that was the worst list i ever seen made on here. wow had very minor problems at launch when compared to alot of others.yeah there was some annoying MINOR bugs but nothing game breaking. same with Aion, Aion ran flawless for me launch day if there was any lag it was because of how many people was packed into one place.while the orginal server me and my friends wanted to play ended up a bust because it was just to packed we quicky just picked a lower pop and played with no problems at all. wich again over populated servers is NOT a bad thing and deffinitly shouldn't be put into the "worst launches" catagory.
and how the hell could you EVER forget Vanguard?? that game's launch is what defines "worst launch" !! it was a buggy mess, i have seriously never played a game with more bugs than vanguard hell it took them YEARS to get the game 1/2 decent. they really turned the game around...eventually , but deffinitly was a horrible launch.
Honestly, I've been playing MMO's since UO and I can't remember any launch that didn't totally shit the bed. Maybe Aion, sure it had queues but at least the game worked when you got in. Although it was bullshit that you had to wait 10 hours to do it. So I can see why that's on the list.
You guys are defending the 5 hours queues for WoW when it launched?!?! EVERY MMO has a crappy launch. I would think the forumla would be WELL tested by this point but it STILL holds true for games launching nowadays. And heaven forbid there be a launch day patch that goes well. YOU KNOW that thousands of people are going to be swarming your servers to get patched and play. Why do you seem so shocked that it occurs on LAUNCH day?!?!
I don't think I've ONCE been on something that has launched successfully. Even games like EQ and UO back in the day had launch issues (though I think they were CONSIDERABLY smaller in relation). The problem was that PC gaming even back then was a niche market so you didn't hear about it nearly as much as you do nowadays.
As someone who played WOW at launch, I will say it should have been #3 behind APB and Hellgate London. Some people just refuse to take off the rose colored glasses.
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You guys are defending the 5 hours queues for WoW when it launched?!?!
5 hour spell queues, I remember those.
As for AoC I thought that was a smooth launch, don't remember any problems. The same for STO, their launch was smooth for me (I think). Both games ended up sucking but the launches were good.
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I have a feeling the only company that will learn from all these MMO mistakes/problems will be Blizzard. How many more of these MMOs do we need before they learn from each others mistakes? Vanguard, AoC, WAR, Aion, etc... it's been going on for too long. I really thought we would have another hit by now. Sadly, none of these new games has heald my interest for long.
Not to say these games were completely bad, but not good enough to keep me subbed. As annoyed as I was with WoW it was the only game to keep me playing for so long.
You guys are defending the 5 hours queues for WoW when it launched?!?!
5 hour spell queues, I remember those.
As for AoC I thought that was a smooth launch, don't remember any problems. The same for STO, their launch was smooth for me (I think). Both games ended up sucking but the launches were good.
5 hour queues, loot lag of a half hour +, disapearing nodes/mobs, your character teleporting across small sections of terrain, as well as corpses, game randomly dumping you back to the 5 hour queue... etc. But I guess WOW will always be perfect
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Why the F did you include Aion? That game had a healthy launch and was out in Korea a year before it hit NA/EU.
SWG's initial launch was terrible, June 26th was a mess, I managed to log in for about 20 minutes then they had to shut down all the servers for about 24 hours. Pre-NGE/CU the game was unbelievably fun regardless of its bugs, JTL was one of the best expansions of any MMORPG even today.
You forgot All Points Bulletin, Vanguard and Hellgate: London, and WoW's launch was very rough as mentioned, servers couldn't stay up long because of the unexpected amount of players trying to log onto it but I wouldn't put WoW as #1 worst, as usual MMORPG.com obviously are anti-WoW.
There's also several other games that launched and died shortly after like Pirates of the Burning Sea, Matrix Online, Auto Assault, Warhammer, etc. Tabula Rasa lasted only a year and had plenty of potential and I miss that game, but the fued between Garriot and NCSoft was unfortunate.
I dunno, Bill. I don't think long queues at release are a good measure of the quality of a launch, since the first month or so is always going to be a significantly higher population than the game is realistically going to have.
