FAIL!

Posted on March 24, 2008 by Scott Jennings| 47 Comments

I’m not sure I agree with this list.  From an MMO centric viewpoint, Anarchy Online, and ESPECIALLY World of Warcraft should be on there somewhere (its issues were very similar to Steam/Half Life 2′s). In fact, it took until a few years ago for MMO launches to NOT be automatically assumed to be failtastic.

Fun trivia tidbit: DAOC had an almost flawless launch day. It went down for about 15 minutes on launch day. That was all my fault. Uh, sorry!

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  • Laitriem

    Why am I not surprised it was your fault Lum? :P

  • Jackbnimble

    Anarchy onlines launch was a joke the game was LITERALLY unplayable for about 2 weeks after release.

    World of Warcraft was fine for me, I had few if any issue on launch day, but I was smart enough to start playing on a server that didn’t have a high population listed.

  • IanB

    WoW’s main issue was a crappy Oracle implementation causing a lot of item-related lag as I recall.

    Where’s Trials of Atlantis on there anyway? :P

  • http://www.independentcreator.com Matt Franklin

    There’s room to quibble, but WW2O sets a very high bar. WoW’s launch was MUCH better.

  • BadMisterFrosty

    FAIL and World of Warcraft does not compute. It invented the genre, inspired Tolkien to write Lord of the Rings and Al Gore to save earth from overheating. Certainly, World of Warcraft had a perfect start and nobody needed to wait in queues for days.

  • Makaze

    Yeah I only remember WoW’s DB issues the first couple of days after launch. It was pretty fail free overall.

    Tip for future developers – Do not have a single item DB that all of your world servers point to and then launch a game that wildly exceeds your subscription expectations.

    Course with VMware there’s absolutely no reason to do that now…

  • hsinclair

    It makes me want to stab my eyes out every time I see a fan claim that (insert game launch here) was horrible and how the launch should have been more like WoW’s. It really is the game that can do no wrong in people’s eyes.

    FFS, my first character was on Archimonde. The server that was down for FOUR DAYS.

  • Anticorium

    Do not have a single item DB that all of your world servers point to and then launch a game that wildly exceeds your subscription expectations.

    Now hiring database administrators for online-world project that will exceed expectations, unless it doesn’t. Duties will include making new servers appear out of thin air and/or vastly overspending on racks full of hardware that will never be needed. Non-precognitives need not apply. Java a plus.

  • Ibn

    U9 as #1, ouch, was not expecting that, mostly because I didn’t know it was that well-known.

    I was one of the volunteer mods for Origin’s official U9 forums. I had the joy of being the primary mod for the “Rants and Raves” forum.

    About a week after the game shipped, I nearly got fired from my PC support job because I was spending all my time on the forum and not actually doing work. It was very depressing. There was nothing I could do about most of their complaints, I tried to be sympathetic, all I was really there to do was to make them stop using foul language.

  • Ibn

    Heh, also they got it wrong. Eager RPG fans booted the game up on their fancy Voodoo3-equipped Pentium II rigs, only to run headlong into myriad 3D engine bugs and crash after game-halting crash.

    If they’d actually been running a Voodoo3 video card they would’ve been fine because the game ran pretty well in GLide. It was just the folks who had switched to the by-then-rather-popular Nvidia chipset and tried to run it in D3D that were really hosed.

  • Gawain The Blind

    Anarchy Online should be number one. Ultima 9 was bad, but it wasn’t THAT bad. Anarchy Online had the worst release of anything before and after. It set the BAR for bad releases.

    Maybe they just didn’t want to fill the list with MMOs. Because how about Shadowbane?

    Wait wait wait, did “Mourning”/”Age of Mourning”/”Thrones Of Chaos”/(Am I forgetting a name?) ever actually launch? Because if it did, I vote for that as number one.

  • Gawain The Blind

    (for the sake of completeness: “Realms Of Krell” was the one I forgot.)

  • http://www.zenofdesign.com Damion

    Because how about Shadowbane?

    Shadowbane’s launch actually went fairly smooth, compared to those on this list. Things didn’t blow up until about a month later, when people’s cities started deleting themselves. Which, just to make it clear, is bad.

