You have to be kidding to say there was anything this major in the L2 launch... The worst I saw from beta on was some Engrish mistakes. I wasn't around for the EQ beta (I was too busy playing games like Civ ), but I also heard that the AC launch was actually relatively ok (I joined AC in may of 2000, so about 6 months after launch or so). But I notice that you often speak of the games that recovered from bad launches such as EQ and AC (assuming they had bad launches), but you have a different envrioment now than you did 9/10 years ago. Back when EQ came out you had the whopping choice of UO (as a forced 2d game) or EQ (the first 3d mmo), when AC came out, your choices were the two afore mentioned games. That was it, they were the 'pioneers' of the genre and thus has the go through the mistakes first. Games 9 years later do not have that excuse and shouldn't be excused for it. A game released in 2009 has 10 years worth of history to learn from, apparently Adventurine didn't learn from it. But now, to turn around the conversation slightly, games like AO had a horrid launch (and so much potential too) and never recovered, same with horizons. DnL and Mourning define scam in the industry. Companies like SOE and Turbine learned from their mistakes of their first games (EQ2's launch was absolutely wonderful, some lag but entirely playable day one and LotRO I believe has set the standard for smooth launch). The only problem was, Adventurine thought they were smarter than all the other developers out there and decided they didn't need to do things the tried and true way of software development, especially for a system that is designed to handle so many people. Such a shame too, as it will probably lead us to 20 more years of EQ clones, which is the last thing the industry needed, since Adventurine actually had some innovation in their concept, but like so many other companies that think outside of the box in the MMO genre, they just couldnt' handle the reality of the logistics.
Oh I completely agree that there have been bad launches for games that never recovered, but there are 100 other people that continue to throw those out there over and over again and compare them to DF. So I was taking the opposite route and throwing out ones that also had bad launches and then recovered from it.
I also beta tested those that failed horribly, but I could see for the way the game actually played that they weren't going to be worth playing afterwards, Anarchy is the only one I played through the bad launch on and that is only because I was GM. DnL was trash and after three days in it's beta I uninstalled it and knew it would fail. I was in Vanguard alpha and beta tested for over a year, I didn't even think about pre-ordering it. Horizons was way to ambitious, on the other hand I beta tested DF for just over a month. The game play is great, if I thought it was failure material i never would have pre-ordered it and I wouldn't be here on the forums now, as I don't stick around games I leave or never plan on playing to bash and trash, which is all the majority of the people on these forums do.
I also agree that those companies learned from their mistakes, those companies also had 10x the resources and manpower as compared to Adventurine. I'm not making excuses for them, I'm also setting here checking back every 30 minutes and waking up in the middle of the night to see if the servers are up, but you do have ot factor that in. They have never released a game, never developed, never produced and damn sure never distrubuted one before. They are attempting to do it all because they don't have the resources to go some where else and pay others to do it for them.
So we can continue to play WOW and EQ2 and pay SOE and Blizzard 100's of millions of $$ to make those games and stay with dumbed down game play or we can decide to give what is pretty much a indie company a chance to make a game for gamers. Believe it or not, the game they have made is there, the servers were fine and running stable until the sync issue, shouldn't be to hard for them to find and fix. That leaves getting the billing system ironed out, which they havent exactly had the chance to test out before now. Personally I choose to give them the benifit of the doubt because I enjoy the hell out of their product.
comming from someone who cut his teeth on Asheron's call, I understand. I am also a Shadowbane refugee, but I've also had my enjoyable time in EQ2, DAoC and now LotRO as well.
I loved Anarchy Online, but half of my guild couldn't even install it and we only lasted there about 6 months... I still have it installed on my rig and play it every once and a while, but it doesn't have that same mystic it did back in 2001 (though it does run much better now)
My concern is that DF will go the way of horizons and DnL and further sap out the innovation that they tried to interject into the genre and we'll wind up with another series of 'play it safe' mmos.
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Oh I completely agree that there have been bad launches for games that never recovered, but there are 100 other people that continue to throw those out there over and over again and compare them to DF. So I was taking the opposite route and throwing out ones that also had bad launches and then recovered from it.
I also beta tested those that failed horribly, but I could see for the way the game actually played that they weren't going to be worth playing afterwards, Anarchy is the only one I played through the bad launch on and that is only because I was GM. DnL was trash and after three days in it's beta I uninstalled it and knew it would fail. I was in Vanguard alpha and beta tested for over a year, I didn't even think about pre-ordering it. Horizons was way to ambitious, on the other hand I beta tested DF for just over a month. The game play is great, if I thought it was failure material i never would have pre-ordered it and I wouldn't be here on the forums now, as I don't stick around games I leave or never plan on playing to bash and trash, which is all the majority of the people on these forums do.
I also agree that those companies learned from their mistakes, those companies also had 10x the resources and manpower as compared to Adventurine. I'm not making excuses for them, I'm also setting here checking back every 30 minutes and waking up in the middle of the night to see if the servers are up, but you do have ot factor that in. They have never released a game, never developed, never produced and damn sure never distrubuted one before. They are attempting to do it all because they don't have the resources to go some where else and pay others to do it for them.
So we can continue to play WOW and EQ2 and pay SOE and Blizzard 100's of millions of $$ to make those games and stay with dumbed down game play or we can decide to give what is pretty much a indie company a chance to make a game for gamers. Believe it or not, the game they have made is there, the servers were fine and running stable until the sync issue, shouldn't be to hard for them to find and fix. That leaves getting the billing system ironed out, which they havent exactly had the chance to test out before now. Personally I choose to give them the benifit of the doubt because I enjoy the hell out of their product.
comming from someone who cut his teeth on Asheron's call, I understand. I am also a Shadowbane refugee, but I've also had my enjoyable time in EQ2, DAoC and now LotRO as well.
I loved Anarchy Online, but half of my guild couldn't even install it and we only lasted there about 6 months... I still have it installed on my rig and play it every once and a while, but it doesn't have that same mystic it did back in 2001 (though it does run much better now)
My concern is that DF will go the way of horizons and DnL and further sap out the innovation that they tried to interject into the genre and we'll wind up with another series of 'play it safe' mmos.