It really don't mater how you look at it, it's unfinished.
I would disagree. The game isn't unfinished. The servers suck. It's unplayable right now, and you have every right to be upset, but once the servers issues are fixed, the game will be fine. I was playing earlier this week before the population peak this weekend and had a fantastic time with next to no complaints. Saying the game's unfinished is suggesting it will take weeks to months to fix everything. This seems easier than that. At least that's my read on it.
Anyway, my guess is if this continues for a few more days, they will add days to your subscription so hopefully you won't actually be losing money. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but unless today was your first day playing, I would expect you to feel much better about the game than you seem to.
Originally posted by crazyiven humm ... the issues.... How many were in the betas? they should have had more people in it to test their equipment. So I have payed top dollar to play an unplayable game. It really don't mater how you look at it, it's unfinished. Seems they have decided not to test more and instead to1 release sooner. So easy come easy go...... Just hope people stop and not waste there money and watch the forums to see the progress.
to the post above, what the point of having betas? Humm to test maybe? now they are live and have major server issues. one thing to have in game issues that's fine but sitting here not being able to play I see that as an issue that should have been solved in beta. I'll sell you a bridge for cheap.....
I have fixed some of the more glaring errors in your post. Have a look at what I changed; I think you'll appreciate it. I have bolded and italicised my corrections.
1: I included this here because the way the sentence was constructed before, it meant that they had decided to both not test more and to release sooner, which does not make any sense.
As for your post itself, I totally disagree. This always happens to games, even a massively funded one like WoW. In fact, as someone already said, there were whole weeks where the servers were down or the game was largely unplayable, and in many of these cases, the forums were down as well. This has been the case in many games, if not most. There is just simply no way to test for a release, so there is no way to fully test their equipment until after release. That is just the way it goes. If this does not sit well with you, maybe you should not play MMOs at release, because this will always happen, until there is some major revolution in technology that in some way can help prevent it. Deal with it or wait until the games stabilise, because this has always been the case.
Always.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Basically, what has happened is the same thing that happens to every other company out there, regardless of what function it serves, software or otherwise. They had an expectation of the number of players they could support and they planned for that. Numbers were run, results were shown to the suits and they spent money according to what they figured. They didn't expect the game to grow as it did and so were unprepared for the number of people that actually showed up, so now they're scrambling to keep the servers running and praying that they last as long as possible. It's simply a case of 'not wanting to spend more money than they have to', which is common to every business out there. Such as restaurants running out of a certain dish or prizes that come with every meal, etc.
Yes, this will hurt them in the short run, but it will result in them upgrading the servers and improving performance and such. This isn't like AoC or Warhammer where they have to add new servers and then have to pull them later on as popularity wanes. It's simply a case of adding more hardware to shift server load over a wider spectrum. Since it happened on a weekend, it will delay it a bit more than otherwise, but we'll see how things go.
As smooth as the headstart went, the retail launch has gone downhill just as quickly. A lot of things didn't go smoothly, such as retail boxes not being available until a week after the game launches or the servers crashing beneath the load of people wanting to play. Hopefully this will get some of the suits' heads out of their asses and they'll approve the money needed to invest into the gem that they have.
First time in 15 years, huh? First MMO launch? Coming from WoW perhaps? Just to let you folks know, this is common at MMO launches. When WoW first launched there was damn near weeks were the game was completely unplayable or the servers were down. Only excellent launch I have ever seen was with Dark Age of Camelot and even that wasn't perfect. Please, before you posted how much experience you have, make sure that it actually applies to the medium your complaining about. Been playing MMO's for eleven years and all this has happened before, even the whining and complaining. And also, before you buy anything would be wise to be an intelligent consumer and know what you are getting into, instead of crying when everything isn't what you expected. Consider this experience part of your education, and welcome to launch week/month.
After 15 years you'd think they would get it right. It's not down to the consumer to check everything works okay. If your expectations are that low then this industry will get away with extremely poor launches. I pay good money to supposed experts to produce a quality product. I don't need to know about the technical difficulties I just want to game without problems. I want the product to do what it says on the side of the tin. This is not unreasonable and the more we complain the better the industry will respond. It's your misplaced empathy and indeed apathy that lets them get away with this.
Superqwerty, while I do think that a certain amount of protest / concern / outrage is healthy to keep developers on track, you simply cannot expect the flawless function of any released software, period.
What most people don't understand is that every software release, even those based on established franchises, are developing and employing completely new technologies every time they go into development, from the methods used for data processing all the way up to the GUI.
This isn't unique to games or MMORPGs; this goes for every single piece of new software.
The other issue that has to be considered is that unless a software development studio begins with significant capital to license existing technologies to support their development, they have to create the software themselves from the ground up.
Which is why you still have glitches and issues with even well-established software franchises like Microsoft Word, or Adobe Flash (with technology based on the original Macromedia product for years).
To make it more challenging, you aren't developing your software to run on just one type of system with known hardware in every category; you are designing it to run on thousands or even hundreds of thousands of different hardware configurations. Particularly when the capabilities of those systems are changing radically from year to year.
