Worst Launch Ever?

[AraneaXV]

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?

Warlords of Draenor has to be one of the worst launches.

[Altyor]

Gates of Discord. EQ back before Wow came out (9 months) MMOs were still new, servers were weak and couldn't handle the load. But the bottlenecks...

EQ was a hard game but God... Gates of Discord broke people. It was balanced to the level increase that hadn't released yet (2 expacs per year, fall expac gave levels).

The flagging mission to get into the third group zone (and to be flagged for the second raid zone) was so hard that with 5 other people who were geared in raids BEYOND the flag that you still only had about a 15% chance of victory.

The mid raid zone for the expac was the worst though. Uqua, the Ocean God's Chantry. I knew full time hard core raiders (40+ hours a week) whose bleeding edge guilds broke apart on the raid like waves against the rocks. Numerous people broke down crying in the middle and logged off never to be seen again.

They nerfed the content 3 times over 6 months and it was still BARELY beatable until the second expac and level boost.

[Wexamos]

Star Wars: Galaxies.

Shortly after the servers came up for live, the database for the game had a critical error and they shut the servers down for over 24 hours until they could actually make the servers function again

[xyaie]

ARR's launch was worse. like 80% of the population couldnt even log in.
Aion's launch, 6-18 hour queues on every server. then you DC.. back in the queue
I've heard WoW's servers were down over 50% of the time

[stanrir]

ARR 2.0 was a million times worse atleast we can log on to play this on ARR you couldnt even log on half the time, it was so bad they had to refund us game time

[Tonberrian]

ARR 2.0 was a million times worse atleast we can log on to play this on ARR you couldnt even log on half the time, it was so bad they had to refund us game time

I agreed with this statement until today. Now people are getting the perma 3102 lockouts until servers reset.

[Daerellin]

I agreed with this statement until today. Now people are getting the perma 3102 lockouts until servers reset.

Yeah.. I tried to do the novice mission to "Avoid Area of Effect Attacks", because it popped up on my screen and I had never seen it, and I got disconnected and cannot get back in.

[Vhailor]

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?

Half-Life 2's Steam activation (which was the original launch of the Steam service) was awfully rough. It was made worse by the fact that it was a single-player title, so it felt very unnecessary.

That said, Stormblood is inching up the ranks for me, mostly because I find it impossible not to take into account SE's prior experience and presumed lesson-learning. Valve got a little bit of a pass for me with HL2 because they were trying something new for them. For SE, this is old hat.

Also, I'm basing my judgment solely on technical errors, not on general product crappiness. Diablo 3, for instance, was a god-awful steaming pile of crap at launch, but technically it didn't do so badly as to stick out in my memory.

[cporter]

Half-Life 2's Steam activation (which was the original launch of the Steam service) was awfully rough. It was made worse by the fact that it was a single-player title, so it felt very unnecessary.

That said, Stormblood is inching up the ranks for me, mostly because I find it impossible not to take into account SE's prior experience and presumed lesson-learning. Valve got a little bit of a pass for me with HL2 because they were trying something new for them. For SE, this is old hat.

Also, I'm basing my judgment solely on technical errors, not on general product crappiness. Diablo 3, for instance, was a god-awful steaming pile of crap at launch, but technically it didn't do so badly as to stick out in my memory.

I'm almost positive steam existed before half life 2... As i remember playing counter strike at net cafes on steam before hl2.

[Vodd]

burning crusades was down for a week at a time on some servers