WAR Launch Smooth As Sexy Satin?
Since last Wednesday, I've had my tiny head buried in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, and frankly I've been having so much fun that I almost failed to notice how smooth the launch went. Which is the point of a smooth MMO launch, I suppose, to get right to the playing and deciding which of the many awesome race/classes I want to invest in.
In an interview with Gamastura, EA Mythic's Mark Jacobs waxed congratulatory on his company's success:
You can measure a launch in a number of ways. Usually, the first way people measure a launch is, does the game stay up? Since last Sunday, when we began our "head start," which allowed in up to 60,000 of the collector's editions -- because that's how many we sold -- plus a lot of our older players, to Tuesday, not a single crash. Not a crash of the game, not a crash of any of the servers.Then we started the second phase of the head start, for our standard edition, and that was a little under 48 hours. No crashes of the game; no crashes of the individual servers. [On Thursday,] we started the official opening for everyone. Again, no crashes of the game; no crashes of an individual server. The only time we took it down was [Friday morning] to put up a server patch, and it was actually back up before schedule.
From that metric, I think it's a really safe assumption that we have the smoothest launch. If you've played any of the other MMOs, if you look at downtime due to crashes or maintenance, there's no comparison.
We launched Dark Age of Camelot back in 2001, and it was regarded as one of the most successful launches of all time. We like to think it was the most successful; the guys at Turbine like to think Asheron's [Call] was. I think we were a little bit better than them. The only problem we had that time was when somebody parked a truck on our internet.
It's interesting to note how, when talking about MMOs, the language of success often hinges upon technological feats such as server downtime and login queues in addition to traditional game-evaluating metrics like gameplay, audio and visual performance, and so on: not only do MMO designers have to compete against the Blizzard gorilla, they've got to avoid tripping over their ambitions technically.
Preparing for WAR: Mark Jacobs on Launching Warhammer Online [Gamasutra]
tiny dancer
Posted to MMOs, Video Games on 22 September 2008
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: age of reckoning, mmo, mmorpg, pc, warhammer online
One of the servers did go down, but i think that might of had something to do with the mass amount of people trying to log on at the same time.
Hopefully they do something about the long queue times also. i noticed a few of them, mine included, have about a 20-30min queue time.
Other than that, this has been a great MMO launch. Much better than WoW when it 1st came out.
AOC had a decently smooth launch too.
Doesn't matter how soothe a ship sails into the ocean if there is no land for it to eventually reach and all the water is filled with Kraken :)
Hey Tiny what server do you play on? : )
No words about the launch in EU, the epic failure?
Dunno, my server was down for 8 hours of emergency maintainence today.
As stated, the EU launch was a disaster of unmitigated proportions, although this was nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the atrociously thought out registration and account management system we were lumbered with. I have a level 20 sorcerer and have yet to encounter a single bug, so I would agree that the game itself is impressively smooth.
And AoC a smooth launch?! The words "bug-riddled nightmare" spring to mind.
I didn't think the EU launch was that bad.
Aside from waiting a whole evening to get my registratration verified and a little trouble logging in the day after everything went fine. Maybe I'm just not that easily bothered.
And I was a week or two late for AoCs launch, but I don't recall any trouble with that one.
In fact, despite all the crap the game gets I liked it. Somewhat sadly, I'm prefering WAR so I've decided not to go back to AoC. A levelcap of 80 at launch is too daunting for me anyway.