems to be a pretty honest post. I don't see a single mention of bugs. Not one. Amazing coming from a guy that's supposedly an EQ2 fanboy. There's even a few responses from a couple other who were playing EQ2 as well and they don't mention bugs either.
"I got this game, just to try it out and all. Wasn't very sure, but i had $50 i really couldn't find something to buy with, so i took a trip to best buy. Picked up a copy, got pissed off that it required a credit-card, but got over that and got playing a day after i bought the game.
So i create an undead warlock on a pvp server, run around, not really knowing what to do since it just drops you in the game with little "tips" that don't even coincide with what you are doing. But i've played my share of mmorpgs and its gerneraly the accepted controls. (except for chat, i found that odd........really odd) As i was saying, i kill some stuff, get to lvl 4 really quickly. Run past everything important and head to the undercity. Pretty nice, actually.......amazingly nice. (no Freeport mind you.......hey, i'm still an Eq2 fanboy) At that point i relized i skipped over way too much and i delted that character, only to remake him just a day ago or so. After i deleted him, i created a Dwarf, Hunter. Pretty sweet, got a nice rifle, (after a quest) and about 1000 bullets.......... Did some quests, got to lvl 6 or so, mabye lvl 7. Headed to Ironforge. Really nice city.......although the lava doesn't kill you. Took the deeprun tram to Stormwind, and took a griffon back. (sorta fun) But yeah, i then killed some till i got to lvl 10, got my little pet, some ice claw bear or something. And joined a guild. It was fun, but to me, its no Eq2. (as i said, i'm a fanboy, and just because i like this game, won't make me hate Eq2) The hunter is currently a lvl 10, and i'm working on lvling him as quickly as possible.
I really like the pvp, all except for the part about you can't attack them in their territory until they attack first...........didn't get that very much, but okay, there are enough contested areas. It was rather enjoyable when the first horde army was spotted somewhere to the east of the ironforge. And yesterday as i logged off, a 30 people or more horde army had attacked the Westfall, and i heard (not sure if its true), that they had besiged a town there.
So in all, i found this game to be much better than i had expected. Although i still find Eq2 more enjoyable, i will look also to WoW now for fun and thrill........and army-style pvp. (not that i'm a complete nut on pvp)
I'm not telling any of you my server name, or characters' names, as i know most of you will just flame me without end.
The only problem i could openly see is the massive amounts of lag (almost made me ripe out my hair cuase it killed me once.......stuipd frostmane troll); and the communty. OMG was it crazy. I went into Elywn forest and the only thing on general chat was Eq2 sucks so much!!!; WoW rulez; ect. Noteably they were saying this when there were massive lag spikes (server lag, not system lag), that were cuasing 2-5 min. of delay. (combat, talking; anyone who was in Eq2 beta and went to antonica before they fixed it.......its like that, only i found it a bit more worse ) But overall, when there isn't server lag (i'll accept it now, since it is just release), i don't have any lag, and i'm running it at near max settings."
Originally posted by Giddian I think his point is, There were major Issues and they worked through them and made a Great game. People don't give other games the same chance.
First, I'll agree that WoW's launch could've been better. Not so much on the number of bugs, but that Blizzard should've planned better for the number of players.
To your point here though, Imo this is a good thing. The old paradigm of giving an MMO a chance to mature is done, and rightfully so. As a community we've been expected to pay (key phrase there) for unfinished products. In some cases (cough AoC), completely borked products lol. If you're going to ask me to pay not only an initial box cost, but $15 per month, in the least give me a finished product.
Who cares how complex MMOs are or how much they cost; if you can't release a finished product then don't release it at all. Thanks to Blizzard the 'HMS Potential' set sail long ago.
And, for the love of all that's good in the Universe ... please studios what's made WoW such a success is it's quality, not that it's another fantasy themepark with epic loots.
Ico Oh, cruel fate, to be thusly boned. Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee.
I keep seeing people finding excuse for games lacking content and overall polish by saying that , at release, WoW was filled with bugs and lacking content and game mechanisms. Is it ouf of spite for the game? I was there at WoW release, and aside from server lag, there was no glaring bugs, lots of quests, most dungeons were in, and by the time people reached 50 they released maraudon, scholomance, stratholme, and molten core Not once in the lvling process did i feel the game lacked anything, nor did i experience ugly things such as CTD or abilities not working properly. In fact everything was pretty smooth. So, why the hate?
You had two different experiences at launch. Some servers exploded in terms of population. These servers became unplayable. Nearly all of the bugs (yes, the loot bugs too) were due to server overload. So yeah, it was a shitty experience for these players.
On the servers which held at low-medium pop (which was about 1/2), you had players who experienced next to no lag, very few rollbacks if any, and a smooth experience in general.
This is where you get the two vastly different stories, one of a bug-ridden WoW and the other of the perfect launch.
I keep seeing people finding excuse for games lacking content and overall polish by saying that , at release, WoW was filled with bugs and lacking content and game mechanisms. Is it ouf of spite for the game? I was there at WoW release, and aside from server lag, there was no glaring bugs, lots of quests, most dungeons were in, and by the time people reached 50 they released maraudon, scholomance, stratholme, and molten core Not once in the lvling process did i feel the game lacked anything, nor did i experience ugly things such as CTD or abilities not working properly. In fact everything was pretty smooth. So, why the hate?
You had two different experiences at launch. Some servers exploded in terms of population. These servers became unplayable. Nearly all of the bugs (yes, the loot bugs too) were due to server overload. So yeah, it was a shitty experience for these players.
On the servers which held at low-medium pop (which was about 1/2), you had players who experienced next to no lag, very few rollbacks if any, and a smooth experience in general.
This is where you get the two vastly different stories, one of a bug-ridden WoW and the other of the perfect launch.
I'll buy this explanation for the most part. I don't think that accounts for what everyone has said, but in general, yes the servers that were full were a problem while the servers that were not full were not. I switched servers early on because of queues. Once I did, I had very few problems and everyone on my server had very few problems.