  • Neil

    Yeah, Anarchy Online really beats the pants off World of Warcraft for worst MMO launch. Granted, only those with rose colored glasses would say that WoW had a good launch, but its problems were more in the realm of “Good god we weren’t expecting NEARLY this many people” coupled with the “Oh sh*t, what do we do now?” deer in headlights brain freeze rather than the buckets of fail topped with pig sweat that was the first two weeks of AO.

  • Neil

    (And as an aside, my WoW server was up to 1k queues on sunday again as recently as last November…)

  • Merkwurdigliebe

    The initial version of Ultima 9 “launched” fine. Everything else about the game sucked.

    As for Anarchy-Online… well, you can play for free now. :D That kinda makes up for the two months I spent not to be able to play it.

  • http://weblog.probablynot.com Jason

    I think people forgot that Anarchy Online was so bad that the subscription based MMO didn’t charge a subscription fee for a year while they fixed it.

  • Pat

    Surely having your Penny Arcade “Because We’re Right” award taken away until the lag issues were resolved means something?

    Perhaps an honorable mention?

  • Rand0m
  • DM

    Yeah, Shadowbane was so bad it didn’t have the decency to improve afterwards. The rest, well, I missed.

  • http://www.vinull.com Michael C. Neel

    AO yes, WoW? No, most servers were fine within a week. DAoC launched well, but if I recall they limited production to 100K copies the launch week and also they had zip for content – unless you could the same mob cut-n-paste, change name, color, level, as “content”.

  • http://blog.somniusonline.com VPellen

    [i]“DAOC had an almost flawless launch day. It went down for about 15 minutes on launch day. That was [b]all[/b] my fault. Uh, sorry!”[/i]

    Details?

  • http://blog.somniusonline.com VPellen

    Crap, I hate it when I use the wrong tags, let’s try that again, shall we?

    “DAOC had an almost flawless launch day. It went down for about 15 minutes on launch day. That was all my fault. Uh, sorry!”

    Details?

  • Sutro

    Second (quadtriple?) the comments supportive of WoW’s launch; I was a midnight buyer and didn’t really notice the queues. Maybe that was because I just stayed online for a week straight…

  • ubvman

    And while it would be easy enough to fill this entire list at least two times over with MMOs alone, we decided not to do that, as it’s just too much fish-in-the-barrel shooting even for us.

    I think the criteria for MMOG inclusion is not just “faw down and go boom”, but rather “faw down, go boom – and take a few thousand subscribers AND the publishers to valhalla with you.” Your casualty list has got to be a lot higher young padawan…

    No personal experience with AO but it was sorta niche to start with wasn’t it? WoW as its said, recovered well enough.

  • danno

    I think the reason U9 got the #1 spot is simply because it was both a massive artistic AND technical failure. A “Perfect Storm of Crapulance” if you will…

  • Jessica Mulligan

    ubvman said:

    “No personal experience with AO but it was sorta niche to start with wasn’t it? WoW as its said, recovered well enough.”

    From today’s vantage point, it looks niche, I’ll grant you; WoW has inflated every measure of expectation. However, AO sold over 125k copies in the first three days; at the time, mid-2001, that was a HUGE success for an MMO, beating out even EverQuest’s 3-day launch total. It can hardly be described as niche in that context.

    Just sayin…

  • UnSub

    Good thing that list was compiled – now no game launch will suck ever again.

  • Aufero

    AO should be #2 on that list. It’s worth playing these days, but it was a festival of suck at launch.

    The WoW launch problems were irritating, (and continued for months, not weeks) but I’d been playing SOE games for years at that point, so my standards were so low it didn’t bother me much.

    Hooray for competition.

  • Njal

    Oh cmon, AO wasn’t that bad at launch. I sometimes stayed connected for 5 minutes at a time.

  • random poster

    AO’s launch was quite horrible. Though now it is a different story. Much improved but relegated to niche because of its craptastic launch (that and it’s ollllld now)

  • Walter Yarbrough

    re: Michael C Neel

    In 2001, that was content: Exhibit A

    http://eqbeastiary.allakhazam.com/search.shtml?zone=18

    The limited production run was fortuitous, but more a result of demand greatly exceeding supply.

