Any argument that starts with, "This is how it is and always will be ... you should deal with it," is flawed logic. Soon (tm) became a running joke on the WoW forums because how long do you wait when you're paying money and part (or all) of the service is broken. $15/mo is high subscription fee if you don't have access to the service.
Rift is a good example of a WoW clone that had a smooth launch and lots of concurrent. The overflow server design isn't new either. CoH did the same thing and outside of some initial rubber banding with travel powers, it worked too.
The real counter point is that people are willing to accept the day 1, week 1, month 1 problems. So, developers cut corners and hope to patch later. That's a societal problem and it's getting worse as console now do the same thing.
Unfortunately $$ speak louder than words (although I wish reviews sites would rip launches like D3 and Sim City rather than handing out high scores for games that may eventually functional correctly). Personally, I don't play MMOs as much anymore because the connection issues and bugs became too annoying. To a lesser extent, I don't play MMOs as much anymore because the design hasn't changed. I get why the progression systems are in place, but when honor points per hour is more of driving factor to compete than actually winning a team PvP match, the system is broken.
p.s. MMORPG really needs to upgrade the comment software or incorporate a cloud solution. The paragraph and return tags don't work correctly, at least in firefox. Right clicking on words and not getting the firefox spell check options is also annoying.
Welcome back to another edition of Player Versus Player! Each week MMORPG pits two of its writers against each other in a battle to the death – or at least a spirited debate. Final Fantasy XIV relaunched last week and reminded us all of how disastrous the first days and weeks of a new MMO can be. This go-round, our combatants step to their podiums ready to duke it out on a topic you probably have first-hand experience with: MMO launches.
Chris: Thanks for letting me start things off, Bill. Let me just say, I understand players being upset with a poor launch. They're no good, especially after you've just spent money on a box and subscription. What really gets me, though, is that everyone acts like they didn't see it coming. It's time to get real folks, MMOs are the hardest games to make and the hardest to launch. Launch issues are the norm. If you rush to buy on day one, then get upset because thousands of other people did the same, I think it's time to look at your expectations.
Why is it, a game like Dark Age of Camelot, with over 30 classes at launch across three realms and have a nearly perfect launch? Three factions with a full 1-50th level map per realm with separate raids for pve and pve content per realm, over 16 races (2001).
IGN stated in 2001 (November article I believe) that DAoC had a flawless release. So yes folks, a game far more advanced than anything we have today was able to have a sustainable launch.
Now we get these trivial so called mmorpgs with 5 classes (usually classless classes nowadays) no true factions (mercenary options, pve crossover [think Secret World and Rift]...or just plain zero factions with 5 races and the same class race combinations in an E-Sport battleground (think Guild Wars 2, SW:ToR, etc).
Subscribers don't need to keep swallowing this junk. Shame is, do they know that it's possible to create a massive mmorpg with more variation and depth than anything on the market today? Sadly, no. Most folks I know never played Dark Age of Camelot. That game raised the bar so high that EA had to buy out Mythic so that Dark Age could be left untouched and undeveloped, swept under a rug, so that it would NOT appear to be a threat to Warhammer (a game that seriously failed).
Dark Age of Camelot
Mythic's MMORPG is beautiful, addicting, and actually stable. The full review....
by IGN Staff
November 2, 2001
I can't post the URL....but you can find this easily. Read how it's supposed to be.
I wonder what would happen if forum goers made the game and devs played it. The excuses would be funny to read....suddenly the experts on everything don't know what the fuck they're doing!
Welcome back to another edition of Player Versus Player! Each week MMORPG pits two of its writers against each other in a battle to the death – or at least a spirited debate. Final Fantasy XIV relaunched last week and reminded us all of how disastrous the first days and weeks of a new MMO can be. This go-round, our combatants step to their podiums ready to duke it out on a topic you probably have first-hand experience with: MMO launches.
Chris: Thanks for letting me start things off, Bill. Let me just say, I understand players being upset with a poor launch. They're no good, especially after you've just spent money on a box and subscription. What really gets me, though, is that everyone acts like they didn't see it coming. It's time to get real folks, MMOs are the hardest games to make and the hardest to launch. Launch issues are the norm. If you rush to buy on day one, then get upset because thousands of other people did the same, I think it's time to look at your expectations.
Why is it, a game like Dark Age of Camelot, with over 30 classes at launch across three realms and have a nearly perfect launch? Three factions with a full 1-50th level map per realm with separate raids for pve and pve content per realm, over 16 races (2001).
IGN stated in 2001 (November article I believe) that DAoC had a flawless release. So yes folks, a game far more advanced than anything we have today was able to have a sustainable launch.
Now we get these trivial so called mmorpgs with 5 classes (usually classless classes nowadays) no true factions (mercenary options, pve crossover [think Secret World and Rift]...or just plain zero factions with 5 races and the same class race combinations in an E-Sport battleground (think Guild Wars 2, SW:ToR, etc).
Subscribers don't need to keep swallowing this junk. Shame is, do they know that it's possible to create a massive mmorpg with more variation and depth than anything on the market today? Sadly, no. Most folks I know never played Dark Age of Camelot. That game raised the bar so high that EA had to buy out Mythic so that Dark Age could be left untouched and undeveloped, swept under a rug, so that it would NOT appear to be a threat to Warhammer (a game that seriously failed).
