Worst Launch Ever?

Nowhere near being the worse, and I've been playing MMOs since Ultima Online.

BUT I will say this: I was expecting better, Heavensward was so freaking smooth compared to other MMO launches... what happened?

Cold Steel brings out the feels. Bad ones. Everything in MSQ cleared up until that point on my end...Otherwise I can't think of anything off the top of my head that can compare.

Not the worst expansion I've seen. I am very irritated of being locked out of the story, but at least the base game is good. Ragnarok Online 2's first expansion heavily nerfed magic, boosted boss HP way up (but they hit like wet noodles), and completely changed leveling/stats/damage calculations/etc. And, for awhile, healing did hundreds of thousands per cast, with jobs having a max under 10k. They changed it from a laid back quest based leveling to hardcore grinding for hours for every level.. with any caster needing to be carried. Plus, it took weeks to fix casters, and the game never did actually return to decent before I left several months later to FFXIV.

I didn't have much bad experience with HW, so I expected SB to go smoothly. My hype has taken a serious hit. :(

1.0 was far worse.

Server basically blew up in 1.0

Star Wars the Old Republic.

To prevent something like this to happen, they made a queue system where X number of people get to enter the game, then wait some time, then let the next numbers enter.
This made it so people had almost no chance (depending on when you got to start playing) to secure a name they wanted.

Worst Launc ever? No. Not by a long shot. That award goes to either Diablo 3, FFXIV 1.0, or the Burning Crusades, IMO.

Was it a good launch though? Oh god no.

Frankly this launch could've been handled far better IMO. A queue for the instances rather then RNG lottery, a bit better Q&A testing to avoid instances like Susano's Prison, and just general improvements to avoid things like Mr. Bahn's Wild Ride.

Worse launch? No way, Diablo 3 was a freaking mess, vanilla WOW was also a disaster. There is still plenty to do even though this part of the MSQ is messed up temporarily.

Diablo 3 > WoW WoD > Stormblood.

That said, stormblood is still in the launch phase, so it still has time to go up on that list...

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Originally Posted by Obsessive

Worse launch? No way, Diablo 3 was a freaking mess, vanilla WOW was also a disaster. There is still plenty to do even though this part of the MSQ is messed up temporarily.

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What? Like fates in only half of one of the new areas? Since dungeons and POTD are bugged too.

Just bought the game 2 weeks ago to play with friends and hoped to catch up before the new content hit.

I've played multiple MMOs, and I've experienced my fair share of downtime, regardless of having paid to play, and not having access to my investment.

That being said, there are not very many games that take over a 24hr period to implement a patch/expansion and have it turn out completely horrendous. Buggy, maybe. Crashes? It happens. To be completely locked out 3 days later?

Perhaps my money was ill invested.

In my line of work, if you turn on something and it explodes, then you are most likely fired. Most likely, as in definitely.

As a new player, this looks extremely bad to me. The time it takes for positive action, bypassing hollow promises and one-sentence updates be damned.


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Only other "terrible" launch I can say that I've actually personally experienced was Blade and Soul, and even then, that wasn't THAT horrible. Long-ass queues if you didn't pay 2 win, but other than that, you could stay logged in forever if you left your character running into a corner so you didn't get the AFK boot.

I don't have much launch experience with games, even started about two months after Heavensward launched so I didn't get the big rush there.

Idk... this is bad, lol. Really bad. XD;

That I've personally experienced...Age of Conan.

To start, they had a cap on the amount of players they were going to let in to early access but didn't tell anyone that until the access to early access was "Sold Out." As I recall, you also had to pay part of your game's cost ($5 worth) up front with the incentive, which they claimed was to help with the bandwidth costs of downloading the game.

Once it began, there was constant game-wide lag that made it completely unplayable for stretches at a time, many players learned just how poorly optimized the game was even on decent (at the time) computers, and disconnects were common. Bugs were even more common. Talents didn't work, gear provided next to no benefit if the stats worked at all. Those that made it through the disconnects and lag learned that the first level 20s full of voice acting and plenty of quests were unlike the next 60 - the VA dropped off immediately and there were large stretches of grinding between available quests (when they worked).

