I'm trying to think back through the decades of gaming history, and I'm finding it hard to think of something. The Diablo III launch was pretty bad though, and the auction houses there ruined the game.

the worst? easily when a game goes bankrupt and close the servers. If you have warning (sometimes you dont) then you spend time with your gaming friends playing 'remember when', taking screenshots, exchanging emails, reminiscing prior to the end. its worst when the devs show up in game and commiserate with you and you know there are real people who put their heart, soul and personal finances on the line to make their creation... and it failed.

sad times

Tabula Rasa on the almost rogue-like closing of the game.

Star Wars Galaxies CU. Most hated the NGE, but don't realize the bulk of the players moved away with a simple change to the way combat calculations were made with the Combat Upgrade. I still loath SOE.

World of Warcraft. Tried it so many times, from launch till very recent with a free pass. Mainly because the ex-wife inherited the account and deleted my toons. But also, the graphics and limited character customization made me cry, because it meant I could NEVER enjoy a game with so many good mechanics and developer systems.

FFXIV:ARR launch, hands down for me. Guild switched servers during phase 4 (which wasn't wiped) around 3 times due to character lockouts, then the game finally launched and couldn't log in without sitting at my computer for literally over an hour and spamming a button because they lacked any sort of meaningful queue. Digital sales became locked out, character creation on all servers locked out.. so friends couldn't join my server even if they did manage to buy the game somewhere.

Then, when things semi got up and running they had issues with the instance servers being slow, so that even if you had a completely full party and queued for something it'd take around 45 minutes for the entry to the dungeon to go through. Running into the dungeon through the physical location didn't help this. Dungeon servers weren't all that stable, but dungeons were required for the main storyline (which also unlocked other features), so if you ran into one of the stints in which their dungeon servers were misbehaving before a critical point you literally couldn't progress as you couldn't even travel to other areas and get quests.

Once I did get to level cap I was met with the grind of the same exact dungeon over and over again to get a single kind of tomes in order to actually get gear to raid. There was suppose to be a raid in between dungeon gear and the raid in the game at launch that bridged the gap between ilvl 70 gear and ilvl 90 gear, but it didn't make it in until a little over 3 months after release, so the tome gear was the only way to get gear to raid efficiently. Eventually they made it so there were two dungeon options, and then speed running became widely popular.. and if you didn't speed run then **** off. Tanks were so imbalanced that one of the two classes that could potentially tank for raids absolutely couldn't because they literally couldn't take hits in a certain phase for a few of the bosses. That wasn't fixed until the first content patch.

They had, and still have, tons upon tons of gold sellers, and bots that farm underground. Logging in, even now, you'll get a few gold selling whispers right off the bat. At launch it was worse because right clicking and blacklisting didn't exist. You had to try and catch the name so you could type it in the blacklist field, but there was also no way to freeze the chat. It would snap down to the newest message entered as soon as a new spam message came up. They literally came up too fast to get names.

They also had a fairly large issue where people who were using the marketboards (their AH) in main cities were having gold stolen off their retainers while they were logged in. There were also blanket bans to anyone who had over a certain amount of gold, and then, even if the person was found not to have "tainted" gold, and had legit earned it through the market, they still had 95%ish of their gold taken away.

Oh, and despite not having any sort of regular maintenance, the game came down for emergency maintenance (and still continues to go down for emergency maintenance) about 2-3 times a week on average. I'd rather have a weekly scheduled thing myself, maybe the constant emergency ones are preferred by some folks, I dunno.

As a last note.. despite all that I still had fun with the game for about four months. It wasn't until after all my friends, and my guild had quit that I also eventually wandered off to play other things.

hm.....
missing my in game wedding 3 times on Myth of Soma was bad....first two time, the GMs cancled. the last time? they didnt send me the time and date, because my mail provider was being pisy (hotmail in the 1990's was baaaad because it was so full) so i was 30 mins late for my own wedding >.>

being called a lazy player on a neverwinternights 1 server, becasue i chose a *human*..being insulted for my background. being called names because my male char had *pink* plate on (when that was the defalt shade of +2 plate in the game XD)oh, and being one hitted by a super cow-bomb a GM on a different server threw there. the whole (small at the time lol) map was hit with a metor type spell. the ground shook. it cracked open, and flaming cows landed, exploding everywhere...i died so hard, i went back 2 levels (when a high level there was lvl 5...HCR neverwinter was brutal when you could die from a single rat >.>)

but i think the thing that was the worst for me?
the sims2.
i lost 2 mainboards, 2 hard drive, 3 graphics cards and a CD-RW drive to that games DRM chewing up my systems. multiple installs. all to learn later that i could remove the problem myself with a bit of work, and later, to change a single file so it wouldnt stop my game from even starting, just becasue i added some new content.
now, my sims games never get internet. and i vowed to only get console sims 4 XD

Wkw, thats alot of horror stories. Many of those I would not have waited through, hehe

Makes me appreciate this game more

Most painful gaming experience...
Playing the first Clock Tower for the psx... "Who will survive this game of horror? *Broken computer voice*
http://youtu.be/SSDCKe1alTE

I remember a couple of years ago I was sent a beta key for "End of Nations". That was my worst gaming experience.