Dark Age of Camelot
Mythic's MMORPG is beautiful, addicting, and actually stable. The full review....
by IGN Staff
November 2, 2001
I can't post the URL....but you can find this easily. Read how it's supposed to be.
DAoC also had less people trying to play during launch, much much less. Hell the game peaked around 250k users (iirc). DAoC was a great game, and had a lovely launch (I was there day 1), but at least compare apples to apples when making comparisons. DAoC did have the best launch of any pre-WoW era mmo though, Mythic did a lot right for the time.
I won't say FF had a perfect launch, because it didn't, but aside from server lock and login issues, the game had less issues than WoW did when it launched. WoW was by far and away the most popular mmo launch of the era. There were login issues, plus people would get loot locked when looting or attempting to gather from a broken gathering node (flowers/mineral veins). The queue issues persisted for months on many servers, which is why they had to break up the populations of many of the largest servers.
Compared to many other equally popular mmo titles, FFXIV had a pretty smooth launch.
Interesting article. I have to say that I expect that bugs and issues can and will arise at launch. I don't blame the company as I know it is something that is unlikely to change. I am one that personally believes that a change needs to be made with how launches need to be changed. I think for subscription based games that the best way to figure out if things work is a preview week before game is released with characters carrying into launch. Let every person who wants to try it do so for that week. Yes, it might lose people but it could also gain people. This would allow a team to know what potential problems are.
I usually don't mind any topic at all,they is always something interesting in a topic.However this one has already been beat to death and gone over even by MMORPG so i am not so sure we need any more dwelling on the obvious.
There are probably a million other topics you could have picked ,even if just looking at FFXIV,but one that is over played,not so interesting anymore.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
But these have been done successfully in the past with far less resources at their disposal (look at Rift).
1. Lets not say Rift didnt have resources at their disposal. Lots of industry vets with 100 million at their disposal. New company, but not a poor one and not one without industry ties.
2. Rift servers, at launch, held 1800 people max. FFXIV servers held 5k and were increased to 7500. Rift aimed low and played it safe. FFXIV did not.
Icculus, where do I find out max capacity of servers out at? I never saw max. amounts in any MMO I played listed anywhere and would be interested in some various MMO's capacities?
Why is it, a game like Dark Age of Camelot, with over 30 classes at launch across three realms and have a nearly perfect launch? Three factions with a full 1-50th level map per realm with separate raids for pve and pve content per realm, over 16 races (2001).
Because DAOC was a very small game to begin with and it launched with only half the content of games like EQ and AC.
Frontier was empty. No Mobs. No doors on Keeps.
Dungeons werent Itemized. They had Mobs, but they dropped no loot.
The PvE areas of the 3 Realms were empty of Mobs the further you went from the main cities.
Avalon (Albion) was completely taken out at release. It was in Beta, but removed. Only to be added later in an Expansion.
DAOC launched smoothly because there was hardly a game there in the first place.
On Topic- Anarchy Online. Worst. Release. Ever.
Bringer of Eternal Darkness and Despair, but also a Nutritious way to start your Morning.
MMOs have been around for more than 15 years. Most industries learn from the mistakes made in the past. The software industry (and the MMORPG industry in particular) can't seem to learn from their own mistakes, let alone the mistakes that their predecessors (and competitors) have made.
FFXIV:ARR had a terrible launch. We're not talking "waiting in a queue for an hour before you can play" terrible; we're talking "I can't even log into the game, and there's no queue system in place when I get there anyway" terrible. It's one thing to forgive SE for being unprepared for the massive influx of players their game experienced. It's quite another to overlook the fact that they hadn't even bothered to have the most simple systems in place once the game went live.
We can all agree that MMORPGs are tough to build. What we can't seem to agree on is how much FUBAR is too much FUBAR. FFXIV:ARR was severely FUBAR'd at launch. No matter how you spin it, the degree to which SE f'd up their launch should serve as an object lesson in how not to launch a game.
It's sad, in my opinion, that as consumers we are complacent about poor game launches because it sends a message to companies that it is acceptable and the norm. Do we put up with this with any other product?
In the case of FFXIV, they are on their second try and had every opportunity in the world to prepare. It seems like alot of bad decisions were made.
This is what I've been saying.You can't blame companies for continually launching badly when no one holds them accountable.
Why launch with a thoroughly tested game and expensive backup plans to account forincreased demand when your consumer base will accept anything and even make excuses for you?Might as well let them and save the money.
This post is full of ridiculous idealism.
It is 100% impossible to ensure a smooth launch. no matter what you do, how many precautions you take, osmething can go wrong. Now, SE wasnt as prepared as they could have been, but preparation doesnt stop everything.
The reason companies launch badly is because MMORPGs are a *very* difficult thing to launch. For one, you can't properly stress test. Most people simply arent going to do the beta stress test. So should we hold everyone that didnt do the stress test (myself included) accountable as well?
And how are we supposed to hold SE accountable? By not playing an enjoyable game? Thats called cutting off your nose to spite your face. Its not like SE hasnt generated massive amounts of complaints about this. And if a company deserves to be held accountable for something, it usually is. Look at NGE. SoE paid for that. Look at vanguard, Sigil launched an unfinished, buggy game and it cost them their company.
