I have never played a game at launch. But from all the rage I have read on this site about Vangaurd I am surprised it didn't make the cut. And for two months I swear half of the forum threads here were raging at the darkfall launch. And then there is FF14, EVE, UO, EQ, MO.....lol just make a top 20 worst launches and get them all on there
Playing: PO, EVE Waiting for: WoD Favourite MMOs: VG, EVE, FE and DDO Any person who expresses rage and loathing for an MMO is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
When I think of bad launches i'm thinking of technical issues. So I wouldn't put Age of Conan on that list though WWII Online should be tops.
I didn't have any issues with WoW at launch however there has been non stop issues since the launch of Cataclysm. There is a 150 page thread on it on the forums related to connection issues and blizzard acknowledged they are having issues. The launch of BC was also unplayable due to massive lag as well as some bugs.
In short, having server problems due to massive, completely unprescedented load due to an unbelievable popularity of your game is a nice problem to have. In fact, it's the best "problem" any game company could ever hope for. Mythic, Funcom, NCSoft, Cryptic, and SOE would KILL to have that kind of problem, and they never have.
By the way, I don't play WoW, as it's not my type of game. But I do recognize it as the dominant game and game company in the MMO space, for good reason.
Again, how Vanguard and FFXIV failed to make this list escapes me. Both enormous and well documented failures, with their problems being of a purely negative kind.
I would agree, that those are the type of problems that any game company would want. However, NC Soft's Aion was so popular taht there were server queues. Of course, when people found out that it wasn't the game for them, those server queues abated very quickly.
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I have never played a game at launch. But from all the rage I have read on this site about Vangaurd I am surprised it didn't make the cut. And for two months I swear half of the forum threads here were raging at the darkfall launch. And then there is FF14, EVE, UO, EQ, MO.....lol just make a top 20 worst launches and get them all on there
This list is pretty silly.
Compare WoW or Aion to, say, APB, a game with almost no content, severe balance problems, and severe hacking problems, all of which contributed not only to the demise of the game, but the demise of the company, in record time.
Or FFXIV, another game with very little content, cut and paste terrain, the worst UI probably in MMO history, and almost every system in the game being badly received except the graphics.
'Ha!' to all those defending WoW like they were insulted personally. I remember all the horrific lag and server downtime when WoW first launched. When the huge lag spikes hit, the servers were down, or the game was just simply unplayable, I just played another game... no big deal... but it was just plain awful. 10 minutes... 15 minutes to loot. I remember my early guild even came up with a holiday attached to the terrible servers: Shiddylag! Shiddylag doesn't just come once per year... it came many, many, many, many times.
In short, having server problems due to massive, completely unprescedented load due to an unbelievable popularity of your game is a nice problem to have. In fact, it's the best "problem" any game company could ever hope for. Mythic, Funcom, NCSoft, Cryptic, and SOE would KILL to have that kind of problem, and they never have.
By the way, I don't play WoW, as it's not my type of game. But I do recognize it as the dominant game and game company in the MMO space, for good reason.
Again, how Vanguard and FFXIV failed to make this list escapes me. Both enormous and well documented failures, with their problems being of a purely negative kind.
I would agree, that those are the type of problems that any game company would want. However, NC Soft's Aion was so popular taht there were server queues. Of course, when people found out that it wasn't the game for them, those server queues abated very quickly.
Many games have had queues. I recall waiting in queue not just for Aion, but for WAR as well. In fact, I can remember 8 hour queues in Darkfall.
But no Western game has had the type of overwhelming crush of players that WoW did. Literally millions of players. No other game has even come close.
Of course, Aion lost its appeal quickly as it wasn't designed for the Western playstyle. WoW, on the other hand, not only maintained its appeal, but grew to an extent that makes all other Western MMOs, past and present, look ridiculous by comparison.
APB was probably the very best it could be at its launch because everyone was near equal, the servers were full of players, and hacking and explointing weren't rampant.
I'm really surpised Aion is on the list. Its Beta was really smooth and launch ONLY had the queues for a week at most. Doesn't make it one of the worst by a long shot.
I think Darkfall should definitely be on the list. Although the game is doing well now, it had a slew of problems when it launched. One of those problems is that people who wanted the game couldn't even buy it. These forums were full of upset players. From server crashes, to the limited launch, to the hacking issues and other things the game was just a mess of a launch.
Sorry, but no. Darkfall only had widespread lag and login issues for less than 14 hours, then the game pretty much ran the way it was supposed to.
