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Do MMORPG Launch Queues Bother You? | MMORPG.com
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Do MMORPG Launch Queues Bother You? | MMORPG.com
Launch queues. These constant wait times that plague MMO launches are a hassle for some, a rite of passage for others. But how do you truly feel about launch queues?
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Now that every game has to be online many of us are punished with the remarks of others.
There is a first for every experience and there is a norm or standard.
*Pretty Standard*
It's a lot like waiting in line to get into a:
-Concert
-Big blockbuster Movie
-Game Release
Other companies don't have their track record, nor as shiny a reputation and should be regarded accordingly and their specific situations taken in to account. I'm all for giving developers/companies some slack but it has to be earned.
This queue acts as a decent shitty community filter. There's tons of people claiming that they refunded the expansion, and cancelled their subscription and all I can say is.. fantastic!
Screw the people who do nothing but complain, loudly. All it does is stress the already incredibly dedicated devs and upset the community even more, even though we all know this is temporary.
However, for B2P/Sub games, there is zero excuse for any kind of Que, they had a direct idea of how many people were going to be hitting their game due to sales numbers, they should have planned accordingly to accommodate them.
If that means they needed to beef everything up for a limited time to make sure they could handle it, than that is what they should do.
Even less an excuse for a game that has been around a while and is putting out a paid expansion.
Again, however, if it was a free update, or expansion, I can respect that perhaps they simply got overwhelmed as they, again, really don't have much of a way to gauge how many players would return for it.
In fact I can even imagine that some games that went F2P, and put out a paid expansion, could get a bit overrun by returning F2P players, that didn't buy the expansion, but opted to try the game again, because it was in the news.
But I would think those players would not be trying to swarm the game on day 1 live of the expansion, and I would come back a wee bit earlier, to see if they wanted to buy up the expansion, if their fire for the game was rekindled. But expecting gamers to be rational and logical, is not a safe bet.. so there is that too.
Some games and technologies allow for some flexibility but so far there is no great solution. Build too small and you have queues. Build too big and you end up with empty servers.
What I think would be interesting is if they limited play time for the first few days. Maybe it's still first come first served, but you only get an hour of playtime a day. If it's a sub based game then just don't start the sub counter for the first week or so or if the game comes with a few 30 day sub then make the first one 40 days or something along those lines to make up for the limited play time.
Another idea:
Why make server signups some secret? Make the server list public before launch. Let players make their characters and select their servers the week before launch. SHOW the number of characters currently listed for the servers. Give people the information to make informed choices instead of scouring Reddit for unofficial lists and polls.
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For me it is whatever, not tonight maybe I'm gonna try it 2morrow. But I can understand for others it hit different.
This^
Anticipating the amount of traffic you're going to have on launch day or patch day or dlc day will never be perfect, but there could be other methods to get better data.
To answer the original question: Yes, queues bother me, I want to play the game.
See thats what been nice right now, if you 2002 error d/c from ffxiv you save your spot in queue for something like 5-10min, giving you time to boot back up and get back in queue. some players just see the queue and leave for an hour to do something else never bothering to check so they think they get kicked to the back every time.
But yeah the hate is unwarranted right now, launches always have queue times, and SE said over and over again that this would happen, even went so far as to say they tried to pay double for new servers, but currently there is a worldwide shortage on servers so they couldnt get any. But we will always have entitled children who complain.
Demand better for your money, or keep taking it in the a....
Here's an idea I've actually supported, selling queue priority for extra cost, heck they do it all the time at amusement parks, airlines and passenger ship boardings, even at the local movie theater.
Let's the have nots wait their turn.
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New content releases are really the only times in MMOs you get to experience that. The rest of the time the population is mostly busy doing their own thing with their chosen few friends or guild mates.
If that doesn't appeal to you, well, wait it out. Some of us do enjoy that though, queues and all.
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I understand there are complications with massive amounts of connections being made. I work in a similar industry so I have first hand knowledge. Even so, it really bugs me when the time used so far was for naught and must be used similarly again.
I think it depends on the company. IN the instance of FF XIV, they have had such massive growth over the last 6 months that I think the ques are fine (the disconnecting 1/2way through the que after waiting for 3 hrs is not fine). AGS and the train wreck that was New World's launch was crap, as poor design choices and a willful ignorance of how many people bought the damn game were at fault there.
I do believe that it has become a bad habit within the industry to "guesstimate" population 2 months in and not at launch to save money. Like shitty, bug-ridden launches, its become something you just seem to have to tolerate if you want to play games as studios don't seem interested in changing it.
In this respect the developer cannot reasonably provide room for everyone that wants to play on the popular servers. They discourage people by placing a queue but that in turn makes the players upset.
Much like how most commercial establishments, like a Restaurant for example, is made for the Weekend Rush, not for the Tuesday late night crowd.
I know people only see the word: "queue" and it's a fairly simplistic conversation from then on out, but that ends up omitting the more important and often boring information.
Case-in-point; it's not every FFXIV server that is having queue issues and lobby timeouts; some select servers are completely normal; it's mainly the high population servers that have reached their maximum player capacities that are being affected.
New World's issues were a whole other beast.
New Worlds problems begin and end with primarily how Amazon created their game, the super low server capacities, lots of inexperience in the genre they were trying to tangle with; over-blown hype; and i would suspect just pure incompetency in areas that really required quick-thinking and a business framework that didn't resemble the whole spreadsheet and quota philosophies' that are felt by the very people that work for Amazon in those god-awful hellpits they call "fulfillment centers"
I can easily defend FFXIV's issues with confidence, because we've been through them before with the game, and we've always come out the other side perfectly fine with little to no battle scares, just memories of the issues that eventually turn into fun memes we laugh about years later; like Raubahn Savage/extreme.
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Easter or other special events have little or nothing to do with it. Because church buildings lay effectively vacant most of the week, churches can readily scale up capacity for short-term events by going to multiple Sunday morning services. It's when they're forced to run more services than they want to every single week that they start thinking about getting a larger building.
Conversely, a lot of churches have a building that is nowhere near full because their congregation has shrunk quite a bit from what it used to be. If their building is paid for, they're probably not going to move to a smaller building just because they can't fill their current one anymore until the situation gets pretty extreme.
they cant get ahold of server parts or even servers they even offered to pay more money then been trying for the last few months