Quote Originally Posted by MJFERN View Post
While I've got major issues with your margin breakdown estimates, I'll table those for a day when I've got the time to do the research to back up what I have to say on that topic.

Here's my problem with the whole situation, lack of planning. In order for this situation to occur, not only did SE have to plan on only a small fraction of the players they ended up with, they had to go with a server solution that was all but non-scalable, completely full racks with no room for quick expansion. One duty finder for the whole game? Ouch, but if it wasn't built maximizing a single set of hardware, the use of expansion hardware and virtual machines could have created the solution we're hoping works right after tonite.

Lack of planning for the player base is simply inexcusable. The modern tracking methods that weren't available on UO, EQ, and WoW's vanilla launch are common now. Digital sales are reported if not instantly, nightly. And most of the games sold in boxes are reported in nightly figures as well, even when they're not tied directly to an install code. So, at the very least on a day by day basis SE had the numbers they needed to know that the launch wasn't going to work the way it was planned. They moved forward anyway.

Lots of people are angry on both sides. Arguably, if they sold 5 million copies they probably have MILLIONS of people who've never been past the character creation screens. Those millions have a legitimate reason for their anger. If you've only been in game once or twice because of the 1017 errors, you've got legitimate reasons for your anger too. And you've got people who've been in game quite a bit with anger about duty finder not working right, or FATE's being too crowded or their friends can't log in because of all the AFK players who won't log out in fear of never getting back in, all with varying degrees of legitimacy for their anger.

But consider this, we all have the SAME reason to be angry with SE, 1 week. One week was all it took to procure the necessary hardware, image drives, fix the duty finder and be ready to implement for tonite's maintenance. This could have all been done with a 1 week delay in launch and all the anger could have been avoided. THAT just plain pisses me off. If I'd known my EA would be worthless, I would have waited a few weeks, maybe that's what SE wanted to avoid, anyone waiting. If they'd delayed EA along with launch I'd still have gotten it, but honestly the way they handled it is just pitiful. The communication they've shared would have gotten customer service managers at companies I've worked for and with fired. And the blatant and obvious disparity in how the JP v NA/EU server issues have been handled...wow. I don't even know what to say about that. They obviously haven't noticed that while they may be a Japanese company, most of their income comes from outside Japan.
While you have solid points, I only have an issue with a few.

1. These problems did not arise in the open beta. Meaning that Square was on the right track.
2. These problems arose in EA. Now, you may say, they should have known their numbers. They did. But I didn't pre order my copy till open access was well... open. They had no number for me. No data. I did not particpate in the beta. I work in the game retail world. Pre-order numbers were very low, until EA. And then, at my store at least, we had to stop pre ordered because they went over what we had already got in shipment. See, games like this ship about a week before release. I know I had copies of this game in my backroom the Wednesday before launch. At this point, SE did not have the data for the extreme spike that EA brought.

I also now that when it did finally release, every store in my area sold hard copy wise. Including the Wal marts and best buys. This game literally blew up by word of month during the weekend of EA. At this point, they can't just push release back by a week. This would cause more problems.

So we went from open beta, no problems, to ea, one week later, blowing up the servers. This was unexpected not only on SE end, but retailers end as well.

I would also point out that Diablo III, another game with modern tracking, had the same issues. Guild Wars 2, another game with modern tracking, had the same issues. And those two games had the expectations MONTHS in advance. FF 14 blew up within a week.