Having a "limited launch" doesn't automatically make it a bad launch. They had to limit the number of copies sold or they would crash their servers, makes perfect sense, and if you can't see that well... I guess you'd prefer not being able to play for days at a time.
The hacking was largely overexagerated, and the server crashes were rare, at best.
As for Vanguard, as horribly buggy and laggy as it was, you could still play, and I had a blast, one of my favorite MMOs too, even when my quest led nowhere.
What's missing from this list is AC2, or WWII Online.
I think he is trying to separate problematic launch days vs. overall game quality. That said, WoW being on the list is pretty silly, I played heavily right at launch, had a perfectly good time, and only remember a few hours of very annoying looting delays as being major issues. That said, I gather certain servers were much more popular and overwhelmed than mine.
Thank you for remembering Anarchy Online after all these years. It's an historic miracle that it's still open.
I also expected FF14 to be #1. I haven't played it. Perhaps there launch stability was decent, although the game itself is junk by all accounts.
The first three weeks of EQ launch were so horrible they gave everyone a free month. They were also still fixing classes and graphics glitches 4 months in.
Most of the launches on the list have been annoying but EQ easily heads this list as worst launch, although, in their defense, its not like they had anything to go by. They were one of the first MMOs.
EQ2 and Vanguard comes to mind. SOE did a did a huge mistake with EQ2 servers by first deciding not to have any kind of flagging for servers for overseas players. This made the european playercommunity to "hijack" one of the servers as soon as servernames was published. As soon as the game went live, Runnyeye was flooded with mainly european players, so SOE decided to flag this as a "UK-preferred" server. Wich only further increased the population with the european players that weren't in the know of the serverchoise already. So they included a second "UK-preferred server", Splitpaw. But too late, Runnyeye was already way too crowded to run properly. Besides this, there were problems with UI-settings that had to be redone every time you logged in because they weren't saved. Also a lot of unscheduled maintenances were happening, during one of those I got into WOW-Beta and never looked back.
AO had the worst launch I've ever seen. I remember being stuck in Omni-1 being unable to move. The chat system worked, so we basically all screamed at each other for hours.
I was there for most of the 1st day launches, but even worse then WoW (I was looking at my account transactions the other day and was laughing at how many one day credits I have listed for it) the game that was the worst and most aggravating launch for me was Vanguard.
The bugs alone made me quit, and I actually had fun in the Vanguard closed beta. SOme of the things that happened to me were being disconnected from the game, and after logging in see that my character lost 4 levels (they would not help me on that one), or going through a chunk and finding your self drowning in the middle of the ocean, or when you flew through a chunk you found yuorself falling to your death because there was no flying mount. I could go on and on how much that game aggravated me and quit after my first month. Of course now it is a gem of a gamebut back then I was so mad lol.
Oh, they forgot Darkfall. It was the worst launch ever. The developers even had to limit the number of subscriptions available the first weeks, because the account-server crashed several times because of the massive influx of people.
AO had the worst launch I've ever seen. I remember being stuck in Omni-1 being unable to move. The chat system worked, so we basically all screamed at each other for hours.
AO's rubberbanding was almost comical. I felt like was in the movie The Three Amigo's and was playing Steve Martin's character when he's chained in the dungeon.... all he has to do to free himself is walk across his cell to the device that got him chained up, but as he takes a step forward, more weight is pulling against him.... causing him to frequently fly backwards to his original point against the wall.. he keeps chanting "Gonna make it..... Gonna make it.... <weight is too much, and he starts going backwards> Notgonnamakeit... notgonnamakeit..."
WW2 Online had the bad luck of being colo'd at the start with idiots, and they had a bad piece of fiber optic cable that failed only intermittently.
I don't really consider having queues part of a "horrible launch".
I"m sure any number of games that had successful launches would be in the same boat if they had far more players than expected.
To me, horrible launch is servers going down, huge lag, lots of bugs, billing errors, etc.
I agree. There are enough games released unfinished, bug ridden, and technical messes to never need look towards games that have long ques or other issues concerning more demand than expected. Then again this site seems to think simply putting "these are my opinion" somewhere in an article alleviates any responsibility towards being credible.
Maybe we should get Bill's definition of "launch." I thought AoC launched fine. A couple of weeks after, people were running out of content and the lack of end-game and missing features causes people to leave. But the launch day and the couple of weeks after were just fine.
