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Battleground Europe: WWII Online Column: Five Scariest MMO Launches
In honor of Halloween this weekend, we count down five of the scariest MMO launches in history.
By Dana Massey on October 30, 2009
MMOs have never launched well. Back in the day, Dark Age of Camelot became an overnight success in part due to their ability to ship a game that didn’t explode on impact. Still, even against this sometimes comical history of failure, some games have really gone above and beyond to screw their customers in those early, fragile days.
Let me say at the outset, there is no way a list of five games will hit every bad launch. We know and encourage you to tell us who we missed. A list of good launches might have been easier to put together, sadly, since there are so few.
;)
?? "What you waiting! What you
waiting! What you waiting for!" ??
Also, I am prepared to give a few “bad launches” a free pass.
World of Warcraft, for example, had a lot of problems that some of the games below did, but when you’re expecting 100,000 subscribers and get the population of some small… screw it, large European countries… well, you get a pass in my books. Even if you did inspire the awesome Queue Dance.
Some early games, like EverQuest and Ultima Online, get breaks too. Why? No one had really done it on that scale before. They get a guinea pig exemption.
I am also going to overlook two of the worst in history, because, honestly, I am not sure they ever actually launched. I’m looking at you MouRning (or whatever it was calling itself that afternoon) and Dark and Light. They claimed they launched sure, I think they even charged some poor souls money, but for all intents and purposes, those games were dead on arrival.
Honorable mention goes out to World War II Online who hilariously launched a World War II MMO with planes that couldn’t fly.
This is a list of five terrible MMO launches (emphasis on launches). This is not about how good the games were or were not, just the ones that fell down and went boom.
So, with that in mind, enjoy!
;)
An Empire Disconnected.
#5 – Star Wars Galaxies
I’ve heard developers and designers at game conferences debate the importance of the first ten minutes of a game in whether or not a player will play (and pay) in the long term. It’s why everyone is always redoing their newbie experience. The drop off rate in those few minutes can be brutal.
Now let’s go back to June 26th, 2003. SOE and LucasArts launched one of the most anticipated MMOs of all time in Star Wars Galaxies.
They turned what is supposed to be a formality into their newbie experience: Account registration.
It took players hours (4 or 5 according to CNet at the time) of errors, frustration and yelling at the screen to even get themselves registered, let alone run around in the lands once roamed by Luke and Anakin. The culprit was “database issues” apparently in one of the more maddening, say-nothing excuses of MMO launch history.
A lack of communication on a broken process to a bunch of fans who had been anticipating this product for years was, as you would expect, a bit of a problem. Perhaps that was a sign of things to come?
;)
...8 hours and 29 minutes!
#4 – Aion
Of all the recent launches, Aion is the only one to sneak their way into this list. NCsoft suffered a fate many highly anticipated MMOs suffer and that’s a tough thing to get too upset about: queue death.
According to numerous reports, players in the game’s headstart program had a bit of a wait time before they could get in to kick some demonic or angelic ass.
And I don’t just mean a few minutes here or a few minutes there. More to the tune of… you know… seven hours.
One hour inspired dancing in the World of Warcraft entry, so you can imagine how pissed off you’d be if you went to the trouble of pre-ordering a game to avoid the cursed lines and then are told to wait seven freaking hours.
“While it is ridiculous waiting for 8 hours in a queue, queues are a good thing. Also consider that the algorithm calculating the queue times does make is skewed due to the special nature of launch and it not having much history to base numbers on,” said Sebastian “Ayase” Streiffert, a Community Manager for Aion in response to the queue complaints.
In the end, he’s probably right. I highly doubt if anyone actually waited out those seven or eight hour queues that it would take that long, but the optics are the optics.
This is the age old problem of MMOs. They don’t want to spend a billion dollars on hardware in case their game launches to a sniff and a whimper – see case Assault, Auto – but at the same time, they do need to be prepared for success. Aion seems to be ironing things out, but any game that asks an early adopter to wait for hours probably wasn’t quite there yet.
And let's be clear on one thing. These queues were during the pre-order headstart. That is the time when a totally predictable number of people were showing up since NCsoft knew how many had pre-ordered. There's no excuse for not being ready for that.
;)
Roughly the number of players
who managed to successfully
log in on launch day.
#3 – Shadowbane
“Play to crush,” became the game’s defacto motto, but it was developer Wolfpack Studios and publisher Ubisoft who got crushed in the fiasco that was Shadowbane’s launch.
You will note a common theme on this list. Anytime you mess with people’s account information in such a way that they fear they may get double billed, tell them they cannot pay, or make them worried they may be paying for someone else, you’ve done something terribly wrong. People generally like to keep their credit card information to themselves. When Shadowbane launched, bugs in their payment system went so far as to hand back the wrong names, billing addresses and credit cards to people during the confirmation process.
They overwhelmed their own customer support with all the screw ups, and made it virtually impossible to do the one thing you want new players to do: give you money. Ooops.
And let’s just say, the game itself wasn’t exactly ready for prime time either once people finally got logged in.
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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.
Considering the title of the topic and all....
Then the reasons given..
How does Horizons not rank in the top 5??
I think Pirates of the Burning Sea... has to rank higher than Aion at least and shoudl have that spot. Lot of potential doesn't change the launch... As opposed to just not "launching with enough servers..." which is my opinion of Aion. Beyond the boring (yet not broken) game play.
Oh and at least 3 of the 5 wouldn't be in my top 5.... Yet I'll admit that's just my opinion.
Dana talked about why wow did not make the list and it is accurate.
Aion had massive ques during the preorder event BEFORE the games official release. It isn't like NCSoft was unaware of how many preorders were coming.
@Dana
Good list and fanatastic call on Dark-n-light and Mourning. WW2online planes that couldn't fly was also funny.
I wasn't there for all those launches, but in my opinion, Age of Conan and Vanguard both had worse launches than Aion - not just for one issue like queues either.
Wow.
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 :)
2 Things:
1. When WoW launched, the queues were just as insane as the queues for Aion. In fact, if you watch the queue dance that you linked in your article, it will continue to climb well into the hundreds of minutes, soaring past 8+ hours of queue time.
