Broken Toys

When you work in the IT industry you will know that every software will have it’s bugs. So a game launch is not different than a Go-Live, for example, for Oracle Applications. It doesn’t matter how many months you spend testing your config or custom code. You will have bugs in the first days…

It can be avoided, of course, if companies drastically bump up the Q&A budget. But why should they? Any bugs that come will surely be cheaper to fix than to have an extra 6 months of testing. Of course that there is a point past which the business as usual becomes incompetence, but that point is seldom well defined.

This goes to say that, no, you can’t compare WAR or Darkfall or any new game to that matter to the existing states of games that are live for 2+ years. It simply doesn’t work like that.

Thus said, there is no excuse for a server down in opening day. And knowing the reasons for it it would be nice: don’t they have high availability? some problem with their provider? database instanced crashed?

“The game is riddled with bugs, hacks, and exploits, and if you aren’t macroing or otherwise cheating you suck. Real hardcore that…”

You are stating facts. Can we have a source please?

@Syncaine
You wrote “They had a HORRIBLE launch, and had a beyond buggy game for quite some time.” – can you name the bugs that made the launch a horrible one please?

Can you tell me if you played 2003 and if, under what corp & name?

The game was playable and worth plying from beta on, infact it was so funny to play in beta already, that many players shared accounts, because back then you could actually log multiple characters in from one account.

I had an anti CCP/carebear blog going back then called “EVE Offline”, so I don’t need to pretend anything, I was there, I witnessed how it all started.

You sound like you’ve read something about EVE’s “bad” start on random forums. Let’s not debate about what S&S’s or CCP’s expectations were, we don’t know. But we can check if the game was beyond buggy if you tell us the bugs that made the launch so horrible back then.

Einherjer :
“The game is riddled with bugs, hacks, and exploits, and if you aren’t macroing or otherwise cheating you suck. Real hardcore that…”
You are stating facts. Can we have a source please?

Just read their forums and do a little Googling. Hell, you can find step by step instructions with little to no effort at all. And if you were one of the *lucky* few who got an account and can actually play then the cheats and whatnot will be hitting you square in the face.

My only point is we need to stop accepting crap like this or we’re going to keep getting crap like this, and in this case, we’ll never know the true potential of this particular section of the market.

@JuJutsu: Thanks. I wasn’t going to give links cause they’re so easy to find.

“And for those two reasons alone, if I were able to, I’d buy Darkfall. I wouldn’t PLAY it mind you. I’d put the box on my shelf alongside the other MMOs I don’t play. But risks deserve rewards.”

I actually disagree with that statement pretty heavily. That lack of quality should not be rewarded with a purchase. We are finally to the point where games are failing because they don’t live up to a basic standard of quality that we expect in products that we are purchasing.

If I am spending $50+ on something:

I expect it to install correctly
I expect it to work properly
I expect it to not run like ass if I meet their minimum specs
I expect to be able to connect and play at my whim
I expect it to be fun in the first 5 minutes

Anything that fails to meet those standards isn’t worth paying for. Rewarding shitty products just means people are willing to aim low and get away with it.

Crask :“And for those two reasons alone, if I were able to, I’d buy Darkfall. I wouldn’t PLAY it mind you. I’d put the box on my shelf alongside the other MMOs I don’t play. But risks deserve rewards.”
I actually disagree with that statement pretty heavily. That lack of quality should not be rewarded with a purchase. We are finally to the point where games are failing because they don’t live up to a basic standard of quality that we expect in products that we are purchasing.
If I am spending $50+ on something:
I expect it to install correctlyI expect it to work properlyI expect it to not run like ass if I meet their minimum specsI expect to be able to connect and play at my whimI expect it to be fun in the first 5 minutes
Anything that fails to meet those standards isn’t worth paying for. Rewarding shitty products just means people are willing to aim low and get away with it.

I can’t remember the last PC game I bought that met all of those requirements.

My computer is over 2 years old (with scattered upgrades) and Darkfall ran fine at max resolution. WAR still runs awful, though.

@Viz
This is why I never get mad dying in WAR, but can’t play EVE anymore cause Empire is boring and getting jumped by 5 gate campers leaves me not wanting to log in again.

actually, just the patch and event to unlock the new classes went Live today. If you do the quest and unlock, you can play the new classes on the 10th or 11th…

otherwise wait another week on top of that to play them without having to unlock.

@Syncaine
For you it’s only, for me it’s 15k players who had fun from the start.

I am still waiting for you to name the gamebreaking bugs though.

Vasagi :
I can’t remember the last PC game I bought that met all of those requirements.

Hmmm…. I can. WoW. I’m sorry, but it’s true. It installed fine on WinXP, it booted fine, the patches downloaded even behind a firewall (I did have to allow access to Blizzard’s IP since PeerGuardian was blocking it), it runs rather well on a laptop that is below the minimum specs, it was up (although there was a queue on my server of choice, but there were servers available without a queue), and it was fun in the first 10 seconds.

