"Today's events verified my fears.  As soon as World of Warcraft comes out, SoE won't see another red cent from me."

This is not intended as a flame, but honestly, if you took a vacation day and went to all that effort for the launch of a new game, then you set yourself up for disappointment.

Every game that I have ever rushed into at launch has had major issues... EQ (servers overloaded), Diablo II (Battle.net hosed), AO (bad CD keys, constant server crashes), Black & White (system freezes), Neverwinter Nights (CD copyright protection bug, multiplayer bugs), and on and on...

At this point, I expect the first day of a major launch to be filled with problems and I just step away for a few hours when they happen.  The registration servers were down, but I came back last night and finished my registration without a problem.  The database has a bug, so I went to sleep and will play after work today.  This stuff takes time to work out, even with the most thorough testing.

I know people get excited and impatient and want to play now now now, but this game is gonna be around for a long long time... there's no hurry.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. The more crybabies like yourself that return the game the happier the rest of us are.

/hands Reverie a kleenex

Here's another vote of confidence in all the developers, designers and engineers.  In my 13-odd years of being a developer, network engineer and technology manager (the very start of the dark side) I can honestly say Murphy is a constant companion always waiting to crop up at the absolute critical moment with a half-baked, left-field problem that no amount of preparation helps you stave off.  Kudo's to each and everyone of you guys in the trenches that had to tackle this beast and stab it with your steely knives.  I'm sure it's still trying to trash to life.

For all those complaining: don't beat up the Dev's! The Dev's are your friends! *jedimindtrick*  You want to complain? Try to get some facts here.  It sounds like (much as I thought otherwise) that the beam counters listened to the propeller heads and had plenty of hardware and plans.  Wanna whack someone? Whack Murphy.  These SWG boys deserve high praise for the job they've pulled.

I have to say that my eyebrows are quirked up at the technology I've heard - and suspect - is in use.  Heard Oracle.  Suspect Java.  One advertised as self-tuning.  Both advertised as scalable. Time will tell and I will be happy to have a new set of experiences with these two technologies   In either event, I think the IT industry, especially Enterprise IT, has a LOT it can leverage from lessons learned by MMO's.

SWG Devs, keep up the good work, there's at least some segment of your user community in awe and praise of the work and effort you have and continue to put in.

After a semi decent nights sleep I awake to a new day andI still want to play the game.

I was afraid I'd be disappointed enough to want to reactivate my UO account and start playing again until SWG is up and running.... but I don't thank goodness.

I consider this entire situation to fall under the theory "sometimes you are the windshield, sometimes you are the bug."

No I don't like what's happening any more than most of us, but I can't change it so getting irked won't help... if it's like this in a week then maybe I'll be singing a different toon.

Ralph, I hope you got a good nights sleep because something tells me today won't be any better for ya'll there either.

Just know that I'm not going anywhere, I'm not returning my CD, and I'll be playing right there along with my husband and our guild.

I stuck with you through UO, and you didn't let me down there so I know you'll do your best here as well.

HOOWAH SWG! HOOWAH Devs!

The good thing about this down time.... it's allowing me to work on my Shadowclan language for this game... down time = cram time! hehe

Hang in their Raph.

SWG is still not the worst launch ever.  The two that are usuaully cited are Anarchy Online and WW2 Online (which I was involved in, so I may be biased).  WW2 Online had stability/load problems, to be sure, but we didn't have data base corruption issues and once you got in, you could play fairly well; it just crashed a lot and we had to implement multiple servers due to an EXTERNAL hardware problem that was the ISP's fault.  There were some others bugs as well, such as sometimes falling through the ground and tanks sometimes flying through the air, but all of that was straightened out within a few months.

Anarchy Online, on the other hand, not only had login trouble, but once you got in, it was horribly slow, especially in cities, it crashed all the time, rollbacks were common, items became corrupted, monsters dropped NONAME loot, and to top it all off, their CREDIT CARD PROCESSING was UNENCRYPTED AND UNSECURE.  You had to transmit your CC# in the clear across the Internet just to subscribe.

Also, AO only gave players 2 free weeks for all their troubles, many of which still existed afterwards.  We didn't start charging for WW2 Online for something like 3 months after release, just to address all the major issues to our satisfaction.

Of course, many other MMOGs had bad launches.  Ultima Online was horribly overloaded.  The dynamic ecology system broke under the load and had to be completely removed.  Rollbacks (called "time warps") were extremely common, causing you to lose hours of gameplay.  EverQuest had problems of its own, primarily crashes, and actually created so much load it actually brought down part of the Internet for a while when routers became overloaded with game traffic.

Where will SW:G rate on the scale of bad launches?  It is too soon to tell.  Obviously you are having trouble, but that isn't uncommon.  Now you just have to throw money at the problem and buy some time until you get things sorted out.

Bruce

Closing this because it's not really todays events (27th), it's yesterdays events (26th).