Compare that with the challenge of designing / developing a new television set (a rather complicated piece of technology, even though we use them every day).
The same basic technology that has made television possible has not changed in nearly fifty years, until the recent advent of LCD / plasma televisions. Even with that innovation, every television accepts information from ports and devices designed specifically to support them, and are designed by the developer to perform one single function; display moving images.
It's their hardware (and in some cases, firmware or software) and thus, they dictate how it will work and what functions it will provide. So in those cases, you can normally expect to get a television that works as stated.
Even then, consumers will still encounter issues when trying to use different devices with their television sets, and in some cases, manufacturing flaws that cause X number of televisions to simply fail on delivery or shortly after they have been purchased.
I'm a developer, and even though we use well-established development languages, graphics / modeling software, and game engines, every new development we begin has us designing new methods. In nearly every situation, those new methods provide the user with a better experience, increased usability, a more appealing UI, and faster, better software.
Conversely, that doesn't mean there aren't bugs in the system. We just can't anticipate every hardware configuration and input type the user is going to employ while using our product.
Finally, even though I hate to admit it.... I'm human. After staring at line after line of code, publishing, and QA -ing for anywhere from two to five years on one single product, I'm bound to miss glitches that unfortunately the user will encounter.
Sometimes these errors result simply from my own familiarity with the product; what made sense to me throughout development and appeared to work perfectly during alpha and beta testing might end up confusing the larger target audience of my product.
Again, I am most definitely not saying not to complain and that every consumer / subscriber does not have the right to be upset and / or hold software developers accountable.
What I am saying is that in the case of games, and specifically MMORPGs, the complexity and number of systems you are working with (audio, video, networking, user input, data processing) increase the chances that issues / glitches / bugs are going to get through.
It is up to the consumer to personally decide if the product itself is good enough to give the developer the benefit of the doubt and allow them to address those issues.
Before I became a developer, I had pretty much the same opinion of software development that you have expressed here. Once I experienced the development process from start to finish on my first product, I realized that my viewpoint was a little naive.
Consumers have the right to expect the delivery of a product in a usable form. In my opinion, however, the game-playing audience needs to have a little more patience if they expect to keep playing games. Otherwise, game development as a whole will stagnate, because studios will not want to invest in new development or technologies at all for fear of the potential fiscal backlash.
Abbatoir / Abbatoir Cinq Adnihilo Beorn Judge's Edge Somnulus Perfect Black ---------------------- Asheron's Call / Asheron's Call 2 Everquest / Everquest 2 Anarchy Online Shadowbane Dark Age of Camelot Star Wars Galaxies Matrix Online World of Warcraft Guild Wars City of Heroes
For me, learning their forums are down means a different thing. Think about this: A lot of people are complaining about lag. According to traceroute, a lot of that lag happens when they hit the Raleigh area. Their forums, servers and business are all located in Raleigh, NC. Could it simply be they're upgrading their network routers and capability rather than some sinister purpose of shutting down bad press?
Come on people....use your damn heads. So what if their official forums are down. Do you honestly believe that they think that would stop any bad press about the problems they're having? I don't think even EA has their heads up their asses that far.
Honestly every mmo launch I participated with we hear the same thing
Horrible start, bad launch, unbelievable catastrophe :-) This means that it's kind of a unofficial process for every new mmo: things will go bad.
However I must admit that it made me think for a second when I saw the forums were down to. On purpose or not? Does it actually matter? Every launch is kind of messy, just look around for the first patch notes of recent mmos. We should not laugh it away, but ok starting cry threads on their forums from the first reason you get is a bit childish. As long as they communicate some detaills...
Tell me about bad luck, I wanted to play a bit so I quickly bought and installed the game through STEAM...just to find out the servers are down -.-
Meh the forums are on the same server, why its down to.
I think way more people were playing this weekend, especially today then they expected. I know I wasn't expecting to see so many folks.
humm ... the issues.... How many were in the betas? they should have had more people in it to test their equipment. So I have payed top dollar to play an unplayable game. It really don't mater how you look at it, it's unfinished. Seems they have decided not to test more and instead to1 release sooner. So easy come easy go...... Just hope people stop and not waste there money and watch the forums to see the progress.
to the post above, what the point of having betas? Humm to test maybe? now they are live and have major server issues. one thing to have in game issues that's fine but sitting here not being able to play I see that as an issue that should have been solved in beta. I'll sell you a bridge for cheap.....
I have fixed some of the more glaring errors in your post. Have a look at what I changed; I think you'll appreciate it. I have bolded and italicised my corrections.
1: I included this here because the way the sentence was constructed before, it meant that they had decided to both not test more and to release sooner, which does not make any sense.
As for your post itself, I totally disagree. This always happens to games, even a massively funded one like WoW. In fact, as someone already said, there were whole weeks where the servers were down or the game was largely unplayable, and in many of these cases, the forums were down as well. This has been the case in many games, if not most. There is just simply no way to test for a release, so there is no way to fully test their equipment until after release. That is just the way it goes. If this does not sit well with you, maybe you should not play MMOs at release, because this will always happen, until there is some major revolution in technology that in some way can help prevent it. Deal with it or wait until the games stabilise, because this has always been the case.