Woolenthreads wrote: »

The issues which have plagued this game are not the worst I've had. The worst gaming experiences I've had were with Skyrim and Eve Online.

Skyrim's was due to the patch that made the f'ing Dragons fly away from you backwards. My work-around was to create another character because the early game doesn't have much in the way of Dragons.

Eve Online's was a new expansion which, for some of us, meant we couldn't login and when we could log in there were issues across the board. This wasn't recent, by the way, I stopped playing it over 4 years ago. To make it worse I was in zero-sec, in a war that we were losing badly, with skills and gear finishing so I was an extremely angry fellow .

I've certainly had other gaming experiences which were worse than any I've had in ESO. I wanted to say Halo as well, where I had a weird vertigo attack watching a cut scene but I worked out that was an effect of low blood pressure crashing.

While I accept people are unhappy here occasionally, it simply isn't that bad. Anyone else have tales, not about ESO, of terrible electronic gaming experiences?

---

Mostly near heartbreaking based on anticipation? VANGUARD.
Still wish SOE would have put the money into it, instead of funneling it away into SOMETHING ELSE. Could have been so awesome if that they would have been committed and jumped on the launch gameplay issues ... the bugginess and way the game run on every sort of rig made it a nightmare and saddened even those of us who hung in there for the longest. Elements of play in that game were fabulous; and the world was gorgeous in addition. ;o(

TOTALLY, COMPLETELY, ABSOLUTELY, UNDENIABLY THE WORST game at both launch and into its 6th month was without a doubt for me trying the franchise of Final Fantasy when it came out as Final Fantasy XV: A Realm Reborn. Astoundingly bad. Especially the customer service and the 'communication' with players, (NOT), of the development staff.Over the previous summer, two friends I had who have been diehard FF console players like since they were I dunno, six lol, worked on me. One of them had played FFXI for years as well.

So though I thought it would be great to go with a new MMO - in this case a relaunch of what many thought had great play elements and had been being reworked for two years ergo shelf ready with all the old goodies, and the issues fixed.

It was ... maddening. I could take up so much space with the play issues, bugginess, quest funneling, gating, mechanics, gold sellers, bots and chat problems .. I won't, but it made me near crazy and I couldn't even finish out my sub. First time I've ever quit an MMO. Not a bit of regret for stopping my subscription, and wouldn't consider for even 1 second returning. Only thing good I can say about it is the quest lines had good writing, and the characters were beautiful and very customizable - I know as I spent a LOT of time fiddling with character creation making yet another alt to cool off from being pissed off about another aspect ingame ;o).


MOST FUN before TESO? A dark-horse, less-heard-of mmo I tried and was infatuated with, and played even through a fair amount of crashing, glitching, bugs etc?
FALLEN EARTH. It was a gem. Loved the humor, the exploration, the blend of reticle or first person aiming, the crafting, the apoc theme, the mass 'parties' the community would have, especially in the early months the three-faction PvP. There were so many awesome players in the first year of that game, really it was very enjoyable!

Steam banned my entire account when it was hacked. When I tried to appeal, they accused me of botting and said there were no signs of hacking. Thing is, I never actually played Counterstrike, I just bought it and never installed it. They would not budge and then just stopped replying.

I made a new account and they banned that one, citing that I was a known botter. I don't even know how bots really work. I dont even use addons. I.was.LIVID.

But what are you going to do, it's Steam. It's not like anyone can compete with them.

Asian Grinders and F2P mmorpgs.

Age of Conan. Funcom. I don't believe I have to say anything further than this. AOC was in all honesty the Game with the most potential I ever saw. It was ruined. Funcom worst company ever. Worst support ever. Most hacked game ever. Must unbanned hackers after 6 years. Worst balance. Worst pvp. Most launch bugs in game after 6 years. I actually hate funcom, which is sad (and i know it).

Guild wars 1. Best game I played ever. Until they put in the Ursine skills that made it possible for every noskill scrub to do all the hard pve content making all the achievements worthless.

Guild wars 2. Nothing to do with the first game whatsoever. Terrible game. Not a sequel at all. Got a full refund though with no arguments.

Dragons lair on Neo Geo, couldn't pass the first screen.

Age of Conan launch.

The game and servers were horribly unstable for weeks, it was one of the first DX10 MMOs(but didn't ship with it) and caused blue screens, crashes, and had terrible performance even on high end rigs.

The game is a perfect example of a bad launch reputation ruining a game forever. It was a decent game excluding the technical issues, and after years of patches it is an amazing game. But it is dead because of their launch reputation.