Signs of immaturity in an MMO developer

[ZombieLover84]

1. Not being prepared for launch after extensive beta testing.

2. Response to launch problems takes longer than a few days.

3. No (real) concessions offered for failure to provide the advertised product.

4. No queues available for an orderly login system even if immediate login is not a possibility.

5. Gold spam is alive and well inside the game. No competent filtering system. Must individually blacklist each one as a player to claim back your chat.

6. Relaunch a game because of failures and broken promises, new game starts with failures and broken promises.

Really Square Enix? This long making game - and this being the SECOND attempt at the same game and you can't get it right?

Maybe this should be the final final fantasy so as to avoid further embarrassment?


And for all the "Dun be so rude, dey be trying real hard!" responders, save your breath. It's perfectly understandable people would want to vent after disappointment and hard earned money wasted.

1. There were ready for the amount of people that played during beta. However, the actual amount of players far exceeded the beta amounts by a very large margin, as seen during early access and into launch. Beta testing can only get you so far. For one, not everyone who purchases or plays the game beta tests. In fact, the numbers are obscenely one sided. As there was no sign of it either, unlike say...a more recent example.

Diablo III. Yes, it isn't an MMO per say, but it is an online only game that requires you to connect to servers to play. It was beta tested a LOT. In fact, even in the beta, the severs crashed, with Blizzard stating that as many as 300,000 concurrent users were on at any give time, which is an obscene amount. Prior to Diablo III launch, Amazon, among many other retailers, provided record breaking pre-orders. Blizzard knew this was coming. Blizzard also happens to run servers for the largest MMO of all time, World of Warcraft. So it shouldn't have surprised them. However, it DID. And it was way worse then this. A couple reasons. One, they knew that they had a huge game. (Although to say that they knew it would be the fastest selling PC game within 24 hours ever would a tad unfair). It sold 3.5 million within the first 24 hours and 6.5 million in the first WEEK.

So, Diablo III, at it's peak in beta, hit 300,000 people logged in at once, and it broke the servers. So why weren't they prepared? Even with the pre-order records, you simply cannot anticipate that big of a release. Look, you can't just buy servers and data centers and give a big thumbs up. For every server or data center, it requires STAFF and PAID MAN HOURS to run. So even with extensive testing, you can sort of guess where you are going to be at, but until it happens, you are guessing. And these guys aren't guessing with your money. They are guessing with THEIR money. What if they are wrong, and waste huge amounts of money for no reason? At a business standpoint, it is better to be in demand than overstocked. No business want's to be overstocked. That is silly. They want to sell everything they have on the shelf. Diablo III as of this past march has 1 million daily unique players, 3 millions unique a month, with a total of 14.5 million unique players total.

Now you ask, how could they not have been prepared? Well, they kind of were. They monitored preorder sales, previous Blizzard titles sells (like Starcraft, World of Warcraft+explansions), and even other top selling PC games. They increased server capacity, well above estimates. It wasn't enough,because Blizzard has never gone from 0 to more than 6 million players across multiple continents within a few days with a brand-new game. THAT is why Diablo II had server problems. It exceeded even the most OPTIMISTIC expectations. And in business, you almost never even bet on the most optimistic. Look at movie ticket sales. All major companies predict their expected opening weekend sales. Some exceed, some bomb. The point is, there is always a number to look at and say "we should be here based on this factual information". Diablo III, and to conclude, Final Fantasy XIV, exceeded even best numbers based on their betas, marketing, and preorder numbers.

2. That is incorrect. They have provided news and updates since early access. On August 27th, the launch day btw for official release, they announced they were expanding data center worlds for North American and European servers. They cut off multiple character creation on high population servers to try and cull the above expected sales of the game. (by limited one account to one character, it provides more room on their data centers so that brand new accounts can make characters and slows down the filling of said data centers until they can be properly expanded.) They STOPPED the digital sale of their game to prevent even more server issues so that people that have already paid would have less issues. In other words....they stopped selling their product, the thing that makes them money, so that current customers could have a smoother experience.

And if you are saying that it's taking them more then a few days to fix the issue, well no kidding. There isn't a magical switch to add more room. There isn't a magical switch to increase their data center capacity.

3. They are given away free days of play because of the login troubles. It isn't that the product is broke, it's that the product is trying to be used by far more people then anyone anticipated. So while you may not be playing on August 27th 24 hours a day, they have announced that you will be compensated for not being able to by extending your free month of play.

