Worst Launch Ever?

[Miyha]

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;

[Berethos]

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.

[Sylvina]

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.

[Makeda]

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

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.

[Daralii]

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

[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.

[Baneus]

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

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...

[Daralii]

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...

51 free days. Damn.

[Baneus]

51 free days. Damn.

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

[NewSinz]

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