Lol i love the pic next to the Anarchy one. "Artists rendition of the anarchy launch",
Anyway Aion's launch was pretty bad. I remember not being able to play cause of 8 hour queues. I found myself waking up very early so i could actually get into the game. Is a mediocre game anyways.
I don't have a lot of good things to say about Aion in general, but I thought they had a great launch compared to many MMOs that I've played at launch. However, my job isn't really a 9-5 so I had an opportunity to play at off peak hours. But still, overall, for a launch, it had to be one of the smoothest I have ever been a part of.
AO was one of the most epically devastating launches in history. I completely agree with that.
Based on what EQ2 was at launch, I would say it had one of the worst launches. It was extremely buggy that first month and is what pushed me to head over and check out what WoW was like. I remember EQ2 gave me the worst lag I've ever really experienced at the outset of launch. EQ2 was extremely buggy in the beginning, but I ended up loving it eventually.
I remember WoW had issues in the beginning, but they addressed them so fast, it just didn't hurt that early WoW experience for me overall. I suppose that's part of the reason it blew up.
Where is Vanguard? And where the hell is AoC?? And where, in the name of God, is WW2Online???
But I guess this is what you get when a noob gets to make a list such as this.
IMHO, while Darkfall sucks ass in multiple different ways, it's lauch was far from horrible. Shouldn't be included in this list at all as there are several games with far worse launches.
I was there for the EQ and AO launches first hand and they were awful. I will never forget making my first EQ character (Halfling Druid).
I leveled him up to 4 and then fell into a pond in Rivervale. Lag set in and I was killed by one of those piranhas. I was disconnected and so upset/worried that I thought my body would disappear and I would lose all of my "hard earned" equipment (at level 4). I just sat by my PC and kept trying to log in. I think I did end up losing everything but, like everyone else it seems, I couldn't get enough and kept coming back.
Yeah... where is Vanguard?! Aion was a pristine gem compared to the Vanguard launch. Actually, Vanguard, at least IMO, should be second to AO without any doubt.
When i saw Aion #4 i stopped reading. Yes queue's suck and can't be justified most times, what NCSoft did with the queue's was balancing issue's mostly (Reason why we got balanced servers now, can anyone say WAR Servers where balanced? ) and one ingame problem called personal shops. You could setup shop and stay ingame for infinite time and not get kicked out for being afk meaning anyone in the queue stayed there, they fixed this later on and queue where almost non-existent. There are definitely worse launches out there and makes me think you hardly did any research on it. For the rest Aion was one of the smoother launch i experienced in a long while.
I actually think that the Aion launch is correctly listed for having some of the worst queues of all time for a mmo. Clearly this was evident at head-start and main launch day. It does make NCsoft look very bad in my eyes, because they had already released the game in Korea and China, and had worked many of the game kinks and bugs out. Clearly, NCsoft kept no track of their pre-order sales and the number of copies sent to games stores at launch and severely underestimated the numbers of potential players for their game. However, if you are cynical you would guess that they felt the game might not appeal to Western players long-term since it is just another grinder with a massive-siege RvR endgame, so perhaps they were simply, in fact, anticipating a mass quit of many players after one month of play. Either way it is a poor excuse, you can always merge low pop servers as the game goes along, even Blizzard and WoW do this.
I love the list and I hope developers read this and WILL improve their launchdays.
I just read the dutch PC Gameplay wich was anticipating the secret world to be a good MMO, probably one of the best. They also anticipated it would have a good launch since Funcom had learned its lesson of Age of Conan.
I really lol'd at the report in PC Gameplay. The person wasn't aware of anarchy online for one. Otherwise he would've made it more like this:
"One fail at anarchy online, then the second at Age of Conan, must mean secret world will have a really sucky launchday too".
I do think world of warcraft could be in the list. In holland we had no monthly subscription options seeing the cards in the shops where all sold out. To activate the account you either needed a credit card or a 30-days card. It took them a small week to set up that you could log in freely with the credit card number 0000. Queues where 1 hour on one server but on Agrammar they where near 240 minutes. Though I still love the game (don't play it anymore since a month) it definitly earned his spot in this list.