Always.
I have fixed some of the more glaring errors in your post. Have a look at what I changed; I think you'll appreciate it. I have bolded and italicized my corrections.
1: I included this here because the way the sentence was constructed before, it meant that they had decided to both not test more and to release sooner, which does not make any sense.
As for your post itself, I totally disagree. This always happens to games, even a massively funded one like WoW. In fact, as someone already said, there were whole weeks where the servers were down or the game was largely unplayable, and in many of these cases, the forums were down as well. This has been the case in many games, if not most. There is just simply no way to test for a release, so there is no way to fully test their equipment until after release. That is just the way it goes. If this does not sit well with you, maybe you should not play MMOs at release, because this will always happen, until there is some major revolution in technology that in some way can help prevent it. Deal with it or wait until the games stabilize, because this has always been the case.
Love people like you, as for the reason you should be able to figure out the above for yourself. Was going to give a big spill on hardware and cool stuff like that but I’m sure you have that all figured out, server load and all.
Not only has the game down most of the day, they turned off the Forums so you cant even post a gripe about it.
I am assuming they disabled the VBulletin forum to get an important message out to the user community, not to prevent players from making posts. I am not sure if you noticed, but apparently the forum servers/software could not handle all the traffic once the game servers were having issues. I was constantly getting the forum message that the server was too busy, try again later. I much prefer they disable the board to get the info message out - otherwise we are all left guessing....
I finally decided to buy the game today because I decided I DO want to try a sandbox mmo, went through the process, waited patiently for the patching, created my forum account... and then got the message the server was down for maintenance.
Ok, that is a bit frustrating, but the kinds of posts you read here... and undoubtedly would have read on the offical forum... are pompous, whiney and ridiculous.
As much as I'd like to try the game I bought today I do see a positive... the game is BUSY! People are wanting to play this, so we can look forward to a healthy community and good income for development, as well as heart-warming success for an Indie company.
I finally decided to buy the game today because I decided I DO want to try a sandbox mmo, went through the process, waited patiently for the patching, created my forum account... and then got the message the server was down for maintenance.
Ok, that is a bit frustrating, but the kinds of posts you read here... and undoubtedly would have read on the offical forum... are pompous, whiney and ridiculous.
As much as I'd like to try the game I bought today I do see a positive... the game is BUSY! People are wanting to play this, so we can look forward to a healthy community and good income for development, as well as heart-warming success for an Indie company.
Look forward to meeting some of you in-game.
Ya it's a bit messy right now.. there's a complaint in "New Player" chat every 3 seconds which makes chat fly by so fast new players can't even ask questions let alone get their questions answered. They really need to address that issue and the lag. The game has been awesome for me until today... Today I've never had such lag - imagine accepting a quest and it taking literally 5 minutes for your objectives to update. Then completing the objective and waiting another 5 minutes for it to tell you where to go next. I gave up, went and worked out, watched some football came back and of course... it's down ;-)
I noticed that the only avenue for players to complain was through ingame chat. Lots of scathing remarks and GM's getting irate. Even threats to ban players for using capital letters in chat. This game is a complete fiasco and I'm bitterly dissapointed by the whole thing after all the hype. The tutorial at the start of the game is really poor. Lots of new players in chat totally confused in the scenario of escaping the Hoover Dam. Someone should be sacked for this. I don't care how technically complicated these games are! When you charge someone money for entertainment or a product you need to deliver it in perfect order. There are lots of products out there that are technically complicated, but they still work on delivery. Time for these software studios to do some growing up and become professional at what they do.
Game is not a complete fiasco... yet.
Lets see if they recover from this.
I hope they do, as I feel there is a lot to like in FE.
OmaliMMO Business CorrespondentMemberUncommonPosts: 1,177
Originally posted by Malickie
Originally posted by Omali
Originally posted by Malickie These things happen in games that have been out (and working) for years. As a cb tester I can say: I don't see how anyone could have problems getting through the tutorial (even though I never bought the game). They hold your hand through the entire thing, what are they going to do when they hit the actual game world? When there is nothing to really tell you what you should be doing, because that's entirely up to you? Secondly, what do you mean by "all the hype"?
I'd like to point out that there are several confirmed bugs in the tutorial where the player is unable to complete it. Instances such as the server not allowing players to loot the corpse to receive your initial weapon, the cutscene not playing at the end of the tutorial (When the bomb goes off) , and other issues (player falling through the map for one).
I'm fully aware of the issues you're referring to ( I played from Cb through OB). Those issues popped up during the stress tests before open beta (through fileplanet). I should point out they were handled admirably. I digress..
I wasn't referring to issues exactly, rather to the fact that it becomes non-linear after the tutorial .
I know. I was in the chat today helping people through the tutorial, and I found that the majority of them were not stuck because they needed their hand held, but because server bugs were preventing them from moving on. The most prevalent issue I saw was people who found themselves stuck on the ATV after the bomb went off, or people who were unable to loot the corpse for the axe.