Creating extra servers to handle the load just makes for dead servers or thin populations come the second or third month.
Allowing overloaded servers just makes for a laggy and negative expereince for the players.
Blizzard's WOW and NCSoft's AION were stable, polished games at release. It was surprising to see them on this list, especially World of Warcraft. With Blizzard, the interest was well beyond what anyone could have predicted or expected, however the backup servers were actually in place - they just didn't expect to need to turn them on for another six or so months.
Granted, you explained much of the above in your article, and I can see your point regarding the frustration the players were having, but I don't see even those players considering it a bad launch, let alone one of the worst ones.
Between SWG and AION there have been many launches that were far worse than most of the ones listed, for a range of reasons. Some of the better known ones are Horizons (billing and technical), Vanguard (extremely buggy), Darkfall(CE disappointment, website problems, server issues, preorder problems), TCOS (client/patcher/install problems), and Asheron's Call 2 (chat server not working, server issues). I was expecting to see some of these on the list - was surprised to see Aion and WOW there.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
You guys are defending the 5 hours queues for WoW when it launched?!?!
5 hour spell queues, I remember those.
As for AoC I thought that was a smooth launch, don't remember any problems. The same for STO, their launch was smooth for me (I think). Both games ended up sucking but the launches were good.
5 hour queues, loot lag of a half hour +, disapearing nodes/mobs, your character teleporting across small sections of terrain, as well as corpses, game randomly dumping you back to the 5 hour queue... etc. But I guess WOW will always be perfect
Huh? What game were you playing at release, most certainly it was NOT Wow! Sure they had a few server issues, but never had more than 20-30 minute queue and never had any loot lag. Way to blow small problems into large ones.
You should have tried EQ2 or Vanguard on release day if you actually wanted to see what a real problem was!
I guess WOW could be considered number one simply because of the sheer number of people the downed servers could possibly have effected but my problem with them being number one is that the non access to servers was an issue only suffered by specific servers (Blackrock was one for certain that I remember) for me the launch of WOW only saw the loot lag (which as I remember it made it often slow to loot not impossible) and then your toon would be stuck in a crouching position whenever it happened but it didn't break the game and often stopped after a few minutes or a quick relog.
Again I don't see a problem with them being listed but number one over those other games I just don't buy, personally with all the flawed launches I've dealt with I'd take Blizzards problems any day as you stated there problems largely were caused by the fact that no one could have imagined that the game would take off like it did.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
I don't really consider having queues part of a "horrible launch".
I"m sure any number of games that had successful launches would be in the same boat if they had far more players than expected.
To me, horrible launch is servers going down, huge lag, lots of bugs, billing errors, etc.
I agree. While surely it is a frustration, I don't think WoW or Aion belong on the list. Or at least Aion should be on the list because the biggest REASON there were queues was the insane amount of gold-botting.
WoW is on the list because this site has an obvious anti-wow nature among a large number of its users. Every MMO has issues at launch (from being unplayable to lack of content or rushed release)...
Myself and 10's of 1000's of players had a great experience on the release of wow playing on one of the less populated servers. The hardcore "nerd" crowd were all fighting to play on what they expected to be the most popular and "best" servers... Only to find that the massive over-population on those servers lead to them being nearly unplayable.
I want to trust this site and come for useful and informative articles and reviews, but I continue to see BS like this that really ruins any credibility the site and community has.
I'm sorry, but you cannot list the single most successful, popular, and widely known MMO (likely video game) of all time as the number f*cking one launch failure?
Wow and Aion? come on now. Since when long queues is a sign of bad launches?
FFXIV should have been on this list instead of AION.
Who could have thought that WOW could bring super power like USA to its knees?
Originally posted by Arcken
To put it in a nutshell, our society is about to hit the fan, grades are dropping, obesity is going up,childhood the USA is going to lose its super power status before too long, but hey, as long as we have a cheap method to babysit our kids, all will be well no? Im picking on WoW btw because its the beast that made all of this possible
Hey folks, Just wanted to call attention to one sentence then I'll leave you to the discussion...