2. Ants are not bugs. They are insects.
That is all.
P.S. I don't even own Aion, so I don't have a dog in that fight. I'm just saying WoW's queue was just as bad.
I remember AO's Launch It was a freaking headache. I think we ended up not playing the game for a long time until it was fixed.
Enjoyed the list. I was there fore a couple of them (SWG, Darkfall). It wasn't pretty, lol.
The legendary post in the AO section was so funny it made me wee a little.
Right, but WoW had that after launch and getting WAY more players than they ever dreamed (they were literally planning for 100k).
Aion had that in the headstart for pre-orders when they knew exactly how many players they'd have to deal with.
Good list. I remember getting my AO cd in the mail for the beta. I was giddy. For the most part it ran pretty decent. Then I remember some patch a few weeks before it came out and the game became unplayable to me. I couldn't believe it when it went out the door. I didn't buy it for a year or two afterwards.
SWG, I remember that one too. The registration problem was easily bypassed by using firefox. That's what worked for me anyway.
Right, but WoW had that after launch and getting WAY more players than they ever dreamed (they were literally planning for 100k).
Aion had that in the headstart for pre-orders when they knew exactly how many players they'd have to deal with.
Ohhhh... see I thought Aion's queue times didn't get crazy until after the official launch. I don't remember reading about people freaking out over 7 hour queues during head start. DOH! If you mentioned that in the article, it must have completely gone over my head. I'll go re-read it. My bad!
I was there for the AO launch and boy howdy was it a mess. I was very excited about a Sci Fi MMO so I did my best to tough it out for 2 months. After being charged 3 times for the same month My brand spanking new computer was ravaged by a memory leak and ... well I still have nightmartes of being trapped in lagg because I get to close to the teleporters. I agree with AO recieving number one. I also agree with Aion's spot. They new how many pre orders were out there and instead of spending money to be prepared they did some bean counting and decided they could loose a certain amount of customers.
How could we forget the AO launch;) Getting trapped in a mission, because all the doors turned into black holes and you couldn't leave the little instance room=) Kind of funny. I remember standing in front of my friends in the city but we couldn't see eachother. The chat went something like, "HEY, I'm right in front of you!!" "No you're not", "Yes I am, I'm jumping up and down on your head, you don't see me?" Then 5 minutes later, people start popping into view, but they're not actually there, they're way out in the zone a few minutes away=) And of course, we have the patch of doom 2-3 months in that cleared out about 75% of what remaining players were left;)
I'm surprised and not surprised by no mention of Eve's launch. A game with no tutorial what so ever, so nobody had a freakin clue what to do=) No explanation how anything even worked at all. Gate camping exploits that left people high and dry. NO missions. No real content at all. It took 5 minutes just to enter a space station, then you couldn't leave=) Just stuck in there... and if you did zone out, you were stuck in a blurry graphical ball of around 20 other space ships all taking up the exact same spot=)
If WOW a game that was more finished than most MMOs out for years get mentioned, Eve should get mentioned for barely having any sort of game there to play at all.
I was at WOWs launch as well and remember the problems but again even if wow had numbers that compared similarly to Aions WOW was a huge success and this happened after WOWs full launch not during a period of time that Blizzard had took customers money for. Aion did this to pre order customers and there is no excuse for not having the server capacity in the case of a limited release like that.
I am beginning to think that NCSoft really does not know how to operate a successful MMO. The server placement, the lack of in game support, the bot/spammer problem, the queue problem at launch. Of course Guild Wars is well done, but really that is an American run franchise.
NCSOFT DID NOT MAKE GW Arena Net did, which was a group of people that left bliz during WoWs creation.
Anyways, yea DFO's launch was horrid; however, they did fix the problems fairly quickly. I completly agree with the list.
Worst: AO and Everquest 1 would have to tie. The first month of EQ was so sad that they refunded our money and gave us a free month. No one pays for being stuck in a mountain for hours.
Best: Lotro: I think this is the case mainly because they opened up both CB and open beta to practically everyone. I've participated in numerous beta's and launches, and this was easily the smoothest I've seen.
Good list and nice article. Thankfully I never been a part of any of these launches.
after being thru the launch of EQ and AO, I'd say I didn't find them that bad all in all. The industry was new, we didn't have a clue for the most part what to expect and they made right by us (or atleast alot of us) for the launches.
I'm suprised Vanguard's not on the list. I had no real issues with it (hell, i preferred it at launch to what it is now), but based on the rabid hype vs the reality of launch......
List is almost dead on except swg should be anked 1st, my gosh i remember how bad the launch was and rollback and all
How did Vanguard miss the top 5
Right, but WoW had that after launch and getting WAY more players than they ever dreamed (they were literally planning for 100k).
Aion had that in the headstart for pre-orders when they knew exactly how many players they'd have to deal with.
On the other hand, the PvP endgame in Aion will hinge on well populated servers, in a way that is similar to WAR. I'd imagine that NCSoft saw the hugely negative impact spreading a playerbase too thin had on that game, and probably decided not to make the same mistake.
They did err a bit too much on the other side, I believe, but after just three weeks, the queues were basically gone, and all the servers had large populations. I guess it worked out in the long run.
I support OP's topic and judging of the games.
Anarchy Online was just that when it came out... I loved the game in beta even if it did destroy my computer twice while testing it. But it was near impossible to play at launch, and the fps was akin to that of a C64 trying to run it.
Spot on.
Vanguard wasn't much different when it launched. Performance was terrible.
While i loved shadowbane, the concept for the game was the best i have played, it deserves to be on here even without mentioning the HORRENDOUS rubberbanding. I am an avid MMOer having played almost every P2P MMO out there and a ton of MUD's MOO's and BBS games in the 90's. Having said that HOW IN THE HECK DID WWIIOL not make it on this list?
How long did the queue issue persist for in Aion?
I played AO, WoW, and Star Wars Galaxies on launch. All three sucked. It took WoW MONTHS to ramp up. I don't buy giving Blizzard a pass. They had a horrible launch, and no real plans to expand. The betas were an indication of how popular the game would be. They ignored it.