And then there is this: Many, many people, myself included, would rather have dealt with the week one issues than have the launch delayed. because once you got in the game, it was great. And its not like we apid for it anyway, that week was free.
And what money did SE save? This cost them more money most likely, because they had to rush to get the servers ready. they had to deal with the negativity on top of that. they earned it, but you are acting like there were no consequences. Good thing for them they have a good product to overcome this.
Put it this way: If a chef I like is opening a brand new restaurant and due to errors in the reservation system it takes me 2 hours to get a table. When i sit down at the table the service is atrocious and the food takes forever to get there. but when it comes, its amazing.
Now, the reservation system should have been better tested and the staff better trained. I filed a complaint about it, and i got a free meal out of it. Am i going to let these issues stop me form going back and enjoying a great meal in the future, especially given that now the reservation works and theyve replaced most of the staff?
The ultimate botched launch was SOE's EQII. It barely ran on most computers, and had so many bugs it was almost unplayable for the first two months. They tried to upstage Blizzard's wow by 3 weeks and ended up making EQII an also ran because of it.
The thing that bugs me about launches these days is these companies that open up the item shop during beta and not just a portion of it, the entire thing. That is NOT a beta in any shape or form it is a stealth launch if you ask me.
I think Lotro and Rift are the best launches that I can think of.
It's sad, in my opinion, that as consumers we are complacent about poor game launches because it sends a message to companies that it is acceptable and the norm. Do we put up with this with any other product?
In the case of FFXIV, they are on their second try and had every opportunity in the world to prepare. It seems like alot of bad decisions were made.
This is what I've been saying.You can't blame companies for continually launching badly when no one holds them accountable.
Why launch with a thoroughly tested game and expensive backup plans to account forincreased demand when your consumer base will accept anything and even make excuses for you?Might as well let them and save the money.
This post is full of ridiculous idealism.
It is 100% impossible to ensure a smooth launch. no matter what you do, how many precautions you take, osmething can go wrong. Now, SE wasnt as prepared as they could have been, but preparation doesnt stop everything.
The reason companies launch badly is because MMORPGs are a *very* difficult thing to launch. For one, you can't properly stress test. Most people simply arent going to do the beta stress test. So should we hold everyone that didnt do the stress test (myself included) accountable as well?
And how are we supposed to hold SE accountable? By not playing an enjoyable game? Thats called cutting off your nose to spite your face. Its not like SE hasnt generated massive amounts of complaints about this. And if a company deserves to be held accountable for something, it usually is. Look at NGE. SoE paid for that. Look at vanguard, Sigil launched an unfinished, buggy game and it cost them their company.
And then there is this: Many, many people, myself included, would rather have dealt with the week one issues than have the launch delayed. because once you got in the game, it was great. And its not like we apid for it anyway, that week was free.
And what money did SE save? This cost them more money most likely, because they had to rush to get the servers ready. they had to deal with the negativity on top of that. they earned it, but you are acting like there were no consequences. Good thing for them they have a good product to overcome this.
Put it this way: If a chef I like is opening a brand new restaurant and due to errors in the reservation system it takes me 2 hours to get a table. When i sit down at the table the service is atrocious and the food takes forever to get there. but when it comes, its amazing.
Now, the reservation system should have been better tested and the staff better trained. I filed a complaint about it, and i got a free meal out of it. Am i going to let these issues stop me form going back and enjoying a great meal in the future, especially given that now the reservation works and theyve replaced most of the staff?
There is no idealism,just because there has been on 100% smooth launch doesn't mean companies shouldn't be striving to achieve it even if it doesn't ever get fully achieved.the only 100% there is is that if no one tries it will 100% never be achieved.
There are a lot of things that are difficult to do but we as consumers expect them to be done,why should MMORPG's be a special unique snowflake?It was acceptable back when this genre was being pioneered and when something truly unique and new is trying to be done with the game especially the network structure but this is not the case for most launches including your one example of FFXIV.
You seem to be going out of your way to make this about SE and FFXIV when the article and resposnes are about MMORPGs in general.Maybe SE did lose money because of this bad launch maybe not neither of us know but many companies have released beta products that are not fully tested as release or started charging during "beta" which does save money because it starts them earning money.
Many people will walk out on a restaurant that has just opened and has terrible service and wait times and will not return until they've been told the food is amazing and the service has improved or not at all.Why should MMORPG customers not do the same to let the people running things know it's not acceptable?
Also in your example people will be more forgiving if the restaurant in question is being opened by people new to the business but if it's being opened by someone with a lot of experience and should know how to open smoothly then it's gonna be criticized harder and piss more people off who had better expectations based on the experience of the openers.
Again why should MMORPG's be so special in regards to consumer expectations and what consumers have a right to expect from such services?
Perhaps Anet has patented their Overflow Server system, that's why no other game dev implemented this feature on their game. Overflow server system is really revolutionary.
Again why should MMORPG's be so special in regards to consumer expectations and what consumers have a right to expect from such services?
And this is textbook idealism. And here is your answer:
Because it is 100% impossible to properly test the product.
You have no choice but to wing it, there is no other way.