Everyone saying that FFXIV should be on the list, think for a minute, Bill's talking about servers crashing, bugs, and the like. FFXIV has not had a server crash and few if any bugs at launch, the User Experience for the game is bad, that is not the same thing as a bad launch. While i love the FF franchise and have played FFXI since it's launch in the NA, I will openly admit FFXIV's User Experience is lack luster to be as forgiving as I can to the franchise, but bad game mechanics are not the same thing as hardware issues, such as servers crashing, not having enough servers to handle the client demand, or major bugs.
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I have never played a game at launch. But from all the rage I have read on this site about Vangaurd I am surprised it didn't make the cut. And for two months I swear half of the forum threads here were raging at the darkfall launch. And then there is FF14, EVE, UO, EQ, MO.....lol just make a top 20 worst launches and get them all on there
Playing: PO, EVE
Waiting for: WoD
Favourite MMOs: VG, EVE, FE and DDO
Any person who expresses rage and loathing for an MMO is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
When I think of bad launches i'm thinking of technical issues. So I wouldn't put Age of Conan on that list though WWII Online should be tops.
I didn't have any issues with WoW at launch however there has been non stop issues since the launch of Cataclysm. There is a 150 page thread on it on the forums related to connection issues and blizzard acknowledged they are having issues. The launch of BC was also unplayable due to massive lag as well as some bugs.
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I would agree, that those are the type of problems that any game company would want. However, NC Soft's Aion was so popular taht there were server queues. Of course, when people found out that it wasn't the game for them, those server queues abated very quickly.
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This list is pretty silly.
Compare WoW or Aion to, say, APB, a game with almost no content, severe balance problems, and severe hacking problems, all of which contributed not only to the demise of the game, but the demise of the company, in record time.
Or FFXIV, another game with very little content, cut and paste terrain, the worst UI probably in MMO history, and almost every system in the game being badly received except the graphics.
And then there's Vanguard. Good lord.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
'Ha!' to all those defending WoW like they were insulted personally. I remember all the horrific lag and server downtime when WoW first launched. When the huge lag spikes hit, the servers were down, or the game was just simply unplayable, I just played another game... no big deal... but it was just plain awful. 10 minutes... 15 minutes to loot. I remember my early guild even came up with a holiday attached to the terrible servers: Shiddylag! Shiddylag doesn't just come once per year... it came many, many, many, many times.
Many games have had queues. I recall waiting in queue not just for Aion, but for WAR as well. In fact, I can remember 8 hour queues in Darkfall.
But no Western game has had the type of overwhelming crush of players that WoW did. Literally millions of players. No other game has even come close.
Of course, Aion lost its appeal quickly as it wasn't designed for the Western playstyle. WoW, on the other hand, not only maintained its appeal, but grew to an extent that makes all other Western MMOs, past and present, look ridiculous by comparison.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
Surprised Darkfall is not on here.
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The author should consider himself lucky for missing some of the worst releases in mmo history.
Ultima Online was a mess at release. Forgiven for being a frontrunner on the industry though.
World war II online, one of the worst ever.
How final fantasy 14 got left off I don't know.
All Points Bulletin... the game closed in under 100 days.
Vanguard and EQ2 were a mess at release and both are still plagued by issues they have had since their respective releases.
Alganon... SMRT!
Tabula Rasa.
The matrix.
Articles like this remind me of why I don't want to buy new mmos until months after they release.
There are a number of games that were left off this list that were far more deserving - you've named many of them above.
Honestly, this List appears to have taken Bill about 15 minutes to research and write.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
The list was intersting however where wa warhammer on the list, it was rocky. Also vangaurd had tons of issues at launch.
I got to admit swg launch was wow bad to saythe least.
I played both EQ2 and Warhammer in beta and didn't have issues with either at launch.
Tribes 2 is back!!!! http://www.tribesnext.com/
And from the makers of tribes: Fallen Empire: Legions http://www.instantaction.com/
APB was probably the very best it could be at its launch because everyone was near equal, the servers were full of players, and hacking and explointing weren't rampant.
I'm really surpised Aion is on the list. Its Beta was really smooth and launch ONLY had the queues for a week at most. Doesn't make it one of the worst by a long shot.
Sorry, but no. Darkfall only had widespread lag and login issues for less than 14 hours, then the game pretty much ran the way it was supposed to.
Having a "limited launch" doesn't automatically make it a bad launch. They had to limit the number of copies sold or they would crash their servers, makes perfect sense, and if you can't see that well... I guess you'd prefer not being able to play for days at a time.
The hacking was largely overexagerated, and the server crashes were rare, at best.
