I admit, I am a video game and MMO novice; I have only beee playing games since the ZX81 came out, and MMOs since UO (although I only dallied with that). My main MMO experience is limited to EQ2, WOW, CoX, LOTRO, DDO, POTBS, GW, and Vanguard. I in no way consider MMOs to be my main video game experience. I have installed countless patches in RTS, FPS etc.

So, from this admittedly blinkered perspective, I I have never experienced a game in which patches were quite so consistently poor - in that they broke so much with every patch, and made such elemental mess-ups (improving catacombs.. oops - no one can actually zone in, there's an oversight).

But I am certainly willing to be corrected. Has any game in history been quite so abysmal at patching?

I believe they are trying to get the Golden Joystick award for worst patches in a MMO in 2008. And I will admit that I would have to vote for them on that since they do such a wonderful job of breaking things.

In break fix they have the break down they just need to workon the fix part.

Originally posted by Lance08

I believe they are trying to get the Golden Joystick award for worst patches in a MMO in 2008. And I will admit that I would have to vote for them on that since they do such a wonderful job of breaking things.

In break fix they have the break down they just need to workon the fix part.

You mean this? 

Originally posted by markyturnip

I admit, I am a video game and MMO novice; I have only beee playing games since the ZX81 came out, and MMOs since UO (although I only dallied with that). My main MMO experience is limited to EQ2, WOW, CoX, LOTRO, DDO, POTBS, GW, and Vanguard. I in no way consider MMOs to be my main video game experience. I have installed countless patches in RTS, FPS etc.

So, from this admittedly blinkered perspective, I I have never experienced a game in which patches were quite so consistently poor - in that they broke so much with every patch, and made such elemental mess-ups (improving catacombs.. oops - no one can actually zone in, there's an oversight).

But I am certainly willing to be corrected. Has any game in history been quite so abysmal at patching?

Anarchy Online, also by Funcom.

Surely there has been.

On another note, how is it that after not logging in for a month, today I patch and log in jus to look around. And to my wonder I am now running 20 fps slower than I was before?

rofl

Originally posted by Byrom

Surely there has been.

On another note, how is it that after not logging in for a month, today I patch and log in jus to look around. And to my wonder I am now running 20 fps slower than I was before?

 

rofl

 

Thats part of their master plan to slow down leveling to buy them time. So the programmers they hired part time from the college work program get their first semester finished.

Goes with doubling all mob health a month ago and lowering attack power 3 weeks ago.

It is rather amusing isnt it. At least it adds another element to the game.....You and your guild can play *find what was broken in the patch* game. Sure is more interesting than their crafting for eg.

anarchy online patch 12.6 was deployed on a friday as the team went home and borked pretty much everything.

that was a funny patch.

 You said you played WOW and yet you ask if any games patches were poor?

 For the first year and beyond anytime Blizz patched the game it took 2 to 3 weeks to get the world server working properly. This was virtually every patch. Also they created lag, caused players to get disconnected and caused general havoc till they repaired it.

 I was on countless raids when all of a sudden half of the 40 man party would be disconnected.

 How quickly we all forget.

Originally posted by peaquop

 You said you played WOW and yet you ask if any games patches were poor?

 

 For the first year and beyond anytime Blizz patched the game it took 2 to 3 weeks to get the world server working properly. This was virtually every patch. Also they created lag, caused players to get disconnected and caused general havoc till they repaired it.

 

 I was on countless raids when all of a sudden half of the 40 man party would be disconnected.

 

 How quickly we all forget.

Well if WoWs overall stability was the same as AoC then the reason why AoC flops and WoW didnt must be that AoC is not only suffering from "normal mmo starter bugs" and "normal mmo starting instability". There must be something more. I guess AoC plainly sucks in all areas that are even remotely important to players.

Originally posted by peaquop

 You said you played WOW and yet you ask if any games patches were poor?

 

 For the first year and beyond anytime Blizz patched the game it took 2 to 3 weeks to get the world server working properly. This was virtually every patch. Also they created lag, caused players to get disconnected and caused general havoc till they repaired it.

 

 I was on countless raids when all of a sudden half of the 40 man party would be disconnected.

 

 How quickly we all forget.

played wow from the outset... it's popular to remind everyone "how bad wow was".. but it really never was this bad, i don't think.. or maybe there was so much other good stuff I never noticed the bad stuff as much
 

 I played from beta and stability was pretty bad in the beginning. Server crashes were a common thing, it got so bad they had to rebuild the servers 8 months later, ALL of them.

 Just an aside, the Onyxia quest line for the Alliance, the quest that takes place in Stormwind has been bugged for 3 years. it was a major pain going through it 2 or 3 times before it worked properly.

 i am not an AOC fangirl, but I have played it and have had no majoor problems with it. It ran very well for me, only got to the mid 40's though. it is a little rough around the edges and needs work, but hey, WOW launched with no end game.

No, there isn't any excuse for such poor development.  I mean christ, the key binding bug is still in the game after 2 months!

no there are zero excuses. i cancelled my account today in fact. it would be one thing if the patches would inspire faith but to be honest each one is just another nail in the coffin.

Originally posted by Zorvan

Anarchy Online, also by Funcom.

Yeah, wasn't it the 12.6 patch (I can't recall) that so utterly borked AO that 50% of the playerbase (including me and my friends) left in discust.  And this was after weeks of patches that broke as much as they fixed.

Lets look at what is true.

Do you want the truth more than you want to feel good?

Well heres the thing, WoW had the core implementations right. They never lied the way Funcom did. The subscription numbers and growth speaks for itself. So stop the lies about how WoW was just as bad as AoC at launch.