The length of the open beta wouldnt have changed the fact that its only going to get a fraction of the people that a launch will.
And even if they were sure that delaying the release a week or two would have made a difference, that would have screwed over far more people than the launch did (again, there were a lot of people happily playing the game) not to mention the logistics of it, including coordinating virtually every retail store that sells games in the world to not sell their copies.
And to use another similar industry: when a game system launches shouldnt we expect it a) to be available to buy and b) have a diverse, quality game lineup? But do these things typically happen? Sometimes they do but most of the time they don't.
Originally posted by Evokerz Perhaps Anet has patented their Overflow Server system, that's why no other game dev implemented this feature on their game. Overflow server system is really revolutionary.
Except its not. It was in EQ2 9 years ago. Its in SWTOR. Im sure it was in a game before EQ2.
Two problems come to mind when it comes to FFXIV ARR, Yoshi-P wanted 2 years with the game before releasing, SE gave him 16 months and secondly SE really really underestimated how popular their game would be.
The game was rushed once again, but Yoshi-P did make a hell of an attempt to put out a remarkable game in a short period of time.
Only time you can cry about a bad launch is when the company does not compensate its customers. So many things can happen when you go live you really cant be ready no matter how ready you try and be. If you cant take the idea of a game having a bad launch and it makes you rage and quit what could be a great game. Then you should not buy new MMOs. Wait 2-6 months and try it then. In the grand scale of things what a few months when MMOs last years and years. Cant take the heat like a big boy, then get out of the kitchen or grow up. Anything online and subject to so many things that can go wrong you have no idea. Networking is not plug and play. Networking is as much an art form as anything with so many verables. Still to this day in my 14 years of MMOing WoW was the worst launch I have ever played and look how that turned out.
Yes SE maybe did a poor job at anticipating the excitement and involvement in the early - launch stage, but really is that a bad thing? They received more response than they anticipated. They did respond with fixes and since that date things as far as login have been fine.
I think as far as this gamer there is no need to comment more... time to play!
For a re-launch that was aimed at making amends for their botched first attempt, they dropped the ball.
There is over a decade's worth of examples to pull from. The apologists simply do not have a reasonable argument anymore for a company that cannot get their stuff together given the mountain of data they should refer to see how others screwed up, and how some succeeded. There are ways to manage unexpected numbers of customers, and SE didn't do anything to anticipate that.
it was another failed launch to add to the pile. Accept it or not, the bottom line is, for a business, lost revenue and a damaged reputation. SE has both of those, again, with this mess.
Excellently put.
SE dropped the ball. It was clear that all was not well in the camp from the moment problems started in Open Beta.
As Bill says in his arguments, they should have significantly extended Open Beta when those problems occurred. They didn't. The 6-8 hours they extended it was not enough, and the fallout at actual EA and launch proved it.
As Bill also points out, they did not do enough testing (if any at all?) on the NA/EU servers prior to launching them. The JP servers are the ones that all Alpha and Beta phases were held on. They were tested, fine-tuned and refined to as near "perfect" as they could have been. The results spoke for themselves; tiring of trying to get into ARR, NA/EU players resorted to creating characters on the JP servers, just so they could actually play the game they'd paid for. SE seriously dropped the ball here, and you have to be willfully ignorant to not acknowledge that.
There should have been at least one beta phase (but ideally "as many as necessary") dedicated to beating the crap out of those new NA/EU servers, doing all kinds of focused stress-testing, to weed out any possible issues or bottlenecks. If they'd done that, all those issues would have quite likely been caught, they'd have been addressed prior to Open Beta, EA and Release. Then we could have been discussing the smooth and successful re-launch of ARR, rather than asking why yet another MMO has fumbled out the door so badly.
Bill makes yet another great point (you can probably tell whose side of the debate I'm on by now , in that saying "all MMOs launch with problems" is no longer a valid excuse. It's more a reason to ask why, with all the data they could draw on of past launches - good and bad - to see what works and what doesn't, why developers are still getting it so wrong and consistently being "caught unprepared"?
ARR's re-launch is definitely one of the worst of recent MMOs, and it shouldn't have been. Again, they'd gotten performance to a great and stable level on the JP servers, so clearly they were capable of doing the same on the NA/EU servers. They just didn't. They could have been more ahead of things, had the servers setup sooner, had players on them and testing them well ahead of even Open Beta. They chose not to do that.
They could have had a better system in place for adding and removing server clusters more swiftly to adjust to demand so the halting of digital sales, and the locking out and throttling of player logins wouldn't have been so necessary just to keep the servers they did have from crashing. They lacked the foresight and initiative to do this, and it came back to bite them in the ass.
To respond to Chris's remark about how players were given an extra week of "free gametime". You know who truly benefitted from that, Chris? The people who were able to play to begin with, thanks to staying logged in for hours and hours at a time, while locking up hundreds (thousands?) of available login slots. They got a bonus. The people who couldn't log in or play for most/all that time are simply getting the week of time they lost in the first place, due the rolling trainwreck. There is no "bonus" for them, and frankly I don't think SE/Yoshi-P's "compensation" was good enough, for that very reason.
All in all, I gotta agree with Bill Murphy on this one. Enough is enough already.