And the cherry on top of that time frame? The 3 days of EA, which people actually had to pay some of their game cost up front for and was "sold out" ended up going down for about a day and a half.

And then launch proper began, and more and more issues came to light, including the hilarious one where building Tier 3 cities with your guild were a literal impossibility - you needed more items in one person's inventory than you could actually have in one person's inventory, and you needed a Tier 3 city to gain access to the PvP siege system, one of the hyped features of the game.

I think there's only a few that have worse launches, and it's certainly the worst I've personally experienced.

It's my first expansion launch in any mmo and if its not the worst ever I don't want to ever see another one.

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Originally Posted by AngryLizard

Worst Launc ever? No. Not by a long shot. That award goes to either Diablo 3, FFXIV 1.0, or the Burning Crusades, IMO.

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I was playing WoW back then. I remember it as pretty smooth. The only problem was that the elf zone was so full of people in elves in bikinis that you could not see even the ground or sky... they were just bouncing around everywhere...
- and the elf players have never really gotten better over there.

But I've never seen anything like this in an MMO myself. I've seen queues to log in (WoW:BC actually did have those), but not the rest of the issues we're having here.

I would easily rate this as the worst launch of an MMO or expansion that I have seen.

Diablo 3's servers were unavailable to the entirety of Korea for months after launch. It is the undisputed champion, beating even 1.0.

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Originally Posted by Berethos

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I was thinking of Conan too, like you say so much was DOA. Its wasn't even a failed launch, it was just a failed game. IDK if it ever turned around? I didn't stick around.

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Originally Posted by DarkLiriel

vanilla wow. couldn't do anything without causing a crash. also heard of some peoples' computer systems being damaged by it.

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Pretty much this. I didn't start until February, two months after launch and the servers were still broken. As in unplayable. Forget broken instances, literally everything was unplayable. Seriously, look at these credits for the days the servers were down or may as well have been:
http://i.imgur.com/DVnKVtz.png

EDIT: and outages carried on for over a year...

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Originally Posted by Baneus

Pretty much this. I didn't start until February, two months after launch and the servers were still broken. As in unplayable. Forget broken instances, literally everything was unplayable. Seriously, look at these credits for the days the servers were down or may as well have been:
http://i.imgur.com/DVnKVtz.png

EDIT: and outages carried on for over a year...

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51 free days. Damn.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

51 free days. Damn.

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Ignore the first 30 day lump, that's standard for a new account.

Heh Star Wars Galaxies.... enough said. LOL. This is not the worst Ive been in but its up there.

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Originally Posted by Xenosan

I was thinking of Conan too, like you say so much was DOA. Its wasn't even a failed launch, it was just a failed game. IDK if it ever turned around? I didn't stick around.

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They eventually fixed most of the intial problems and Age of Conan actually became a quite good game.
It never quite recovered financially though - too many people left early and never came back.
It is still around, amd was but recently put into maintenance mode. (Officially that is. Unofficially it had already been in maintenance mode for some time.)

Been enjoying the input a lot so far. Kind of helps me put this whole mess into perspective. Think the only commonly referenced ones I was a part of were Diablo 3 and ARR/2.0 launch. D3 I don't remember as much but 2.0 was so bad I gave up for months.

@Mistakenot
t3-t6 was great! Despite the initial launch---> until around circa 2011, it was trashcan; but after that, the quality of the game picked up as the playerbase slowly - and inevitably - declined.

t1-and 2 were so glitchy, that if you had a necro in your party, you could just about take down an instance with the right placement I.E.: Vistrix.

The raid mechanics of that game were amazing, however, and the combo system (at least for melee) was at a level - for the time - that no game could touch.

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Originally Posted by SwarleyMcSwarls

Since we all have time to be disconnected or locked out of content, just wanted to ask people the worst game launches that they can remember. The Stormblood launch is fresh on people's minds but there's gotta be worse ones than this that people can think of. Right?