Though, I agree with Anarchy Online. I bought the game, and a 6 month membership. I played for 3 days. I feel like Funcom owes me a LOT of money for a complete failure of a launch. I will never buy another one of their games, and will continue to tell all my friends to avoid them like the plague.
I can distinctly remember making a Suicide Button. Then after I'd spend 10 minutes arranging my bags I'd zone and everything would be out of order again. I never was able to get back into my apartment, just that one time and the key no longer worked (was missing as I recall now). It was a crazy time.
Actually, the OP needs to check the calendar. Halloween is on Saturday not Sunday. I can't believe that not a single soul proof reads their posts anymore.
pretty good list. was around for most of those launches, and yes they were bad.
honorable mentions that could have made it as well:
vanguard
everquest (original); though given the genre's infancy, I think this should get a pass. There was no excuse for the AO launch.
That gives me an idea for another worst of list.....
5 most unplayable games at launch
Like VG for example: One could register and log in with little problem, but once there.....yikes.
_______________________
Second, if Aion's queue's put it in the list, weren't WoW's queue issues worse? Dunno, didn't jump on the Aion bandwagon.
I second that Horizions should have been on the list. Nothing like pre ordering the game and having it be nothing like what was promised. It had horrible lag, the creatures wouldn't spawn unless you waited a long time. It was a terrible launch.
And ppl think Funcom has changed ? =)
Well - they are themselfs talking about the "miraclepatch" that fixed AOC 1 week before launch... Ye right..
The auctionhouse bug must have escaped that miracle =)
Or the animiation fiasco that made female do less dmg than male ...
Want more ?
Agree with Aion big time.
I had to wait 3.5 hrs to log into the HEAD START. Then the server would go down and the quene would be back around 5-8 hours. Totally ridiculous, yet legions of fanbots claim this wasn't a problem.
They knew exactly how many people they would have, yet a ton of people basically could not take advantage of the head start extra time - probably the main reason they preordered in the first place.
Heck, After visiting my apartment the first time I wasnt able to find it again! The lag and rubber banding was so bad I had lost my direction and never found it again.
Just over a week if I recall, which isn't that bad all things considered.
Personally, I love how WoW gets a "pass" on the list. It had the same exact issue as Aion at launch (as another poster pointed out - 8+ hour queues, non-functioning servers, etc.), yet it magically gets excused for it, while a game that's been released for a month just happens to be the "newest" game to "slipped" into the list?
Care to be a bit more biased when it comes to comparing the two currently spotlighted MMOs?
Personally, I'm thinking that the author is a WoW player and just wants to toss Aion in the list just to be a douche. However, before this gets flamed for fanboism, I'd expect the same vice versa. Why the hell can't anyone just be neutral on these "reviews" when it comes to these two? Every single article/review/comparison involving Wow vs. <insert new MMO here> is always done from clearly biased for one or the other.
And as others have pointed out, there are several games that aren't even mentioned that have failed EPICALLY at launch that should replace at least half of those currently listed.
Good article concept, however, if it were an MMO it would easily be in the top 10 failures as well.
EDIT: Oh, since I know the "IT WAS IN HEADSTART!" Aion argument surfaces again, sure, you can know EXACTLY how many people should be logging in. HOWEVER, I'd like for these responders to try and predict how many of those people will choose the SAME SERVER. That was the major issue, lotta people on a main server. There were at least 2-3 that had no queue times at all and were pretty dead when you logged in. Ironically, as per another one of my observations I should write about sometime, it was all the hard-to-pronounce servers that had the lowest queues, while the easiest one - Siel - had the largest queue times.
You know, I don't comment on these sort of things.
But I really must say, This is the worst article ever. I honestly feel like slitting my own throat right now just so I don't have to swallow your garbage.
Sure you had some decent points. But really, do you even have half a clue?
Epic FAIL. I hope to god you never write another thing about any game. Cause in my books you just lost all rights to do as such.
Anyways, I am sure I should of explained myself and my reasoning some, but I honestly feel like it.
~wrtiii
"Velox, Versutus, Vigilans"
Congratulations on your first post! This is probably a very exciting time for you, so I'm here to help you through your transition from forum lurker to opinion spouter!
Now you're going to have to develop a thick skin, because there's nothing internet people love more than first time posters. They'll call you things like dumb, or nonsensical and they'll call your posts dumb AND nonsensical. You need to ignore all of this though and just continue posting, because you just know, in your heart of hearts, that everyone agrees with you.
And remember, opinions can be stated as facts here. And so can half-truths. And blatant lies. Just have fun with it and know that there's no one that can prove you wrong if you don't actually supply any actual facts to debate.
Again, congratulations! I hope your stay here is a long and fruitful one we can all learn from.
As an aside, didn't EQ2 have a particularly bad launch? I seem to remember it being down for like, 2 or 3 days straight in the beginning. I just remember switching to WoW at that time. Ah well.
I definitely agree with your assessment here...hands down. Was definitely one of, if not THE, smoothest launch to date, at least of the many I have experienced.
I pre-ordered toward the end of beta (for the head start)....and due to some seemingly unnameable problem caused by a late patch (I TRIED to elicit help from customer service...they couldn't figure out what was causing the issue, even though MANY on the forums were complaining about having it)....I never COULD get logged into the head start.
I cancelled my pre-order after 2 days of constantly trying to log in, and determined that, even though I had been anxiously awaiting this game's release, I was NOT going to be playing it.
Aion shouldn't be on this list.
Vanguard, AoC, Warhammer, WoW, + a dozen others had rockier first months.
Aion? Really?
It was just crowded and some servers were real easy to get on. It also played fine when you logged on.
I was there in 2001 for AO launch. It was horrible.
Dana you forgot in Shadowbane of players hacking the game itself and acting like GMs, The Flying out over the ocean and teleporting you there so you drown with no hope of getting back to your corpse.
Shadowbane was still the best and purest PVP game ever made.A total life drain , always in fear of your guild Keep , completely chaotic , never knew when you would be hit. I bet i used Trac on my scout 100,000 times, in my 3 years of playing it.
I was in the SWG launch but I was also in the WoW launch.