I know. I was in the chat today helping people through the tutorial, and I found that the majority of them were not stuck because they needed their hand held, but because server bugs were preventing them from moving on. The most prevalent issue I saw was people who found themselves stuck on the ATV after the bomb went off, or people who were unable to loot the corpse for the axe.
Hmm I helped a guy today with the tutorial... he didn't know you had to "Right Click" on the terminal to talk to it. I think there's a mix of 2 things. Massive server problems and People that don't want to read text, listen to instructions and instead want everything on a spoon.
I mean the kid I talked to was clear and consise about his problem but really? He said "I'm clicking on it and clicking on it and nothing is happening" I said, "Are you using the right-mouse button?" I know.. it's not totally obvious... but still lets work through the logical options that it could be.
Originally posted by crazyiven humm ... the issues.... How many were in the betas? they should have had more people in it to test their equipment. So I have payed top dollar to play an unplayable game. It really don't mater how you look at it, it's unfinished. Seems they have decided not to test more and instead to1 release sooner. So easy come easy go...... Just hope people stop and not waste there money and watch the forums to see the progress.
to the post above, what the point of having betas? Humm to test maybe? now they are live and have major server issues. one thing to have in game issues that's fine but sitting here not being able to play I see that as an issue that should have been solved in beta. I'll sell you a bridge for cheap.....
I have fixed some of the more glaring errors in your post. Have a look at what I changed; I think you'll appreciate it. I have bolded and italicised my corrections.
1: I included this here because the way the sentence was constructed before, it meant that they had decided to both not test more and to release sooner, which does not make any sense.
As for your post itself, I totally disagree. This always happens to games, even a massively funded one like WoW. In fact, as someone already said, there were whole weeks where the servers were down or the game was largely unplayable, and in many of these cases, the forums were down as well. This has been the case in many games, if not most. There is just simply no way to test for a release, so there is no way to fully test their equipment until after release. That is just the way it goes. If this does not sit well with you, maybe you should not play MMOs at release, because this will always happen, until there is some major revolution in technology that in some way can help prevent it. Deal with it or wait until the games stabilise, because this has always been the case.
Always.
I have fixed some of the more glaring errors in your post. Have a look at what I changed; I think you'll appreciate it. I have bolded and italicized my corrections. 1: I included this here because the way the sentence was constructed before, it meant that they had decided to both not test more and to release sooner, which does not make any sense. As for your post itself, I totally disagree. This always happens to games, even a massively funded one like WoW. In fact, as someone already said, there were whole weeks where the servers were down or the game was largely unplayable, and in many of these cases, the forums were down as well. This has been the case in many games, if not most. There is just simply no way to test for a release, so there is no way to fully test their equipment until after release. That is just the way it goes. If this does not sit well with you, maybe you should not play MMOs at release, because this will always happen, until there is some major revolution in technology that in some way can help prevent it. Deal with it or wait until the games stabilize, because this has always been the case.
Love people like you, as for the reason you should be able to figure out the above for yourself. Was going to give a big spill on hardware and cool stuff like that but Im sure you have that all figured out, server load and all.
You do know that over here we spell those sorts of words different, yes? I also say colour, and honour. And technically, that is more correct, because America changed the spellings of those words just to not be like Britain. So get over yourself.
As for hardware...they know much...MUCH more about that than you do. This happens in EVERY EVERY EVERY EVERY game I have every played in my entire life. It is not new, you are just a whiny little brat. They cannot plan for every contingency, and so problems like this have to get worked out live. Deal with it.
Edit: Syntactical error.
I really think you just do not understand how MMOs work. You claim that you know how this hardware and infrastructure works, but if you did, you would know that it is extremely complex and it is nearly impossible to not have these sorts of errors when implementing a large network or internet interface. It is just a fact of life. How can you not know that if you know all you claim to know?
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
OmaliMMO Business CorrespondentMemberUncommonPosts: 1,177
Originally posted by vive
Originally posted by Omali
I know. I was in the chat today helping people through the tutorial, and I found that the majority of them were not stuck because they needed their hand held, but because server bugs were preventing them from moving on. The most prevalent issue I saw was people who found themselves stuck on the ATV after the bomb went off, or people who were unable to loot the corpse for the axe.
Hmm I helped a guy today with the tutorial... he didn't know you had to "Right Click" on the terminal to talk to it. I think there's a mix of 2 things. Massive server problems and People that don't want to read text, listen to instructions and instead want everything on a spoon.
I mean the kid I talked to was clear and consise about his problem but really? He said "I'm clicking on it and clicking on it and nothing is happening" I said, "Are you using the right-mouse button?" I know.. it's not totally obvious... but still lets work through the logical options that it could be.
There are some stupid people in Fallen Earth, yes. I helped someone who wasn't able to spawn their horse, and it turned out they bought an untrained horse, and practically smashed their mouse key trying to click it in their bag. I had to explain to him who he had to go back to and learn to get a horse.
