The Shrine

Looking at discussion for FF14 I realize this myth gets mentioned a lot, and not just on FF14. Anytime you say a new MMORPG has problems someone will always say: "They all have problems." So Age of Conan has launch problems but it sold 700K or whatever boxes that WoW had to put some statistics like '50% of the guys who left for Age of Conan returned after 3 months?' I mean you can talk about marketing and hype sure but what's the hype around Age of Conan? A new game made by a lead designer whose best credential is that he also was involved in other MMORPG that failed horribly? If Age of Conan can get 700K on hype alone that means anything you that's more renown (which is a lot of other stuff) should get several million boxes sales just on reputation alone. But you don't actually see this happening, which is why AoC's crash is one of the most spectucular in MMORPG history.

Most MMORPGs are actually surprisingly good at launch. Yes you might have hardware problems but that can be solved by having a guy drive down to Fry's with a boatload of money to buy new computers, and they usually do get solved like that. Yes a lot of MMORPG crash spectucularly since they don't have a long term plan, but by then it is no longer a LAUNCH issue! I'd say that of all the MMORPGs I have played, just about all of them have no launch issues, even the one I stopped playing after a month. I stopped playing them because there's nothing to do after the launch period, not because the launch itself was bad.

Don wrote:Most MMORPGs are actually surprisingly good at launch. Yes you might have hardware problems but that can be solved by having a guy drive down to Fry's with a boatload of money to buy new computers, and they usually do get solved like that.

Yes, Don, Fry's. That's where you can find the good high-quality 16-core VM cluster servers with RAID-5 arrays, dual power supplies, multi-homed Gig-E NICs, preloaded with Windows 2007 Server.

It's an exaggeration to the fact that such problems are not very hard to solve. I don't know of any remotely halfway decent MMORPG that was plagued by persistent hardware problems. Yes maybe you could be on the one server that is just very bad for whatever reason, but in general hardware problems do not last very long. Obviously those guys have their own special retailers to deal with it, but really if your only problem is that half a million people are hammering your servers and overloading them, those problems are easily solved with money, and it'd make sense to solve them really soon because otherwise those guys might be not hammering your servers anymore by quitting.

Don wrote:I don't know of any remotely halfway decent MMORPG that was plagued by persistent hardware problems.

http://wowqueuedance.ytmnd.com/

The queue problem was solved rather quickly by opening more servers. Yes if you insist on staying on the server Archimonde or Illidan which had some ridiculous number of people (well over 10K I think) the queue never improved much, because they'd be like the equivalent of a server named 'Sephiroth' in a FF game. It's really not a hardware issue anyway because there were clearly enough servers to spread everyone out equally (there were no shortage of low population servers) but people flocked to a few servers that had better names than other. If you were just trying to play the game the queue was mostly irrelevent. If you wanted to play on the Archimonde server that's your own problem being user #3021 on the queue.

I was there for most of the 'bad' launches in MMORPG history. If they were as bad as people say they were, no game would've even gotten off a decent start. There's usually a couple servers that's just really, really bad for whatever reason (maybe the hardware hosting that server was just messed up) but no one said you had to play on a particular server, especially in a game with low commitment on time like WoW.

Also, Age of Conan's launch problems weren't related to the lack of servers. It was the lack of content. Even on a "rough launch", if you can clearly see that there is no content, or that there are balance issues, or glaring bugs, it doesn't take a inside programmer to tell you that the game is going to be shit in the longer term. Games like Anarchy Online, Conan, and Star Wars Galaxies fall in that category.

SWG's problem came much later when they had some patch that really screwed existing stuff up at least an year into the game so that's well outside of the launch window.

Anarchy Online I think has some serious lack of content at the beginning, but it's impossible to know subscription numbers so it's hard to tell when the drop occurred.

Age of Conan appeared to have only enough content for about 1-2 months but given that it sold like at least 700K boxes it's a pretty healthy amount of capital infusion, certainly enough to say get a few good programmers and create some content in a hurry. You might not be able to create great content by just throwing money/people at it but you can certainly create *some* content, which is better than nothing. Let's say you have a 2 month lead and that's it, it doesn't seem like it should be an inherent impossibilty to come up with something that keeps people busy before your 2 month lead is up. WoW, after all, only had about a 3-5 month lead time at launch. Yes WoW has a unique advantage having lack of competition at its launch and later being the biggest game, but you can't look at say the Argent Colliseum cycle which took at least 3 months and seriously tell me that's good content. It's like 5 bosses that an intern could have finished the basic skeleton stuff in a week. Now nobody was impressed by the Argent Colliseum arc in most likelihood but then its sole purpose is just to keep people busy for a month or two while the team was working on ICC.

WAR had a similar issue, where it sold a ton of boxes and it was obvious that it didn't have the content to support the game once people leveled up. You can't just throw filler content forever as people will figure it out, but it can certainly buy you a lot of time. It looks like some games just decided rather than having filler content, they'll go with nothing, so people quit.