I'll buy this explanation for the most part. I don't think that accounts for what everyone has said, but in general, yes the servers that were full were a problem while the servers that were not full were not. I switched servers early on because of queues. Once I did, I had very few problems and everyone on my server had very few problems.
It does, pretty much. I'll give you two examples of polar opposites.
Illidan
vs
Draenor
If you played on Draenor, you probably experienced _very rare_ problems during the launch. Maybe one or two rollbacks of a few hours after a server crash, out of the first three months of play. You would get stuck in a queue maybe once or twice. No fewer than a half-dozen times in the first three months, and even this is a stretch. The loot bugs (caused by overcrowding in specific areas) were extremely rare. You might encounter it in the starting zone for your race, if you played Human or NE, but outside of that, no. World downs were essentially non-existent. If you only played back then, you might not even know what a world server down was.
Illidan _today_ is fucked because of overcrowding. It has recently (after 3.0 hit and for a few weeks after) been completely unplayable. At launch, it was immeasurably worse. _frequent_ world server downs. If you happened to log off in the wrong one out of EK or Kalimdor, sorry, you're screwed. Constant realm crashes. Frequent rollbacks as a result. You can forget even going through the main cities at peak times, literally. Thirty minutes to conduct what should be 5-10 minutes of AH business.
The experiences would have been night and day back then.
In fact, I'm pretty certain I could make a list of launch servers, and I could tell you which group the people who liked the WoW launch were on and which group the people who hated it were on.
I'll buy this explanation for the most part. I don't think that accounts for what everyone has said, but in general, yes the servers that were full were a problem while the servers that were not full were not. I switched servers early on because of queues. Once I did, I had very few problems and everyone on my server had very few problems.
It does, pretty much. I'll give you two examples of polar opposites.
Illidan
vs
Draenor
If you played on Draenor, you probably experienced _very rare_ problems during the launch. Maybe one or two rollbacks of a few hours after a server crash, out of the first three months of play. You would get stuck in a queue maybe once or twice. No fewer than a half-dozen times in the first three months, and even this is a stretch. The loot bugs (caused by overcrowding in specific areas) were extremely rare. You might encounter it in the starting zone for your race, if you played Human or NE, but outside of that, no. World downs were essentially non-existent. If you only played back then, you might not even know what a world server down was.
Illidan _today_ is fucked because of overcrowding. It has recently (after 3.0 hit and for a few weeks after) been completely unplayable. At launch, it was immeasurably worse. _frequent_ world server downs. If you happened to log off in the wrong one out of EK or Kalimdor, sorry, you're screwed. Constant realm crashes. Frequent rollbacks as a result. You can forget even going through the main cities at peak times, literally. Thirty minutes to conduct what should be 5-10 minutes of AH business.
The experiences would have been night and day back then.
In fact, I'm pretty certain I could make a list of launch servers, and I could tell you which group the people who liked the WoW launch were on and which group the people who hated it were on.
Another thing that contributed was that servers were initially indicated with a time zone. A lot of folks assumed that you had to pick a server that was in your time zone or you would have horrible lag. That wasn't the case at all. In fact picking a low or medium pop server even if it was in another time zone was better than picking a high pop server in your own time zone. When my guild was switching servers, everyone wanted one that was in our time zone, but there were few low or medium pop servers in that time zone and they were growing quickly. I instead insisted upon one that was in a different time zone which had a fairly stable medium population because I had read a post from Blizzard stating this was a better choice. There was very little lag and to this day the server remains a medium pop server. Later on Blizzard removed the time zone indicator for servers for just this reason. People only wanted to play on servers in their time zone and naturally the east and west coast servers were more crowded then the ones in the other time zones. I can even remember many angry posts on the forums when they removed the time zone indicator because people then insisted they would have lag if they chose a server outside their time zone. Just another example of how people make something out of nothing and how they refuse to listen to the game developer because of pre conceived notions.
Most of those server problems were not because of overcrowding, the servors were just bad. That's the reason why they started to virtually rebuild and upgrade everyone about 8 months later. Actually the reverse is true. One of the reasons for the initial server server crashes was because they literally had to double the number of servers overnight at launch to match demand. Anytime you have that many servers with little to no testing them in advance there are gonna be issues. And then when they started to upgrade the existing servers to allow more capacity, they in turn had issues related to the upgrades. Haven't heard anyone mention the Mage blink bug, blink and fall through the world and die. Happened often and was around for about 5 months. Major bug, a Mage had a choice, stand and die or blink and possibly die. I played a mage. Played a Mage from release and never once had this happen to me. I don't even remember it being talked about by anyone. Must have been very rare. Paladin reckoning bomb was a serious bug, ask any Horde who went up against a Pally. Also the Crusader seal bug, increased damage over time instead of diminishing returns. I played a Paladin. I remember it being a problem, but was not all that familiar with it since I played Alliance. If I recall correctly it was fixed fairly quickly. Warriors were so upset from the nerfs they got in the first few months making them easy targets that they staged a warrior event and crashed one of the servers. Class balance was a major issue. Warrior were indeed pretty unbalanced to begin with, but that's not really a bug, it's a balance issue that had to be worked out. If you are gonna call balance issues bugs then Warhammer was one of the buggiest games at release I've ever seen because the balance in that game was/is terrible. Balance issues take a while to be identified and corrected. That's normal. Actually for the first few days on Illidan about all that worked was fishing. If you say so. You could die and not rez at the spirit healer, had to reboot. Was very rare. Never happened to me. The ship would disappear in the middle of the voyage and you would drown. Was very rare. Never happened to me. Hunter pets were bugged, virtually useless. In what way? Never had a problem with my Hunter pet. Server rollbacks, servers down for days. Still happened years later on some servers. CTD's, disconnects were not uncommon Disconnects were pretty common, but not CTD. Only time I ever had problems with CTD's were right after patches from time to time. And for disconnects it was really hard to make the determination if the problem was on Blizzard's end or on your end. I get disconnected from a lot of online games on a fairly regular basis. I contribute that mostly to just general internet problems. Surely some of that was Blizzard's fault, but not all of it. World server crashes after every patch, unable to log in. Uusally took a couple of weeks to straighten them out. Seems like this just happened with the recent patch last month also. You are so exxagerating it's