While you give WWII Online honorable mention I fail to see why it is not amongst the top five. I suppose the niche of this game keeps it from mainstream fantasy playschool world type games that dominate the MMO world. I do remember flying plane pretty early in the game game nough not sure from day one as on day one I could not even log into the game. Having preordered the game and playing such online games since the GEnie days, I new I was going to have to have a decent machine so I upgraded. That did not keep me from the horrendeous loading of the game routine that took sometimes 20 minutes. Once in the game well it worked but was so clunky the game was hard to play. Its mere newness and arrival of a true online wargame is what kept it afloat well not exactly from what I recall. The dev team quickly declared bankruptcy and most likely took some investors down in the move. However, for the players this was seamless and were rewarded with almost 4 months of free play.
After all that it is still around after 8 years and is still the only Military style Wargame on the net. It was such a horrendeous launch though it is still not finish and needs a rewrite almost every six months to keep it fresh to the dev team.
I hate to keep a topic going that has been more over played than Lindsay Lohan's drug and alcoholc binging.....
But what about the crappy launch that CO had? All that negative hype about lifetime subscriptions.... The famous "Launch Day Massacre." I'm guessing thousands demanded their money back on the 6 month and lifetime subs.
They have really recovered well from it all and now have a playable and fun game, but let's face it that wasn't a launch it was just an accident with several casualties. I'm sure they shunned away several customer permanantly.
Good list, but I would have put Vanguard on there for sure. Releasing a game 6-12 months early is much worse IMO than anything Aion's done. BTW, I pre-ordered Aion and have played since early access. I don't know if I'm just lucky or what, but I have never once encountered a wait to log in.
honest question time...not a flame, not looking to troll, but seriously, has Dana written a decent article yet?
Grouping in Old school mmo's: meeting someone at the bar and chatting, getting to know them before jumping into bed. Current mmo's grouping: tinder. swipe, hookup, hope you don't get herpes, never see them again.
Thats the title, not the five scariest pre-order head starts. WoW was horrible at launch, there was more than I months time that I could not even play the game due to crashes and ridiculous ques. Going by the title of the list and the facts of WoWs problems at launch it should have definately been one of the ttitles included, but hey I guess its good to be the king lol.
Originally posted by comerb If you don't think the marketing and sales team didn't have the tools available to them to predict expected sales your mildly retarded and have no clue how marketing actually works or how much statistical analysis goes into it. Especially for a company with the financial pull Blizzard had, even back then.
So it is your contention that Blizzard knew how many people were coming on launch day (despite industry wide opinion that no one say the massive success coming, including blizzrd), but intentionally kept the number of servers so low which would only result in launch day problems? That is your theory?
Like you said, blizzard has tons of money, so why would they be afraid of adding some hardware if they knew how many people were coming?
The more I read from your trying to prove your point the more unbelievable it looks.
For those of you out there who constantly bash posters as trolls this article is a great indication of exactly why the mmo community is often so divided and untrusting as the article stated and most mmo players will tell you there are way more scary launches than good ones. And as a console player as well I think it abosultely pathetic that so many broken products get dumped onto the public to pay money for. MMO ers can continue to hate EA but atleast when I buy an EA game I know damn well everything they advertise as a game feature will be in there and it will actually work in essence I am for certain going to get exactly what I paid for as opposed to it being subject to both interpretation and the companies EULA.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Articles like this make me wonder who vets these people into positions where they're read en masse. This list just says one of two things, "I don't have much experience with MMO launches" or "I'm a hater of a few titles, so I'll include them even though others are more deserving".
honest question time...not a flame, not looking to troll, but seriously, has Dana written a decent article yet?
Decent is in the eye of the beholder isn't it? I don't always agree on every single point Dana makes but hmmm since when are you supposed to? People act like mmo's run under some kind of rules that totally exclude it from common sense......
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Hey Dana... dont think anyone here bother to read the point of the artical........
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude; greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. Samuel Adams
Good list, but I would have put Vanguard on there for sure. Releasing a game 6-12 months early is much worse IMO than anything Aion's done. BTW, I pre-ordered Aion and have played since early access. I don't know if I'm just lucky or what, but I have never once encountered a wait to log in.