Add me when the servers come back online (Which should be in 15 minutes apparently). My username is the same on FE as it is here, "Omali"
I noticed that the only avenue for players to complain was through ingame chat. Lots of scathing remarks and GM's getting irate. Even threats to ban players for using capital letters in chat. This game is a complete fiasco and I'm bitterly dissapointed by the whole thing after all the hype. The tutorial at the start of the game is really poor. Lots of new players in chat totally confused in the scenario of escaping the Hoover Dam. Someone should be sacked for this. I don't care how technically complicated these games are! When you charge someone money for entertainment or a product you need to deliver it in perfect order. There are lots of products out there that are technically complicated, but they still work on delivery. Time for these software studios to do some growing up and become professional at what they do.
Game is not a complete fiasco... yet.
Lets see if they recover from this.
I hope they do, as I feel there is a lot to like in FE.
Well its hardly a fiasco, up until today the game has had a great launch. No waiting to log in, bugs and rubberbanding occured but hardly game breaking. Once people got out of the overcrowded towns the play was very good.
Honestly if this is the worst that happens they have really had a successful launch.
It happens again and again and yea its a fiasco.
They just never anticipated the number of folks that were interested, nobody did.
People don't want ot learn how to play a game they just want to play. And FE has a steep learning curve because of the depth of the game. Yet, still the masses swarm to New Player chat with the same questions over and over and over. If they typed /support and asked their questions they would get it answered more than likely along with a ton of others they may have.
I'm not worried about th efuture of FE because I think they can iron out the problems which seem to be more population issues than anything. Starting in head start and being far from the starter zones on release I saw smooth performance and never a problem.
Love the devs and their committment to being active in the game. They are also active in the forums posting things daily. Combined with the healthy (for the most part) gamer community, this game will shape up nicely.
I had problems getting through the the tutorial purely due to server side lag not a lack of understanding. Can you turn that off for alts, this was the second time I went through it... don't fancy doing it again.
You dont need to use the tutorial with alts. Thats allmost the first thing the game tells you.
My apologies if the point of the post was missed. In 15 years of gaming this is the first time I have ever seen a gaming company turn off their forums when they take down a game server, very strange in my eyes.
The forums were and are NOT turned off, they just can't handle the load (1000+ ppl watching). Their forum server was not ready for a wave of folks in such a size....
I could check the forums once in every 5 minutes last night, but in the rest of the time it came back as "offline". So, it wasn't switched off, it was just overloaded.
DB
Denial makes one look a lot dumber than he/she actually is.
The server crashes due to load and the forums go down and the first thing the OP thinks of is a conspiracy, so much so that he comes to post here about it.
Is it not conceivable that the they closed the forums to deal with the load? Or due to some other related technical issue? Or the games goes down and everyone hits the forums and ultimately they crash too?
If you(the OP) have been playing MMOs for 15 years, i assume that you must be older than 15 years old, and as such i can't understand why you would arrive at the conclusion you have, as even a child would naturally conclude that it must be due to the technical issues and not some drawn out conspiracy that they want to hide the teething problems from the rest of the world.
I doubt that the thought even crossed their minds(Icarus Studios), as they are less concerned if the masses like this game or not, as ultimately the people that will play this game for the long term are not the "Johnny just come WoW MMO player". I am sorry to say that in your 15 years of playing MMOs you have not learnt much about the industry at all, shame.
Comments
I would disagree. The game isn't unfinished. The servers suck. It's unplayable right now, and you have every right to be upset, but once the servers issues are fixed, the game will be fine. I was playing earlier this week before the population peak this weekend and had a fantastic time with next to no complaints. Saying the game's unfinished is suggesting it will take weeks to months to fix everything. This seems easier than that. At least that's my read on it.
Anyway, my guess is if this continues for a few more days, they will add days to your subscription so hopefully you won't actually be losing money. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but unless today was your first day playing, I would expect you to feel much better about the game than you seem to.
You want a game without issues go play tic tac toe
because there hasn't been or ever will be an MMO that comes out without issues of some kind
sadly it's the nature of the beast where game makers need funding from impatient outside sources
that force them to release before everything is totally ready
as to the people who go i'm going to cancel if you dont do this or dont do that bugger off and whine somewhere else
we've seen it all before and your nothing special and you absolutely will not get special treatment because you threaten to leave
I have fixed some of the more glaring errors in your post. Have a look at what I changed; I think you'll appreciate it. I have bolded and italicised my corrections.
1: I included this here because the way the sentence was constructed before, it meant that they had decided to both not test more and to release sooner, which does not make any sense.
As for your post itself, I totally disagree. This always happens to games, even a massively funded one like WoW. In fact, as someone already said, there were whole weeks where the servers were down or the game was largely unplayable, and in many of these cases, the forums were down as well. This has been the case in many games, if not most. There is just simply no way to test for a release, so there is no way to fully test their equipment until after release. That is just the way it goes. If this does not sit well with you, maybe you should not play MMOs at release, because this will always happen, until there is some major revolution in technology that in some way can help prevent it. Deal with it or wait until the games stabilise, because this has always been the case.
Always.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
WTF? No subscription fee?
