What is the worst MMORPG service experienced?

[Dark Orb Choir]

given the 3 years of development time it has taken for this game to come to this stage, you would have thought that the account creation verification system would have been hardy enough to handle the tens of thousands of people trying to create their accounts and input their open beta keys.

somewhere else in this forum it says something about GOA buying 25000 images from india for the image verification sytem when creating your own account, don't get me wrong but if you distribute 50000 or more open beta keys and only have 25000 images then it is obvious that somethings gonig to go wrong.

the "its in beta" argument doesnt hold any water in relation to the account creation and beta key verification as these are systems that could have been tested independantly.

"its in beta" to me means logging onto the servers and playing the game, unless the developers have had thousands of robot charachters interacting with each other on servers then this is why we are "testing" the gameplay out


I know things cannot go 100% on launch and i know problems occur, but the project management of the account creation side of things has bee nless than perfect.

 

[Lecoste]

Lejemorder

u talk such shit man. alot of people have paid with promises of open beta yesterday. dont go on about the 'its only beta' excuse when u dont know what it means. thats like saying:

' oh its only a fire DRILL for fk sake who cares'

10 days later 399 people die of a blaze started by children un knowingly burning gas.

 

[Lejemorder]

Lejemorder

u talk such shit man. alot of people have paid with promises of open beta yesterday. dont go on about the 'its only beta' excuse when u dont know what it means. thats like saying:

' oh its only a fire DRILL for fk sake who cares'

10 days later 399 people die of a blaze started by children un knowingly burning gas.

I didnt use the its just beta, I just said that people act like 10 years old there cant get his candy.

 

[mgX]

i would have to say....GOA's little "oops" where most ppl lost their items in daoc...backup anyone??

 

[Soazak]

WoW was pretty bad in the beggining, AO was terrible, I think Funcom are far worse than GOA, which is a shame because both AO and AoC would have been pretty good games.

Losing items on Prydwen was pretty bad, but didn't people get them back? (I wouldn't know as I was on Excal at the time).

Mythic were also pretty poor at handling the problems with Lancelot that affected gameplay for quite sometime. While I'm no fan of GOA, I honestly don't believe they are among the worst out there for customer service, they at least appear to try.

 

[Mehuge]

somewhere else in this forum it says something about GOA buying 25000 images from india for the image verification sytem when creating your own account, don't get me wrong but if you distribute 50000 or more open beta keys and only have 25000 images then it is obvious that somethings gonig to go wrong.

Why would anyone *buy* 25000 images? That's absurd, especially when you factor in, refresh cos I cant read it, and oh dam typed it in wrong and now its asking me again.

You generate them on the fly.

 

[civy]

This is nothing. For a real horror story look into Dark and Light.
Dark and Light

 

[Soazak]

Also, there was Dawn....if anyone remembers that! (Vaporware)

 

[Elsavildori]

GoA shortly after the release of toa, declaring to everyone that complained on prdywen about the unplayable lag, that the lag was caused by our ISP's and was no fault of the GoA servers.. even tho it turned out to be exactly that, the servers fault

That was ace

 

[Flimgoblin]

Why would anyone *buy* 25000 images? That's absurd, especially when you factor in, refresh cos I cant read it, and oh dam typed it in wrong and now its asking me again.

You generate them on the fly.

These are special hand carved images, someone saw them in a shop over there and bought the lot.

 

[Cordain]

First couple of points id like to share.
First of all were talking about MMORPG service so i assume that leaves stuff like poor design on the game out? ie. if the game just sucks by design, its not counted as poor service?

Second, when complaining about WAR keep in mind that EA Mythic did the software for the game (hence game servers up and running) while GOA handles the EU registration etc. account software.

So id pick as #1 Sony's decision to radically alter the SWG game.
I have never seen so many people quit a game they loved, so fast and in such vast numbers. If the person ultimately responsible for pushing that content change in was not fired then there is no god and/or justice in the world. Period.

#2 has got to me GOA blaming the gamers for poor server performance, nice little thing someone other seems to remember as well. Always a classy move to put the blame on paying customers, even when they back up their claims by evidence and logs.

#3 GOA shutting down the official EU DAOC forums when customers started to complain in them. Could be that there were other reasons too but they didn't bother to share them.

#4 AoC development after launch. Usually when people start quitting in large numbers the dev's wake up and try a bit harder. In AoC they continued to ignore the player base and up to date no real patch or working plan has come up that addresses the main issues of the game. As an added bonus it was nice to see the CEO of FunCom unload hes stocks when it was apparent that AoC was going to fail. Nothing spells doom like rats jumping off the sinking boat.

#5 You can debate over this but implementing Trammel to UO was such a bad move that, i think, it qualifies as bad service.

 

[Ribbit]

Losing items on Prydwen was pretty bad, but didn't people get them back? (I wouldn't know as I was on Excal at the time).

I was on Excal when Coruscating Mines was itemised. I'd been xp'ing there trying to get gear with Novamere, Cuthervaen, and a few others (sorry guys it's been so long now, and my memory . . .), and I'd got some great new Black Sable armour pieces (I was mainly dressed in grey con junk including cloth, as a Druid prior, and everyone was mucking in to try and get me some decent gear). About 4 nice Black Sable drops I think it was, including gloves, leggings, boots*maybe, and a highly prized helm. As well as a Shadow Crystal 1h mace (droooool!).

Next thing, the server crashes.

When it comes back up, all that effort and xp was gone, and all the items I'd got had gone too. Talk about gutted - more for the wasted effort others had put in to get me geared up.

Took me a few years later until I was on Hib Lance to get a couple of those items again, and my young Druid wore *a complete set of Black Sable* and carried *a 1h Shadow Crystal Mace* all around DF in homage to all the old crew that had tried to kit me out.

 

[Cordain]

Roll-backs like that happens in pretty much every MMO.

 

[Puppet]

I had a closed beta account, but the 'WAR-issues' wheren't that big for me. Sure launch was postponed a few hours, but after that I had smooth gameplay, no DC's and nothing.

Compare that to AoC which crashed every hour (or more), had buggy instances, buggy classes, buggy zones ('dont enter zone XXX or ur char is stuck!!') and best of all no support. Yeah, if you could afford to stay online for 17 hours straight (logging off = ur appeal got deleted) and had to manually update it every so hour.

And yes, this is open-beta, ofcourse everyone wants to play smoothly, but its pretty obvious issues arise. Just that there should be more communication (as always, most MMORPG's suffer from bad communication towards the community, including Blizzard)

 

[rynnor]

Neocron was pretty ropey (and a bad game) - WoW crashed a lot in early days and the Auction house was pretty broken - Lord of the Rings crashed a fair bit at launch and the events lagged it so bad it crashed so no more events

But the worst thing I had was Eve online when they released a duff patch that deleted a key windows file !!! Ouch - that was bad lol.