Again why should MMORPG's be so special in regards to consumer expectations and what consumers have a right to expect from such services?
And this is textbook idealism. And here is your answer:
Because it is 100% impossible to properly test the product.
You have no choice but to wing it, there is no other way.
The length of the open beta wouldnt have changed the fact that its only going to get a fraction of the people that a launch will.
And even if they were sure that delaying the release a week or two would have made a difference, that would have screwed over far more people than the launch did (again, there were a lot of people happily playing the game) not to mention the logistics of it, including coordinating virtually every retail store that sells games in the world to not sell their copies.
And to use another similar industry: when a game system launches shouldnt we expect it a) to be available to buy and b) have a diverse, quality game lineup? But do these things typically happen? Sometimes they do but most of the time they don't.
It is not 100% impossible to test the product properly,it maybe impossible to be 100% you've caught everything but you can stress test things and make plans and contingency plans for unforseen demand and problems to minimize things.You speak like we haven't got over a decade of experience in launches of all sizes to draw from and that there are companies with lot's of internal experience that should be able to achieve smoother launches.
as to your next analogy
A) You can't equate demand outreaching your manufacturing limitation to not spending money to be able to expand your server infrastructure or have servers in reserve.Totally different things and costs.But yes the console manufacturers should by now have more manufacturing plants than they did previously given past launch numbers.
diversity and game line upa t launch is not totally up to the console manufacturers most of it lies in third party developers.Even so they are TRYING to bring that to this next gen launch window.They haven't given up on trying.
There will never be a 100% problem free MMO launch there will always be bugs and unforseen problems but that doesn't mean they should be allowed to stop trying and shouldn't have to plan server infrastructure better.
But why should they when consumers will make excuses for them to in fact stop trying and go backwards.
I can see why players get angry over a troublesome launch, but let's be realistic its more thank likely very frustrating for the company as well. Imagine your game not coming online or working properly at release with that said, patience is keen with mmo's. Online games will always have issues and there's no use in going apeshit over it. I've said it before and I'll say it again I wish all of the people claiming to jump ship at launch would actually not play the game because they complain and complain until the game works correctly making the launch ever more so irritating for those of us patient enough to wait for the fix, if you really want to jump ship over launch issues then you really don't need to play the awesome game anyways. However overflow servers are great and I'm glad to see more and more games helping ease the pain of a burdening launch.
The vibe on this website towards FFXIV: ARR is disappointing. If you only visited this site to read about FFXIV: ARR you would think it was a load of crap, when in reality it is the furthest from it compared to everything else here.
The only issue FFXIV: ARR had was being too crowded and that is all but fixed now. If you want to make a new character on certain servers you will have to wait for others to drop out, its that crowded. Even with the server capacity increased I have been in queue once or twice.
When the world transfer opens up it should fix any problem that exists now.
Why is it, a game like Dark Age of Camelot, with over 30 classes at launch across three realms and have a nearly perfect launch? Three factions with a full 1-50th level map per realm with separate raids for pve and pve content per realm, over 16 races (2001).
Because DAOC was a very small game to begin with and it launched with only half the content of games like EQ and AC.
Frontier was empty. No Mobs. No doors on Keeps.
Dungeons werent Itemized. They had Mobs, but they dropped no loot.
The PvE areas of the 3 Realms were empty of Mobs the further you went from the main cities.
Avalon (Albion) was completely taken out at release. It was in Beta, but removed. Only to be added later in an Expansion.
DAOC launched smoothly because there was hardly a game there in the first place.
On Topic- Anarchy Online. Worst. Release. Ever.
That does make sense to me - however, can we agree that the pvp was so damned fun no one cared about the lack of pixel targets in pve?
Spring of that 2002 (5 months from release I believe) I was in Darkness Falls - and pve'ing across the maps of three realms. I'm guessing they caught up incredibly fast with their what, 30 staff?
I'll take the DAoC launch any day. Knowing (a) my pvp will be a lot of fun - which we don't get anymore in any title (b) knowing the team will keep spitting out mobs and content - which they did until they imploded with Trials of Atlantis after being fooled into thinking what EQ was doing was going to work for them..and then bam - enter WoW. (c) I got to fight enemies that were different than I was - this NEVER happens anymore since everything is amalgamated together into one clusterfudge of same class race combinations (d) we had a plethora of classes - this NEVER happens anymore since classes are either classless fotm healer mage tanks of some variant or just the standard fighter, mage, cleric, rogue, pet class, archetypes.
Yep - I'll take DAoC over the crap I've seen come out since WoW.
Originally posted by Atadis I can see why players get angry over a troublesome launch, but let's be realistic its more thank likely very frustrating for the company as well. Imagine your game not coming online or working properly at release with that said, patience is keen with mmo's. Online games will always have issues and there's no use in going apeshit over it. I've said it before and I'll say it again I wish all of the people claiming to jump ship at launch would actually not play the game because they complain and complain until the game works correctly making the launch ever more so irritating for those of us patient enough to wait for the fix, if you really want to jump ship over launch issues then you really don't need to play the awesome game anyways. However overflow servers are great and I'm glad to see more and more games helping ease the pain of a burdening launch.
