I had intended to write this last week, but the specific badnesses of the Guild Wars 2 launch (note: the game itself is great!) required a full column.
YOU ONLY GET ONE CHANCE TO SCREW UP A FIRST IMPRESSION
To quote Princess Irulan at the beginning of the movie version of "Dune", the beginning is a very delicate time. It certainly holds true for MMOs and their launches.
The very nature of MMO launches has changed enormously, and the players' expectations have kept up with those changes.
The old paradigm for an MMO launch went a little like this:
Work begins. Alpha testing. Friends and family testing. Small, secretive beta testing. Game launch. Shit hits the fan.
The new paradigm for an MMO launch goes more like this:
Work begins. Game is announced. Alpha testing. Beta sign-ups taken. Friends and family testing. Small secretive beta testing. Larger betas begin. Press beta testing. Press NDA drops. Very large scale betas, either to pre-purchasers or by an open beta. Game launch. Game runs smoothly or...wait for the pun...the fans hit the shit.
If that joke made just a little more sense it might even be funny. But probably not.
Now I've simplified what happens at launches, as there's been everything between "tragi-comical clusterfuck" and "something must be wrong because pretty much nothing went went wrong".
I'd like to touch on some of those zeniths and nadirs individually.
THE WORST MMO LAUNCH IN HISTORY
Maybe not the worst...there might have been some tiny-budget launch that exploded so badly the game was pretty much done on Day One. But other than that...
"Anarchy Online" wins the prize by acclimation. Go ahead and Google "worst MMO launch". Yeah, AO is so far ahead that nobody else comes close.
You'd be hard pressed to name a single potential problem that ever appeared at the launch of any other MMO that didn't show up at AO's launch. Billing problems (lots), server stability (none), customer support (hah!)...you name it.
And they had all of their problems with a whole, whopping 35,000 customers! You can even see their mea culpa here: http://web.archive.org/web/20010812075759/216.74.158.92/news/bigNews/statement.html
I wasn't around for the launch, but I joined a few months later and the performance in the cities was still often a slideshow of seconds per frame.
Despite that, AO did for me what EQ and UO didn't...it grabbed me. It was the first MMO I devoted serious amounts of time into.
But if I'd been around for that launch and those first few months...
As a further note, Anarchy Online is still around 11 years later, and Funcom continues to update it, as it will be upgraded to use the engine used by Conan and TSW. AO was also, I believe, the first "name" western MMO to adapt the free-to-play system.
So despite The Worst MMO Launch In History...Anarchy Online survived. Bravo Funcom.
FUNCOM...THEY CAN BE TAUGHT!
For all the crap they (justly) received over the Anarchy Online launch, for all the issues with their "Age of Conan" launch (which I won't get into here), Funcom learned their lesson for the launch of "The Secret World".
I'll skip the details here as I gave full feedback on my TSW launchblog (http://lensonmmos.blogspot.com/2012/06/lens-on-secret-world-launchblog.html), but I gave them an 8.75/10 rating. It was smooth, with only a few minor glitches and one significant absence, the auction house which was announced to be late, and showed up a couple weeks later. And upon further review, the store issues weren't as bad as they seemed at the time, so it probably deserves a 9/10.
Regardless, bravo Funcom! TSW launched beautifully.
If only more people were buying and playing it.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SUCCEED TOO MUCH?
A question all MMOs hope they have to answer...but pretty much only one has really had to.
World of Warcraft was the first game to launch with what I described above as "the new paradigm". They had a lot of publicity and incredibly good word-of-mouth coming out of their large (public?) beta. And when they launched, the game exploded.
Well actually the servers ran OK compared with what was expected at the time.
No, the explosion was popularity.
Sure the game had some bugs and issues and instability...in those days it was expected. Memorably, Blizzard would provide recompense for server outages with extra game time...unheard of!
But what WoW brought to the table that was new, was servers so crowded that queues to get in would last for hours.
20 servers weren't nearly enough.
So Blizzard, having dreadfully underestimated on their "best case scenario" was forced to do the unthinkable.
They stopped selling the game.
For a period of time (A month? Six weeks?) they stopped making and selling their game while they hurriedly bought and installed new hardware to deal with their sudden success.
So while the WoW launch had its issues, especially being the first of the "new paradigm", what it's best remembered for is the ludicrous success in commercial terms.
And they're still at it...printing money, piling it up on the floor, rolling around in it, and laughing at every other game's launch ever since.
SWTOR GETS IT SO RIGHT...
The guys at BioWare have obviously had...issues...with "Star Wars: The Old Republic". But I want to talk about something they did for launch that was wonderful. And it's something that every other major MMO company needs to copy or steal.
It's something that Guild Wars 2 could have used for sure.
Launches are very stressful for the players. What class should I play? Will I get my name(s)? Will the servers be stable? How am I going to survive the wait?
Oh...and "what server am I going to play on?"
That last one is especially a problem if you're in a guild. Or two. The amount of e-mail back and forth and forum posting, and guessing, and cajoling, and weeping, and pulling of hair and rending of flesh...you get the picture...that goes on as everyone tries to coordinate one simple thing...
"What server are we all playing on?"
Believe me, we just went through this extended dance with Guild Wars 2. Totally unnecessary stress and drama.
For TOR you could pre-create your guild on their website. Give it a name. Pick PvE or PvP, East or West coast. They provided forums for your nascent guild on their web site to chat and organize and get excited about the game. You could choose other guilds to be allies/enemies with (as long as you were the same PvE/P and West/East coast).
