Aye WW2 Online will always be in my Top5. Flying Tanks, Slideshow lagg, don't even try to fly a plane, and the game still sucks 10 years later.

A memorable FLOP.

I just might be the only one in .. the world.. that did not have any problems with Anarchy when that launch. Not only could i log in with no problem, but i never crash either.

WoW had me waiting a bit a few times,

Aion was never a problem, a bit boring game, no new innovation i mean at all, but no problems either.

SWG nah.. didnt have problem there at all, remembering a very good experience until i ran out of content.

Age of Conan... nope no problmes, ran pretty well, was lack of content of course, but no technical problems to speak of

then i bought, yeah i know.. Fifa Manager 10... omg, crashed in the main menu, couldnt save the game, crashes very often during gameplay.

Conclusion: It is my experience that MMO's are a lot better quality assured than standalone games. The customer amounts is about the same, but a lot more effort is put into making the MMO work.

I didn't see anyone mention Dark and Light for that list.  Was that launch so bad that the MMORPG community has collectively purged the game from its memory.  That launch had everything wrong with it:  billing, gamplay, game cancellation issues and lawsuits.

Also noteworthy bad launches:

EQ1, WWII Online, Vanguard.

I was at the AO launch and, yes, it was that bad. 

I knew AO would be number one on list even before i clicked on the link. Nothing can beat the worst Launch in MMO history. It has left a deep impression on me (not in a good way) since it was my first MMO and yes i was there at the launch day.

It seems a lot of people either skimmed or, otherwise, did not read the article.  If people were unable to play the game, then it was a bad launch, and for many thousands of people, they could not play Aion at launch.  I think it earned its place on the list, just for that and the ignorance of NCSoft, who knew how many pre-orders they had, not to have more servers.  Keep up the good work, Dana.  I enjoy reading your articles, and the comments that follow.

Sorry you did NOT play Wow at the start then.  The game was fine.  There were a few hours downtime initially, but I played everyday and had few problems.  The only thing your post shows is ignorance!

Aion on the other hand I could not even play because the server queue was sometimes over 7 hours long!

So much for the Aion bigots!

Either you didn't play WoW at launch or your flat out lying.  Any person that was there for WoW's launch knows as much.

Also, WoW didn't sell "over a million" copies in a few weeks.  By Thanksgiving they had sold 350k copies.

Thats complete rubbish regarding Aion.

You only waited in ques if you ignored NCSofts suggestions regarding which servers to start on.

NCSoft to let people know that certain servers had way to many people signed and did suggest

servers with smaller populations.  Its not thier fault if people chose to ignore that advice and signed

of for over populated servers anyways.

Its just like retards buying a hot ass cup of coffee and getting pissed off because they got burned.

They were warned and chose to ignore the warning. 

J

Originally posted by Mitara

I just might be the only one in .. the world.. that did not have any problems with Anarchy when that launch. Not only could i log in with no problem, but i never crash either.

WoW had me waiting a bit a few times,

Aion was never a problem, a bit boring game, no new innovation i mean at all, but no problems either.

SWG nah.. didnt have problem there at all, remembering a very good experience until i ran out of content.

Age of Conan... nope no problmes, ran pretty well, was lack of content of course, but no technical problems to speak of

then i bought, yeah i know.. Fifa Manager 10... omg, crashed in the main menu, couldnt save the game, crashes very often during gameplay.

Conclusion: It is my experience that MMO's are a lot better quality assured than standalone games. The customer amounts is about the same, but a lot more effort is put into making the MMO work.

I have a hard time believing your first sentence about AO. The whole game was shut down for extended periods of time.Maybe your Game Key worked but they had Hardware problems which effect everyone. Or maybe you only play 4 hours a week and just happened to play when it was working......
 

Originally posted by mmaize

Aion...really?  That's a good problem to have imo so long as you can react to it quickly.  I love how easily we forget or perhaps conveniently forget how WoW at launch had some servers that were completely unplayable, and Blizzard had to stop selling or limit copies of the game until they could compensate from a server standpoint.  It also had the exact same queue problem due to underestimated sales soo...

Not defending the issue entirely because queues suck don't get me wrong, but it most definitely doesn't qualify as one of the top scariest launches as aside from the queue issue Aion had none of the issues that many of it's predecesors faced like characters getting stuck in the environment all over the place, bugs, and outright game breaking game issues or undeveloped areas as some that were not on this list.

...???

WoW's discussed at the beginning of the article. No one's forgotten WoW's launch... conveniently or otherwise. In fact, it's brought up as a defense for any other poor launch to come since it was released. Even with MMOs whose fans normally bash and tear WoW to shreds in every way imaginable (which is almost any MMO that isn't WoW it seems), people will immediately prop it up as an example of how even a more successful MMO's rocky launch isn't really so bad... 

Originally posted by Dana

I suspect the line I'll be repeating this week (despite it being in the article) is: 

 

This is not about how good the games were at launch, just how bad their launches were.

 

...but anyway, here is time #1 :)

/em hands Dana a full pot of coffee.