Basically, what has happened is the same thing that happens to every other company out there, regardless of what function it serves, software or otherwise. They had an expectation of the number of players they could support and they planned for that. Numbers were run, results were shown to the suits and they spent money according to what they figured. They didn't expect the game to grow as it did and so were unprepared for the number of people that actually showed up, so now they're scrambling to keep the servers running and praying that they last as long as possible. It's simply a case of 'not wanting to spend more money than they have to', which is common to every business out there. Such as restaurants running out of a certain dish or prizes that come with every meal, etc.
Yes, this will hurt them in the short run, but it will result in them upgrading the servers and improving performance and such. This isn't like AoC or Warhammer where they have to add new servers and then have to pull them later on as popularity wanes. It's simply a case of adding more hardware to shift server load over a wider spectrum. Since it happened on a weekend, it will delay it a bit more than otherwise, but we'll see how things go.
As smooth as the headstart went, the retail launch has gone downhill just as quickly. A lot of things didn't go smoothly, such as retail boxes not being available until a week after the game launches or the servers crashing beneath the load of people wanting to play. Hopefully this will get some of the suits' heads out of their asses and they'll approve the money needed to invest into the gem that they have.
Honestly every mmo launch I participated with we hear the same thing
Horrible start, bad launch, unbelievable catastrophe :-)
This means that it's kind of a unofficial process for every new mmo: things will go bad.
However I must admit that it made me think for a second when I saw the forums were down to. On purpose or not? Does it actually matter?
Every launch is kind of messy, just look around for the first patch notes of recent mmos.
We should not laugh it away, but ok starting cry threads on their forums from the first reason you get is a bit childish.
As long as they communicate some detaills...
Tell me about bad luck, I wanted to play a bit so I quickly bought and installed the game through STEAM...just to find out the servers are down -.-
After 15 years you'd think they would get it right. It's not down to the consumer to check everything works okay. If your expectations are that low then this industry will get away with extremely poor launches. I pay good money to supposed experts to produce a quality product. I don't need to know about the technical difficulties I just want to game without problems. I want the product to do what it says on the side of the tin. This is not unreasonable and the more we complain the better the industry will respond. It's your misplaced empathy and indeed apathy that lets them get away with this.
Superqwerty, while I do think that a certain amount of protest / concern / outrage is healthy to keep developers on track, you simply cannot expect the flawless function of any released software, period.
What most people don't understand is that every software release, even those based on established franchises, are developing and employing completely new technologies every time they go into development, from the methods used for data processing all the way up to the GUI.
This isn't unique to games or MMORPGs; this goes for every single piece of new software.
The other issue that has to be considered is that unless a software development studio begins with significant capital to license existing technologies to support their development, they have to create the software themselves from the ground up.
Which is why you still have glitches and issues with even well-established software franchises like Microsoft Word, or Adobe Flash (with technology based on the original Macromedia product for years).
To make it more challenging, you aren't developing your software to run on just one type of system with known hardware in every category; you are designing it to run on thousands or even hundreds of thousands of different hardware configurations. Particularly when the capabilities of those systems are changing radically from year to year.
Compare that with the challenge of designing / developing a new television set (a rather complicated piece of technology, even though we use them every day).
The same basic technology that has made television possible has not changed in nearly fifty years, until the recent advent of LCD / plasma televisions. Even with that innovation, every television accepts information from ports and devices designed specifically to support them, and are designed by the developer to perform one single function; display moving images.
It's their hardware (and in some cases, firmware or software) and thus, they dictate how it will work and what functions it will provide. So in those cases, you can normally expect to get a television that works as stated.
Even then, consumers will still encounter issues when trying to use different devices with their television sets, and in some cases, manufacturing flaws that cause X number of televisions to simply fail on delivery or shortly after they have been purchased.
I'm a developer, and even though we use well-established development languages, graphics / modeling software, and game engines, every new development we begin has us designing new methods. In nearly every situation, those new methods provide the user with a better experience, increased usability, a more appealing UI, and faster, better software.
Conversely, that doesn't mean there aren't bugs in the system. We just can't anticipate every hardware configuration and input type the user is going to employ while using our product.
Finally, even though I hate to admit it.... I'm human. After staring at line after line of code, publishing, and QA -ing for anywhere from two to five years on one single product, I'm bound to miss glitches that unfortunately the user will encounter.
Sometimes these errors result simply from my own familiarity with the product; what made sense to me throughout development and appeared to work perfectly during alpha and beta testing might end up confusing the larger target audience of my product.
Again, I am most definitely not saying not to complain and that every consumer / subscriber does not have the right to be upset and / or hold software developers accountable.
What I am saying is that in the case of games, and specifically MMORPGs, the complexity and number of systems you are working with (audio, video, networking, user input, data processing) increase the chances that issues / glitches / bugs are going to get through.
It is up to the consumer to personally decide if the product itself is good enough to give the developer the benefit of the doubt and allow them to address those issues.
Before I became a developer, I had pretty much the same opinion of software development that you have expressed here. Once I experienced the development process from start to finish on my first product, I realized that my viewpoint was a little naive.
Consumers have the right to expect the delivery of a product in a usable form. In my opinion, however, the game-playing audience needs to have a little more patience if they expect to keep playing games. Otherwise, game development as a whole will stagnate, because studios will not want to invest in new development or technologies at all for fear of the potential fiscal backlash.