unbelievable. Every patch? I think not. Couple of weeks? Sorry, every once in a while they'd have to hotfix like a day later. Patch day just recently was pretty bad, but everything was pretty much back to normal by the next day. In my first half year of play I received close to 20 free days becuase of playability issues. Me too and I thought that was extremely generous of Blizzard. I probably missed no more than a day or 2 of play time total in that first 6 months. I could go on and on. Many of these were major issues. See line above on free days. Like I said, they were very generous. They gave everyone several days whenever there was a major issue even if it only effected a small percentage of the population. And you are talking about over the first 6 to 12 months of the game, not the launch which is the issue here. You are talking about bugs that have crept into the game over a 4 year period, not just the launch. If you played from launch and don't remember some of these, I don't know what to say to you. I played on 5 servers and these problems were present on all of them. I remember most of them and they were very rare in most cases. Only a few of them were repeatable types of things and were major problems and they were fixed quickly in most cases. LIke I have said before, the biggest bug I ran into was the mining node problem and yes it did take them a long time to figure that one out. That's one major problem that effected only 1 profession and only certain nodes that people learned to avoid. The only other thing that I really even remember causing me any frustration was the loot lag issue and it was more an annoyance than anything else. I don't even know if I would call that a bug, it just needed to be improved. Kinda like the mail issue that Warhammer had at launch. Wow's launch was not that pretty, but after time things got slowly better, not in the first month as some have indicated, but over time. It was not one of the better launches. Every game has issues at launch. That's not the issue. The issue is does it affect your enjoyment of the game and does it cause you to quit playing? Very few people quit playing WoW at launch because of the issues. In fact the game became a huge sensation and most people told their friends to go get the game. This is surprising for a game with so many issues according to you. Compare that to Vanguard and AoC. The problems those games had caused many people to quit playing. I played Wow for 3 and a half years, just got WOW'ed out. So obviously things weren't so bad that you quit.
So obviously you really didn't understand my post or read some things through.
I liked, enjoyed playing WOW, hence the 3 plus years. I played beta also. The problems were frustrating and many did quit the game, but many more came behind them, the Warcraft series brought in a lot of players. Sometimes you have to wonder where WOW would be if 1,2 and 3 hadn't preceeded it. It wasn't till May/June of 2005 that it finally crossed the 1 million threshold in North America. About six months in.
WOW certainly had its issues and still has some. The world server problems at patch times. I am sorry to say it took longer than 1 day to fix them as it did in this last patch, I still read the WOW forums, and the issues sometimes did go on for two weeks before they were ironed out completly, not every patch but more than they should have.
As far as rare bugs/problems, all I can say is that you must have led a charmed life and I would like to get hold of your lottery numbers. These issues happened often not rarely. You may not find complaints about all the problems on the WOW forums, they have a tendency like all games to delete threads about problems. "Working as intended", was the WOW phrase, then they would quietly try to fix the problem.
The servers were not that good. Blizzard lowered the caps on the servers that were having problems (all of them?) at launch which actually started some of the queues. And after the lowered caps these issues really did not get better. It even took months to properly sync the combat animations, no sorry, it wasn't lag, client server issues
By the way I never said the warrior issue was a bug, I said it was a balance issue.
I know I seem to be bashing the game, but these are not imagined problems, and they were bigger than your efforts to make light of them. It was not all pie in the sky, but they worked on them and made it a stable game. Not in a couple of days or weeks, but in months.
Be careful how you try to belittle these issues whether they be major or small, you tend to discredit yourself with the overkill of your defense.
I keep seeing people finding excuse for games lacking content and overall polish by saying that , at release, WoW was filled with bugs and lacking content and game mechanisms. Is it ouf of spite for the game? I was there at WoW release, and aside from server lag, there was no glaring bugs, lots of quests, most dungeons were in, and by the time people reached 50 they released maraudon, scholomance, stratholme, and molten core Not once in the lvling process did i feel the game lacked anything, nor did i experience ugly things such as CTD or abilities not working properly. In fact everything was pretty smooth. So, why the hate?
So obviously you really didn't understand my post or read some things through. No I understood it just fine. I know I seem to be bashing the game, but these are not imagined problems, and they were bigger than your efforts to make light of them. I didn't say you imagined them, just that they were minor issues. It was not all pie in the sky... No it wasn't. I never said it was pie in the sky. I said it wasn't as bad as people have tried to make it out. Go back and read the forums from around 11/24/2004 from this site. I gave you a link a couple posts up. Please show me all the doom and gloom forum posts. There are very few. Even posts from people who were EQ2 fans were saying that it was better than they expected. I'm not making this up. Go and read the forums and show me the posts that talk of all these bugs. Most of the bugs were not brought up until weeks if not months after launch because they were small issues that took a while to find. The major issues at launch were server stability, lag and queues. Now, those are pretty major problems, but they were directly related to the overwhelming popularity of the game and full servers, not because the game was fatally flawed at release. Be careful how you try to belittle these issues whether they be major or small, you tend to discredit yourself with the overkill of your defense. But whether they be major or small IS the whole issue. We agree to disagree.
So obviously you really didn't understand my post or read some things through. No I understood it just fine. I know I seem to be bashing the game, but these are not imagined problems, and they were bigger than your efforts to make light of them. I didn't say you imagined them, just that they were minor issues. It was not all pie in the sky... No it wasn't. I never said it was pie in the sky. I said it wasn't as bad as people have tried to make it out. Go back and read the forums from around 11/24/2004 from this site. I gave you a link a couple posts up. Please show me all the doom and gloom forum posts. There are very few. Even posts from people who were EQ2 fans were saying that it was better than they expected. I'm not making this up. Go and read the forums and show me the posts that talk of all these bugs. Most of the bugs were not brought up until weeks if not months after launch because they were small issues that took a while to find. The major issues at launch were server stability and queues. Now, those are pretty major problems, but they were directly related to the overwhelming popularity of the game and full servers, not because the game was fatally flawed at release. Be careful how you try to belittle these issues whether they be major or small, you tend to discredit yourself with the overkill of your defense. But whether they be major or small IS the whole issue. We agree to disagree.