  • Scott Jennings

    Details?

    I was responsible for the customer support system, which on launch day flooded the authentication server offline with requests. Three days later it was fixed, which meant (a) the first 3 days DAOC was online the CSRs were fielding tickets without the benefit of tools and (b) I got very little sleep until 4 days later.

  • xzzy

    I remember a problem with flying badgers in DAoC’s first couple days.

    Sure it didn’t take the game down.. but flying badgers? Those guys are deadly enough on the ground. Newbie Hibernians didn’t have a chance once they took to the skies.

  • tannenburg

    xzzy – I still have nightmares about Wee Wolves. Those little bastards…

  • Njal

    Bah those were nothing compared to Ugnof Toestubber and his gang.

  • bloo

    “Taxi To Victory” is a badge of honor for us now.

  • Drakks

    Yea, suprised AO didn’t make that list. I’d really only put WWO ahead of it in terms of pure omgwtf-titude on launch day.

    And I’m not seeing the WoW connection. As much as the game bored me quickly, I can’t really say I ever had much gripe from a technical standpoint. From day 1 launch to my canceling the accounts I never had any real issues. I’ve always thought I had to hand to to Blizzard for that.

  • Mox

    … Ugnof Toestubber .. .

    Where’s that little fellow running off to? Oh well, never mind.

  • nero

    DAOC did launch very well for it’s time. I launched about 80% finished… but technically solid.

  • blachawk

    WoW does not belong on that list. Anarchy Online needs to be on it, and Ultima 9 needs to remain on it.

  • taodon

    Dark and Light should be on this list… it should be 3rd, 2nd, AND 1st. I’m just saying.

  • Comstar

    WW2OL had to steal their own servers back the *day* before launch because the hosting/routing company went bust, and had under 24 hours to get everything set up at an alternate location…which predictably didn’t quite work for several months. And the strategy of “throw more coders at the project” was a disaster as well.

    EQ had a free 1(or was it 2?) months of free play time due to it’s failure to launch. Far worse than WOW ever did if I recall.

    AO is equal to or higher than WW2OL, but the bar is pretty close.

  • Jadawin

    EQ had some rough times the first couple of months. WoW had recurring issues for a long, long time, although many of those were apparently server specific (heck I had some issues with Alleria a couple of months ago before I decided to bail). I seem to remember that while launch day was splendiferous for DAoC, the next 2 months saw several stability/uptime issues, but that’s been 7 years ago (gah) so I could be mistaken.

  • http://www.plaguelands.com krones

    I thought WoW’s launch was alright given the circumstances with everyone and their grandmother rushing to play. As for the BT patches, maybe worse patch system evah list, but not a launch list. AO, Vangaurd, any old EQ expansion, any third rate MMOG like Mourning, and your game when it launches. Don’t hate, I kid! I kid! Well, at least we hope so.

  • http://hitnrun.blogspot.com HitNRun

    Anarchy Online was…whoa. I mean, whoa.

    WoW’s serious problems didn’t last quite as long, but they were quite explosive in their own way, with 4 servers basically getting deleted as far as the players were concerned.

    DAOC had a great launch. What few problems there were got covered by XP handouts. After putting up with Verant for years, this felt like the end of the Exodus story in the Bible.

  • http://www.mmogchart.com SirBruce

    People are also forgetting that when Anarchy Online launched, you had to sign up with your credit card number on the website… on a non-encrypted connection. No HTTPS, just HTTP. They fixed in in a day or two, but that’s pretty bad.

    When Ultima Online launched, things were so bad you couldn’t even move in town. Don’t you remember the Birtannia lag? Or waiting for a minute for your backpack to open?

    When EverQuest launched it actually *took down part of the Internet* in California from so many people playing it.

    WW2OL’s launch had many problems, but a good portion of them were due to a faulty fiber connection to their ISP. Because their previous ISP went bankrupt without warning and the servers had to be moved overnight to a new location, there was no time to properly load test the new connection.

    Bruce