Has a MMO or MMO Expansion EVER launched smoothly?

[aozgolo]

It seems to be an expectation nowadays, and part of the reason I no longer jump on the bandwagon to be a part of the release of anything that has a dedicated multiplayer aspect. Packed servers, unexpected down-times, Day 1/2 Patches, Exploits, DDoS Attacks, Corrupted Saves, Server Rollbacks, Incredibly long queue times, Lag, the list goes on and on of things that plague MMOs and their ilk.

So I have a very simple and curious question:

Has a MMO launch ever gone smoothly and according to plan?

 

[Grizzly_Bear_1]

From what I remember, Dark Age of Camelot's launch went smoothly. More recently, I don't think there was anything wrong with Planetside 2 at launch. Although, with PS2, I have such bad aim, I couldn't hit you from a foot away if you were standing still and I was armed with a gun that shot beach balls. So who knows, maybe there were lag issues.

 

[Jandau]

Not really. When talking about MMO launches it's more about the extent of the disaster. For instance, from what I gathered, Warlords of Draenor's launch is pretty bad, with entire chunks of the game being unavailable (Garrisons) and the main method for entering the expansion flat out doesn't work (The Dark Portal), in addition to the lag, the crashing and such...

 

[BloatedGuppy]

From what I remember, Dark Age of Camelot's launch went smoothly. More recently, I don't think there was anything wrong with Planetside 2 at launch. Although, with PS2, I have such bad aim, I couldn't hit you from a foot away if you were standing still and I was armed with a gun that shot beach balls. So who knows, maybe there were lag issues.

Nah it was a mess.

The game was half-finished when it launched. There wasn't any PvP model in place to speak of (no rewards or anything, just fighting), there was no itemization in any of the dungeons or past level 36, and the class balance was completely half-baked (archers could one-shot anyone from distance while completely stealthed).

GW2 and Rift had relatively mechanically smooth launches, although the former was riddled with bots and had serious server stability issues, including the near impossibility of actually connecting with friends on the multitude of overflow servers. The latter had "Hack Gate" a few weeks after launch where the account/password database was compromised and they had to scramble to get authentication measures in place while player accounts were stripped bare.

New MMO = Clusterfuck. Unless the thing is an unpopular disaster, the massive week one concurrency issues always lead to some kind of calamity.

 

[Rayce Archer]

I wasn't there for it but since nobody played the Warhammer Fantasy MMO, I'd assume its launch was okay.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I wasn't there for it but since nobody played the Warhammer Fantasy MMO, I'd assume its launch was okay.

From what I remember it launched OK but was horribly mechanically broken.

OT: Didn't help Blizz much that there were DDOS attacks happening which caused a lot of server instability coupled with some unforseen bugs due to the item squish mechanic they implemented. It was a huge change overall for the game and looks like things didn't work the way they expected. I don't think there's been any smooth MMO launch since the early days of the genre.
It will all get straightened out. Just wish there was a way for them to work out better.

 

[Josh Gowan]

If I recall correctly, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, and Mists of Pandaria had much smoother launches than either Burning Crusade or Warlords of Draenor to the point that I and other WoW veterans I follow on Twitter were kind of caught off guard by WoD's launch problems.

 

[KisaiTenshi]

Oh let me share...

Final Fantasy XIV - Cluster****
Wizardy Online - Cluster****
Final Fantasy XIV:ARR - Cluster****
Archeage - Cluster****

I've played plenty more during beta's.

Everyone already knows how much of a screwup FFXIV's V1.0 was, so I'll skip over that.
Wizardy Online - Had servers get crushed and lag out, repeatedly during the first two weeks, people who paid for "services" got partial refunds.
FFXIV:ARR - Hope you made a character during V1.0, because if you didn't you were never getting on those (legacy) servers again. Even to date, the server I'm on STILL does not permit new characters to be created, and it's been just over a year since FFXIV:ARR came out. Occasionally they open slots up when they bulk-ban users, but that's pretty rare. On the plus side... if you're on a server with locked character creation... no bots. Or at least none that you can find. During Launch however, there was hundreds and hundreds of bots that persisted well past the two month point before they started nuking them, and during that time many players who had accrued large amounts of gold (either from V1.0 or from actually playing the game) had their gold balance decimated for some reason that became a beleaguered source of whine all month.
Archeage - Much like FFXIV, they didn't put enough servers online, so everyone who "prepaid", couldn't get on, so those that did get on, camped their login and did anti-AFK activities to ensure they never get booted, thus creating several-hour long queues. This continued all month. Then when they opened new servers, people wouldn't move to them because they already camped land on the founding servers. It took them over a month to start banning bots, which only then did the hours-long queues start disappearing. But on some servers zones there were more bots than players.