Do people so quickly forget that the World of Warcraft launch was terrible? For my playing experiences it was far and away the worst I've had. Star Wars Galaxies had some enormous hiccups but WoW was nearly unplayable for the first few weeks. The immense server load, shortage of servers, and the unstoppable game killing lag was horrendous.
Vanguard only because the game itself was unpolished and the same can be said for Age of Conan. Warhammer had a buttery smooth launch as far as I could tell. I didn't experience any significant lag, queues or crashes. WoW though... ya, that was bad.
Go check out Darkfall Online then if that's what you like.
Heck, After visiting my apartment the first time I wasnt able to find it again! The lag and rubber banding was so bad I had lost my direction and never found it again.
The main reason WOW gets more or less of a pass the games being released now, is because blizzard had no idea the number of people that were going to try WOW (this being a time that if a game had over 100k subscriptions it was considered a major success).
'Tho yes WOW's release was pretty bad (bad enough that I didn't play it again untill after BC was released), but trully the only game I played at launch that had a smooth launch was LOTR. There were the epically bad ones (AO, SWG, Vanguard, EVE) and then launches that were just frustrating (COH, Matrix, Fallen Earth, WAR).
I actually agree with Aion being a bad launch, for the majority of the first week there was little news coming from ncsoft and the queues were to the point that I was hardly able to play, which I'm hardly the first nor the last person to make that claim. Yes Aion stability was impressive, but that could be partly due that a lot of people that wanted to be playing were sitting in a queue.
Right, but WoW had that after launch and getting WAY more players than they ever dreamed (they were literally planning for 100k).
Aion had that in the headstart for pre-orders when they knew exactly how many players they'd have to deal with.
Headstart is the same as launch, the game is launched but for a fewer number of people. WoW also knew how many games they had sold, every company knows how many copies they sell, it is the thing they monitor the most when they launch a game, not just online games, but any game for that matter.
So the excuse of excluding WoW for not knowing is not valid, Blizzard knew they had sold a ton of copies during launch and after launch, the same as NcSoft knew they sold a lot of copies.
What I noticed in general when articles are written about something bad happening in the mmo world, the writers tend to always exclude WoW, which I presonally find amusing, probably the editor in chief forbids the writers to publish anything bad about WoW or the Blizzard axe will cut his head :)
But anyways, when you write an article like this, try to be fair and accurate please, some people mentioned Vanguard, I am a big fan of Vanguard, and I still play it today, but it should definitly be in there. I remember once losing 3 levels in the same day because I was dying from running around. There was a bug where you would die for no reason, and because you lose exp in Vanguard at death, you could also your level. There were also a lot of billing issues, wrong CD key issues, and many other bugs that weren't even sorted out before a couple of months. So Vanguard should be in that list too...
Dont know about Shadowbane and Anarchy Online as i didnt play those form the start, but Id agree with the others. Didnt play Darkfall but read enough on these forums. LOL!
(AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Raises plunger in Salute to MMORPG staff)
The LAUNCH for Vanguard was Fine. The game was a Steaming pile of Poo. NOT the same thing.
And I was in the beta for Anarchy Online and haveing a blast.. Then launch... Never played it again. Hell I canceld IN the first month pissed they had somehow Ruined the game from beta..
Warcraft's pre-order numbers where something along the lines of 250k. Unless someone in accounting dropped the ball pretty friggin bigtime I'm pretty sure they knew exactly how many copies they sold.
The "we never expected it to do this well" line is just a canned response that all MMOs use, and is just an example of bandwagon marketing. Bottom line is they don't want to put up the money for the hardware and datacenter space it requires to run all those servers when they may potentially lose thousands of customers after launch.
The way Aion did it was a necessary evil. Otherwise you
a) Wind up with game servers that are constantly crashing due to overpopulation and no-one has a pleasant experience
b) wind up with servers that are deserted within a few months of launch; which is an absolute disaster for a RvR game.
WoW did both of those, they initially didn't have enough servers and everyone had a crap experience at launch... and then they ballooned their servers numbers to ridiculous amounts, causing some servers to be virtually empty.
That's not even touching on the faction imbalances that existed in WoW because they didn't impose limits, which are virtually non-existant in Aion servers(atleast as far as numbers are concerned, its always within 2-3%).
Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Blizzard and Blizzard games. But they didn't handle their launch well, and making excuses for them doesn't change that.
You know, it was ultimately Darkfall's launch that made me give up on it. I played in the beta, was part of a guild that is rather small but managing to control an unbelievable amount of space (thanks, largely, to the sheer data collection we did during beta), but when the game launched and I couldn't purchase my own entry into it for more than a week, the little things that made Darkfall suck for me just really built up in my head, and the fact that I couldn't play a game I had put so much effort into as well. By the time I actually got through and could click the button to buy the game, I just didn't care about it any more.
Congratulations on your first post! This is probably a very exciting time for you, so I'm here to help you through your transition from forum lurker to opinion spouter!
Now you're going to have to develop a thick skin, because there's nothing internet people love more than first time posters. They'll call you things like dumb, or nonsensical and they'll call your posts dumb AND nonsensical. You need to ignore all of this though and just continue posting, because you just know, in your heart of hearts, that everyone agrees with you.
And remember, opinions can be stated as facts here. And so can half-truths. And blatant lies. Just have fun with it and know that there's no one that can prove you wrong if you don't actually supply any actual facts to debate.
Again, congratulations! I hope your stay here is a long and fruitful one we can all learn from.
As an aside, didn't EQ2 have a particularly bad launch? I seem to remember it being down for like, 2 or 3 days straight in the beginning. I just remember switching to WoW at that time. Ah well.
That was the best response I have ever read. You are my eHero.
Warcraft's pre-order numbers where something along the lines of 250k. Unless someone in accounting dropped the ball pretty friggin bigtime I'm pretty sure they knew exactly how many copies they sold.
The "we never expected it to do this well" line is just a canned response that all MMOs use, and is just an example of bandwagon marketing. Bottom line is they don't want to put up the money for the hardware and datacenter space it requires to run all those servers when they may potentially lose thousands of customers after launch.
The way Aion did it was a necessary evil. Otherwise you
a) Wind up with game servers that are constantly crashing due to overpopulation and no-one has a pleasant experience
b) wind up with servers that are deserted within a few months of launch; which is an absolute disaster for a RvR game.