Wake up!

AOC does 3 things right.  Music, melee combat, and bear shaman.  Everything else is broken in some way, and breaks more and more as the days goes by. 

As far as I remember many of the start-up issues in WoW were hell however,  there was much to do aside from the things being fixed or jus plain messed up. In AoC, I guess I think Im seeing nerfing of things to balance broken aspects, as opposed to hammering out fixes, and laying off the nerf button til the designed game is running. IDK jus what it seems like

seems like what happened in swg(i dont play aoc so i can only compare by the sound out it) fiired good programmers for colledge kids lol

 To borrow your phrases,

Quote: "Lets look at what is true.

Do you want the truth more than you want to feel good?"

  There were many things broken in WOW at launch, and not all the core implementations were in at launch.

  Many high end quests were missing and added later, no end game at launch, it was added several months later. Character armour was incomplete (graphics), servers crashed almost on a daily basis, often multiple times. On patch days the world server would crash and when it was working often didn't let players log onto there servors for days at a time. Bugs galore, anyone remember the loot bug? Had to log out and in to get rid of it and it took almost a year to fix it.  I could go on for a while with this.

  WOW was far worse than AOC at launch, I know I was there.

Erling needs to call Guiness and get the record for longest string of bad patches in an MMO and worst patches of any MMO ever.

Originally posted by peaquop

 To borrow your phrases,

Quote: "Lets look at what is true.

Do you want the truth more than you want to feel good?"

  There were many things broken in WOW at launch, and not all the core implementations were in at launch.

  Many high end quests were missing and added later, no end game at launch, it was added several months later. Character armour was incomplete (graphics), servers crashed almost on a daily basis, often multiple times. On patch days the world server would crash and when it was working often didn't let players log onto there servors for days at a time. Bugs galore, anyone remember the loot bug? Had to log out and in to get rid of it and it took almost a year to fix it.  I could go on for a while with this.

  WOW was far worse than AOC at launch, I know I was there.

Do you smoke crack?

I was their and half the people in  my AOC quild was there also and 90% of WOW's problems was authentication servers and game servers couldnt handle 5 mil people trying to log in and play. They had to stop selling the game to buy time to add servers. AOC boxes dont even move off the shelves after launch.

After they released another 50 servers to spread people out over the next couple of months it was fine. AOC never had that problem because people started quiting within days of launch and the game is instanced to hell and back so only the zones would drop.  AoC stopped twice a week patches to go to once a week patches supposedly for better quality control and the patches got WORSE.

WOW never even came anywhere close to AOC's horrible patches, missing content or promises of the content that was missing at launch month after month after month (wheres your PVP patch or DX10 patch only been waiting 10 weeks for the PVP and still vaporware). 
 

 It would seem most of the complainers here have selective dementia.

 Every WOW patch broke the world server, it wasn't just all the players. The servers had load limits and started a queue,  but even less than full load servers crashed and disconneted people.

 If people can't remember the early days of WOW, I would guess they had no idea what was going on or really didn't play then.

 Down time was so bad on servers they even started to comp subs because of the outcry. People were ready to burn Blizzards headquarters down. Now that is bad.

 Crack? Don't use it. Try to be a little more original with your insults knave.

Originally posted by Lance08

Originally posted by peaquop

 To borrow your phrases,

Quote: "Lets look at what is true.

Do you want the truth more than you want to feel good?"

  There were many things broken in WOW at launch, and not all the core implementations were in at launch.

  Many high end quests were missing and added later, no end game at launch, it was added several months later. Character armour was incomplete (graphics), servers crashed almost on a daily basis, often multiple times. On patch days the world server would crash and when it was working often didn't let players log onto there servors for days at a time. Bugs galore, anyone remember the loot bug? Had to log out and in to get rid of it and it took almost a year to fix it.  I could go on for a while with this.

  WOW was far worse than AOC at launch, I know I was there.

Do you smoke crack?

I was their and half the people in  my AOC quild was there also and 90% of WOW's problems was authentication servers and game servers couldnt handle 5 mil people trying to log in and play. They had to stop selling the game to buy time to add servers. AOC boxes dont even move off the shelves after launch.

After they released another 50 servers to spread people out over the next couple of months it was fine. AOC never had that problem because people started quiting within days of launch and the game is instanced to hell and back so only the zones would drop.  AoC stopped twice a week patches to go to once a week patches supposedly for better quality control and the patches got WORSE.

WOW never even came anywhere close to AOC's horrible patches, missing content or promises of the content that was missing at launch month after month after month (wheres your PVP patch or DX10 patch only been waiting 10 weeks for the PVP and still vaporware). 
 

  If I remember correctly, US subs never reached 3 million. Not to mention in the first few months the subs were never over 1 million.

all i know is when i logged into FFXI, everyone woulda get bored and say, "Well, i'm off to WoW."

Sure wow had alot of bugs, but it was enjoyable, fun, and easy. Something that is not shown in current MMOs.

But imho, the reason wow did well was because of its originality,gameplay style, and its reach toward casual gaming.

AoC has a unique style, is kinda fun, but in the most part, its broken and shown no signs of recovering. And on top of that, funcom also scammed people out of money  when they quit after the first free month which shows disloyalty to the customer and sets up a long decline in the process

(and when wow patched, servers might have gone bad, but at least some problems were addressed, while AoC patches do not address major issues and continue to prolong problems that need dire attention)

Oh and AoC strives to meet the 5% of hardcore gaming market while WoW reaches the over growing casual. so imho, that is what really sets the two games apart in success