"Bear in mind, these are based on the author’s (my own) personal experiences since I began this hobby, and when I write the following synopses I’m not picking on the mentioned games… I’m just trying to call it like I see it."
Without disrespect Bill, the list is more a refelection of your experience than the actual worse MMORPG Launches. Perhaps the title should reflect that? Arguably AO is the only title that really deserves to be on there. No Dark & Light or Darlfall, what about Alganon? Dark and Light would get my number 1 spot and by any objective measure one cares to choose I think that is justified. I guess it's just a 'fluff' piece anyway, the MMO equivalent to 'cat stuck in tree'.
Spot on for the most part, but I definitely believe that Vanguard: Saga of Heroes should be in the top 5 worst launches ever.
I agree completely with that. Especially that in Vanguard in beta a lot of stuff runned quite well and at the end of beta they changed and messed up so much things that the release was quite a debacle!
my top 3 would be vanguard / wow ....and a drum roll plz! .....darkfail err um i mean darkfall..their launch was a joke
Really? Because I could play on day 1 without any issues at all, AND it had all its promised features, unlike AoC and several others on this list.
WoW deserves its spot because, unlike SWG, Darkfall, Vanguard, and the others, you couldn't even actually play it for MONTHS after launch.
WoW launched late November of 04 and I purchased Jan of 05, so I can't speak for December. However, in January (around the 3rd or so), the game played fine. Queue times were around 10 min at peak and none off-peak, there was some looting lag issues, but nothing that was overly gamebreaking.
Stating that WoW was unplayable for months is a dramatic overexageration.
The only problem free launch I ever experienced was DAoC, and there was class balancing issues, but nothing that prevented game play. CoH had a pretty clean launch too.
Giving WoW top honors, over AO, is a joke though and just shows the bias on this site, or Bill's lack of experience with earlier games.
Aion even being on the list is a bit of a joke. The game played fine, getting in was a bit of a problem due to queues. That doesn't make a poor launch, it just means it had a popular launch.
EVE online and Anarchy online were the worst, hands down but it seems on this site you won't hear anything negative about CCP's game. How the hell did WoW make it to 1 place? Hate much? They had fucking rollbacks in some games and people cry about laggs and queues, bwuahaha.
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I had a great time playing Age of Conan and WoW at release.
Dishonorable mentions:
Latest Final Fantasy
Auto Assault
WARhammer
STO
Tabula Rasa
that was the worst list i ever seen made on here. wow had very minor problems at launch when compared to alot of others.yeah there was some annoying MINOR bugs but nothing game breaking. same with Aion, Aion ran flawless for me launch day if there was any lag it was because of how many people was packed into one place.while the orginal server me and my friends wanted to play ended up a bust because it was just to packed we quicky just picked a lower pop and played with no problems at all. wich again over populated servers is NOT a bad thing and deffinitly shouldn't be put into the "worst launches" catagory.
and how the hell could you EVER forget Vanguard?? that game's launch is what defines "worst launch" !! it was a buggy mess, i have seriously never played a game with more bugs than vanguard hell it took them YEARS to get the game 1/2 decent. they really turned the game around...eventually , but deffinitly was a horrible launch.
Worst MMO launches in history?
How about all of them?
Honestly, I've been playing MMO's since UO and I can't remember any launch that didn't totally shit the bed. Maybe Aion, sure it had queues but at least the game worked when you got in. Although it was bullshit that you had to wait 10 hours to do it. So I can see why that's on the list.
how about a Vanguard unplayable at the beginning?
A list like that without Dark and light is pure bullshit
All statements I make is from my point of view unless stated otherwise.
You guys are defending the 5 hours queues for WoW when it launched?!?! EVERY MMO has a crappy launch. I would think the forumla would be WELL tested by this point but it STILL holds true for games launching nowadays. And heaven forbid there be a launch day patch that goes well. YOU KNOW that thousands of people are going to be swarming your servers to get patched and play. Why do you seem so shocked that it occurs on LAUNCH day?!?!