Ive played almost every major MMO to date and if anyone thinks server lag or loot lag means a bad launch hasnt played very many MMOs. Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, Everquest, WW2 Online, etc. were almost impossible to play. Star Wars Galaxies was completly lacking everything for years.
When I played WoW I didnt notice any bugs only some loot and server lag which was understandable considering the biggest MMO before WoW was Everquest at 500k people. They didnt expect the players they got. Quests, professions, abilities, etc. all worked perfectly for me.
1. I remember, because of lag, I could not play for 2 weeks. I was not compensated for this as well.
2. I was sitting in the queues of 500-800 people for 1-2 weeks minimum. Can't remember how long but it was long enough to get me frustrated. It was not like 2-3 days of WAR.
3. There were stupid bugs everywhere, like the loot bug. Some of my spells/abilities were totally bugged.
4. Blizz did not expect to see such a rush to their games. There were too few servers at start. They could simply not estimate the potential number of players.
So yeah... even AoC's release was much better compared to WoW's.
----------------------------- Osbourne Cox: You are the guy from the gym.
Ted Treffon: I don't represent Hardbodies.
Osbourne Cox: I know very well what you represent. You represent the idiocy of today.
Ted Treffon: No, I don't represent that either.
Osbourne Cox: You are part of a league of morons. Oh, yes. You see you're one of the morons I've been fighting my whole life. But guess what. Today, I win.
1. I remember, because of lag, I could not play for 2 weeks. I was not compensated for this as well. 2. I was sitting in the queues of 500-800 people for 1-2 weeks minimum. Can't remember how long but it was long enough to get me frustrated. It was not like 2-3 days of WAR. 3. There were stupid bugs everywhere, like the loot bug. Some of my spells/abilities were totally bugged. 4. Blizz did not expect to see such a rush to their games. There were too few servers at start. They could simply not estimate the potential number of players. So yeah... even AoC's release was much better compared to WoW's.
.....BUT, with all that happening, you always had the feeling that the Blizz Devs were working hard to make the game better and to stabilize the situation.....
WoW was not a smooth launch. Anyone saying that is simply looking at things through Rose-Colored glasses. BUT Blizzard, .... ...., always gave me, as a player, the feeling that they were working on improving things and never left you feeling like the Dev's did not care.
I keep seeing people finding excuse for games lacking content and overall polish by saying that , at release, WoW was filled with bugs and lacking content and game mechanisms. Is it ouf of spite for the game? I was there at WoW release, and aside from server lag, there was no glaring bugs, lots of quests, most dungeons were in, and by the time people reached 50 they released maraudon, scholomance, stratholme, and molten core Not once in the lvling process did i feel the game lacked anything, nor did i experience ugly things such as CTD or abilities not working properly. In fact everything was pretty smooth. So, why the hate?
so you dont remember when you got on a boat and zoned it would then vanish and you would drown in the water? that bug was around nearly 6 months after release..wow had a ton of bugs.
Originally posted by wb3380 WoW was buggy at the beginning, you've either forgotten the worst of it or you weren't in the US launch. The EU launch was months after the American one so, by that time, the worst of the bugs had been ironed out and the European players had few serious problems to contend with. Also bear in mind that you may have just been lucky regarding ctds. As an example I hardly ever crashed playing Vanguard and yet I know others could barely play without major issues
Yes it was. Played with several friends and there were many bugs, crashes to desktop, loot bugs, mob freezing, timesinks, etc. The game was still good, but you can't say there weren't ANY bugs at release, that's just wrong.
I think you've probably quoted the wrong person but just to clarify; I'm not saying it was bug free. I simply stated that the EU launch was a lot smoother than the US one, and had fewer bugs. I was on EU Dragonmaw from the start and didn't have any serious problems. Despite the bugs, WoW was a much more enjoyable game back then
the EU launch was more stable than the US launch because it was launched in february 2005 and the US launch was november 2004. Some people just dont know.
I keep seeing people finding excuse for games lacking content and overall polish by saying that , at release, WoW was filled with bugs and lacking content and game mechanisms. Is it ouf of spite for the game? I was there at WoW release, and aside from server lag, there was no glaring bugs, lots of quests, most dungeons were in, and by the time people reached 50 they released maraudon, scholomance, stratholme, and molten core Not once in the lvling process did i feel the game lacked anything, nor did i experience ugly things such as CTD or abilities not working properly. In fact everything was pretty smooth. So, why the hate?
I didn't play WoW until January 5th of 2005. I reached level 60 by the end of March of 05. I'll be the first to admit the game was alot of FUN leveling up. It had everything I loved in an MMO, great backstory, enticing and FUN classes, some very cool dungeons, and PvP. Now, my biggest gripe with WoW was the lack of end game content. After running Strait, Scho, BRD, UBRS, LBRS a hundred times, the game kinda got boring.. MC and Onyxia was the only 40 man raid dungeon and after doing Rag/Onyxia so many times, alot of ppl quit. It wasn't until May/June that DM went live. And in August BWL finally went live. But I was already so burned out, I didn't feel motivated to play the game anymore until the first expansion was released. But in a couple months of playing TBC and getting my toon to 70, I quit yet again. Which brings me to my point. Blizzard waited to long to release new end game content. The leveling process was to easy and by the time you got to the end, you found yourself doing the same 3-4 dungeons over and over because there was nothing else left to do. So in other words, WoW barely had any challenging end game content in the beginning. But it is usually like that with most MMO's. One literally has to wait until after the first expansion to be spoiled with content to last a while.
