The Daily Grind: Launch day blues

We here at Massively have seen a lot of MMORPG launch days, some good, some not so good, and some nearly unplayable. As we waited patiently for Age of Conan's servers to come up and wisk us away to the wild lands of Khitai and Rise of the Godslayer earlier this week, it seemed as good a time as any to wax nostalgic about some of our most memorable launch day experiences.

For my part, I always like to start with the bad news and wash it down with the good. The worst launch day offender in my book was SOE's Star Wars Galaxies. June 26, 2003: a date that will live in infamy....ok maybe it wasn't that dire, but I distinctly remember taking the day off from work, purchasing the retail client at nine in the morning, and finally making it to character creation and the dust-caked streets of Mos Espa around eleven that night. In between, there was much swearing and spamming of the account login launcher, and even more Starsider server lag when I finally managed to jack in.

On a more positive note, recent MMORPG releases seem to be improving in terms of both stability and performance. My opening day experiences with both Lord of the Rings Online and Warhammer Online were completely free of login and stability issues. What about you, dear readers? Care to share your launch day horror stories or happy endings?

Reader Comments (37)

Anarchy Online. Ugh, lag so bad you couldn't even turn. Mobs popped in and out of walls. Worst. Launch. Ever.

AO, worst launch ever!

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/feature-articles/ianarchy-onlinei-first.php?page=1

Yeah I've played nearly every major MMO on launch day and AO is still hands down the worst one ever.

And not just launch, every single patch was guaranteed to screw things up for that day. And here we are in 2010 and Funcom is still terrible at patching.

Oh hell yeah, I remember that one. Even the end of beta "event" was such a mess, hard times for Funcom them days. I guess they ran out of funds for testing/production and had no other choice than go "gold." After a few months (or 6) they finaly got AO patched into pretty good game.

I skipped school to play FFXI on launch day. I remember logging in at nine or ten that morning and finding it pretty quiet. It didn't heat up till the weekend, when it became packed.

Shadowbane.

launch day that lasted for months.

i remember rubberbanding across whole zone.

this ^

Cataclysm will be the first game I'll be able to be around on launch day (been living in Brazil, harder to buy games on launch day there). But I've been thinking of postponing and just joining the week after, when things should feel more normal. I fear all the bad stories about huge lag, insane quantities of people at the same and the wierd bugs. I play the game to relax, if there is a chance it will stress me, I just go do something else.

If Cata launch is anything like BC and Wrath launch, you really just need to stay away from the "New Shiny" starting zones, in this case the Worgen and Goblin starting areas.

Then again, since most zones are getting an overhaul, I am sure the populations will be fairly spread out.

BC was reeeeaaaallllyyyy bad at day 0, account management went down due to load so you couldn't even activate the expansion, then a metric crapton of players gathered at the dark portal and mass slaughtered each other unable to pass (because they couldn't activate) which leaded to multiple successive continent server crashes. When account page issues were fixed every single person on the server started questing in HFP and it went down promptly as well...

Wrath wasn't that bad at all, the masses were split between 2 northrend zones and DK starting area (which was heavily phased and handled the load very well) so i guess blizzard did learn their lessons, and i don't expect Cataclysm launch to be a clusterfuck.

Oh and in BC (unlike wrath and i hope cataclysm) both new starting areas were on the same continent server handling outland... that didn't add to stability either i guess.

lucky for me when BC lauched most people in Australia still hadnt got there copy so i was ahead of the main group of players leveling

I actually played Aion on Launch Day. True Story. My roommate on the other hand was in that everlasting queue.

The only launch day I have been around for is the WoW EU launch, and that wasn't really that bad.. I remember the account creation was offline for a bit, some lag (500-1k ms) and some disconnects. I think some of the later patch days have actually been worse than the launch.

she is playing a racing game with a joystick.... lol sorry

as for bad launches SWG launch was horrible couldn't log in the first day as the servers were crashing was nuts

And maybe even a split screen racing game... hard to be sure. She's yelling at the other driver to get the hell out of the way.

The worst launch day I've ever experienced was World of WarCraft's European launch. It was impossible to even create an account until two days later when some good soul at Blizzard figured out that a 5MB account creation page wasn't such a good idea with tens of thousands of gamers hammering it 24 hours a day. You'd think they'd have learned a few lessons from the utter fail that was the North American launch...

The launch fail continued for months as servers regularly crashed under heavy loads, many servers saw enormous queues and early zones were utterly unplayable for days. I haven't played a MMOG since that saw that much server downtime and free time added to accounts.

As for the smoothest launch day experience: Guild Wars. There wasn't even any overcrowding of early zones, due to the instanced gameplay. Perfect!

Ugh.

I'd take several daily server crashes over instanced gameplay ANY day.

Server crashes typically takes no more than 15 minutes of your game time at worst. Often as little as 1-2 minutes. And it's only when the game/expansion is new.

Instanced gameplay takes so much out of the feel of the world, and the enjoyment of the game, and lasts for a lifetime.

Wow, looks like that woman needs to take a laxative.

Never been there on launch day. I expect that to change with SWTOR though.

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The Daily Grind: Launch day blues

Reader Comments (37)

Posted: May 12th 2010 8:18AM (Unverified) said

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Posted: May 12th 2010 9:16AM phobic99 said

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Posted: May 12th 2010 8:38AM Wisdomandlore said

Posted: May 12th 2010 8:31AM Enkiel said

Posted: May 12th 2010 9:23AM Inspectah said

Posted: May 12th 2010 8:40AM Carolina said

Posted: May 12th 2010 8:46AM misterorff said

Posted: May 12th 2010 10:44AM Unverfied B said

Posted: May 12th 2010 10:47AM Unverfied B said

Posted: May 12th 2010 11:58AM (Unverified) said

Posted: May 12th 2010 8:44AM misterorff said

Posted: May 12th 2010 8:56AM Faryon said

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Posted: May 12th 2010 1:54PM GRT said

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