I don't think I've ONCE been on something that has launched successfully. Even games like EQ and UO back in the day had launch issues (though I think they were CONSIDERABLY smaller in relation). The problem was that PC gaming even back then was a niche market so you didn't hear about it nearly as much as you do nowadays.
As someone who played WOW at launch, I will say it should have been #3 behind APB and Hellgate London. Some people just refuse to take off the rose colored glasses.
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5 hour spell queues, I remember those.
As for AoC I thought that was a smooth launch, don't remember any problems. The same for STO, their launch was smooth for me (I think). Both games ended up sucking but the launches were good.
-----
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
I have a feeling the only company that will learn from all these MMO mistakes/problems will be Blizzard. How many more of these MMOs do we need before they learn from each others mistakes? Vanguard, AoC, WAR, Aion, etc... it's been going on for too long. I really thought we would have another hit by now. Sadly, none of these new games has heald my interest for long.
Not to say these games were completely bad, but not good enough to keep me subbed. As annoyed as I was with WoW it was the only game to keep me playing for so long.
5 hour queues, loot lag of a half hour +, disapearing nodes/mobs, your character teleporting across small sections of terrain, as well as corpses, game randomly dumping you back to the 5 hour queue... etc. But I guess WOW will always be perfect
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Lol FF14 should have been number one. Obviously MMORPG.com is in their pocket.
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I love every kinda snail.
I just want to hug them all, but I cant.
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I'm sorry but that is total bullshit that Wow is the worst launch.
AoC completely lacked questing in zones for the last 30 levels. Keep sieges weren't even possible months into the game.
Why the F did you include Aion? That game had a healthy launch and was out in Korea a year before it hit NA/EU.
SWG's initial launch was terrible, June 26th was a mess, I managed to log in for about 20 minutes then they had to shut down all the servers for about 24 hours. Pre-NGE/CU the game was unbelievably fun regardless of its bugs, JTL was one of the best expansions of any MMORPG even today.
You forgot All Points Bulletin, Vanguard and Hellgate: London, and WoW's launch was very rough as mentioned, servers couldn't stay up long because of the unexpected amount of players trying to log onto it but I wouldn't put WoW as #1 worst, as usual MMORPG.com obviously are anti-WoW.
There's also several other games that launched and died shortly after like Pirates of the Burning Sea, Matrix Online, Auto Assault, Warhammer, etc. Tabula Rasa lasted only a year and had plenty of potential and I miss that game, but the fued between Garriot and NCSoft was unfortunate.
I dunno, Bill. I don't think long queues at release are a good measure of the quality of a launch, since the first month or so is always going to be a significantly higher population than the game is realistically going to have.
Creating extra servers to handle the load just makes for dead servers or thin populations come the second or third month.
Allowing overloaded servers just makes for a laggy and negative expereince for the players.
Blizzard's WOW and NCSoft's AION were stable, polished games at release. It was surprising to see them on this list, especially World of Warcraft. With Blizzard, the interest was well beyond what anyone could have predicted or expected, however the backup servers were actually in place - they just didn't expect to need to turn them on for another six or so months.
Granted, you explained much of the above in your article, and I can see your point regarding the frustration the players were having, but I don't see even those players considering it a bad launch, let alone one of the worst ones.
Between SWG and AION there have been many launches that were far worse than most of the ones listed, for a range of reasons. Some of the better known ones are Horizons (billing and technical), Vanguard (extremely buggy), Darkfall(CE disappointment, website problems, server issues, preorder problems), TCOS (client/patcher/install problems), and Asheron's Call 2 (chat server not working, server issues). I was expecting to see some of these on the list - was surprised to see Aion and WOW there.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Huh? What game were you playing at release, most certainly it was NOT Wow! Sure they had a few server issues, but never had more than 20-30 minute queue and never had any loot lag. Way to blow small problems into large ones.