Rallithon Oakthornn (Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
Most of those server problems were not because of overcrowding, the servors were just bad. That's the reason why they started to virtually rebuild and upgrade everyone about 8 months later. Actually the reverse is true. One of the reasons for the initial server server crashes was because they literally had to double the number of servers overnight at launch to match demand. Anytime you have that many servers with little to no testing them in advance there are gonna be issues. And then when they started to upgrade the existing servers to allow more capacity, they in turn had issues related to the upgrades. Haven't heard anyone mention the Mage blink bug, blink and fall through the world and die. Happened often and was around for about 5 months. Major bug, a Mage had a choice, stand and die or blink and possibly die. I played a mage. Played a Mage from release and never once had this happen to me. I don't even remember it being talked about by anyone. Must have been very rare. Paladin reckoning bomb was a serious bug, ask any Horde who went up against a Pally. Also the Crusader seal bug, increased damage over time instead of diminishing returns. I played a Paladin. I remember it being a problem, but was not all that familiar with it since I played Alliance. If I recall correctly it was fixed fairly quickly. Warriors were so upset from the nerfs they got in the first few months making them easy targets that they staged a warrior event and crashed one of the servers. Class balance was a major issue. Warrior were indeed pretty unbalanced to begin with, but that's not really a bug, it's a balance issue that had to be worked out. If you are gonna call balance issues bugs then Warhammer was one of the buggiest games at release I've ever seen because the balance in that game was/is terrible. Balance issues take a while to be identified and corrected. That's normal. Actually for the first few days on Illidan about all that worked was fishing. If you say so. You could die and not rez at the spirit healer, had to reboot. Was very rare. Never happened to me. The ship would disappear in the middle of the voyage and you would drown. Was very rare. Never happened to me. Hunter pets were bugged, virtually useless. In what way? Never had a problem with my Hunter pet. Server rollbacks, servers down for days. Still happened years later on some servers. CTD's, disconnects were not uncommon Disconnects were pretty common, but not CTD. Only time I ever had problems with CTD's were right after patches from time to time. And for disconnects it was really hard to make the determination if the problem was on Blizzard's end or on your end. I get disconnected from a lot of online games on a fairly regular basis. I contribute that mostly to just general internet problems. Surely some of that was Blizzard's fault, but not all of it. World server crashes after every patch, unable to log in. Uusally took a couple of weeks to straighten them out. Seems like this just happened with the recent patch last month also. You are so exxagerating it's unbelievable. Every patch? I think not. Couple of weeks? Sorry, every once in a while they'd have to hotfix like a day later. Patch day just recently was pretty bad, but everything was pretty much back to normal by the next day. In my first half year of play I received close to 20 free days becuase of playability issues. Me too and I thought that was extremely generous of Blizzard. I probably missed no more than a day or 2 of play time total in that first 6 months. I could go on and on. Many of these were major issues. See line above on free days. Like I said, they were very generous. They gave everyone several days whenever there was a major issue even if it only effected a small percentage of the population. And you are talking about over the first 6 to 12 months of the game, not the launch which is the issue here. You are talking about bugs that have crept into the game over a 4 year period, not just the launch. If you played from launch and don't remember some of these, I don't know what to say to you. I played on 5 servers and these problems were present on all of them. I remember most of them and they were very rare in most cases. Only a few of them were repeatable types of things and were major problems and they were fixed quickly in most cases. LIke I have said before, the biggest bug I ran into was the mining node problem and yes it did take them a long time to figure that one out. That's one major problem that effected only 1 profession and only certain nodes that people learned to avoid. The only other thing that I really even remember causing me any frustration was the loot lag issue and it was more an annoyance than anything else. I don't even know if I would call that a bug, it just needed to be improved. Kinda like the mail issue that Warhammer had at launch. Wow's launch was not that pretty, but after time things got slowly better, not in the first month as some have indicated, but over time. It was not one of the better launches. Every game has issues at launch. That's not the issue. The issue is does it affect your enjoyment of the game and does it cause you to quit playing? Very few people quit playing WoW at launch because of the issues. In fact the game became a huge sensation and most people told their friends to go get the game. This is surprising for a game with so many issues according to you. Compare that to Vanguard and AoC. The problems those games had caused many people to quit playing. I played Wow for 3 and a half years, just got WOW'ed out. So obviously things weren't so bad that you quit.
Just because it didn't Hapen to you, does not make it Rare. People I played with or myself had the majority of those issues. they were wide spread. I'm glad you didn't have them.
I think his point is, There were major Issues and they worked through them and made a Great game. People don't give other games the same chance.
Why should people give other games a chance. Take a hike if you even try to say fairness.
I keep seeing people finding excuse for games lacking content and overall polish by saying that , at release, WoW was filled with bugs and lacking content and game mechanisms. Is it ouf of spite for the game? I was there at WoW release, and aside from server lag, there was no glaring bugs, lots of quests, most dungeons were in, and by the time people reached 50 they released maraudon, scholomance, stratholme, and molten core Not once in the lvling process did i feel the game lacked anything, nor did i experience ugly things such as CTD or abilities not working properly. In fact everything was pretty smooth. So, why the hate?
I think people just don't take everything into account when they talk about a games release and that is why they just don't understand the success of WoWs launch despite the debate over its technical issues.
Did WoW have lag, was it wildly over populated which made those issues worse, had some nasty bugs, etc. Yes it did, just like many other MMO that releases.
However if the game was so broken as people are trying to make out here, then why were people waiting in lines to get in? Why did the game completely sell out? Why did the game continue to grow week after week? Even if the game was this horrible nightmare of unplayable broken code, why did the game keep people coming back?
Most won't admit it, but the gameplay was finished, it was fun, it was fresh and it had an impact. Think about that for a moment, people sat at their computers staring at a login screen for hours just for the chance to play.
It doesn't matter how well a game runs if the actual play is boring and uninspiring. People have proven they are willing to play through technical issues if the game play is worthwhile. Even sticking around in games that have potential (tm) to become great games for longer than those games deservered.