4. It isn't that there are not queue systems, it's that they are having to cap it because of the extreme load. As an example, say a server is full. Now, say you keep letting players queue up. That takes away from the bandwidth of the server. Eventually, this would cause extreme server instability. And that is exactly what happened when EA launched, and exactly why they are closely monitoring it. When Cataclysm launched, server queues reached the 2000's, which was around a 2 hour wait time. The way Square is doing is, is what when the server get under a certain user amount, around a 200 queue limit opens up. Currently, when the server gets below a certain number of users, the queue system opens and let's in a batch of players, and then closes again when the server gets above that user limit again. What this does is provide a smooth experience for players currently playing (I always have an excellent connection to my server) while preventing the server from becoming bogged down by server queues and crashing.

5. There hasn't been a single MMO that I have been apart of since EQ that didn't have gold spammers and that didn't find a way around any sort of counter measure. Blacklist them and report them. This is how it works in almost every MMO.

Venting is fine. Spewing information you know nothing about is not. How exactly is your hard earned money wasted? Are you saying you expect to never play the game at all? It's been exactly one week since official launch. An MMO is a unique product, both in the video game world and in the business world. This is actually expected to happen because it is positively impossible to have a perfect launch. No major MMO has ever come close. Between server and computer issues on a client to client basis, it's impossible. You cannot name me one major MMO that this hasn't happened to. In fact, this launch has been pretty damn smooth compared to the dozens upon dozens I've been apart of. The fact that the only fault of Square Enix was not being able to predict to future, is pretty damn impressive. No one saw the popularity spike coming. Pre-orders were not high. Hype was not high. There hasn't been a huge marketing campaign. Instead of being upset that the game you bought is so popular that Square Enix are spending more money then expected to ensure everyone can play as quickly and as smoothly as possible, you should be happy you didn't buy a 60 dollar MMO that was dead on arrival, and one that shows a extreme amount of promise and player base potential.

And to follow up on Diablo III, and how it doesn't matter how prepared you are or how many servers you have, or how many betas, etc. I am going to throwing some numbers at you. These are numbers from WoW, and Blizzard as a company in general. This numbers were current as of 2009. Why am I using 5 year old numbers? Well, WoW peaked to it's highest sub base around later 2011 to early 2012, so I didn't want to grab them at it's highest. It also shows just how much it takes to run a successful MMO, even years after launch, and still have problems releasing a huge title like Diablo III, even when your biggest income from WoW was coming at the release of Diablo III. Anyway, here is just a few numbers for you to think about the next time you are pissed a server is down. (and let's remember, WoW uses a much more basic engine compared to current MMO's, and while it has been updated, it doesn't take near the bandwidth because of the simpler textures, the more basic spell effects, etc)

When WOW Launched Blizzard had:

60 Devs working on WoW
400 total employee's

2009:
4600+ Employees Worldwide

World of Warcraft had as of 2009:
5,500,000 – Lines of code
1,500,000 – Art assets
33,681 – Production tasks
70,167 – Spells
37,537 – NPCs (non-player characters)
27 – Hours of music
2600 – Quests in the original World of Warcraft
2700+ – Additional quests in WoW: The Burning Crusade
2350+ – Additional quests in WoW: Wrath of the Lich King
7650+ – Quests total (how many have you finished?)
4,449,680,399 – Achievements earned by players since their implementation

WoW has had 4.7– Petabytes (4700 terabytes) of data delivered to players through patches as of 2009 (would you like to go and estimate the bandwidth cost of that?)

In 2009, WoW had:

13,250 – Server blades running WoW servers, with a total of
75,000 – CPU cores, and
112.5 – Terabytes of RAM

I wonder how much running 13,250 server blades cost running? In just electricity alone? Replacement parts? Cooling? Oh now let's get to where the REAL money is spent

In 2009, Blizzard had:

Support:

2,056 – Game masters (let's be nice and say they got paid 20,000 a year. That is 41,112,00 dollars just for in game GM. That doesn't include health care costs, taxes, but just basic salary.

340 Employee's in the billing department

2,584 Total customer service employee's (again, the 20k a year salary.... that is 51,680,000 dollars just in salary alone. and I am being VERY generous with these salary numbers. VERY)

They also had 1,724 employee's in international offices.

I think that is enough to at least dent a little sense into you the next time you want to complain about a product like an MMO in it's first week of launch that could potentially prove you 1000's hours of entertainment at the inital 60 dollar investment and around 180 bucks a year if you paid every month the 14.99. Let's say you bought the three highest selling and anticipated games this year. Grand Theft Auto 5, Call of Duty, and eh another major franchise of your choosing. That is 180 bucks that I promise you you wouldn't get NEAR the amount of content and time played as a major MMO.