I'm a big fan of how NCsoft does things, especially their support software. If you've played a few MMORPGs, you know the frustration that sometimes regardless of how well the game is designed, the software for patch downloads, logins, etc. is often very poor, not to mention the lack of server stability. NCsoft however, excels at these things, at least in my experience.

I love NCsoft's PlayNC Launcher:

Specifically, I love the PlayNC Launcher because it runs all of the time, scooping up any patches for the games it supports while you're away from your PC. No waiting to play after you get home from work, just because it's a patch day.

Back when I was playing City of Heroes, I loved their background downloader built into the game. Unlike downloaders from other companies (*cough* Blizzard *cough*) it was unintrusive, didn't add noticable lag or performance issues to the game and most of all it meant little or no manual downloading needed for patches. It was mess-free and hands-off. Because of its robustness, Cryptic was able to patch City of Heroes in small increments to solve problems quickly, which meant almost no major bugs or issues when larger content patches were added (again, unlike other companies).

I haven't played CoH in awhile, so I'm not sure if the PlayNC Launcher / Downloader replaces the built-in patcher, but I hope it doesn't and simply integrates and augments it instead.

Extra notes on Server Stability:

I was seriously impressed with the City of Heroes servers: in the 9 months that I played, I had only once experienced unexpected downtime on the server my characters were on and even then it was very brief. In fact, I had a hard time convincing our guild to switch to WoW because it was like night and day with so many problems on launch compared to what they were used to with CoH.

City of Heroes also had a flawless launch, which is almost unheard of within MMORPG history.

Is it just me, or has server stability for World of Warcraft gotten even worse than it was (and it was pretty bad to begin with). Maybe I've been spoiled lately with other MMORPGs, but I honestly thought I had an easy-going attitude to server stability with games. I understand that it's a huge thing and huge things tend to have growth pains, but sometimes I think it's just absurd.

It doesn't help that this happened while I was rolling for the first epic loot from a boss in my very first raid instance run. Talk about bad timing and a bad impression. It's the second time this week that multiple servers have been completely borked for hours on end.

I love the game, but I'm starting to agree with Penny Arcade's take on the whole stability issue back in January: they revoked World of Warcraft's "Game of the Year" title. I'm seriously wondering if Blizzard is pulling an EA here and is abusing a situation of popularity, not putting enough resources into stability while collecting millions in subscriptions. I don't want my hours refunded, I want the thing to be up. I may not be a fan of Everquest as a game, but Blizzard could learn a lot in the way of customer service from them. I think they've been spoiled by the fanboys of their previous games.

I'll keep playing, for the same reason others do: because I enjoy the game, I've invested my time in it so far and on gameplay I think the competition sucks. But if I keep playing after too many situations like this, I'll be the one feeling like a sucker.

I had a little debate recently with a friend over the amount of server downtime that World of Warcraft has had since the official release, plus the stability (or lack thereof) of the client software. Now I'm a perfectly understanding customer in regards to this sort of thing in new MMORPGs. I've played my share and I have had a professional interest in the technical difficulties involved in massive network games, ever since I played my first**, quite a few years back. It's just not an easy thing to do, to run servers that can support so many players in real-time.

To give you an idea of the downtime-- Blizzard refunds a day of gametime when a server has been down for a significant time period. I just looked at my WoW account and there are a whopping 8 days of refunded time on my account. That's 8 service interuptions of significant length (3-4 hours or more, in some cases 12+ hours) over the course of exactly 2 months. Not a great track record.

Still, I'm loving it. I honestly have to say, World of Warcraft is the best massive multiplayer game I've played to date. I'll gladly trade some downtime for the experience to be inside such a rich and enjoyable world, they didn't even need to refund the time to me.

** I'm not counting non-graphical MUDs, so that would be Kesmai's awesome Air Warrior, which began ~1987, far ahead of it's time and perfectly playable using 1200 & 2400 baud modems on GEnie. In fact, when I finally got to interview some of their network engineers years later, they spoke strongly of a fondness for less bandwidth but better latency networks than currently found on the Internet. Kesmai is sadly no more, having been enveloped into the behemoth corporation of EA.