Gonna be a long night :)

Seriously, though.. it does illustrate just how *serious* and defensive some people get when it comes to their game of choice when they can't just get into the spirit of a given article, have a laugh or at least an acknowledging nod and say "yeah, I can agree with that".

Though I suppose it would make these forums a little less interesting if everyone suddenly became open-minded and not hyper-protective of "their game".

Hell.. FFXI is my all-time favorite MMO and there's many things I'll defend it against (primarily ignorance or blatant misinformation), but I'll be the first to rag on it for its flaws and the various decisions by SE that made me think "WTF were they thinking?".

I would have included Seed on that list, given it launched because the devs were running out of money. Plus its launch was also its burial.

 With all due respect....

The author did NOT do his homework with this one.  Aion shouldn't even be on the list.  While they should maybe have had 1 or 2 more servers open; I'd probably put this in a top list of successful, smart, well planned launches.

1.  Yes there were people that waited 2-4 hours to get logged in to a server.  HOWEVER, there were no regions, none whatsoever, that required a wait in a queue.  The people that waited in queues chose to do so because they had decided on a server ahead of time and did not want to switch to one of the open servers with which had more room for population growth.

2.  The server Queues along with also controlling faction numbers per server was also very smart.  READ THIS:  Oh trust me I was ticked off trying to get a toon made during head start on the "right server" on the "right faction", but from a long term perspective this was the right hassle to cause people that weren't willing to move to other servers.

3.  Why......???    Warhammer.  Yup.   Warhammer.  Aion did not want to have a knee jerking reaction to the demand by creating more servers when they had plenty they could force the game population to balance out on.  Aion did not want to have low pop desolate servers that would then have to be merged and downsized like Warhammer had to do once the initial month launch hyped died down a bit.  NCSoft  wanted to have HEALTHY & BALANCED server populations for the actual subscribing community to play on.

Final Thought:  Sure they could have made a few different choices, but I think NCSoft played this one pretty close to right on.  Especially once they fixed the personal shop afk to skip the Queue issue.  After 1 or 2 weeks of the game being out tops I don't think anyone even mentioned anything about a Queue time or being mad about it.

Ok all done.  Carry on.  =)

Originally posted by scope006

 With all due respect....

 

The author did NOT do his homework with this one.  Aion shouldn't even be on the list.  While they should maybe have had 1 or 2 more servers open; I'd probably put this in a top list of successful, smart, well planned launches.

 

1.  Yes there were people that waited 2-4 hours to get logged in to a server.  HOWEVER, there were no regions, none whatsoever, that required a wait in a queue.  The people that waited in queues chose to do so because they had decided on a server ahead of time and did not want to switch to one of the open servers with which had more room for population growth.

 

2.  The server Queues along with also controlling faction numbers per server was also very smart.  READ THIS:  Oh trust me I was ticked off trying to get a toon made during head start on the "right server" on the "right faction", but from a long term perspective this was the right hassle to cause people that weren't willing to move to other servers.

 

3.  Why......???    Warhammer.  Yup.   Warhammer.  Aion did not want to have a knee jerking reaction to the demand by creating more servers when they had plenty they could force the game population to balance out on.  Aion did not want to have low pop desolate servers that would then have to be merged and downsized like Warhammer had to do once the initial month launch hyped died down a bit.  NCSoft  wanted to have HEALTHY & BALANCED server populations for the actual subscribing community to play on.

 

Final Thought:  Sure they could have made a few different choices, but I think NCSoft played this one pretty close to right on.  Especially once they fixed the personal shop afk to skip the Queue issue.  After 1 or 2 weeks of the game being out tops I don't think anyone even mentioned anything about a Queue time or being mad about it.

 

Ok all done.  Carry on.  =)

This is one of the better replies about aion. Something everyone is forgetting to mention they said there would be queue times before head start. That they were going to limit the number of players let in at first to keep the starting zones from being overcrowded. Then slowly let more people in if i remember correctly the first few hours they were only letting in 15% server cap then was bumped to 25% they did not get to over 50% till launch. This is smart planing imo not a bad launch.  I was on the 2nd highest pop server and only waited in queue over 2 hours 1 time. Granted that is a long time but if i chose to change to a lower pop server i would have only had a 30 min wait. Thats not as bad as some of the queues that wow had not to long ago and its been out for years.

www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/worldofwarcraft/show_msgs.php

People say that there was a 7 hour wait but there was never anyone that had to wait that long all the screenshots you see with 7 hour queue time are wrong. The system was new and had nothing to base a average wait time or how long it was taking people to get in.   

World of Warcraft and Vanguard easily beats the snot out of Aion and Darkfall on the list of worst launches -- especially because Vanguard and WoW were much more mainstream and their issues affected more people.

Even if WoW's queues were shorter, the fact that so many more people were affected by it and the game was tremendously hyped by comparison made their situation worse.

If anything, the way NCSoft dealt with Aion's server queues were the best thing they ever did -- they knew their game wasn't as mainstream, so they refused to simply add so many more servers that would eliminate the queues but reduce the average server population.

Originally posted by grimmbot

World of Warcraft and Vanguard easily beats the snot out of Aion and Darkfall on the list of worst launches -- especially because Vanguard and WoW were much more mainstream and their issues affected more people.