With the exception of people who are just desperate for a new MMO, those times are dead and gone. A game can run like a wild mustang, but if the gameplay sucks people are just going to leave as can be witnessed by several high profile letdowns.
Comments
Just because it didn't Hapen to you, does not make it Rare. People I played with or myself had the majority of those issues. they were wide spread. I'm glad you didn't have them.
I think his point is, There were major Issues and they worked through them and made a Great game. People don't give other games the same chance.
I've played the game non stop for 4 years. I was in the beta. I have played with hundreds if not thousands of people over that time. Many of them I have spoke at length with on Ventrilo. The issues that I said were rare were NEVER thought to be major by ANYONE that I have known. Most of them were well known because it happened to a few people here or there, maybe once or twice, but it was certainly not a big issue. There's a few people that have a cow anytime ANYTHING happens no matter how small or insignificant and blow it way out of proportion. Those issues that were brought up that I said were rare, fall into that category.
There were a few issues that effected everyone. Lag. A few bugs. CTD's on occasion. Disconnects. Balance issues. These things every single release has had to deal with and correct. They are normal for a release and every release has had them. Some not as bad as others, but all have been affected by them.
Then there are issues that effect only a very small percentage of the people. These are large games. There are literally billions of possible combinations, that in some instances things can go wrong. These are minor issues. Again, every release has this things.
The one big thing that WoW had to deal with that no other game has had to deal with since then is the amazing popularity. Blizzard was not prepared for it. Because of that issue, queues were a MAJOR problem for people and rightfully so. You couldn't log into the game and play it. When you did get into the game, there was a large amount of lag because of the high population on the server. This was a HUGE problem. However, there was a VERY simple way to fix the problem yourself. All you had to do was choose another server and the problem was solved. My guild did it. We simply decided to switch servers and we never saw another queue. End of the problem. MANY wouldn't do that. That's their choice and they waited a couple weeks for Blizzard to turn up a bunch of new servers to alleviate some of the overcrowding. That was their choice. They had an alternative which they did not want to take, so while I sympathize with those people, I also know that Blizzard did everything they could to rectify the problem as quickly as they could. Had Blizzard known they would have had record numbers of customers, perhaps they could have avoided the problem altogether, but NOBODY suspected that would happen....except maybe a few fanboys.
You have your opinion and your welcome to it. I have mine.
Here's a link back to November 2004. If these bugs were such a problem at release, then there should have been some comments in these forums about them. Please point them out, because I can't seem to find them.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/forum/432/page/406
Edit: Ok, one last note. Here is the link and contents of one poster that I found back in November of 2004. This seems to be a pretty honest post. I don't see a single mention of bugs. Not one. Amazing coming from a guy that's supposedly an EQ2 fanboy. There's even a few responses from a couple other who were playing EQ2 as well and they don't mention bugs either.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/28598
"I got this game, just to try it out and all. Wasn't very sure, but i had $50 i really couldn't find something to buy with, so i took a trip to best buy. Picked up a copy, got pissed off that it required a credit-card, but got over that and got playing a day after i bought the game.
So i create an undead warlock on a pvp server, run around, not really knowing what to do since it just drops you in the game with little "tips" that don't even coincide with what you are doing. But i've played my share of mmorpgs and its gerneraly the accepted controls. (except for chat, i found that odd........really odd) As i was saying, i kill some stuff, get to lvl 4 really quickly. Run past everything important and head to the undercity. Pretty nice, actually.......amazingly nice. (no Freeport mind you.......hey, i'm still an Eq2 fanboy) At that point i relized i skipped over way too much and i delted that character, only to remake him just a day ago or so. After i deleted him, i created a Dwarf, Hunter. Pretty sweet, got a nice rifle, (after a quest) and about 1000 bullets.......... Did some quests, got to lvl 6 or so, mabye lvl 7. Headed to Ironforge. Really nice city.......although the lava doesn't kill you. Took the deeprun tram to Stormwind, and took a griffon back. (sorta fun) But yeah, i then killed some till i got to lvl 10, got my little pet, some ice claw bear or something. And joined a guild. It was fun, but to me, its no Eq2. (as i said, i'm a fanboy, and just because i like this game, won't make me hate Eq2) The hunter is currently a lvl 10, and i'm working on lvling him as quickly as possible.
I really like the pvp, all except for the part about you can't attack them in their territory until they attack first...........didn't get that very much, but okay, there are enough contested areas. It was rather enjoyable when the first horde army was spotted somewhere to the east of the ironforge. And yesterday as i logged off, a 30 people or more horde army had attacked the Westfall, and i heard (not sure if its true), that they had besiged a town there.
So in all, i found this game to be much better than i had expected. Although i still find Eq2 more enjoyable, i will look also to WoW now for fun and thrill........and army-style pvp. (not that i'm a complete nut on pvp)
I'm not telling any of you my server name, or characters' names, as i know most of you will just flame me without end.
The only problem i could openly see is the massive amounts of lag (almost made me ripe out my hair cuase it killed me once.......stuipd frostmane troll); and the communty. OMG was it crazy. I went into Elywn forest and the only thing on general chat was Eq2 sucks so much!!!; WoW rulez; ect. Noteably they were saying this when there were massive lag spikes (server lag, not system lag), that were cuasing 2-5 min. of delay. (combat, talking; anyone who was in Eq2 beta and went to antonica before they fixed it.......its like that, only i found it a bit more worse ) But overall, when there isn't server lag (i'll accept it now, since it is just release), i don't have any lag, and i'm running it at near max settings."
First, I'll agree that WoW's launch could've been better. Not so much on the number of bugs, but that Blizzard should've planned better for the number of players.
To your point here though, Imo this is a good thing. The old paradigm of giving an MMO a chance to mature is done, and rightfully so. As a community we've been expected to pay (key phrase there) for unfinished products. In some cases (cough AoC), completely borked products lol. If you're going to ask me to pay not only an initial box cost, but $15 per month, in the least give me a finished product.