I can agree with you on companies not wanting to have a troublesome launch either but as a consumer that's not my concern,the onus is on the company to provide the service they want people to pay for.sure online games will always have problems but that is not an excuse for extreme cases and lack of service.
There can be mitigating circumstances in some cases like at the birth of the genre or being done by developers completely new to mmos or unprecedented demand which earns FFXIV some forgiveness due to unforeseen demand on the console side of things.
Comments
Any argument that starts with, "This is how it is and always will be ... you should deal with it," is flawed logic. Soon (tm) became a running joke on the WoW forums because how long do you wait when you're paying money and part (or all) of the service is broken. $15/mo is high subscription fee if you don't have access to the service.
Rift is a good example of a WoW clone that had a smooth launch and lots of concurrent. The overflow server design isn't new either. CoH did the same thing and outside of some initial rubber banding with travel powers, it worked too.
The real counter point is that people are willing to accept the day 1, week 1, month 1 problems. So, developers cut corners and hope to patch later. That's a societal problem and it's getting worse as console now do the same thing.
Unfortunately $$ speak louder than words (although I wish reviews sites would rip launches like D3 and Sim City rather than handing out high scores for games that may eventually functional correctly). Personally, I don't play MMOs as much anymore because the connection issues and bugs became too annoying. To a lesser extent, I don't play MMOs as much anymore because the design hasn't changed. I get why the progression systems are in place, but when honor points per hour is more of driving factor to compete than actually winning a team PvP match, the system is broken.
p.s. MMORPG really needs to upgrade the comment software or incorporate a cloud solution. The paragraph and return tags don't work correctly, at least in firefox. Right clicking on words and not getting the firefox spell check options is also annoying.
If you don't worry about it, it's not a problem.
I have never been acceptable of launch mishaps.
Why is it, a game like Dark Age of Camelot, with over 30 classes at launch across three realms and have a nearly perfect launch? Three factions with a full 1-50th level map per realm with separate raids for pve and pve content per realm, over 16 races (2001).
IGN stated in 2001 (November article I believe) that DAoC had a flawless release. So yes folks, a game far more advanced than anything we have today was able to have a sustainable launch.
Now we get these trivial so called mmorpgs with 5 classes (usually classless classes nowadays) no true factions (mercenary options, pve crossover [think Secret World and Rift]...or just plain zero factions with 5 races and the same class race combinations in an E-Sport battleground (think Guild Wars 2, SW:ToR, etc).
Subscribers don't need to keep swallowing this junk. Shame is, do they know that it's possible to create a massive mmorpg with more variation and depth than anything on the market today? Sadly, no. Most folks I know never played Dark Age of Camelot. That game raised the bar so high that EA had to buy out Mythic so that Dark Age could be left untouched and undeveloped, swept under a rug, so that it would NOT appear to be a threat to Warhammer (a game that seriously failed).
Dark Age of Camelot
Mythic's MMORPG is beautiful, addicting, and actually stable. The full review....
by IGN Staff
November 2, 2001
DAoC also had less people trying to play during launch, much much less. Hell the game peaked around 250k users (iirc). DAoC was a great game, and had a lovely launch (I was there day 1), but at least compare apples to apples when making comparisons. DAoC did have the best launch of any pre-WoW era mmo though, Mythic did a lot right for the time.
I won't say FF had a perfect launch, because it didn't, but aside from server lock and login issues, the game had less issues than WoW did when it launched. WoW was by far and away the most popular mmo launch of the era. There were login issues, plus people would get loot locked when looting or attempting to gather from a broken gathering node (flowers/mineral veins). The queue issues persisted for months on many servers, which is why they had to break up the populations of many of the largest servers.
Compared to many other equally popular mmo titles, FFXIV had a pretty smooth launch.
I usually don't mind any topic at all,they is always something interesting in a topic.However this one has already been beat to death and gone over even by MMORPG so i am not so sure we need any more dwelling on the obvious.
There are probably a million other topics you could have picked ,even if just looking at FFXIV,but one that is over played,not so interesting anymore.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
gameplay > graphics
Icculus, where do I find out max capacity of servers out at? I never saw max. amounts in any MMO I played listed anywhere and would be interested in some various MMO's capacities?
Because DAOC was a very small game to begin with and it launched with only half the content of games like EQ and AC.
Frontier was empty. No Mobs. No doors on Keeps.
Dungeons werent Itemized. They had Mobs, but they dropped no loot.
The PvE areas of the 3 Realms were empty of Mobs the further you went from the main cities.
Avalon (Albion) was completely taken out at release. It was in Beta, but removed. Only to be added later in an Expansion.
DAOC launched smoothly because there was hardly a game there in the first place.
On Topic- Anarchy Online. Worst. Release. Ever.
Bringer of Eternal Darkness and Despair, but also a Nutritious way to start your Morning.
Games Played: Too Many
MMOs have been around for more than 15 years. Most industries learn from the mistakes made in the past. The software industry (and the MMORPG industry in particular) can't seem to learn from their own mistakes, let alone the mistakes that their predecessors (and competitors) have made.
FFXIV:ARR had a terrible launch. We're not talking "waiting in a queue for an hour before you can play" terrible; we're talking "I can't even log into the game, and there's no queue system in place when I get there anyway" terrible. It's one thing to forgive SE for being unprepared for the massive influx of players their game experienced. It's quite another to overlook the fact that they hadn't even bothered to have the most simple systems in place once the game went live.