Even if WoW's queues were shorter, the fact that so many more people were affected by it and the game was tremendously hyped by comparison made their situation worse.

If anything, the way NCSoft dealt with Aion's server queues were the best thing they ever did -- they knew their game wasn't as mainstream, so they refused to simply add so many more servers that would eliminate the queues but reduce the average server population.

So in other words, planning for failure was a good idea?

I don't think we should go so easy on the screwups of WoW. Honestly it was a terrible launch.

North America got launched first, and there they had overwhelming success and not enough servers, and backbone problems, etc. Massive lag and queues and server reboots, etc.

Now I can understand that, Blizzard got more players than they ever imagined in their wildest dreams.

However, more than a month later it gets released in Europe, and the exact same problems happen, nothing has been improved. I guess Blizzard thought "screw em, we got plenty".

Furthermore, backbone and server problems continues months, even years after launch, it was not pretty.

So I won't cut them some slack, because it took way too long before they finally got things under control.

 SWG worked at launch time, like you could create a character log in and start playing.  The game itself didn't work.

No pathing, no quests, no jedi (they lied it wasn't)  combat missions... and wait... more combat missions... when you were done that you could do... more combat missions.

Upon logging in the first time I witnessed players getting red con Fambaa's stuck in Moenia's architecture, notably a gate and shooting it safely without getting touched.  You could also go into any of the many cave dungeons and shoot things lower then you because the pathing was non existant.  You could master combat professions in a day.  I tried every one of the professions until figuring out the right template that equated win at pvp =  BH eye shot.  Worked like a charm at the time for awhile.

Launches far far worse than most things listed here...

Asheron's Call 2

Age of Conan

WW2 Online

Vanguard

Originally posted by dkzero

Aion does not belong on this list at all.  It's funny how #1 Anarchy Online turned out to be the single best mmorpg ever (this is not an opinion, it is fact). 

Ya, except every mmo fan and their mom has their own fact.

lol.. Aion gets #4 not because of bugs, crashes, server outages, rollbacks etc.  It gets #4 because it suffered from queues for a little less than a week.  AND that was ONLY if you ignored the suggested servers that were given to players and filled the over populated servers.

Rock on, another nicely trolled article.   You're ruining what little credibility this site has

Originally posted by SignusM

Launches far far worse than most things listed here...

 

Asheron's Call 2

 

Age of Conan

 

WW2 Online

 

Vanguard

 

 

Nicely done!  See Dana, it wasnt that hard.  This guy actually appears to play MMO's

---

Originally posted by Hodo
I am REALLY surprised that WWIIOL didnt make that list...
 
Day 1..... June 6 2001...... L-Day.
 
Game launched, server went up.....  And so began the 6 hour download patch....... 
 
IF you managedto get through this, you then might get into the game, but seeing as the patching server and the game server shared the same network connection and bandwidth, as it seemed.   You were getting horribly high ping rates, if you didnt crash out of the game with in 5 minutes of logging in.     The game launched with less than 1/5th its promised content, that was in the book that came with the game.....   The launch was so bad that 6 months later they were still sorting out launch issues and you were basicly in the first pay to beta game that I can remember.    
 
Now 8 years later, the game looks MUCH better, and continues to look better, but over all the game still is lacking many of the features that were promised, and is still a capture the flag frag fest.    Oh well theres always hopeing for the next big WWIIOL game..... but after the horrible launch and  haphazard development of the current WWIIOL, I doubt there will be any company that attempts anything that big, in that genre again.

---

This was probably one of the worst MMO purchases I had ever made. After shelling out $49.00 bucks I played it for about 20 minutes, put all the information back in the box, unloaded the game and never touched it again.

---

Originally posted by Thillian
"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
 

---

Always a classic. I like the write up on EQ as well.

Ranking Aion as the 4th scariest launch in history is quite offensive considering the vast competition out there.

Originally posted by Hodo

I am REALLY surprised that WWIIOL didnt make that list...

 

Day 1..... June 6 2001...... L-Day.

 

Game launched, server went up.....  And so began the 6 hour download patch....... 

 

IF you managedto get through this, you then might get into the game, but seeing as the patching server and the game server shared the same network connection and bandwidth, as it seemed.   You were getting horribly high ping rates, if you didnt crash out of the game with in 5 minutes of logging in.     The game launched with less than 1/5th its promised content, that was in the book that came with the game.....   The launch was so bad that 6 months later they were still sorting out launch issues and you were basicly in the first pay to beta game that I can remember.    

 

Now 8 years later, the game looks MUCH better, and continues to look better, but over all the game still is lacking many of the features that were promised, and is still a capture the flag frag fest.    Oh well theres always hopeing for the next big WWIIOL game..... but after the horrible launch and  haphazard development of the current WWIIOL, I doubt there will be any company that attempts anything that big, in that genre again.

It did have a bad launch but your statement about a "pay for beta" is false.  I do believe no one was charged to play the game for several months.

I had read that a CO-LO going bankrupt, complete server move to another, and then hardware failure at the new co-lo was to blame for connection issues.   As far as gameplay well you can't explain away that one. :)