Worst Launch Ever?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Seoulstar]

No Man's Sky

[saber_alter]

2.0 was a complete and utter total disaster for a launch.

this.

frankly, the susano bug is pretty goddamn bad, but there has always been worse. *cough1.0cough*

[Vhailor]

With Diablo 3, you couldn't access the game, period. XIV 1.0 literally broke the game. Stormblood may be a mess at the moment, but it's not even close to some of the more publicized expansion flops.

In fairness, I'm not sure it's appropriate to compare brand-new game launches to expansion packs. XIV 1.0 was new; D3 was new. Stormblood is a second expansion.

And, yes, I'm aware I compared Stormblood to HL2 in my own post - so I hardly followed my own advice. This just occurred to me later.

[MakotoNano]

With Diablo 3, you couldn't access the game, period. XIV 1.0 literally broke the game. Stormblood may be a mess at the moment, but it's not even close to some of the more publicized expansion flops.

I don't remember having any issues with Diablo 3 myself .. or 1.0. in the last 20 years I can remember every MMO launch that was terrible .. and neither of those are on my list.

[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

[Kaisinel]

Every FF14 launch was terrible 2.0 especially