Have players become impatient?
Age of Conan hit its first real day of server-instability today and if you go by the forums you'd think the Titanic sunk or something. Openedge1 has quit the game over it.
I find myself boggled, given that AoC's launch has been more stable than most MMOs by far. Ultima Online went down for 3 days immediately from launch and players were made to disperse any time they collected in one location. Everquest had servers bounce up and down for months, plus lag issues to the extreme. Blizzard stopped selling copies of World of Warcraft for 6 weeks due to server instability and Penny Arcade revoked their game-of-the-year award from WoW for the same reason.
During all of those, there were players freaking out, for sure. For UO there was even a class-action suit, which led to the EULA-disclaimer-heaviness of today's MMOs.
Everyone's entitled to their complaints. They are paying for a service and when it's not there, they get upset. I get upset when my power goes out, it drives me nuts that it happens in a big city. But I lived in a small town for awhile where the power wasn't exactly-- consistent. Whenever there was an outtage, we'd just shrug.
In MMORPG land, expect troubles in the first 6 months, that's just pragmatic.
It feels like there's some new kind of intolerance. Maybe players have had enough, maybe more than a decade of stability issues being 'normal' for MMOs in the first year is just too much for players to take anymore? Maybe it's a generational gap?
I suspect the complaints are more noticeable now that blogging your MMO experience has hit its stride, not to mention the wealth of established MMORPGs that are stable now that you can choose from.
Whatever it is, I think people should be ready for more disappointments, because this sort of thing isn't going to magically disappear anytime soon.
My advice: Don't take it personally, the bugs and downtime aren't tailor made for your frustration. Take a break now and then, have backup plans if your nite of gaming is disrupted.
Or don't play a new MMORPG unless you have a lot of patience, because it's either going to have issues or it's going to be delayed heavily for a cleaner launch (even then it's a crap shoot). Either way, there's waiting involved.
Update: Discussion on the Wiccana forums seems a lot more reasonable than the general Age of Conan forums, as usual. Most players there seem to also be suggesting patience.
Jun 27, 2008 7:57am
It really boils down to confidence. Confidence in Funcom, confidence in customers sticking around so there are groups, etc.
I go into the reasons a little more on my blog, but it is not the fact of the actual game. Right now, I consider AoC the most fun I have had in an MMO in a long time. It just felt like the first time all over again.
But, Funcom made a major mistake in what they did. It has been noted they were aware of the problem, yet released this patch anyways.
The fact that the patches have continual changes to classes. If Funcom was not comfortable and confident in the way their classes were to begin with, how can I be confident in that company. Still too many missing needs like items, armor, crafting, traders, and more.
I have my good old watchlist (which I plan to post later) and see if these things are handled properly. If these items are taken care of within the next 30 days, then I will renew at that time.
For now, I would prefer to put my 15 bucks somewhere else, and not deal with the frustrations. I figure I can hit myself in the head so many times and say "Doh" before my head starts hurting. And right now I have one mean headache.
Jun 27, 2008 5:27pm
I'll have to disagree on some of that Openedge1.
The class changes & balances for instance, taking WoW as the usual example lately, Blizzard completely revamped each and every class with it being one-class per content patch for more than a year. What Funcom has done with Necromancers recently pales in comparison. I honestly hate the balancing meta-game, I think it should be done once and the mistakes lived with, but I'll put up with it because so many players think it should never end.
As for the patch, Funcom needed to get their fixes in, they identified the new alchemy drop system as causing the instability on the EU servers and they were mostly right, because I know I managed to play last night once the patch went in. There were server-side lag problems, so they missed something, but as a tradeoff to the fixes to other bugs I accepted that.
To say they put the same patch through is painting it in some malicious or incompetent way and it doesn't describe what happened. I'd take Funcom to task if this seemed like extreme downtime, but it wasn't even a full day, it was 5 hours.
30 days? Who knows? Seems a bit short to me considering every MMORPG up until this date has been either unstable, buggy, or lacking significant features (generally Endgame). Usually it takes about 6 months to smooth the major issues out. I'd recommend looking back at the halfway mark to that (so 60 days from now?) and seeing if they're at least halfway to where you want.