No game, outside of one man projects, sets out to sell 10k copies. They just don’t. It’s fun to pretend they had this magical plan of having a tiny launch and then growing slowly over 5+ years, but that’s not reality. Give them credit for sticking with it and getting the game into the shape it is now, but also accept that their consistent growth is also due to starting at the lowest possible point.

As for game breaking, what did you start with when creating a new character in 2003? What did it take to get beyond mine a roid in a frig for hours? How often was the server down? How was the performance back in 2003? Either you just choose to ignore all this, or are one of the 10-15k with amazingly thick skin and utter determination to play a flawed game. I was busy playing AC-DT, sorry.

@Syncaine: Sigh, I could write a couple of business plans and design documents for subscription based games aiming at 10k sold copies at launch in the worst case, just to prove you wrong; and the development wouldn’t be a one man project. It’s more possible today than it was possible a couple of years ago, the technology to make an MMOG is more affordable.

I would prefer to do a microeconomics-style development of games; I value products with unique selling positions aimed for a special audience and quality over quantity.

EVE was cleary a niche product from the beginning (sci-fi, ships in space, to some just an SQL-frontend), developed by a small venture capital financed company from Island no one heard about before.

Did you know of CCP or EVE in 2003? I came across EVE via a friend, I am not sure if the game was even marketed in a big style, I assume not. If I wouldn’t have had played Battlefield with some guys who knew about EVE I wouldn’t have bought it as it was not on my radar (and unlike you I wouldn’t comment on the game’s quality at launch ). I tried it out in the beta and loved the concept.

Why should I give CCP credit for sticking with the game? That was their plan from the start, they always said that the development will continue once the game is out.

EVE is as flawed or not flawed today as it was 2003, infact, a lot of people who stayed in the first 2-3 years left the game due to newly introduced flaws (capital ships blobing to name one).

I didn’t mine much, I PvP’ed from day one, you could also farm NPCs or trade or build stuff from day one. There were plenty of opportunities to run different careers in the game.

The server was down for an hour daily (which was always and still is part of the service plan), with longer downtimes for patches and emergency fixes.

The performance of the client was excellent back then, you could run multiple accounts at the same time (I owned 4 accounts at some point).

Server wise, small scale battles were perfectly lag free and fleet fights of 100 vs 100 did happen in 2003 already though it was a slide show at times.

To sum it up: EVE was very playable at the launch. One could even kill GMs and loot their corposes for drama.

It can succeed… because the market is there. The “no rules! extreme carnage! total domination of the weak!” PvP str1cktly-hardc0r3 may not be particularly a market *I* want to service, but it does exist and is quite capable of funding a realistically budgeted MMO.

This is a fairly large base assumption and one that really needs questioned. It is undoubtedly true that there is a *demand* for this but that doesn’t mean there is a market, the demand needs to be backed by the willingness/ability to pay to create a market and the ability to supply and this is the problem for open PvP games.

The core problem, as I see it, is that the ability to supply a game which people pay for over a sustained period of time is just not there. You cannot churn out sheep fast enough and keep them playing long enough and convert enough of them to wolves to sustain it. High level wolves prove time and again that once they get to Level X, they are far happier sitting around noob areas farming brand new players than continue progressing their character.

This hasn’t changed since Meridian59. I remember watching new player after new player quit because they just couldn’t level up due to PKs farming them. The mechanic for Hunters isn’t rewarding. It’s rare for any late comer to persist to a high enough level to remove this and thats true today.

It should succeed… because most previous attempts to service this market have failed. The most prominent of these, Shadowbane, clearly had a market, one lovingly sustained over years during the game’s development (much like Darkfall later), and which abandoned the game due to technical, not design issues. This same market was a significant subset of Ultima Online’s early adopters (albeit one that limited the early growth of the service, which is why they were eventually tossed over the side). And one game, Eve, has in fact prospered by serving this market, albeit with a radically different product and a different genre. This is what people who have more money than I do call “market opportunity”.

Well again, this is an assumption open to challenge.

Has Eve succeeded because it is a working implementation of open PvP.

Or has Eve succeeded because it is the only viable choice of space based MMORPG.

The answer to this is massively important to your point and it is completely unknown.

Alongside Eve are an awful lot of games going back 15 years which have failed to sustain this market. Some of them worked and worked well. Meridian59 was technically impeccable for a 1995 game. But it never broke 5k subs. Eve is the only exception we have so far to this continued stream of failed pvp games.

It must succeed… because the big-budget MMO business model is killing our industry. World of Warcraft’s success has been wonderful for exactly two companies: Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts.

I don’t see your linkage.

There are lots of games from lots of people and many are failing but to say Darkfall specifically needs to break the dominance of WoW seems to be completely unrelated to anything else. Its almost a left field comment. Why Darkfall and not another game?

The issue with MMORPGs isn’t specific to the genre, it is part of a more generally malaise in game development which runs through every single genre out there. The problem is that the development cycle has not changed for 30 years and is broken.