And when they launched, they automatically chose a server for your guild (along with allies/enemies). When you first logged in, by default your assigned server was clearly marked and at the top of the server list.
Absolute, pure fucking genius. It solved the players problems and one of the biggest launch problems for the guys in charge, server population imbalance.
The TOR guys get a 10/10 for this idea and implementation.
AND THEN SWTOR GETS IT SO WRONG...
And at launch it worked perfectly. In fact, TOR's launch was generally pretty good. Sure, there were a number of bugged quests, and the storyline ones could be cockblockers, but it was mostly stable and mostly good.
From a technical launch point of view. Some of the game systems were shit *cough*openworldPvP*cough*, but the launch itself was pretty good.
But there were queues. Pretty long ones, actually. But with a launch like theirs, with 1 million plus players, that was to be expected. As players levelled out of the introductory planets, queues would have shortened and in a couple of weeks, the problem would have fixed itself.
But no, BioWare got the wrong message.
They thought, "AaaaaHAH! We have a WoW-type success on our hands! We shall be rich and successful beyond the wildest fantasies of Croesus! Let's open up a shitload of new servers for every to fill up while we start browsing for yachts on the Internet!"
So they created a bajillion new servers without putting in one percent of the thought and planning they had with the pre-launch guild system, as an example.
Because if people wanted to play on one of the new, non-queued servers they had to leave their established characters (and guilds so wonderfully pre-created and assigned as per above) behind. Because any kind of character transfer was impossible at that time (literally, they could not do it). And for months to come.
So the first batch of new servers got good-sized populations as queued players made alts and new buyers got into the game.
But subsequent batches of new servers had very light populations.
And as players finished the content and found the endgame lacking...OK, not "lacking", "missing"...they stopped playing. And unsubscribed.
Suddenly all those extra servers were empty. A friend of mine created alts on a few servers to check how empty. One server, Imperial side during prime-time hours, had 35 people on it.
All those empty servers (not to mention all the PvP servers with huge faction population imbalances) became additional disincentives for people to play. Or to pay.
Make no mistake, SWTOR was destined to disappoint. But the bright spot of the launch prep BioWare provided to guilds was a beautiful thing.
And misreading of the launch "success" by BioWare only hastened the rapid exit to free-to-play.
We'll see how that launch goes for 'em.
A MERCIFULLY QUICK DEATH
I'll add a quick note here on one of the cautionary tales of MMO launches.
"APB". I bought it at launch because I was in the MMO doldrums. I got it via Steam. It didn't work. Ever. I spent about 6 weeks going back and forth with the tech support people before giving up on it.
That's 6 weeks of the 9 or 10 weeks the game existed, as the whole company folded about 2 months after launch.
Note that the assets were purchased, the game was rejiggered, and it's currently available as a free-to-play title.
I haven't bothered trying it out.
But the lesson here is clear...you can drop a lot of money on developing an MMO and it can still be dead a couple months after launch.
APB was DOA.
ONE LAST WHINE
I'll finish up by reiterating one of the points from my launch review of Guild Wars 2.
Communication.
Please, figure it out before launch and use it correctly.
Guild Wars 2 is a fine game, and I'm enjoying it a great deal.
But in the two weeks it's been out, to be informed of what's going on with the "state of the game", players have to have kept track via Twitter, FaceBook, Reddit, and, finally, for a couple of days now, the GW2 forums.
That's four sources of official information that players need to try to keep an eye on, and three of them are totally beyond the control of ArenaNet.
If a player had a question or problem (beyond the veil of customer support), he had to create an account on one of these social sites and hope that someone at A-Net paid attention. And face the venom of some of the jackholes that inhabit the Internet with the sole raison d'etre of inflicting insults and injury on others.
This is not acceptable.
NOT ACCEPTABLE.
ArenaNet needs to be called on this bullshit every single time they show their face in public. They can't try to float their line of "oh we think the social media are awesome way-cool ways to communicate with our players!" without it being met with a universal display of middle fingers.
ArenaNet, use a few of those millions of dollars you're taking from us to buy some hardware to run decent forums on, hire some moderators and community reps and behave like pretty much every other professional MMO-providing company.
AND TO FINISH UP...
Yeah, back to launches...
Sorry, I love GW2 and that amateur-hour communication really pisses me off.
Perhaps you noticed?
We MMO players have to put up with a lot when a new game launches. It's stressful for us, to be sure, but it's even more stressful at the other end. I can't imagine how much coffee and aspirin gets consumed at the launch of a major MMO.
We've seen a number of smooth launches over the last few years. "Rift", even though I've not mentioned it before now, perhaps set the bar for good launches. Between that and the quantity and quality of new content they crank out...I'd say that right now Trion are the best in the business, regardless of whether you enjoy the game or not (and I do).
As players, we've come to expect a LOT more at launches than just a few years ago. Perhaps we've come to expect too much. I mean it's easy to say "Well why is Game A having so much more trouble than Game B had at launch?"
So what do I want from a game at launch?
Relatively short queues.
Fast server reboots for hotfixes with at least a few minutes notification in-game.
Regular fixes and small patches, with patch notes.
Regular (and extensive) lists of known issues being worked on.
A single location for reporting and tracking issues (i.e. official forums).
All previously announced major game systems in place and functioning.
Communication, communication, communication. Let the players know what you're thinking and that you're listening.
Oh, and one last thing...
I want a game so goddamned much fun that I consider moving the fridge next to my computer and using a Texas catheter to avoid breaks.
Is that so much to ask?
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