Who cares how complex MMOs are or how much they cost; if you can't release a finished product then don't release it at all. Thanks to Blizzard the 'HMS Potential' set sail long ago.
And, for the love of all that's good in the Universe ... please studios what's made WoW such a success is it's quality, not that it's another fantasy themepark with epic loots.
Ico
Oh, cruel fate, to be thusly boned. Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee.
You had two different experiences at launch. Some servers exploded in terms of population. These servers became unplayable. Nearly all of the bugs (yes, the loot bugs too) were due to server overload. So yeah, it was a shitty experience for these players.
On the servers which held at low-medium pop (which was about 1/2), you had players who experienced next to no lag, very few rollbacks if any, and a smooth experience in general.
This is where you get the two vastly different stories, one of a bug-ridden WoW and the other of the perfect launch.
You had two different experiences at launch. Some servers exploded in terms of population. These servers became unplayable. Nearly all of the bugs (yes, the loot bugs too) were due to server overload. So yeah, it was a shitty experience for these players.
On the servers which held at low-medium pop (which was about 1/2), you had players who experienced next to no lag, very few rollbacks if any, and a smooth experience in general.
This is where you get the two vastly different stories, one of a bug-ridden WoW and the other of the perfect launch.
I'll buy this explanation for the most part. I don't think that accounts for what everyone has said, but in general, yes the servers that were full were a problem while the servers that were not full were not. I switched servers early on because of queues. Once I did, I had very few problems and everyone on my server had very few problems.
I'll buy this explanation for the most part. I don't think that accounts for what everyone has said, but in general, yes the servers that were full were a problem while the servers that were not full were not. I switched servers early on because of queues. Once I did, I had very few problems and everyone on my server had very few problems.
It does, pretty much. I'll give you two examples of polar opposites.
Illidan
vs
Draenor
If you played on Draenor, you probably experienced _very rare_ problems during the launch. Maybe one or two rollbacks of a few hours after a server crash, out of the first three months of play. You would get stuck in a queue maybe once or twice. No fewer than a half-dozen times in the first three months, and even this is a stretch. The loot bugs (caused by overcrowding in specific areas) were extremely rare. You might encounter it in the starting zone for your race, if you played Human or NE, but outside of that, no. World downs were essentially non-existent. If you only played back then, you might not even know what a world server down was.
Illidan _today_ is fucked because of overcrowding. It has recently (after 3.0 hit and for a few weeks after) been completely unplayable. At launch, it was immeasurably worse. _frequent_ world server downs. If you happened to log off in the wrong one out of EK or Kalimdor, sorry, you're screwed. Constant realm crashes. Frequent rollbacks as a result. You can forget even going through the main cities at peak times, literally. Thirty minutes to conduct what should be 5-10 minutes of AH business.
The experiences would have been night and day back then.
In fact, I'm pretty certain I could make a list of launch servers, and I could tell you which group the people who liked the WoW launch were on and which group the people who hated it were on.
I'll buy this explanation for the most part. I don't think that accounts for what everyone has said, but in general, yes the servers that were full were a problem while the servers that were not full were not. I switched servers early on because of queues. Once I did, I had very few problems and everyone on my server had very few problems.
It does, pretty much. I'll give you two examples of polar opposites.
Illidan
vs
Draenor
If you played on Draenor, you probably experienced _very rare_ problems during the launch. Maybe one or two rollbacks of a few hours after a server crash, out of the first three months of play. You would get stuck in a queue maybe once or twice. No fewer than a half-dozen times in the first three months, and even this is a stretch. The loot bugs (caused by overcrowding in specific areas) were extremely rare. You might encounter it in the starting zone for your race, if you played Human or NE, but outside of that, no. World downs were essentially non-existent. If you only played back then, you might not even know what a world server down was.
Illidan _today_ is fucked because of overcrowding. It has recently (after 3.0 hit and for a few weeks after) been completely unplayable. At launch, it was immeasurably worse. _frequent_ world server downs. If you happened to log off in the wrong one out of EK or Kalimdor, sorry, you're screwed. Constant realm crashes. Frequent rollbacks as a result. You can forget even going through the main cities at peak times, literally. Thirty minutes to conduct what should be 5-10 minutes of AH business.
The experiences would have been night and day back then.
In fact, I'm pretty certain I could make a list of launch servers, and I could tell you which group the people who liked the WoW launch were on and which group the people who hated it were on.
Another thing that contributed was that servers were initially indicated with a time zone. A lot of folks assumed that you had to pick a server that was in your time zone or you would have horrible lag. That wasn't the case at all. In fact picking a low or medium pop server even if it was in another time zone was better than picking a high pop server in your own time zone. When my guild was switching servers, everyone wanted one that was in our time zone, but there were few low or medium pop servers in that time zone and they were growing quickly. I instead insisted upon one that was in a different time zone which had a fairly stable medium population because I had read a post from Blizzard stating this was a better choice. There was very little lag and to this day the server remains a medium pop server. Later on Blizzard removed the time zone indicator for servers for just this reason. People only wanted to play on servers in their time zone and naturally the east and west coast servers were more crowded then the ones in the other time zones. I can even remember many angry posts on the forums when they removed the time zone indicator because people then insisted they would have lag if they chose a server outside their time zone. Just another example of how people make something out of nothing and how they refuse to listen to the game developer because of pre conceived notions.
So obviously you really didn't understand my post or read some things through.
I liked, enjoyed playing WOW, hence the 3 plus years. I played beta also. The problems were frustrating and many did quit the game, but many more came behind them, the Warcraft series brought in a lot of players. Sometimes you have to wonder where WOW would be if 1,2 and 3 hadn't preceeded it. It wasn't till May/June of 2005 that it finally crossed the 1 million threshold in North America. About six months in.
