Stienbjorn wrote: »

Anarchy Online, my MMO love/hate relationship. That game was a broken mess when it launched, but man did it reek of potential.

Dude! I was there.... still am, but not. Why did they have to have a crappy engine? I miss having sunglasses...

vanillexhope wrote: »

Maybe somewhere between 5-10 actual launches and many games where I joined within a few months of launch. I fork out the cash knowing damn well the game won't be perfect.

For me, it's worth it though. I actually love joining a game during it's birth and watching it transform. A year from now, we will all get to talk about the launch and be proud that we witnessed it and can remember how things "used to be."

I've been through numerous launches since Beta of Asheron's Call. I have same set of lowered expectations you do and I also love being in early even if things aren't fully up-to-speed. However, today's market is vastly different than even the market when WoW first launched. And also the tech in those days was new and untried. Today's market comes with a history of expectations that wasn't there in the early days. We didn't have the years of experience behind us to know how things could be better, or even what we preferred in terms of how the game handled things. Everything that's in ESO has been done before -- everything -- so many of us have expectations now about how these things should work from day 1.

If your playerbase knows what to expect, then the devs/designers should be even more knowledgeable. Examples?
- Why no equipment preview?
- Why no in-game warning that they're bringing down the servers?
- Why is no one out there monitoring zone chat and blocking/banning gold spammers?
- What is there no way to take a single attachment from an email -- you must take them all; and why can't I select "email item" when I right-click on it the same way I can right-click to enchant?
- Made the pre-order and edition rewards attached to a single character with no in-game way to get again if accidentally deleted?
- Why no option to turn on/off nameplates?
- Why no way to easily distinguish friends and guildmates in-game? Only group-mates and raid-mates get an obvious indicator.
etc. etc.

ESO gets a lot of things right and much of the game -- 90% -- works. But what isn't working is not minor. The "stuck" quests, and their intermittent success/failure I'm sure is just as frustrating for their developers and testers as it is for us as players. But since it affects PvE in a major way, and since it is one of the biggest things that sets apart ESO from other games, it needs to be addressed quickly and *most of all* they need to be communicating about it openly with the player base.

MMO players are a very forgiving lot -- as long as you tell them what's going on. They'll help each other out, they'll go play other things, but don't mislead them or ignore their voices or they will abandon your game in droves.

Not to mention the game hasn't officially launched yet. Welcome to early access. Or as I like to call it. Last minute Beta.

Wow. You know those comments that when you read them, your BS meter goes off?

I've worked for gaming publications and EB Games/Gamestops, and with that I'm always given free copies of games and MMOs, and I'm invited to tons of Alphas and Betas, but even I haven't played 40 MMORPGs, especially since EQ. Using your information, you would have averaged 2-3 MMORPG launches a year. That's only about 4-6 months each. Factoring in a life, however minor it would be, I couldn't see that happening. I'd have to assume you would have only averaged (again taking in any social life and school) 3-4 months per MMORPG at most. Someone that jumps around that much without giving each game time to be involved with, which is also not a lot of time to have all the bugs worked out, your opinions matter as much as a man that calls himself a licensed nutritionist because he eats cereal every morning.

Thete wrote: »

I struggle to believe that you've been involved in the launch of so many MMOs. Apart from anything else, if it were true, it must mean you either review them for your job or you don't actually like them and just move onto the next title. Maybe you should consider that you just don't like MMOs.

The other query I have is that this is by far the smoothest pre-launch (it hasn't been launched yet I remind you) I have ever seen, and smoother than some actual launches. Now I don't claim to have played anywhere near the number you have (only WoW, AoC, WAR, SWTOR and now this from launch itself) and this has exceeded my expectations. I was expecting constant disconnects, bugged mobs and quests and frequent rollbacks. So far I've had one disconnect, not come across any bugs of any kind (though I gather some have) and even the downtime for maintenance that people have complained about has only resulted in me losing out on a grand total of one hour and fifty minutes playtime.

Was that to me, or the OP? I actually agree with you. I've been to quite a few launches, not as many as OP claims, and I actually DID work with a couple of gaming magazines, and this launch is running MUCH smoother than most.

troll comment becuase this is easily the smoothest launch ever, SWTOR AOC took days for people to get on yet alone Diablo 3. WoW had same issues as well as tonds of broken content. Rift also had very similar issues. War Hammer online didnt fix quests for years. STO was horrible. UO tons and tons of connection problems and LAG.

Gotta wonder if the OP was there for SWG's launch where they couldn't even keep the servers up. Or how about WoW's loot lag that would keep your character trapped for up to 10 minutes at a time, and in the meantime you've been killed by something. Now those were frustrating launches. This is one of the smoothest I've seen of the half dozen I've been through.

And yes, a lot of the issues are due to the game community being front-loaded into the earlier levels currently. As time progresses, the beginning quest areas should be much quieter.