Try launching one 10 years early like WWII Online. It was so bad two years into it they renamed it BattleGround Europe because the Lawyers found that they infringed using Blitzkrieg
Comments
Lol i love the pic next to the Anarchy one. "Artists rendition of the anarchy launch",
Anyway Aion's launch was pretty bad. I remember not being able to play cause of 8 hour queues. I found myself waking up very early so i could actually get into the game. Is a mediocre game anyways.
I don't have a lot of good things to say about Aion in general, but I thought they had a great launch compared to many MMOs that I've played at launch. However, my job isn't really a 9-5 so I had an opportunity to play at off peak hours. But still, overall, for a launch, it had to be one of the smoothest I have ever been a part of.
AO was one of the most epically devastating launches in history. I completely agree with that.
Based on what EQ2 was at launch, I would say it had one of the worst launches. It was extremely buggy that first month and is what pushed me to head over and check out what WoW was like. I remember EQ2 gave me the worst lag I've ever really experienced at the outset of launch. EQ2 was extremely buggy in the beginning, but I ended up loving it eventually.
I remember WoW had issues in the beginning, but they addressed them so fast, it just didn't hurt that early WoW experience for me overall. I suppose that's part of the reason it blew up.
Where is Vanguard? And where the hell is AoC?? And where, in the name of God, is WW2Online???
But I guess this is what you get when a noob gets to make a list such as this.
IMHO, while Darkfall sucks ass in multiple different ways, it's lauch was far from horrible. Shouldn't be included in this list at all as there are several games with far worse launches.
AO... now that one gives me nightmares still.
"1:36am - I tried to group with a billboard advertisement of a large man."
What a laugh! Good read.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/feature-articles/ianarchy-onlinei-first.php?page=3
REALITY CHECK
Looking at that list and even the ones held exempt from it...
Finding I vividly remember almost all of the issues mentioned there...
I discovered: I must really like this genre, or it's the Stockholm Syndrome talking!
I was there for the EQ and AO launches first hand and they were awful. I will never forget making my first EQ character (Halfling Druid).
I leveled him up to 4 and then fell into a pond in Rivervale. Lag set in and I was killed by one of those piranhas. I was disconnected and so upset/worried that I thought my body would disappear and I would lose all of my "hard earned" equipment (at level 4). I just sat by my PC and kept trying to log in. I think I did end up losing everything but, like everyone else it seems, I couldn't get enough and kept coming back.
Vanguard wasn't on the list...
I'm a VG fanboi and even I'm surprised.
Currently playing: Vanguard: SOH
Yeah... where is Vanguard?! Aion was a pristine gem compared to the Vanguard launch. Actually, Vanguard, at least IMO, should be second to AO without any doubt.
I actually think that the Aion launch is correctly listed for having some of the worst queues of all time for a mmo. Clearly this was evident at head-start and main launch day. It does make NCsoft look very bad in my eyes, because they had already released the game in Korea and China, and had worked many of the game kinks and bugs out. Clearly, NCsoft kept no track of their pre-order sales and the number of copies sent to games stores at launch and severely underestimated the numbers of potential players for their game. However, if you are cynical you would guess that they felt the game might not appeal to Western players long-term since it is just another grinder with a massive-siege RvR endgame, so perhaps they were simply, in fact, anticipating a mass quit of many players after one month of play. Either way it is a poor excuse, you can always merge low pop servers as the game goes along, even Blizzard and WoW do this.
I love the list and I hope developers read this and WILL improve their launchdays.
I just read the dutch PC Gameplay wich was anticipating the secret world to be a good MMO, probably one of the best. They also anticipated it would have a good launch since Funcom had learned its lesson of Age of Conan.
I really lol'd at the report in PC Gameplay. The person wasn't aware of anarchy online for one. Otherwise he would've made it more like this:
"One fail at anarchy online, then the second at Age of Conan, must mean secret world will have a really sucky launchday too".
I do think world of warcraft could be in the list. In holland we had no monthly subscription options seeing the cards in the shops where all sold out. To activate the account you either needed a credit card or a 30-days card. It took them a small week to set up that you could log in freely with the credit card number 0000. Queues where 1 hour on one server but on Agrammar they where near 240 minutes. Though I still love the game (don't play it anymore since a month) it definitly earned his spot in this list.