Abbatoir / Abbatoir Cinq
Adnihilo
Beorn Judge's Edge
Somnulus
Perfect Black
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Asheron's Call / Asheron's Call 2
Everquest / Everquest 2
Anarchy Online
Shadowbane
Dark Age of Camelot
Star Wars Galaxies
Matrix Online
World of Warcraft
Guild Wars
City of Heroes
For me, learning their forums are down means a different thing. Think about this: A lot of people are complaining about lag. According to traceroute, a lot of that lag happens when they hit the Raleigh area. Their forums, servers and business are all located in Raleigh, NC. Could it simply be they're upgrading their network routers and capability rather than some sinister purpose of shutting down bad press?
Come on people....use your damn heads. So what if their official forums are down. Do you honestly believe that they think that would stop any bad press about the problems they're having? I don't think even EA has their heads up their asses that far.
Meh the forums are on the same server, why its down to.
I think way more people were playing this weekend, especially today then they expected. I know I wasn't expecting to see so many folks.
I have fixed some of the more glaring errors in your post. Have a look at what I changed; I think you'll appreciate it. I have bolded and italicised my corrections.
1: I included this here because the way the sentence was constructed before, it meant that they had decided to both not test more and to release sooner, which does not make any sense.
As for your post itself, I totally disagree. This always happens to games, even a massively funded one like WoW. In fact, as someone already said, there were whole weeks where the servers were down or the game was largely unplayable, and in many of these cases, the forums were down as well. This has been the case in many games, if not most. There is just simply no way to test for a release, so there is no way to fully test their equipment until after release. That is just the way it goes. If this does not sit well with you, maybe you should not play MMOs at release, because this will always happen, until there is some major revolution in technology that in some way can help prevent it. Deal with it or wait until the games stabilise, because this has always been the case.
Always.
I have fixed some of the more glaring errors in your post. Have a look at what I changed; I think you'll appreciate it. I have bolded and italicized my corrections.
1: I included this here because the way the sentence was constructed before, it meant that they had decided to both not test more and to release sooner, which does not make any sense.
As for your post itself, I totally disagree. This always happens to games, even a massively funded one like WoW. In fact, as someone already said, there were whole weeks where the servers were down or the game was largely unplayable, and in many of these cases, the forums were down as well. This has been the case in many games, if not most. There is just simply no way to test for a release, so there is no way to fully test their equipment until after release. That is just the way it goes. If this does not sit well with you, maybe you should not play MMOs at release, because this will always happen, until there is some major revolution in technology that in some way can help prevent it. Deal with it or wait until the games stabilize, because this has always been the case.
Love people like you, as for the reason you should be able to figure out the above for yourself. Was going to give a big spill on hardware and cool stuff like that but I’m sure you have that all figured out, server load and all.
I am assuming they disabled the VBulletin forum to get an important message out to the user community, not to prevent players from making posts. I am not sure if you noticed, but apparently the forum servers/software could not handle all the traffic once the game servers were having issues. I was constantly getting the forum message that the server was too busy, try again later. I much prefer they disable the board to get the info message out - otherwise we are all left guessing....
my 2 cents
Ever play EVE online (One server as well)? Get used to it.
I finally decided to buy the game today because I decided I DO want to try a sandbox mmo, went through the process, waited patiently for the patching, created my forum account... and then got the message the server was down for maintenance.
Ok, that is a bit frustrating, but the kinds of posts you read here... and undoubtedly would have read on the offical forum... are pompous, whiney and ridiculous.
As much as I'd like to try the game I bought today I do see a positive... the game is BUSY! People are wanting to play this, so we can look forward to a healthy community and good income for development, as well as heart-warming success for an Indie company.
Look forward to meeting some of you in-game.
Ya it's a bit messy right now.. there's a complaint in "New Player" chat every 3 seconds which makes chat fly by so fast new players can't even ask questions let alone get their questions answered. They really need to address that issue and the lag. The game has been awesome for me until today... Today I've never had such lag - imagine accepting a quest and it taking literally 5 minutes for your objectives to update. Then completing the objective and waiting another 5 minutes for it to tell you where to go next. I gave up, went and worked out, watched some football came back and of course... it's down ;-)
Game is not a complete fiasco... yet.
Lets see if they recover from this.
I hope they do, as I feel there is a lot to like in FE.
I'd like to point out that there are several confirmed bugs in the tutorial where the player is unable to complete it. Instances such as the server not allowing players to loot the corpse to receive your initial weapon, the cutscene not playing at the end of the tutorial (When the bomb goes off) , and other issues (player falling through the map for one).
I'm fully aware of the issues you're referring to ( I played from Cb through OB). Those issues popped up during the stress tests before open beta (through fileplanet). I should point out they were handled admirably. I digress..
I wasn't referring to issues exactly, rather to the fact that it becomes non-linear after the tutorial
.
I know. I was in the chat today helping people through the tutorial, and I found that the majority of them were not stuck because they needed their hand held, but because server bugs were preventing them from moving on. The most prevalent issue I saw was people who found themselves stuck on the ATV after the bomb went off, or people who were unable to loot the corpse for the axe.
