Why are there issues with every MMO release?

[udubdave]

I'm not pointing a finger strictly at Square. I think the newest Sim City's "MMO" release was even worse than this. My question is, why does this happen? Is it that these companies are cheap and try to get away with the absolute bare minimum in terms of infrastructure and hardware? Don't these companies learn from past mistakes?

[Jaxxie]

Its all about technical limitations...it doesn't matter how good your servers will be, how good que system you have...when its come to peak they just die, its same reasons why you can't use mobile phone at new year night...overload thats rly it. No need to QQ, whine, ask for refound.


from another forum
"I'm certainly not going to try to get a refund over 1 day of downtime for a game I plan to play for a couple years if at all possible."

[Winzhi]

People claim that MMO releases has been like this for ages, however the last couple of years the launches has been somewhat near excellent. The FF Early Access is a disaster.

I love the game, but people that say we should expect a launch like this are not right in their mind, we should have expected this in the early 00's but not in 2013.

If anyone should know it would be me, I have been playing every major MMO released since 1998, starting with Lineage.

[Eightandzero]

Because SE is incompetent. Seriously. Tera launched fine, laggy at times but now bad. Aion was damn near flawless. Rift was decent with minor surges.

I'd rather SE take it down for a few days then tell us when it's ready. Because I'm tired of trying to play the lottery to log in.

[Boohiss]

If there ever was an MMO that could have greatly benefited from a good or great release, it's ARR. Now we will see articles on every review site talking about how they can't even get on to play. That's not what you want to see for a reboot of an unsuccessful game.

[Tsukino]

From my experience, it seems to be a little of that plus a lot of "unusual" behavior from players around the time of release.

Once the game is already out and people are able to log in all the time, a large number of people will only spend a few hours a week in the game. But during release time tons of those people get up early to play ASAP, spend the whole day online, etc. For FFXIV specifically, you get NA and EU players who would rarely ever be on at the same time doubling up. Beyond those people, there are a lot who buy the game to try it out and then decide it's not for them a month in.

Most companies don't want to spend the money on a ton of servers to accommodate all of that, nor do they want to program logon systems which will essentially never get used beyond the first couple of weeks. Not only is there the monetary concern from their side, but if you created all the servers to properly house all the people trying to play at launch, those servers would be veritable ghost towns a few weeks in and you'd have to merge them.

Not that this excuses things like the permanent 3102 or a lack of working queue, etc. in this case.

[Proxy]

This launch has been one of the worst. I think only Vanilla WoW was worse. Tera, GW2, Rift and SWTOR were all smoother then this release. Rift being the perfect launch, some high ques started and they added some servers and that fixed all the issues. I'm not sure they even had downtime, just a few server resets.

We expect server issues at release, but the fact there's no real que system and servers are capped make this an awful experience. I've been trying to play since the early morning maintenance and I haven't been able to get in.