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Not even close. I can't say I'm thrilled about the way it's played out, but the worst ever?

You must be new to online games.

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Originally Posted by MakotoNano

At least with 2.0 you could access 100% of the content, just with the risk of being disconnected every so often.

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Nah. You must not remember error 3102, where you would be DC'd from the game and your character would stay logged in, for days sometimes, I think. The devs had to go around and manually log people out one by one if I recall correctly.

Final Fantasy 14

Worst launch ever? FFXIV 1.0 would like to have a word with you.

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Originally Posted by Belisaire

Nah. You must not remember error 3102, where you would be DC'd from the game and your character would stay logged in, for days sometimes, I think. The devs had to go around and manually log people out one by one if I recall correctly.

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Ugh I totally forgot about that. Yeah... That was not fun.

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Originally Posted by Maliki_Ozari

Not even close. I can't say I'm thrilled about the way it's played out, but the worst ever?

You must be new to online games.

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?

I'm asking for people's opinions on what they think some of the worst launches they've experienced are. To hopefully put this into perspective for everyone and also to shine some light on the frustration of the issues that we are experiencing.

Wildstar FTP launch could not log in for 3 days.

This is Maplestory levels of broken, I don't even know how that's possible from a paid expansion in a paid mmo with a paid cash shop...

Maybe they should move Gilgamesh to the other NA Data Center since having two high pop servers on one Data Center seems to be an issue.

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Originally Posted by Higashikata

This is Maplestory levels of broken, I don't even know how that's possible from a paid expansion in a paid mmo with a paid cash shop...

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It's not broken, for a lot of us it works perfectly. You're the vocal minority. Yes, it's annoying. But you're mostly throwing a tantrum.

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Originally Posted by SwarleyMcSwarls

?

I'm asking for people's opinions on what they think some of the worst launches they've experienced are. To hopefully put this into perspective for everyone and also to shine some light on the frustration of the issues that we are experiencing.

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I skimmed and misunderstood. I apologize.

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Originally Posted by Maliki_Ozari

It's not broken, for a lot of us it works perfectly. You're the vocal minority. Yes, it's annoying. But you're mostly throwing a tantrum.

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This.

/thread

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Originally Posted by Maliki_Ozari

It's not broken, for a lot of us it works perfectly. You're the vocal minority. Yes, it's annoying. But you're mostly throwing a tantrum.

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Several aspects of the game are having serious issues. Some people getting through the errors does not make it fine nor does having other parts of the game functioning normally.

Me, as well as every one of my friends has yet to pass the cold steel barrier. We try to do other things, but are often presented by disconnects on trying to do other instance based content that then keep us out of the game for quite a while.

Could we do other other things? Sure, I know I have for a bit. But that's still a large amount of the game that's being locked out because of technical issues on SE's end. Large amounts of the game that we specifically wanted to explore and play through when we purchased the expansion.

I feel like SW:ToR was probably one of the worst releases I've participated in, and I've been in pretty much every AAA MMO since WoW: BC. The queue times were bad, constant disconnects, quests wouldn't work, abilities wouldn't work, and you'd randomly get disconnected because of the server stress issues. Sounds similar to what's going on here, but SW:ToR was on a whole different level.

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Originally Posted by Maliki_Ozari

It's not broken, for a lot of us it works perfectly. You're the vocal minority. Yes, it's annoying. But you're mostly throwing a tantrum.

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hahahahahahahahaha

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Originally Posted by Maliki_Ozari

It's not broken, for a lot of us it works perfectly. You're the vocal minority. Yes, it's annoying. But you're mostly throwing a tantrum.

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Nope. Very broken. Sitting at Rauban for 5 hours meanwhile one of my LS friends has been sitting in a queue for the level 57 dungeon for 3 hours as a tank.

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Originally Posted by Maliki_Ozari

I skimmed and misunderstood. I apologize.

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All good! It's definitely confusing if you just see worst launch ever.