You should have tried EQ2 or Vanguard on release day if you actually wanted to see what a real problem was!
I guess WOW could be considered number one simply because of the sheer number of people the downed servers could possibly have effected but my problem with them being number one is that the non access to servers was an issue only suffered by specific servers (Blackrock was one for certain that I remember) for me the launch of WOW only saw the loot lag (which as I remember it made it often slow to loot not impossible) and then your toon would be stuck in a crouching position whenever it happened but it didn't break the game and often stopped after a few minutes or a quick relog.
Again I don't see a problem with them being listed but number one over those other games I just don't buy, personally with all the flawed launches I've dealt with I'd take Blizzards problems any day as you stated there problems largely were caused by the fact that no one could have imagined that the game would take off like it did.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
I agree. While surely it is a frustration, I don't think WoW or Aion belong on the list. Or at least Aion should be on the list because the biggest REASON there were queues was the insane amount of gold-botting.
WoW is on the list because this site has an obvious anti-wow nature among a large number of its users. Every MMO has issues at launch (from being unplayable to lack of content or rushed release)...
Myself and 10's of 1000's of players had a great experience on the release of wow playing on one of the less populated servers. The hardcore "nerd" crowd were all fighting to play on what they expected to be the most popular and "best" servers... Only to find that the massive over-population on those servers lead to them being nearly unplayable.
I want to trust this site and come for useful and informative articles and reviews, but I continue to see BS like this that really ruins any credibility the site and community has.
I'm sorry, but you cannot list the single most successful, popular, and widely known MMO (likely video game) of all time as the number f*cking one launch failure?
Really?
Wow and Aion? come on now. Since when long queues is a sign of bad launches?
FFXIV should have been on this list instead of AION.
Who could have thought that WOW could bring super power like USA to its knees?
Originally posted by Arcken
To put it in a nutshell, our society is about to hit the fan, grades are dropping, obesity is going up,childhood the USA is going to lose its super power status before too long, but hey, as long as we have a cheap method to babysit our kids, all will be well no?
Im picking on WoW btw because its the beast that made all of this possible
Without disrespect Bill, the list is more a refelection of your experience than the actual worse MMORPG Launches. Perhaps the title should reflect that? Arguably AO is the only title that really deserves to be on there. No Dark & Light or Darlfall, what about Alganon? Dark and Light would get my number 1 spot and by any objective measure one cares to choose I think that is justified. I guess it's just a 'fluff' piece anyway, the MMO equivalent to 'cat stuck in tree'.
I agree completely with that. Especially that in Vanguard in beta a lot of stuff runned quite well and at the end of beta they changed and messed up so much things that the release was quite a debacle!
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Really? Because I could play on day 1 without any issues at all, AND it had all its promised features, unlike AoC and several others on this list.
WoW deserves its spot because, unlike SWG, Darkfall, Vanguard, and the others, you couldn't even actually play it for MONTHS after launch.
WoW launched late November of 04 and I purchased Jan of 05, so I can't speak for December. However, in January (around the 3rd or so), the game played fine. Queue times were around 10 min at peak and none off-peak, there was some looting lag issues, but nothing that was overly gamebreaking.
Stating that WoW was unplayable for months is a dramatic overexageration.
The only problem free launch I ever experienced was DAoC, and there was class balancing issues, but nothing that prevented game play. CoH had a pretty clean launch too.
Giving WoW top honors, over AO, is a joke though and just shows the bias on this site, or Bill's lack of experience with earlier games.
Aion even being on the list is a bit of a joke. The game played fine, getting in was a bit of a problem due to queues. That doesn't make a poor launch, it just means it had a popular launch.
EVE online and Anarchy online were the worst, hands down but it seems on this site you won't hear anything negative about CCP's game. How the hell did WoW make it to 1 place? Hate much? They had fucking rollbacks in some games and people cry about laggs and queues, bwuahaha.
EvE is rated number one everywhere on this site (and in a recent article) and wow is rated worst and bashed in yet another article?
Is this site run by FOX?