While you give WWII Online honorable mention I fail to see why it is not amongst the top five. I suppose the niche of this game keeps it from mainstream fantasy playschool world type games that dominate the MMO world. I do remember flying plane pretty early in the game game nough not sure from day one as on day one I could not even log into the game. Having preordered the game and playing such online games since the GEnie days, I new I was going to have to have a decent machine so I upgraded. That did not keep me from the horrendeous loading of the game routine that took sometimes 20 minutes. Once in the game well it worked but was so clunky the game was hard to play. Its mere newness and arrival of a true online wargame is what kept it afloat well not exactly from what I recall. The dev team quickly declared bankruptcy and most likely took some investors down in the move. However, for the players this was seamless and were rewarded with almost 4 months of free play.
After all that it is still around after 8 years and is still the only Military style Wargame on the net. It was such a horrendeous launch though it is still not finish and needs a rewrite almost every six months to keep it fresh to the dev team.
I hate to keep a topic going that has been more over played than Lindsay Lohan's drug and alcoholc binging.....
But what about the crappy launch that CO had? All that negative hype about lifetime subscriptions.... The famous "Launch Day Massacre." I'm guessing thousands demanded their money back on the 6 month and lifetime subs.
They have really recovered well from it all and now have a playable and fun game, but let's face it that wasn't a launch it was just an accident with several casualties. I'm sure they shunned away several customer permanantly.
Good list, but I would have put Vanguard on there for sure. Releasing a game 6-12 months early is much worse IMO than anything Aion's done. BTW, I pre-ordered Aion and have played since early access. I don't know if I'm just lucky or what, but I have never once encountered a wait to log in.
Id put Vanguard over Aion. Aion was very stable, only had big queues. Which game didnt? I remember 2000 queues when WoW released
honest question time...not a flame, not looking to troll, but seriously, has Dana written a decent article yet?
He writes fine, but has to consult with people who know more about MMOs. Every list he makes has flaws
He writes fine, but has to consult with people who know more about MMOs. Every her list has flaws
Dana is male.
Edit: And it appears you have flaws in everything you write.
"General: The List: Five Scariest MMO Launches"
Thats the title, not the five scariest pre-order head starts. WoW was horrible at launch, there was more than I months time that I could not even play the game due to crashes and ridiculous ques. Going by the title of the list and the facts of WoWs problems at launch it should have definately been one of the ttitles included, but hey I guess its good to be the king lol.
No signature, I don't have a pen
Vanguard online not on the list?hhmmm
Well,it makes one wonder about that list: how was club penguin's launch? One of the greatest mmo since wow. Did it had a good launch?
=]
So it is your contention that Blizzard knew how many people were coming on launch day (despite industry wide opinion that no one say the massive success coming, including blizzrd), but intentionally kept the number of servers so low which would only result in launch day problems? That is your theory?
Like you said, blizzard has tons of money, so why would they be afraid of adding some hardware if they knew how many people were coming?
The more I read from your trying to prove your point the more unbelievable it looks.
For those of you out there who constantly bash posters as trolls this article is a great indication of exactly why the mmo community is often so divided and untrusting as the article stated and most mmo players will tell you there are way more scary launches than good ones. And as a console player as well I think it abosultely pathetic that so many broken products get dumped onto the public to pay money for. MMO ers can continue to hate EA but atleast when I buy an EA game I know damn well everything they advertise as a game feature will be in there and it will actually work in essence I am for certain going to get exactly what I paid for as opposed to it being subject to both interpretation and the companies EULA.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Articles like this make me wonder who vets these people into positions where they're read en masse. This list just says one of two things, "I don't have much experience with MMO launches" or "I'm a hater of a few titles, so I'll include them even though others are more deserving".
Shadow of Apophis - Council Member
Decent is in the eye of the beholder isn't it? I don't always agree on every single point Dana makes but hmmm since when are you supposed to? People act like mmo's run under some kind of rules that totally exclude it from common sense......
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Hey Dana... dont think anyone here bother to read the point of the artical........
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude; greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Samuel Adams
Try launching one 10 years early like WWII Online. It was so bad two years into it they renamed it BattleGround Europe because the Lawyers found that they infringed using Blitzkrieg