"Guys! I had an idea! What if
we just don't let anyone actually
buy the game?"

#2 – Darkfall

In an effort to deal with queue and popularity problems, Darkfall took a unique approach. They only sold a certain number of copies of the game, which left lots of people on the outside looking in on launch day, but they hoped would minimize popularity problems.

Just a couple problems with that one: There was some kind of lag in the system and some people who thought they bought the game before it was “sold out” didn’t. So, at launch, lots of people were scrambling around, totally thinking they’d bought and could play the game when they couldn’t. Crap.

Eventually, Aventurine SA got those people in, and there they found some new and feisty problems.

Another issue with the rationing approach was that no one believes a digital distribution can be “sold out.” We got what they were doing, but to people who wanted to play the game and were literally being turned away, it was ridiculous. I suspect they’re not turning away would-be subscribers anymore, eh?

The blog Keen and Graev outlined a bug where the Monster AI servers were not properly synced with the rest of the world, which had some pretty fun consequences. Bottom line? Some players were being killed by invisible monsters, while some clever exploiters figured out that they could take down massive non-responsive monsters for profit that were way out of their league. Way to bone up the economy on day one, eh? It took them over a day to fix that issue when no one could play.

The lesson for everyone? If you’re going to limit the number of players to ensure a smooth launch, it’s generally good PR to have said smooth launch.

Artist rendition of the Anarchy
Online launch.

#1 – Anarchy Online

It’s been over eight years, and Funcom still has not lived this one down. Anarchy Online launched on June 27th, 2001 and proceeded to make MMO history for the scariest - and if you were not involved, funniest – MMO launch.

To say it was unplayable is an understatement. This game could have been brilliant for all anyone knew, no one could get in long enough to find out. Something Awful did an uncharacteristically understated play-by-play of their experiences that became one of those legendary posts that’s still well worth reading eight years later:

“Once you zone in, your CPU begins rendering three polygons per minute, even less if you don't have the recommended 15 gigs of RAM installed on your computer. And I'm not talking about that crappy SDRAM either, I'm talking about that new RAM that uses lasers and atomic energy to shoot data all over the place like a drunken cowboy on metamphetamines [sic] who's shooting data all over the place,” they wrote.

And it wasn’t just hardware issues. There were login bugs, there were crash bugs, there were more bugs than an ant colony. Most of the major problems resolved around the registration system. People tend to get annoyed when you bill them twice by accident. The game also refused to accept seas of CD keys as valid.

Naturally, this led to an overwhelming flood of calls to customer support, which in turn overwhelmed them. Within days of launch, their Director of Public Relations had issued a statement that both bragged they had “35,000 registered accounts” and apologized for all the screw ups.

The sheer volume of mistakes has made AO a footnote in every bad launch story since. “At least it wasn’t as bad as Anarchy Online,” has likely been shrugged by an over caffeinated developer in every MMO studio that’s launched a game since.

What’s amazing though is that not only did Anarchy Online survive, but it thrived for many years and Funcom deserves a lot of credit for picking themselves off the mat and making a pretty good little science-fiction game that continues to operate to this day.

Still, while it was one of the first handful of graphical MMOs, Funcom set the bar high for how to screw up an MMO’s launch. It’s a gold standard that despite all the noble attempts on this list no one has matched since and hopefully never will.