WoW did both of those, they initially didn't have enough servers and everyone had a crap experience at launch... and then they ballooned their servers numbers to ridiculous amounts, causing some servers to be virtually empty.
That's not even touching on the faction imbalances that existed in WoW because they didn't impose limits, which are virtually non-existant in Aion servers(atleast as far as numbers are concerned, its always within 2-3%).
Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Blizzard and Blizzard games. But they didn't handle their launch well, and making excuses for them doesn't change that.
Link for the 250k pre-order of WoW or your post is worthless. If your going to spew facts, back them up.
Thats because there was nothing there to explode.
Mythic removed 1/3 of the content they had in Beta. Dungeons were empty or if they did have MoBs in them they werent itemized (MoBs didnt drop anything). There were large areas that were devoid of life, you could run around for hours without encountering 1 MoB.
Sure the launch was smooth. Any game company would have a smooth launch when there is almost no content.
Link for the 250k pre-order of WoW or your post is worthless. If your going to spew facts, back them up.
http://www.gamershell.com/companies/blizzard_entertainment/188228.html
240k in first day sales. You couldn't buy the game off the shelf, all copies were sold out before they even arrived at the store. I know, I remember calling different retailers a couple days before the game shipped.
They also had several hundred thousand open beta applicants, which should have clued them in.
Link for the 250k pre-order of WoW or your post is worthless. If your going to spew facts, back them up.
http://www.gamershell.com/companies/blizzard_entertainment/188228.html
240k in first day sales. You couldn't buy the game off the shelf, all copies were sold out before they even arrived at the store. I know, I remember calling different retailers a couple days before the game shipped.
They also had several hundred thousand open beta applicants, which should have clued them in.
Still waiting for a factual link. Your link is in-store first day sales after tha game was launched, not pre-order....try again :)
Blizzard doesn't do "official" press releases on pre-orders as far as I know. Retailers place orders based upon pre-order sales. If a retailer "sales out" before the game arrives at the store they are being limited by the manufacturer. Blizzard knew exactly how many game's were expected to sale on day 1. What they didn't realize was that that number was going to continue to rise as quickly as it did over that holiday period.
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.
The first month of launch in korea was way worse. But I digress
Anyways, the best launch I've experienced was FFXI, but just like Aion, its not fair to put on any list since it launched in a different region first where people couldn't buy it due to laws/language barriers.
VG should of been on the list I agree.
Blizzard doesn't do "official" press releases on pre-orders as far as I know. Retailers place orders based upon pre-order sales. If a retailer "sales out" before the game arrives at the store they are being limited by the manufacturer. Blizzard knew exactly how many game's were expected to sale on day 1. What they didn't realize was that that number was going to continue to rise as quickly as it did over that holiday period.
You post a false link to prove your made up number then try to skirt it, truly a mark of a desperate person. Your definition of pre-order is also false. Expectation of sale does not relate to a retailers orders, to assume so is a lack of thoughtful approach. Blizzard had no idea whatsoever how many copies of WoW would be sold day 1, its not possible. What proof do you have that the copies of WoW were sold out before arriving at retailers? provide a factual link that states another of your made up facts. No gaming company can realize how many copies would be sold shortly thereafter launch, you state the the obvious that encompasses all as if it was localized. And that brings us back to your original post making it once again based upon nothing but supposition an opinion, not fact. With all do respect, if your going to argue facts be prepared to offer factual evidence to support your claims, otherwise, they have no weight.
You post a false link to prove your made up number then try to skirt it, truly a mark of a desperate person. Your definition of pre-order is also false. Expectation of sale does not relate to a retailers orders, to assume so is a lack of thoughtful approach. Blizzard had no idea whatsoever how many copies of WoW would be sold day 1, its not possible. What proof do you have that the copies of WoW were sold out before arriving at retailers? provide a factual link that states another of your made up facts. No gaming company can realize how many copies would be sold shortly thereafter launch, you state the the obvious that encompasses all as if it was localized. And that brings us back to your original post making it once again based upon nothing but supposition an opinion, not fact. With all do respect, if your going to argue facts be prepared to offer factual evidence to support your claims, otherwise, they have no weight.
The link isn't false, those are first day sales. Expectation of sales does relate to retailers orders, retailers don't want to end up with a surplus of extra games they can't unload... the exception is particular chains that don't offer pre-sales (ie walmart)... who order a mass quantity of the unit (on predicted sales) and then distribute those units equally amongst outlets.
Believe whatever you want killer. If you think any MMO retailer launches without a realistic view of what their expected initial sales are, well I'm not going to argue with you. It's mean its not like they didn't have open beta tests, forums, and stress tests that gave them a very real idea of their player base....... oh wait.
It's a far more pathetic idea that their marketing/sales team short-sold their probable opening day sales, if you actual believe that to be the case. How exactly do you mistake the population your market audience by that much? Oh yeah, you don't.
Feel free to point me to the press release showing Blizzard only had 100k presales.., (a number which, when Funcom passed, they made the comment that they believed they would eventually have more presales than WoW, and I'm sure they had some insight on presale numbers.) until then your argument has no more weight than my own.
You post a false link to prove your made up number then try to skirt it, truly a mark of a desperate person. Your definition of pre-order is also false. Expectation of sale does not relate to a retailers orders, to assume so is a lack of thoughtful approach. Blizzard had no idea whatsoever how many copies of WoW would be sold day 1, its not possible. What proof do you have that the copies of WoW were sold out before arriving at retailers? provide a factual link that states another of your made up facts. No gaming company can realize how many copies would be sold shortly thereafter launch, you state the the obvious that encompasses all as if it was localized. And that brings us back to your original post making it once again based upon nothing but supposition an opinion, not fact. With all do respect, if your going to argue facts be prepared to offer factual evidence to support your claims, otherwise, they have no weight.
Believe whatever you want killer. If you think any MMO retailer launches without a realistic view of what their expected initial sales are, well I'm not going to argue with you.
It's far more pathetic that their marketing/sales team short-sold their probable opening day sales, if you actual believe that to be the case. How exactly do you mistake the population your market audience by that much? Oh yeah, you don't.