But I agree with the basic premise, if you don't have confidence in the company, it will seem like a long wait indeed.
In 6 months AoC will be a different game. I have confidence in Funcom on that. They pulled Anarchy Online out of the fire from insanely worse, if it had been a different company they might have sacked it (EA has dropped numerous MMOs now), or sold it (SOE would have bought it I bet, like they did Vanguard).
I have in the past recommended waiting before playing a new MMORPG. I still recommend that to most people, it takes patience to wait for stability, but far less frustration. Bad experiences taint what you see further down the road, for sure.
And to lighten the mood with a related bit of fun: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/11/28/
Jun 28, 2008 6:31am
And I will have to disagree with you Rog (smile...this is great discourse!!)
I have been in many beta's in the past. Let me use LOTRO as my prime example.
Upon launch the game had a glaring issue with their AH. An exploit. They took the AH down like Funcom did with the Traders.
But, this became their focus. It was fixed as soon as possible.
They had uncompletable quests. They completed work on those as well.
Within two weeks no further quests were so broken that they could not be done.
They added some features in that players requested (sound for gathering resources) and the like.
But, during those first 30 days of launch, the majority of the patch notes were fixes. Not a balancing act. Of course the PvP focus did not exist here either.
Even though I had issues still with LOTRO and certain features, I stuck it out as I saw their commitment.
The community did as well.
I felt confident in Turbine.
I gave them 6 months because of that commitment on their part.
Now, whether AoC is more high profile or whatever the case may be, they needed to show a real effort to fix some major problems. I did see this at first, but as each patch after the first kept pushing more bugs than fixes, this is where I lost that "patience"
The key is effort. Whether it was a shortage of workers and developers or monetary issues that held back quality patches, will be a mystery.
But, until that mystery is solved, I felt instead of being frustrated each time, I would be better off taking that monthly scrip and doing something else, so that when I come back in a month and see the progress of my watchlist, I can say, alright lets renew.
I started with my first issue last night, the female attack speed. I lost my wife due to that and many other problems. It is a good indicator to me on how often she would play that will help me decide if I need to stick out a game.
LOTRO lost her interest due to ugly female character models, a badly designed AH (which is still horrid to this day), and boredom in quests.
In AoC besides that bug with females being so weak (dying over and over in her opinion was not equal to fun), itemization, no downtime based gaming (mini games, town based features like a good AH, community based features that women love), these all are important factors for fun gaming.
Once Funcom realizes that balance can happen, but not when glaring issues prevent a ton of people from playing, and they tackle those main issues...then the game will rock.
It is pure and simple. AoC has been my all time favorite MMO. Yet, the company has spoiled some of that fervor.
But, I plan to go back in 30 days and revisit. I have my eye on the forums to see what fixes go in place, and I am counting of many of you, the blogging community to show me they are making strides.
Not bitter at least, just a little disillusioned is all.
(Sorry for the long comment...cheers to ya)
Jun 28, 2008 8:47am
No problemo on the long comment, as you said, it's an interesting exchange.
The only two MMORPGs that I've counted as having reasonably smooth launches are City of Heroes and LOTRO. Both share something in common, they lacked much for Endgame content at launch. LOTRO also wasn't super innovative, I think on that you'll agree, there's nothing that compares to a new combat system in LOTRO.
I did not stick around with LOTRO past beta for three reasons:
Funcom sticking with Anarchy Online is HUGE to me. Games with better launches have been closed down by other companies.
I'm not sure what you've expected to see happen with Age of Conan. Many of the bugs or content holes I've experienced have already been fixed (I complained about Toirdealbach's Tomb and it was fixed by the time I'd posted about it), some are being 'worked on'. Some of the content holes they're filling come with new bugs, but I expected that too, it's an uphill battle and that's why the process takes awhile.
I think this has much to do with perspective, because would this scenario have felt better to you?--
What if Funcom delayed all new content for the big content patch coming later in the summer, rather than trickling it out along with the fixes? Then the patches right now would be all 100% fixes and introduce less bugs in the meanwhile. There would be new bugs when the content comes of course tho.
To me, that would be a shame. I'd rather have the little bits of content now rather than wait for a big patch two or three months down the road.
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