Hmm I helped a guy today with the tutorial... he didn't know you had to "Right Click" on the terminal to talk to it. I think there's a mix of 2 things. Massive server problems and People that don't want to read text, listen to instructions and instead want everything on a spoon.
I mean the kid I talked to was clear and consise about his problem but really? He said "I'm clicking on it and clicking on it and nothing is happening" I said, "Are you using the right-mouse button?" I know.. it's not totally obvious... but still lets work through the logical options that it could be.
You do know that over here we spell those sorts of words different, yes? I also say colour, and honour. And technically, that is more correct, because America changed the spellings of those words just to not be like Britain. So get over yourself.
As for hardware...they know much...MUCH more about that than you do. This happens in EVERY EVERY EVERY EVERY game I have every played in my entire life. It is not new, you are just a whiny little brat. They cannot plan for every contingency, and so problems like this have to get worked out live. Deal with it.
Edit: Syntactical error.
I really think you just do not understand how MMOs work. You claim that you know how this hardware and infrastructure works, but if you did, you would know that it is extremely complex and it is nearly impossible to not have these sorts of errors when implementing a large network or internet interface. It is just a fact of life. How can you not know that if you know all you claim to know?
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
WTF? No subscription fee?
Hmm I helped a guy today with the tutorial... he didn't know you had to "Right Click" on the terminal to talk to it. I think there's a mix of 2 things. Massive server problems and People that don't want to read text, listen to instructions and instead want everything on a spoon.
I mean the kid I talked to was clear and consise about his problem but really? He said "I'm clicking on it and clicking on it and nothing is happening" I said, "Are you using the right-mouse button?" I know.. it's not totally obvious... but still lets work through the logical options that it could be.
There are some stupid people in Fallen Earth, yes. I helped someone who wasn't able to spawn their horse, and it turned out they bought an untrained horse, and practically smashed their mouse key trying to click it in their bag. I had to explain to him who he had to go back to and learn to get a horse.
Add me when the servers come back online (Which should be in 15 minutes apparently). My username is the same on FE as it is here, "Omali"
Game is not a complete fiasco... yet.
Lets see if they recover from this.
I hope they do, as I feel there is a lot to like in FE.
Well its hardly a fiasco, up until today the game has had a great launch. No waiting to log in, bugs and rubberbanding occured but hardly game breaking. Once people got out of the overcrowded towns the play was very good.
Honestly if this is the worst that happens they have really had a successful launch.
It happens again and again and yea its a fiasco.
They just never anticipated the number of folks that were interested, nobody did.
People don't want ot learn how to play a game they just want to play. And FE has a steep learning curve because of the depth of the game. Yet, still the masses swarm to New Player chat with the same questions over and over and over. If they typed /support and asked their questions they would get it answered more than likely along with a ton of others they may have.
I'm not worried about th efuture of FE because I think they can iron out the problems which seem to be more population issues than anything. Starting in head start and being far from the starter zones on release I saw smooth performance and never a problem.
Love the devs and their committment to being active in the game. They are also active in the forums posting things daily. Combined with the healthy (for the most part) gamer community, this game will shape up nicely.
I had problems getting through the the tutorial
purely due to server side lag not a lack of understanding. Can you turn that off for alts, this was the second time I went through it... don't fancy doing it again.
You dont need to use the tutorial with alts. Thats allmost the first thing the game tells you.
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The forums were and are NOT turned off, they just can't handle the load (1000+ ppl watching). Their forum server was not ready for a wave of folks in such a size....
I could check the forums once in every 5 minutes last night, but in the rest of the time it came back as "offline". So, it wasn't switched off, it was just overloaded.
DB
Denial makes one look a lot dumber than he/she actually is.
Meh..........
The server crashes due to load and the forums go down and the first thing the OP thinks of is a conspiracy, so much so that he comes to post here about it.
Is it not conceivable that the they closed the forums to deal with the load? Or due to some other related technical issue? Or the games goes down and everyone hits the forums and ultimately they crash too?
If you(the OP) have been playing MMOs for 15 years, i assume that you must be older than 15 years old, and as such i can't understand why you would arrive at the conclusion you have, as even a child would naturally conclude that it must be due to the technical issues and not some drawn out conspiracy that they want to hide the teething problems from the rest of the world.
I doubt that the thought even crossed their minds(Icarus Studios), as they are less concerned if the masses like this game or not, as ultimately the people that will play this game for the long term are not the "Johnny just come WoW MMO player". I am sorry to say that in your 15 years of playing MMOs you have not learnt much about the industry at all, shame.
Ok, one more run.
NOBODY CLOSED THE FORUMS!!! They were simply overloaded, that's all. See my previous post.
DB
Denial makes one look a lot dumber than he/she actually is.
Ummm....you should think before you open your mouth. The servers AND forums were taken down yesterday for around 3 and a half hours.
And just in case you want to try to claim otherwise, here is the official word: http://www.fallenearth.com/node/172
Offline means they were taken down and they do specify servers and forums.