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I think FoxFlame puts it quite well. There is an (un)happy medium between "MMOG launches all are terrible, you must simply endure what you cannot cure" and "The devs suck, I'm calling my lawyer".
I think it is perfectly fair to raise politely critical questions about whether the particular issues that came up yesterday had to happen. The registration process was hobbled by hardware failures which Holo has explained in some detail, but given the expertise and resources that SOE has in this area in specific, it is really hard to not feel that some very particular person didn't do their job very well getting ready for launch day. (Not Holo, nor the devs that we have come to know, but the people responsible for tending to the hardware that deals with connection and registration).
SOE has been told before that their web management is not very good; well, that was costly yesterday as well. People who finally discovered the Mozilla workaround had it work because the new build of Mozilla doesn't time out as regularly as IE: that underscores that the horrible bottleneck yesterday in registration was made a million times more frustrating by a basic process that was not well designed.
I can't say as much about the servers being down due to the Oracle problem, but that too it seems to me is a problem that it is reasonable to suppose could have been found during a beta-testing process given that many of us in Beta observed that communication between the databases and the game processes was often the source of problems or at least the visible symptom of a problem. Given that this is the case, I think players have a right to expect that this would have been one of the most aggressively tested aspects of the game.
I also think it is fair--and Holo thinks so too, evidently--that the SWG team could have done a better job of communicating clearly and specifically yesterday about what was going on. But here the bottlenecks on their own forums were the problem--Q-3P0 couldn't read and post in these forums any better than the rest of us. That also strikes me as a case of not thinking very clearly: when you create your own forums, you have to expect that when the game is down, especially and particularly on launch day, that's where you're going to find almost every player. Don't create an avenue for communication in a crisis in such a way that it predictably will function poorly in that crisis. It makes the situation a hundred times worse. The posts that eventually appeared on the front page of the site should have appeared earlier, and should have been more forthcoming and detailed, in the kind of language Holo has been using, rather than in public relationsese. That too makes things much worse, when any idiot can see that there is a huge problem but the frong page says something like "We're sorry for some minor delays, which should only last a few minutes".
Of course there were going to be (and are still going to be) problems on launch. And unlike DingoBoi, I don't hold the developers we know responsible, nor have I "lost respect" for the SWG team. But I am disappointed, I do feel that launch was ruined by problems that one reasonably could feel should have been prevented, and I do think it is right that we say that. It's not just whining.
Some of the smaller or more inexperienced developers like Wolfpack have some right to claim that problems in the launch of their MMOGs stem from inadequate resources or their inexperience. SOE and the SWG team simply don't have that excuse. If anybody could do a smooth launch, they should have been able to--and even the problems should have been more garden-variety kinds of server instability, bottlenecking and so on. What we saw yesterday were failures on multiple levels, including failures to communicate in a timely, specific fashion that was consistent from top to bottom of the site, and I'm sorry, SOE has the experience and resources to have avoided those mistakes.
Atino Xepteed
Maker of Mediocre Weapons
Chilastra
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