Games are designed by programmers to this day. That’s not necessarily the best way to create product. It is certainly not how content is produced in more mature businesses. A movie producer *might* have a background as a director or an actor but they are more likely to have a background in business in an unrelated field. This takes them out the loop in terms of vested interests and opens up the decision making process.

Game designers are still obsessed with pitching their games at the bleeding edge. They still cater to the eye candy brigade despite absolutely ZERO research indicating that this should be the market focus. It’s again a sign of the industries immaturity. Most industries pitch their product at the mainstream consumer, they don’t exclude 90% of their potential customer base before they even start creating. You don’t get IMAX only £100m budget movies.

There’s other issues too. The gaming industry in general has missed some pretty vital steps in its maturation. Until those are addressed, it will still be 9 misses for every hit. And *that* is what leads to domination by the mega-crop like EA.

Regards,
Eduin

You know a point of view is that exploits and hacks are not more that other launches, its just that they are far more used and far more obvious because PvP players are the ones with more motivation to use them, just after pharmers. They do it more for the desire to crush their oponents.

Will DarkFall survive? I dont know, i cant predict the future. But theres a fact: MMOS are a service, and in service industry you dont create a provider and expect that magically everybody quit the other and use yours.

No game is going to kill the giant fast, if it dies (and nobody is inmortal) its going to be a slow death for aiming a different market, and slowly convincing people that your service is better, more polished and the most important: more FUN.

The only way to do that is trying new and fresh ideas that allows the player to, well being able to say: Hey, this is more fun than WoW. WoW is the current king of the DIKUMud concept and a)That isnt going to change and b)DIKUMuds are an overused convept. On the other hand, this new and fresh concept need to be well thinked (aka a decision that is polished, not something that you thinked while drunk)

If i could, i would buy DarkFall, because i want to see a different idea succed. And i can predict this: If Adventurine doesnt fight the hacks and exploits and reduce them so something manageable, DarkFall will perish. So lets breath and check again in a few months.

If Darkfall was the only indy extreme hardcore game to come out (or that will come out) in recent years, then I’d agree that we’d have to bank on it succeeding to pull us out of the rut of a mainstream dominance market.

However, the way I see it, Darkfall is just a drop in the bucket of competing products. Through a sheer fluke of excessive development time and exposure, it has more attention than most such games, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find worthier products on the market to bear that mantle.

@The Claw

Any software product must strike a balance between being shipped with a few bugs or being endlessly delayed due to further testing and bug correction.

Blizzard has now become The Man, but back in 04 they were already bigger than Mythic or any other MMO company operating at that time. They could afford to take their time as they can now. And even then, WoW had a troublesome start as with any game. Of course there are those that cannot take their fanboi-rose-colored glasses off. In two years from now, if Warhammer survives, their launch will be considered the most immaculated launch ever with angel choirs singing hosannas as the first players logged into the server.

Well seems Darkfall will fail, but not because any deep problem with PvP, community or anything like that: They can’t bill you if the name in your CC is longer than 15 characters.
I can stand FFA PvP, was looking forward to it, but changing my real name is too hardcore. I must be paperwork carebear.

Dan Gray :
Define this ‘indy extreme hardcore’ genre, please.

Indy as in made by indies. Extreme hardcore as in a PvP game with harsh death penalties. (Yes, I probably should have said “indy extreme hardcore PvP,” but the reply was in context with the original post.)

Einherjer :
@The Claw
Any software product must strike a balance between being shipped with a few bugs or being endlessly delayed due to further testing and bug correction.
Blizzard has now become The Man, but back in 04 they were already bigger than Mythic or any other MMO company operating at that time. They could afford to take their time as they can now. And even then, WoW had a troublesome start as with any game. Of course there are those that cannot take their fanboi-rose-colored glasses off. In two years from now, if Warhammer survives, their launch will be considered the most immaculated launch ever with angel choirs singing hosannas as the first players logged into the server.

You know, it’s not the immediate problems with a launch that doom a game, it’s the long-term problems that become evident in the first few months. Witness Age of Conan and the incomplete PvP system. People will now say that Conan was launched incomplete, but the launch itself was decent enough and the game quite playable.

I think the same thing has happened with Warhammer. It launched with an RvR system that just doesn’t work the way it should, due to the difficulty of controlling player actions. It’s easier to trade keeps than it is fight for them. It’s easier to disappear from oRvR by joining a scenario than it is run around find players to fight, etc.

So Darkfall’s immediate problems are the kind that can be overcome. The long-term problems are yet to be known, though the harsh PvP style may be one of them.

@softdev

Yup. I’m completely clueless about the ‘behind the scenes’ of software development. I do know about the ‘behind the scenes’ of other technological arenas. I know that they are just as difficult if not moreso (you want to argue that coding software is harder than microbiology…go for it). I know that they can’t get by with pushing junk out the door and justify it with ‘but it’s too hard to do right’.
Let me be blunt: if you can’t get a decent product done on time and within budget find another line of work. You either suck at design or you suck at implementation. Your company can then hire someone competent at project design and project management.