WOW certainly had its issues and still has some. The world server problems at patch times. I am sorry to say it took longer than 1 day to fix them as it did in this last patch, I still read the WOW forums, and the issues sometimes did go on for two weeks before they were ironed out completly, not every patch but more than they should have.
As far as rare bugs/problems, all I can say is that you must have led a charmed life and I would like to get hold of your lottery numbers. These issues happened often not rarely. You may not find complaints about all the problems on the WOW forums, they have a tendency like all games to delete threads about problems. "Working as intended", was the WOW phrase, then they would quietly try to fix the problem.
The servers were not that good. Blizzard lowered the caps on the servers that were having problems (all of them?) at launch which actually started some of the queues. And after the lowered caps these issues really did not get better. It even took months to properly sync the combat animations, no sorry, it wasn't lag, client server issues
By the way I never said the warrior issue was a bug, I said it was a balance issue.
I know I seem to be bashing the game, but these are not imagined problems, and they were bigger than your efforts to make light of them. It was not all pie in the sky, but they worked on them and made it a stable game. Not in a couple of days or weeks, but in months.
Be careful how you try to belittle these issues whether they be major or small, you tend to discredit yourself with the overkill of your defense.
Lay off the crack pipe, kthxbai!
-----------------------
...I'm in your panties
As you fly off in your F4U Chance-Vought Corsair.
Cheers!
Ive played almost every major MMO to date and if anyone thinks server lag or loot lag means a bad launch hasnt played very many MMOs. Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, Everquest, WW2 Online, etc. were almost impossible to play. Star Wars Galaxies was completly lacking everything for years.
When I played WoW I didnt notice any bugs only some loot and server lag which was understandable considering the biggest MMO before WoW was Everquest at 500k people. They didnt expect the players they got. Quests, professions, abilities, etc. all worked perfectly for me.
1. I remember, because of lag, I could not play for 2 weeks. I was not compensated for this as well.
2. I was sitting in the queues of 500-800 people for 1-2 weeks minimum. Can't remember how long but it was long enough to get me frustrated. It was not like 2-3 days of WAR.
3. There were stupid bugs everywhere, like the loot bug. Some of my spells/abilities were totally bugged.
4. Blizz did not expect to see such a rush to their games. There were too few servers at start. They could simply not estimate the potential number of players.
So yeah... even AoC's release was much better compared to WoW's.
-----------------------------
Osbourne Cox: You are the guy from the gym.
Ted Treffon: I don't represent Hardbodies.
Osbourne Cox: I know very well what you represent. You represent the idiocy of today.
Ted Treffon: No, I don't represent that either.
Osbourne Cox: You are part of a league of morons. Oh, yes. You see you're one of the morons I've been fighting my whole life. But guess what. Today, I win.
Care to own up?
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/2272881#2272881
I feel the same about WAR and Mythic
so you dont remember when you got on a boat and zoned it would then vanish and you would drown in the water? that bug was around nearly 6 months after release..wow had a ton of bugs.
Yes it was. Played with several friends and there were many bugs, crashes to desktop, loot bugs, mob freezing, timesinks, etc. The game was still good, but you can't say there weren't ANY bugs at release, that's just wrong.
I think you've probably quoted the wrong person but just to clarify; I'm not saying it was bug free. I simply stated that the EU launch was a lot smoother than the US one, and had fewer bugs. I was on EU Dragonmaw from the start and didn't have any serious problems. Despite the bugs, WoW was a much more enjoyable game back then
the EU launch was more stable than the US launch because it was launched in february 2005 and the US launch was november 2004. Some people just dont know.
I didn't play WoW until January 5th of 2005. I reached level 60 by the end of March of 05. I'll be the first to admit the game was alot of FUN leveling up. It had everything I loved in an MMO, great backstory, enticing and FUN classes, some very cool dungeons, and PvP. Now, my biggest gripe with WoW was the lack of end game content. After running Strait, Scho, BRD, UBRS, LBRS a hundred times, the game kinda got boring.. MC and Onyxia was the only 40 man raid dungeon and after doing Rag/Onyxia so many times, alot of ppl quit. It wasn't until May/June that DM went live. And in August BWL finally went live. But I was already so burned out, I didn't feel motivated to play the game anymore until the first expansion was released. But in a couple months of playing TBC and getting my toon to 70, I quit yet again. Which brings me to my point. Blizzard waited to long to release new end game content. The leveling process was to easy and by the time you got to the end, you found yourself doing the same 3-4 dungeons over and over because there was nothing else left to do. So in other words, WoW barely had any challenging end game content in the beginning. But it is usually like that with most MMO's. One literally has to wait until after the first expansion to be spoiled with content to last a while.
Rallithon Oakthornn
(Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
Just because it didn't Hapen to you, does not make it Rare. People I played with or myself had the majority of those issues. they were wide spread. I'm glad you didn't have them.
I think his point is, There were major Issues and they worked through them and made a Great game. People don't give other games the same chance.
Why should people give other games a chance. Take a hike if you even try to say fairness.
I think people just don't take everything into account when they talk about a games release and that is why they just don't understand the success of WoWs launch despite the debate over its technical issues.
Did WoW have lag, was it wildly over populated which made those issues worse, had some nasty bugs, etc. Yes it did, just like many other MMO that releases.
However if the game was so broken as people are trying to make out here, then why were people waiting in lines to get in? Why did the game completely sell out? Why did the game continue to grow week after week? Even if the game was this horrible nightmare of unplayable broken code, why did the game keep people coming back?
Most won't admit it, but the gameplay was finished, it was fun, it was fresh and it had an impact. Think about that for a moment, people sat at their computers staring at a login screen for hours just for the chance to play.
It doesn't matter how well a game runs if the actual play is boring and uninspiring. People have proven they are willing to play through technical issues if the game play is worthwhile. Even sticking around in games that have potential (tm) to become great games for longer than those games deservered.
With the exception of people who are just desperate for a new MMO, those times are dead and gone. A game can run like a wild mustang, but if the gameplay sucks people are just going to leave as can be witnessed by several high profile letdowns.