Moral of the story is:
1. Do not buy "founders packs" - You will get screwed by not being able to take advantage of the time since you won't be able to log in. In the case of Archeage itself, people had botting scripts designed to camp as much land as possible in the first hour the game was up, so if you weren't the lucky person who bought the 150$ founder pack and was willing to live dangerously to get to the most desirable places first, you were SOL.
2. Do not expect the game to be bug-free or bot-free. In fact, if the game is out in another region before the region you are in, that none of the bugs they deal with have been fixed.
3. If the game is a Korean or Japanese import, assume the game's competitiveness will suffer due to not being designed for 70ms latency (East-West), compared to the sub-20ms Korea and Japan have.
4. There will be DDoS's against the routing infrastructure or login server at launch in order to "screw" people from being able to login/create characters.


One of the reasons I'm less willing to commit to any MMORPG has a lot to do with new games over-reliance on "founder" beta tests. Who in their right mind pays to beta test? If this is how a company wishes to do beta testing, they should be paying the beta testers who find bugs, rather than having the beta testers pay for access (and writing wiki's/guides as they do.) Archeage's founder/beta tests wound up screwing everyone who wanted to play because they needed twice as many servers than they initially rolled out.

The only MMO's I ever tried (non-beta) that didn't horribly fail at launch was Dragons Nest and Fantasy Earth Zero.
*PS Wizardy Online, and Fantasy Earth Zero both shut down due to lack of revenue/interest, both are Japanese imports.

 

[Lilani]

Oh let me share...

Final Fantasy XIV - Cluster****
Wizardy Online - Cluster****
Final Fantasy XIV:ARR - Cluster****
Archeage - Cluster****

I've played plenty more during beta's.

Everyone already knows how much of a screwup FFXIV's V1.0 was, so I'll skip over that.
Wizardy Online - Had servers get crushed and lag out, repeatedly during the first two weeks, people who paid for "services" got partial refunds.
FFXIV:ARR - Hope you made a character during V1.0, because if you didn't you were never getting on those (legacy) servers again. Even to date, the server I'm on STILL does not permit new characters to be created, and it's been just over a year since FFXIV:ARR came out. Occasionally they open slots up when they bulk-ban users, but that's pretty rare. On the plus side... if you're on a server with locked character creation... no bots. Or at least none that you can find. During Launch however, there was hundreds and hundreds of bots that persisted well past the two month point before they started nuking them, and during that time many players who had accrued large amounts of gold (either from V1.0 or from actually playing the game) had their gold balance decimated for some reason that became a beleaguered source of whine all month.
Archeage - Much like FFXIV, they didn't put enough servers online, so everyone who "prepaid", couldn't get on, so those that did get on, camped their login and did anti-AFK activities to ensure they never get booted, thus creating several-hour long queues. This continued all month. Then when they opened new servers, people wouldn't move to them because they already camped land on the founding servers. It took them over a month to start banning bots, which only then did the hours-long queues start disappearing. But on some servers zones there were more bots than players.

Moral of the story is:
1. Do not buy "founders packs" - You will get screwed by not being able to take advantage of the time since you won't be able to log in. In the case of Archeage itself, people had botting scripts designed to camp as much land as possible in the first hour the game was up, so if you weren't the lucky person who bought the 150$ founder pack and was willing to live dangerously to get to the most desirable places first, you were SOL.
2. Do not expect the game to be bug-free or bot-free. In fact, if the game is out in another region before the region you are in, that none of the bugs they deal with have been fixed.
3. If the game is a Korean or Japanese import, assume the game's competitiveness will suffer due to not being designed for 70ms latency (East-West), compared to the sub-20ms Korea and Japan have.
4. There will be DDoS's against the routing infrastructure or login server at launch in order to "screw" people from being able to login/create characters.


