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Worst relaunch ever?
Bhob
Member UncommonPosts: 126
As a big fan of Final Fantasy 11 (mmo wise), I have to say I this is not a good first experience. I don't like beta tests for long term games because I want to feel the whole long term involvement thing, so I was really looking forward for something new (or atleast a little FF spirit) from the whole wow-esque mmo formula but I cannot even enjoy FF14 because I cannot play. I've gotten on 4 times in the last 4 days and now they have shut down for maintenance during US prime time.
I know I'm being captain obvious on this but it really pisses me off that SE can be so stupid on a second chance for themselves and then snubbing a good portion of paying customers. When I couldn't log on (or spent more time trying to log on than play), yet I could see people on twitch.tv who never log off leveling up, that sort of cheesed me off, but then you shut down the servers on prime time, I'm not sure why people would want to pay to play.
Maybe FF fans would pay, but in a free to play world, why would you be that short sighted?
Comments
i am trying to remember other "relaunches" as you put it...
however, it has been rough, no doubt.
the core game is pretty darn fun, and we will see if the technical improvements/additions make a difference in the coming days.
It's hard to call it a genuinely bad relaunch when there's essentially only one thing wrong with it: the demand was so much higher than anticipated that they were completely unprepared to allow most people to log in.
However, if you do somehow log in, you'll find a completely playable game, without bugs, that won't disconnect you more than any other MMORPG, and whose overall quality is head and shoulders above 95% of MMORPGs out there in most ways conceivable.
You see how this makes it hard to call it a bad relaunch? And this is coming from a guy who only managed to log in successfully once since I've been trying over the past 2-3 days.
I say relaunch it's their second chance and not too many game s get to do that. You'd think they learn, or atleast cover themselves. Make no mistake I'm more than willing to pay monthly but I feel no love or reason why I would want to pay just on these desisions. In a freemium environment you better give a reason why someone would pay a monthly charge and bad decisions don't help.
I'm sorry, but in the end I'm paying for a service after 30 days. Maybe people don't think of it that way but that's all it is. If you can't provide that in the first 30, then why should people expect anything more.
Pretty much this.
Login / queue issues are being worked on and will quickly fade away. A game being bad, which has been the case with so many games in the past few years either due to just being a dull rehash of everything else or being horribly coded and loaded with tons of bugs that take them months to fix, wont fade away. The game itself is very well done and you will run into very few hitches while actually playing.
1. It is not down during neither Japanese nor European primetime.
2. It is practically the only AAA MMORPG in recent years that has done a real relaunch.
3. Hopefully this maintance will make it far more likely for people to login smoothly at all times.
4. No item mall
5. It is FF
I don't know of many other games that have been relaunched, so I can't compare it to that. In terms of launch though, it's hardly the worst launch I've played. I suffered WoW and Age of Conan Launch, WoW was by far my worst experience, and the game I ended up playing most.
In terms of being annoying, 1017 is annoying, but easy to bypass if you're persistent. Once you get into the world, everything is great. Few things that need some adjusting, but nothing too crazy that I've noticed and I have made it to 50. All of the dungeons have been awesome, and I can't think of any of them ever bugging out. I was able to complete all of my quests without an issue, unlike some games, where they have several quests you're unable to get through due to some sort of bug.
I won't say it's the best launch, but hardly the worst. SE still has my money with this game, and I played a total of 5 minutes in 11, and I logged in, logged out and uninstalled on 1.0.
You do realize its going to be primtetime somewhere in the world no matter when they take the servers down right? There will always be some EU version or JP version of you complaining that its unfair that a downtime occurred during your primetime. Oh no! They had important updates to do during my playtime on 1 day! Game is destined to fail.
BTW if it makes you feel better the servers wont even be back up until JP primetime is just about over, and thats IF they come back up on time with no issues. Both US and JP are missing out on several hours of primetime play today. Also most of their other downtime has been during late night / early morning US time, on several days, which is primetime for EU or JP. Stop complaining about 1 day for the US. Deal with it.
There really isn't many games that actually had a high value budget, huge IP, and did a relaunch to boot.
So, worst in history is like saying the tallest guy in the world is the only one who can hit his head on a 10 foot door entrance ..
i.e. competition is key to your claim.
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Worse launch ever as far as I'm concerned.
There have been games with lots of technical issues at launch but I avoided those knowing the games were broken (EQII for ex). Some games just aren't worth playing so whatever their launch condition is isn't a factor (AC2 was an abomination, for ex).
A lot of players have rose colored perspectives on launches and claim so and so launch was worse and blah blah blah. Well, I've been thru pretty much every major launch and yeah, most have some issues, but very few have outright denial of service for days on end, multiple downtimes that accomplish nothing, such sluggishness with fixing issues, and so many widespread gamewide problems, or a company that seems to not give a crap about hundreds of thousands of NA/EU players.
I'm also sick of players making excuses. Not all MMORPG launches are horrible and few are this bad. The fact that some have been bad doesn't excuse yet another disaster. Especially not from a company that has one of the more successful MMORPGs in MMORPG history and SHOULD have people who are familiar enough with the history of the genre to have some damn clue about how to release AND how to beta and stress to ensure a solid release. FFXIV's not so open beta too close to launch and lack of a real stress test were not so bright.