Its not a matter of what I believe, its a matter your inability to prove your own arguements, unless you count links that are devoid of such proof and your continuing approach of stating facts without factual evidence to support. Whos marketing/sales team? Blizzard? The retailers? Either of which would have no possible clue as to the success or failure of a launch. You take the approach on aside that you factualize the ability of any marketing team to know how many copies they would sell. Once again where is your proof this is the case? Post your evidence from all the MMO's that they new exactly or even close to the actual sales that would accompany their launch? To discuss opinion is one thing and has room for error and leeway but your constant and adamant approach to fact is perplexing since you have none to offer. With respect, perhaps you should avail yourself of the many search engines available to you and research your thoughts and have readily accessible proof to back your many implausible statements.
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.
I remember WoW being pretty much unplayable for the entire first month(and they refunded most of the first month too! people who have accounts from when they started playing WoW can see it on their payment thing.)
Straight off Blizzard's site.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/news/wow-news2004.html
"The World of Warcraft open beta test has now come to a close. During the beta test, over 500,000 players adventured through the lands of Azeroth and helped World of Warcraft on its way to becoming one of the largest massively multiplayer online games in the U.S.! The beta test community has been a tremendous source of information and feedback for the development teams, and we wish to thank our beta testers for participating in the beta test process. When the final version of World of Warcraft hits stores on November 23rd, you'll see the culmination of your hard work. The entire World of Warcraft team is now focusing on a smooth launch, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts about the game. Thank you again for your continued support with this project; we look forward to seeing you on in Azeroth. "
500k beta testers. 100k expected users my ass.
What I think is funny with Funcom and AO, that they did not learn from it.
The Age of Conan launch was bad to, not as bad as AO, but it hade the same cd problems, having a zone where almost every player that went there got stuck and had often to get gm support to get out, and you hade to go trough that zone to get to other importen zones.
and as with AO it seam they have made Age of conan alot better then it was, if you belive news from some gamesites.
Not a bad list one does wonder if NCSOFT did not pay MMORPG enough money for advertising to put Aion on list at #4. Swap it for Vangaurd / AoC and the list is solid.
Dana has got it wrong a MMO with queue times on a small handfull of servers that were the most populated during beta only lasted about a week. I once logged onto my server Nezekan and it said 3 + hours, however it only actually took 20-30 minutes. So yes I call BS on this one. Lord of the Rings and AION are the two most smooth launches I have ever seen.
But Aion got the highest rating any MMO has ever got on this site, surely it can’t be in a worst list two months later? Hmmm maybe that score was a teensy bit overrated? :)
There is no statistical correlation between beta tester period and pre-order sales, they are not the same they are not related, prove your point or your arguement is moot. Show the amount of beta testers in relation to sales of other MMO's to back your claim, you offer nothing to further your misguided attempts at proving your wild opinions, however, kudos on taking my advice on using the search function. At least your learning, how does it feel?
I understand your confusion, Scot, but the article refers to a specific event of Aion. While it is accurate it does not represent the Aion as a whole, just the launch.
There is no statistical correlation between beta tester period and pre-order sales, they are not the same they are not related, prove your point or your arguement is moot. Show the amount of beta testers in relation to sales of other MMO's to back your claim, you offer nothing to further your misguided attempts at proving your wild opinions, however, kudos on taking my advice on using the search function. At least your learning, how does it feel?
You're pathetic, I'm not writing a thesis. The numbers wouldn't even correlate unless I could drag up numbers from some other MMO that released at the same time, since the potential MMO players market and the press attached to betas has expanded exponentially since then. There are no hard numbers because Blizzard doesn't publish them, which I'm sure your well aware of. You can continually lean on that crutch all you want, it doesn't change the fact that 1+1=2. Even if there isn't an answer sheet that confirms it.
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.
Ah, AO, that was fun. I remember yucking it up with a bunch of other players stuck in one of the newbie loading zones (none of the other zones were accessible).
Does anyone remember the lovely beta patch that totally hosed Windows NT/2000 installations? Little hint for game developers, do not name ANY of your game files boot.ini
Drev
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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......
Hey Dana... dont think anyone here bother to read the point of the artical........
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
There has been a lot of bad releases in this genre. Hard to pick even 5 out of that morass. Anyone trying to put Wow on that list did not play the game at release though. Any problems Blizzard had were minor compared to those on this list.
I think Aion belongs on this list because of NCSoft being extremely cheap, they did not want to spend much on servers to handle the initial load and in so doing made almost everyone suffer. With their limited characters on the account it made the queues even worse.
Maybe NCsoft learned from other games that if you over expand your servers it is more of a pain to merge servers when the populations dies down.
Every Game is super crowded at the start , and what to the developers do ?! They say "OMG we are gonna be rich! Lets double our servers". Then after 4 months the population is 40% of the start and each servers' pop is so low noone can find a group anymore.Now its time to not only address a problem but tell them that the solution is going to cause them more pain in having to transfer chars and hope you can get you name, not to mention all the cost of the ("OMG we are gonna be rich! Lets double our servers") that are no longer needed.
As tough as it was, they prolly lost less customers than they would have if they have opened up many more servers.(in the long run)
Aion?? Granted the ques were scary, but it no wear compares to Age of Conan.. which i believe should've been on the list. Age of Conan was AO all over again with Funcom.
I played WoW at launch and I don't know what game you were palying but it was pretty much unplayable for a month or longer from server crashes and long ass ques. Hell they gave all of us subscribers free play time on top of the free month becuase of it. If Aion belongs on that list then WoW definately does. As I said before though its good to be the King lol.
A MMO that had only queue issues at release day made it into the top5, did the genre really have no other launches with structural, network or any other problems? Can't comment much on which ones specifically because the only ones I've played at NA day one were LOTRO, Aion and Guild Wars, and from these Aion was the only not-so-smooth release (never suffered directly from the queues issues though as I login in the morning).
I played WoW at release... I played Aion at release.
WoW was worse, far worse. Servers constantly crashed or were in maintenance states for hours on end, you'd get stuck for hours and hours in a crouched position because of loot lag. Queues would go into the thousands. If I recall they even pushed billing cycles back several times in their first couple months due to extended downtimes.