One of the reasons I'm less willing to commit to any MMORPG has a lot to do with new games over-reliance on "founder" beta tests. Who in their right mind pays to beta test? If this is how a company wishes to do beta testing, they should be paying the beta testers who find bugs, rather than having the beta testers pay for access (and writing wiki's/guides as they do.) Archeage's founder/beta tests wound up screwing everyone who wanted to play because they needed twice as many servers than they initially rolled out.

The only MMO's I ever tried (non-beta) that didn't horribly fail at launch was Dragons Nest and Fantasy Earth Zero.
*PS Wizardy Online, and Fantasy Earth Zero both shut down due to lack of revenue/interest, both are Japanese imports.

For the record, the reason character creation on certain servers gets blocked on FFXIV is for server population management. They need to make sure all servers are gaining roughly the same number of newbies at the same pace, or else you'll have some servers flooded with newbies and others with "generation gaps" due to not enough newbies floating in. That issue is not a lack of servers, it's balance. The only time I see trouble with the servers these days is immediately after a patch or on free login weekends, which is pretty standard for any MMO.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Ultima Online, it launched without any issues (At least none as far as my father or any person that I've spoken to about it can tell) and it continued running without any issues until a pleb dared to kill Lord British while he was giving a public speech. The same can be said about most MMOs and MUDs created around 1997-1999 Tibia and Furcadia are the most popular ones that I can think of.

LB was killed during Beta, not after the launch. But the game ran great as a murder simulator and one of the highest griefing rates in any game to date as far as I remember personally. I loved and hated that game equally.

Everquest, the "mother" of modern MMO's, launched without much of a hitch as far as I remember and its first expansion went well. I didn't play beyond that because I took some time off to work a job that required me to give up any semblance of personal life for a year. Then I was accepted into the Beta of WoW and I don't remember the initial launch having much, if any issues.
Since then I've played mutliple MMO's but almost all of them have failed to capture me and there've been quite a few bad launches since then.

 

[TT Kairen]

I was present for the launch of SW:TOR, day one early access, first wave. Launch was completely solid. Unfortunately the game turned out to be mediocre but the logistics and planning of the launch was nothing short of impressive.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Ultima Online, it launched without any issues (At least none as far as my father or any person that I've spoken to about it can tell) and it continued running without any issues until a pleb dared to kill Lord British while he was giving a public speech. The same can be said about most MMOs and MUDs created around 1997-1999 Tibia and Furcadia are the most popular ones that I can think of.

Everquest, the "mother" of modern MMO's, launched without much of a hitch as far as I remember and its first expansion went well.

UO was about as broken at launch as any game has a right to be, outside of famed calamities like Ultima IX or Battlecruiser 3000 AD. Aside from the ass-smashing lag and constant server collapses and rollbacks, the game's virtual ecology shattered on impact with players. You could wander the woods for 20-30 minutes at a time and not find so much as a deer to kill. That's not even to speak of the myriad issues that occurred in the weeks to follow, like the infamous Magic Missile bug (where wearing metal armor caused the base level magic missile spell to one shot you) or widespread item duping. It was one of the first games of its kind, so everyone was largely forgiving, but the launch was a disaster.

EQ wasn't quite as mechanically shaky, but also suffered from constant server outages and rollbacks. The game's quest content was also woefully broken, but as it was (ironically) secondary to the core experience people didn't fuss too much.

You can count the smooth MMO launches in history on the fingers of one hand.

 

[Little Gray]

If I recall correctly, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, and Mists of Pandaria had much smoother launches than either Burning Crusade or Warlords of Draenor to the point that I and other WoW veterans I follow on Twitter were kind of caught off guard by WoD's launch problems.

As somebody who started within a year of wow launching up until Cataclysm I cant say I remember a bad expansion launch when I was playing. Any issues that they had were fixed within the first twelve hours before the vast majority of players got on.

 

[gigastar]

While i was playing it, RuneScape was rolling out updates smoothly every month or so.

 

[Duster]

back in 2004 wow launched and had a lot of updates and bugfixes in it's files, already ready to be put into the game, but not on public servers. I couldn't tell you the reception, but it likely went smoother.

 

[Here Comes Tomorrow]

I wasn't there for it but since nobody played the Warhammer Fantasy MMO, I'd assume its launch was okay.

Nope, it was awful. Especially the EU launch. Poor WAR, never had a chance.

If I remember, TERA had a decent launch.