We can all agree that MMORPGs are tough to build. What we can't seem to agree on is how much FUBAR is too much FUBAR. FFXIV:ARR was severely FUBAR'd at launch. No matter how you spin it, the degree to which SE f'd up their launch should serve as an object lesson in how not to launch a game.
This post is full of ridiculous idealism.
It is 100% impossible to ensure a smooth launch. no matter what you do, how many precautions you take, osmething can go wrong. Now, SE wasnt as prepared as they could have been, but preparation doesnt stop everything.
The reason companies launch badly is because MMORPGs are a *very* difficult thing to launch. For one, you can't properly stress test. Most people simply arent going to do the beta stress test. So should we hold everyone that didnt do the stress test (myself included) accountable as well?
And how are we supposed to hold SE accountable? By not playing an enjoyable game? Thats called cutting off your nose to spite your face. Its not like SE hasnt generated massive amounts of complaints about this. And if a company deserves to be held accountable for something, it usually is. Look at NGE. SoE paid for that. Look at vanguard, Sigil launched an unfinished, buggy game and it cost them their company.
And then there is this: Many, many people, myself included, would rather have dealt with the week one issues than have the launch delayed. because once you got in the game, it was great. And its not like we apid for it anyway, that week was free.
And what money did SE save? This cost them more money most likely, because they had to rush to get the servers ready. they had to deal with the negativity on top of that. they earned it, but you are acting like there were no consequences. Good thing for them they have a good product to overcome this.
Put it this way: If a chef I like is opening a brand new restaurant and due to errors in the reservation system it takes me 2 hours to get a table. When i sit down at the table the service is atrocious and the food takes forever to get there. but when it comes, its amazing.
Now, the reservation system should have been better tested and the staff better trained. I filed a complaint about it, and i got a free meal out of it. Am i going to let these issues stop me form going back and enjoying a great meal in the future, especially given that now the reservation works and theyve replaced most of the staff?
The ultimate botched launch was SOE's EQII. It barely ran on most computers, and had so many bugs it was almost unplayable for the first two months. They tried to upstage Blizzard's wow by 3 weeks and ended up making EQII an also ran because of it.
The thing that bugs me about launches these days is these companies that open up the item shop during beta and not just a portion of it, the entire thing. That is NOT a beta in any shape or form it is a stealth launch if you ask me.
I think Lotro and Rift are the best launches that I can think of.
There is no idealism,just because there has been on 100% smooth launch doesn't mean companies shouldn't be striving to achieve it even if it doesn't ever get fully achieved.the only 100% there is is that if no one tries it will 100% never be achieved.
There are a lot of things that are difficult to do but we as consumers expect them to be done,why should MMORPG's be a special unique snowflake?It was acceptable back when this genre was being pioneered and when something truly unique and new is trying to be done with the game especially the network structure but this is not the case for most launches including your one example of FFXIV.
You seem to be going out of your way to make this about SE and FFXIV when the article and resposnes are about MMORPGs in general.Maybe SE did lose money because of this bad launch maybe not neither of us know but many companies have released beta products that are not fully tested as release or started charging during "beta" which does save money because it starts them earning money.
Many people will walk out on a restaurant that has just opened and has terrible service and wait times and will not return until they've been told the food is amazing and the service has improved or not at all.Why should MMORPG customers not do the same to let the people running things know it's not acceptable?
Also in your example people will be more forgiving if the restaurant in question is being opened by people new to the business but if it's being opened by someone with a lot of experience and should know how to open smoothly then it's gonna be criticized harder and piss more people off who had better expectations based on the experience of the openers.
Again why should MMORPG's be so special in regards to consumer expectations and what consumers have a right to expect from such services?
And this is textbook idealism. And here is your answer:
Because it is 100% impossible to properly test the product.
You have no choice but to wing it, there is no other way.
The length of the open beta wouldnt have changed the fact that its only going to get a fraction of the people that a launch will.
And even if they were sure that delaying the release a week or two would have made a difference, that would have screwed over far more people than the launch did (again, there were a lot of people happily playing the game) not to mention the logistics of it, including coordinating virtually every retail store that sells games in the world to not sell their copies.
And to use another similar industry: when a game system launches shouldnt we expect it a) to be available to buy and b) have a diverse, quality game lineup? But do these things typically happen? Sometimes they do but most of the time they don't.
Except its not. It was in EQ2 9 years ago. Its in SWTOR. Im sure it was in a game before EQ2.
Two problems come to mind when it comes to FFXIV ARR, Yoshi-P wanted 2 years with the game before releasing, SE gave him 16 months and secondly SE really really underestimated how popular their game would be.
The game was rushed once again, but Yoshi-P did make a hell of an attempt to put out a remarkable game in a short period of time.
Yes SE maybe did a poor job at anticipating the excitement and involvement in the early - launch stage, but really is that a bad thing? They received more response than they anticipated. They did respond with fixes and since that date things as far as login have been fine.
I think as far as this gamer there is no need to comment more... time to play!
Excellently put.
SE dropped the ball. It was clear that all was not well in the camp from the moment problems started in Open Beta.