As for Vanguard, as horribly buggy and laggy as it was, you could still play, and I had a blast, one of my favorite MMOs too, even when my quest led nowhere.
What's missing from this list is AC2, or WWII Online.
By this logic, doesn't that mean FFXIV is gonna be a good game?
I think he is trying to separate problematic launch days vs. overall game quality. That said, WoW being on the list is pretty silly, I played heavily right at launch, had a perfectly good time, and only remember a few hours of very annoying looting delays as being major issues. That said, I gather certain servers were much more popular and overwhelmed than mine.
Thank you for remembering Anarchy Online after all these years. It's an historic miracle that it's still open.
I also expected FF14 to be #1. I haven't played it. Perhaps there launch stability was decent, although the game itself is junk by all accounts.
The first three weeks of EQ launch were so horrible they gave everyone a free month. They were also still fixing classes and graphics glitches 4 months in.
Most of the launches on the list have been annoying but EQ easily heads this list as worst launch, although, in their defense, its not like they had anything to go by. They were one of the first MMOs.
EQ2 and Vanguard comes to mind. SOE did a did a huge mistake with EQ2 servers by first deciding not to have any kind of flagging for servers for overseas players. This made the european playercommunity to "hijack" one of the servers as soon as servernames was published. As soon as the game went live, Runnyeye was flooded with mainly european players, so SOE decided to flag this as a "UK-preferred" server. Wich only further increased the population with the european players that weren't in the know of the serverchoise already. So they included a second "UK-preferred server", Splitpaw. But too late, Runnyeye was already way too crowded to run properly. Besides this, there were problems with UI-settings that had to be redone every time you logged in because they weren't saved. Also a lot of unscheduled maintenances were happening, during one of those I got into WOW-Beta and never looked back.
Slacker extraordinaire!
AO had the worst launch I've ever seen. I remember being stuck in Omni-1 being unable to move. The chat system worked, so we basically all screamed at each other for hours.
I was there for most of the 1st day launches, but even worse then WoW (I was looking at my account transactions the other day and was laughing at how many one day credits I have listed for it) the game that was the worst and most aggravating launch for me was Vanguard.
The bugs alone made me quit, and I actually had fun in the Vanguard closed beta. SOme of the things that happened to me were being disconnected from the game, and after logging in see that my character lost 4 levels (they would not help me on that one), or going through a chunk and finding your self drowning in the middle of the ocean, or when you flew through a chunk you found yuorself falling to your death because there was no flying mount. I could go on and on how much that game aggravated me and quit after my first month. Of course now it is a gem of a gamebut back then I was so mad lol.
Oh, they forgot Darkfall. It was the worst launch ever. The developers even had to limit the number of subscriptions available the first weeks, because the account-server crashed several times because of the massive influx of people.
AO's rubberbanding was almost comical. I felt like was in the movie The Three Amigo's and was playing Steve Martin's character when he's chained in the dungeon.... all he has to do to free himself is walk across his cell to the device that got him chained up, but as he takes a step forward, more weight is pulling against him.... causing him to frequently fly backwards to his original point against the wall.. he keeps chanting "Gonna make it..... Gonna make it.... <weight is too much, and he starts going backwards> Notgonnamakeit... notgonnamakeit..."
WW2 Online had the bad luck of being colo'd at the start with idiots, and they had a bad piece of fiber optic cable that failed only intermittently.
I agree. There are enough games released unfinished, bug ridden, and technical messes to never need look towards games that have long ques or other issues concerning more demand than expected. Then again this site seems to think simply putting "these are my opinion" somewhere in an article alleviates any responsibility towards being credible.
AO, War, darkfall, Eve, Vanguard...So many way worse launches. This was quite literally the worst "the list" I've seen.
Maybe we should get Bill's definition of "launch." I thought AoC launched fine. A couple of weeks after, people were running out of content and the lack of end-game and missing features causes people to leave. But the launch day and the couple of weeks after were just fine.
Everyone saying that FFXIV should be on the list, think for a minute, Bill's talking about servers crashing, bugs, and the like. FFXIV has not had a server crash and few if any bugs at launch, the User Experience for the game is bad, that is not the same thing as a bad launch. While i love the FF franchise and have played FFXI since it's launch in the NA, I will openly admit FFXIV's User Experience is lack luster to be as forgiving as I can to the franchise, but bad game mechanics are not the same thing as hardware issues, such as servers crashing, not having enough servers to handle the client demand, or major bugs.