With SQEN it didn't start with EA either. The code registration (which stupidly was done just days before EA) was a congested mess too. If you pre ordered you ended up entering three codes and I dunno about you but I needed two separate accounts. It's a ridiculous amount of hassle just to play an MMORPG and I've never seen anything so screwed up fro account/pre order mechanisms. Their store was a mess before EA. Pretty much everything except the game itself has been a mess in some way.
Top if off with them having the most screwed up and restricted forums I've ever seen. I and many others have long said that character level doesn't equate to intelligence or ability. SQEN never got the memo. To them unless you level up you're not even worthy of communicating on their forums. That and putting limits on how many posts you can make per day or how many characters you can enter per post are really whack for a game that's all about social and communication. WTF.
At least with FFXIV, the game itself is pretty solid and polished. Pretty cool for those who got to play most of the past 10 days or so.
Duty finder not being able to handle load is part of the core though, and it's been rough, only mitigated by the tons of AFK players effectively lowering active server pops. If they had booted AFKers and the servers were full of active players, duty finder most likely would've choked to a halt as it did in the first few days of EA.
IMO the fact that it's been 10+ days with no real action by SQEN is absolutely mind boggling. They tinkered during EA with multiple multi-hour downtimes that seemed to do nothing. Since then, it's been...nothing at all and almost no communication except for endless excuses and apologies. In fact, while the game is unplayable by many and their own sales are halted they're posting nonsensical gooberage on their twitter like everything is just peachy. Again...mind boggling. Hey! Dork #1 just won a stuffed moogle - that he can punch in the face while trying to login for the 300th time today. Let's all smile a bit more!
I work in technology (software engineer) for a company that has many online presences and have lots of high profile clients. We're 24/7 and international. Downtime is not something we can experience. If for some reason we're down beyond redundancy, our network/hardware/whatever people will be moving heaven and earth to restore service in minutes...hours at worst. Or our clients go nuts and money is at risk if we're down. Even I have to be available 24/7 and have to deal with clients (like our AUS office) at odd hours that work for them.
Must be nice to be a MMORPG company and be able to treat your customers like shit and get away with it.
Premium MMORPGs do not feature built-in cheating via cash for gold pay 2 win. PLAY to win or don't play.
Hmmm. Kind of sounds like you work for my old company. Starts with an I, ends with a T?
If so, I feel sorry for you. Theres a reason they had a mass exodus of bout 80% of their IT / IS staff, including me (after 5 years) and others who had invested 15-20 years there, over the course of 3 or 4 months about 2 years ago. Yeah, they may treat the customers pretty well but they treat their own staff horrible, especially if you're not in Sales.
Perfect example: "Sorry guys. We cant afford to give any raises at all this year to IT"..... meanwhile posting record growth for the company that year and then immediately spending around $1.5m for a "rebeautification" project on the building that was not needed and nobody cared about.
There really is no excuse for "demand being so much higher than anticipated". They should have gotten reasonably accurate counts from pre-orders and legacy accounts. (could have sent a survey to legacy accounts asking who planned on returning)
By following the trend of pre-orders a week or two before launch they could have EASILY predicted a better number of server to start with.
TBH they most likely got hit with the largest flood of sales within the final week before launch. With having the limited betas leading up to launch, and how horribly 1.0 did, most people probably held off on purchasing until a bit after phase 4 to see how it was going. I know I did, as did many others I play with.
What do you have difficulty understanding, the game is awesome, so much so they dont have enough servers for demand. Thats unfortunate for service but examples a great relaunch!
There has been no other MMO re-launch so technically this is the best re-launch ever. See how this works?
This game has one single Problem: It's massive popularity that was very unexpected after the first release tanked. Really, the only thing that is wrong is that everyone want's to play it and not everyone can because they had to stop sales and exceeded server capacity.
The game itself has none of the usual MMO launch issues. I have not seen an MMO launch with no bugs, crashes, non functioning skills, broken dungeons, non working AH and even exploits except FFXIV:ARR.
Let's just look a the last few releases:
GW2
Neverwinter
Personally, i take the few server issues over another complete disaster of a release where half of the game is bugged, unbalanced, exploited and followed by massive changes to the core system and sometimes even rollbacks due to exploits.
I think i would call this an incredible success not a failure. This is the best re-launch ever!
Most memorable games: AoC(Tryanny PvP), RIFT, GW, GW2, Ragnarok Online, Aion, FFXI, FFXIV, Secret World, League of Legends (Silver II rank)
I do, and I know they could have had EU servers and taken them down in stages. I also know the game's been hardly playable for more than 1 day (which is almost more frustrating thank it being down)... unless you leave your game up all the time. Finally more to the point this is thier 2nd time around with this game, so they should have really known better and planned ahead.
It's pretty bad when you have to stop sales and yet let people stay on when they are not playing. Just sayin'
The actual launch of Age of Conan went pretty smooth. Now end game was another story.
The worst launch atleast to me, is still Anarchy Online
I think what frustrates me the most is the sort of cavalier attitude towards these things, like we all should expect nowadays that games will be buggy and not expected to run well for atleast week or a month. Given these economic times and FTP games getting better, companies that expect a monthly charge should be bending over backward to have the smoothest launch possible even if that takes having too much bandwidth and working a little extra overtime.
You can say XX game was worse, but there were some seriously bad choices made on this one which have nothing to do with technical problems.