As Bill says in his arguments, they should have significantly extended Open Beta when those problems occurred. They didn't. The 6-8 hours they extended it was not enough, and the fallout at actual EA and launch proved it.
As Bill also points out, they did not do enough testing (if any at all?) on the NA/EU servers prior to launching them. The JP servers are the ones that all Alpha and Beta phases were held on. They were tested, fine-tuned and refined to as near "perfect" as they could have been. The results spoke for themselves; tiring of trying to get into ARR, NA/EU players resorted to creating characters on the JP servers, just so they could actually play the game they'd paid for. SE seriously dropped the ball here, and you have to be willfully ignorant to not acknowledge that.
There should have been at least one beta phase (but ideally "as many as necessary") dedicated to beating the crap out of those new NA/EU servers, doing all kinds of focused stress-testing, to weed out any possible issues or bottlenecks. If they'd done that, all those issues would have quite likely been caught, they'd have been addressed prior to Open Beta, EA and Release. Then we could have been discussing the smooth and successful re-launch of ARR, rather than asking why yet another MMO has fumbled out the door so badly.
Bill makes yet another great point (you can probably tell whose side of the debate I'm on by now
, in that saying "all MMOs launch with problems" is no longer a valid excuse. It's more a reason to ask why, with all the data they could draw on of past launches - good and bad - to see what works and what doesn't, why developers are still getting it so wrong and consistently being "caught unprepared"?
ARR's re-launch is definitely one of the worst of recent MMOs, and it shouldn't have been. Again, they'd gotten performance to a great and stable level on the JP servers, so clearly they were capable of doing the same on the NA/EU servers. They just didn't. They could have been more ahead of things, had the servers setup sooner, had players on them and testing them well ahead of even Open Beta. They chose not to do that.
They could have had a better system in place for adding and removing server clusters more swiftly to adjust to demand so the halting of digital sales, and the locking out and throttling of player logins wouldn't have been so necessary just to keep the servers they did have from crashing. They lacked the foresight and initiative to do this, and it came back to bite them in the ass.
To respond to Chris's remark about how players were given an extra week of "free gametime". You know who truly benefitted from that, Chris? The people who were able to play to begin with, thanks to staying logged in for hours and hours at a time, while locking up hundreds (thousands?) of available login slots. They got a bonus. The people who couldn't log in or play for most/all that time are simply getting the week of time they lost in the first place, due the rolling trainwreck. There is no "bonus" for them, and frankly I don't think SE/Yoshi-P's "compensation" was good enough, for that very reason.
All in all, I gotta agree with Bill Murphy on this one. Enough is enough already.
It is not 100% impossible to test the product properly,it maybe impossible to be 100% you've caught everything but you can stress test things and make plans and contingency plans for unforseen demand and problems to minimize things.You speak like we haven't got over a decade of experience in launches of all sizes to draw from and that there are companies with lot's of internal experience that should be able to achieve smoother launches.
as to your next analogy
A) You can't equate demand outreaching your manufacturing limitation to not spending money to be able to expand your server infrastructure or have servers in reserve.Totally different things and costs.But yes the console manufacturers should by now have more manufacturing plants than they did previously given past launch numbers.
There will never be a 100% problem free MMO launch there will always be bugs and unforseen problems but that doesn't mean they should be allowed to stop trying and shouldn't have to plan server infrastructure better.
But why should they when consumers will make excuses for them to in fact stop trying and go backwards.
The vibe on this website towards FFXIV: ARR is disappointing. If you only visited this site to read about FFXIV: ARR you would think it was a load of crap, when in reality it is the furthest from it compared to everything else here.
The only issue FFXIV: ARR had was being too crowded and that is all but fixed now. If you want to make a new character on certain servers you will have to wait for others to drop out, its that crowded. Even with the server capacity increased I have been in queue once or twice.
When the world transfer opens up it should fix any problem that exists now.
That does make sense to me - however, can we agree that the pvp was so damned fun no one cared about the lack of pixel targets in pve?
Spring of that 2002 (5 months from release I believe) I was in Darkness Falls - and pve'ing across the maps of three realms. I'm guessing they caught up incredibly fast with their what, 30 staff?
I'll take the DAoC launch any day. Knowing (a) my pvp will be a lot of fun - which we don't get anymore in any title (b) knowing the team will keep spitting out mobs and content - which they did until they imploded with Trials of Atlantis after being fooled into thinking what EQ was doing was going to work for them..and then bam - enter WoW. (c) I got to fight enemies that were different than I was - this NEVER happens anymore since everything is amalgamated together into one clusterfudge of same class race combinations (d) we had a plethora of classes - this NEVER happens anymore since classes are either classless fotm healer mage tanks of some variant or just the standard fighter, mage, cleric, rogue, pet class, archetypes.
Yep - I'll take DAoC over the crap I've seen come out since WoW.
I can agree with you on companies not wanting to have a troublesome launch either but as a consumer that's not my concern,the onus is on the company to provide the service they want people to pay for.sure online games will always have problems but that is not an excuse for extreme cases and lack of service.
There can be mitigating circumstances in some cases like at the birth of the genre or being done by developers completely new to mmos or unprecedented demand which earns FFXIV some forgiveness due to unforeseen demand on the console side of things.