In Aion, they had queues for a couple days.. Because NCSoft was so "cheap" we now have a cluster of servers with very healthy populations, no queues, and equally balanced factions. Damn you NCsoft for doing a good job!!
Again, I like Blizzard... I like WoW. I'm not a huge fan of NCSoft because of their weak gold seller/botting policing. But Aions launch was handled very well, and WoWs was not.
Aion in no way deserves to be on a list of worst mmo launches. say what you will about the game, but the launch was not that horrible. compared to other games on this list? and in front of SWG?!?! i may of been lucky, but i was in the head start, and for the first few weeks of the games release, and i never once saw a queue. i've since stopped playing, but thats due to the community being too much like WoW, hoping it cleans up, and i'll try again later. seriously though, i've been at the launch of a lot of mmos, and Aion was beautifully smooth for me. my list would be
5. AoC
4. WoW
3. Vanguard
2. SWG
1. Anarchy Online
granted, all based on personal experiences, as i know people who played SWG on launch day, and yet it took me a few days to even get an account made... my only problem with Aion, was giving NCsoft more money, when i have collectors editions of Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa, staring at me.... i loved both games, and royally pissed NCsoft axed them. hell, netdevil even asked to buy Auto Assault back, so they could still run a lone server like they do for jumpgate, and NCsoft said no, to making a little more cash.....
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.
WoW is Blizzard same company, and what you just typed makes you loose any value your post had.
Merging server is not good ever in any MMO. A Poor excuse? look at war, they didn't regulate their servers sides where unbalanced and months later the game need not one but several server merges. And i don't think you even understand what caused those queue's and why.
As does the person who made this article, i geuss you don't need much to get a staff position..
LOL is this article even remotely serious? Aion for all the things that it has going against itself (bots, gold, grind) was the smoothest launch I think I have ever seen in a MMORPG for a long time. To say a server had a long queue because of popularity is not a good reason when there were other servers out there to play on that filled up just as fast...your guild or friends could have easily coordinated and changed servers.
How is a launch as bad as AoC not on here? Terrible servers, unpolished client (which is part of the damn launch) and other problems lead to the almost complete destruction of the game. In fact most MMO players refer to AoC as the lesson to learn from...don't keep people in the dark on stuff and deliver a good product and experience at launch.
Ok some people don't agree with the AION pick.. Let's see. What a game is? The box? The manual? The screenshots? The forums (hell yeah for the trolls)? No.. it's the game itself.. And what is the most important thing of all? To be able to f... play it. Waiting 8 hours or even 3 hours to play a game it's not ok. Among all those people who tried AION u could find working men/women who simple could not log in and play during their free hours. So yes.. it had a bad launch. They were also very slow resolving the problem with the addition of new servers
It was not as bad as WoWs that's a fact.
I remember SWG on its launch day, I had gone to compusa here locally and was so excited about it, I had been reading all the news about it but hadn't been in beta and was just giddy to death about it, as soon as I got my hands on that box I even grabbed the help book and ran home as soon as I could to install it. It seemed like the install took forever and ever and ever to go through.. I finally got it installed and saw that last little bit that said experience the greatest adventure ever your own.. then it jumped to a registration window...and that's where I got stuck....for a day...
The next day, after work I was so disappointed I tried again to get onto it, woah I got registered...yeah....then I click play and ...there goes the downloading new updates window.....for hours................ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Thankfully it coming up on a weekend and I played like 72hrs straight once i got in...lol...
It's not that most people agree or don't agree with the Aion pick that is the problem, it's that the author used a lame excuse to exclude WoW which in fact had the exact same problem in terms of queue time as Aion did but far worst than Aion.
His excuse is that WoW did not know it's going to be popular, but Aion did, which is far from the truth, both NcSoft and Blizzard knew exactly what was coming their way.
So either leave Aion out of this list, or list it at # 4 and WoW # 3. It's simple...
Aion had one of the best launches iv ever seen. All the screen shots of crazy que times are not right. The very first day of head start was bad but they were limiting the number of people that could log in at one time to keep the starting zones from being swamped. The 2nd day of head start was bad when i loged in it gave me a 10+ hour que time but it olny took 1 1/2 hours to log in at peak time. Que times stayed about 1 to 2 hours till they patched the private stores limiting the amount of time people could idle in game that was like a week after launch then it went to about half hour at most on weekend nights. And i played on lumiel the 2nd highest pop server. People bashing aion or any game over something they know nothing about is bad. WoW's and vanguards launch was much worse than aions. Argue what you want about WoW but the constant crashing, que times and extended mantance for days even a month after put it above aion. Dose not matter if wow is or is not a better game than aion that is a different argument.
Anarchy Online... Heh, I didn't even make it to launch.
I was in the beta, and I couldn't get out of my room. (At that time you started in your apartment.) After a month with no replys from support/dev, I gave up. A couple years later I found out they had it working and you now start in a newbie 'training' area.
Just imagine what that month was like for me. Make a character, load it to play. Find yourself in a barren cube like gray room with a non-functioning exit... Oh well, I've seen worse... :)
I still find it ironic that people are confusing quality of game vs. launch day issues (but that was noted very early by the OP). But then again....reading comprehension, grammar, and diction are definitely not top priority on the "Internets" these days.
I agree with the list, though personally I don't remember myself having an issue with SWG...or it might be because I blocked those memories out of my mind <_<. It seems to me lots of folks have pent up SOE & FunCome aggression - I suggest more FPSing to wash away all the pent up angst away; also, I'll add that WoW's launch may have not been good, but compared to the issues with battle.net - I'd argue a world of improvement.
I would also put WAR on the list. Well at least for us Aussie's. When we bought the game, they didnt include the games war.exe file as part of the install. So you had to contact Mythic and then get them to send you the file so you could run it.
Just wanted to nominate WWII Online for a spot on the list. Few remember that launch though, as it was overshadowed by AO a month or so later. ;-)
I played WoW at launch and I don't know what game you were palying but it was pretty much unplayable for a month or longer from server crashes and long ass ques. Hell they gave all of us subscribers free play time on top of the free month becuase of it. If Aion belongs on that list then WoW definately does. As I said before though its good to be the King lol.
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!
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!
You are showing your true colors by first telling me I didn't play at launch and then insulting me. I was in closed beta and then immediately purchased the game and started playing at launch. I played the game for 3 1/2 yrs after launch. You obviously were not there at launch if you think none of those problems I mentioned happened. There was major crashing of the servers and long extended periods of maintenance. Also horrible que times and as I said and I am sure others can attest to the fact they gave out free play time to players shortly after launch because of all the problems. There are plenty of people who can back up what I said about WoWs launch, hell I am not the only one in this thread alone to talk about it. Please get a clue...
Your statement that refers to me as an Aion bigot is also untrue. While I do play the game I have barely touched it since purchase and have no rose colored glasses on when it come to the game and its shortcomings. I was merely pointing out that WoW deserved to be on that list more than Aion.
edit: wow did I just use the word launch that many times...... sorry lol
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!
You are showing your true colors by first telling me I didn't play at launch and then insulting me. I was in closed beta and then immediately purchased the game and started playing at launch. I played the game for 3 1/2 yrs after launch. You obviously were not there at launch if you think none of those problems I mentioned happened. There was major crashing of the servers and long extended periods of maintenance. Also horrible que times and as I said and I am sure others can attest to the fact they gave out free play time to players shortly after launch because of all the problems. There are plenty of people who can back up what I said about WoWs launch, hell I am not the only one in this thread alone to talk about it. Please get a clue...
Your statement that refers to me as an Aion bigot is also untrue. While I do play the game I have barely touched it since purchase and have no rose colored glasses on when it come to the game and its shortcomings. I was merely pointing out that WoW deserved to be on that list more than Aion.
edit: wow did I just use the word launch that many times...... sorry lol
I was there 2nd day after launch and i dont remember it being as bad as you say, there were a few problems (que's and a crash or two) that i experienced. I'm sure Blizzard never expected a million+ people to buy the game on the first week.So ofcourse there were gonna be que's and some overload crashes.Yes i got my free month too, but i never looked back on WoW as a bad release game.
You are showing your true colors by first telling me I didn't play at launch and then insulting me. I was in closed beta and then immediately purchased the game and started playing at launch. I played the game for 3 1/2 yrs after launch. You obviously were not there at launch if you think none of those problems I mentioned happened. There was major crashing of the servers and long extended periods of maintenance. Also horrible que times and as I said and I am sure others can attest to the fact they gave out free play time to players shortly after launch because of all the problems. There are plenty of people who can back up what I said about WoWs launch, hell I am not the only one in this thread alone to talk about it. Please get a clue...
Your statement that refers to me as an Aion bigot is also untrue. While I do play the game I have barely touched it since purchase and have no rose colored glasses on when it come to the game and its shortcomings. I was merely pointing out that WoW deserved to be on that list more than Aion.
edit: wow did I just use the word launch that many times...... sorry lol
I was there 2nd day after launch and i dont remember it being as bad as you say, there were a few problems (que's and a crash or two) that i experienced. I'm sure Blizzard never expected a million+ people to buy the game on the first week.So ofcourse there were gonna be que's and some overload crashes.Yes i got my free month too, but i never looked back on WoW as a bad release game.
Just do a search for "WoWs problems at launch" or any number of other topics regarding WoWs launch in a search engine and you will find tons of info on just the problems I mentioned when WoW was released. There are always going to be people who say they never experienced these problems becuase of server choice or other factors though.
As to your statemnet about me inferring WoW was a bad release game. I never said that or thought that, the criteria for the list was scariest launches and Aion was put on that list for que issues. I was just pointing out that WoW had plenty of problems at launch including ridiculously long que times. Therefore it deserved to be on the list more in my opinion than Aion.
How in the world did Vanguard: Saga of heroes not make it into this list???? wow
It was the worst MMO game I ever played at launch. Yet you put aion in over a Queue problem? Vanguard was riddled with huge, laughable bugs, many of which persisted in the game for a half a year before being addressed. They are just now finally trying to claim the game is all fixed....2 or 3 years later.
How could you leave Vanguard off? It's been like 3 years and they are still fixing the game.
I know Aion had queues but it's difficult to predict demand. Vanguard....what else needs to be said, highly anticipated, total let down on every level?
Also Horizons was pretty scary also. Another highly anticipated game that crashed headfirst into the dirt on every level.
How about Hellgate London?
Asherons Call 2? Lord talk about scary launch, you could hardly chat for 6 months...
The list goes on and on...
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.
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
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......
...???
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...
/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. =)
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.
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
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
Nicely done! See Dana, it wasnt that hard. This guy actually appears to play MMO's
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.
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.
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. :)
Something I haven't seen mentioned by people is how horrible WoWs patcher was. If you couldn't get the game fully patched, you couldn't play. It took FOREVER! I swear, it was like one byte per hour. Some of that was because the game rubbed windows security the wrong way, but even after you found out how to change settings around the game still patched super slow. I had a cable internet connection that was the best available at the time, the problem wasn't on my end. It was night after night after night. Took months before the game patched smoothly & relatively quick.
I'd leave the comp on overnight, wake up, STILL NOT DONE PATCHING! F*** YOU BLIZZARD MAKE IT WORK I WANNA PLAY! Ugh.
Hahaha ooooh man that brings back memories. I had that same reaction. Nice.
Worse by Far: AoC followed up by WoW
Best by Far: LotrO
Dude, no one reads this site of the articles and reviews, it's a forum battleground. This site a giant forum PvP match
When they do bother to do a "review" it's usually a re-review of SWG
Aion had massive queues during the preorder event on the popular servers. Both of the servers I'd picked to create characters on have connected me right to the game without a wait from the head-start on out -- and I don't think being in the Pacific timezone would push me that far out of prime-time for when I was connecting..
Aion should not be on that list. I was in head start and not once ever did I have to wait in a que. They even had messages saying if you had that problem pick another server with a lower population and showed the populations. maybe you should have followed their advice? I feel Aion was probably the smoothest launch ever. Of course it had an advantage to its western launch.