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Games Entertainment

Anarchy Online - The Perils Of Pushing Products 183

Posted by Hemos from the bwahaha dept.
Johnath writes: "Anarchy Online was supposed to be the next big thing in MMORPG [?] s. It was huge, it was complex, it was sophisticated. Unfortunately, it was also released far far FAR before its time. The AO forums are filling up with negative posts (which are then apparently being deleted by moderators) and the reviews, which AO reps asked people not to write are starting to come out anyhow." Update: 07/12 5:03 PM EST by CT : Links were randomly redirecting people, so I dropped them.
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Anarchy Online - The Perils Of Pushing Products More

Anarchy Online - The Perils Of Pushing Products

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  • Sierria Studios (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This happened to Sierra and Dynamix and Tribes2.

  • Asherons Call launched without issue. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I believe it went three weeks without any changes to the client or server code. Its devs had the foresight to launch a massive stress test of the server back in beta so they could gauge how well the production ones would handle the initial load. In addition to an excellent uptime record, it also gets new content every single month, with no fee beyond its $9.95 a month.

  • Re:Graeme Devine fights back (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Devine's posts weren't deleted. The sheer number of posts on the Funcom board shoves threads far from the front page in minutes sometimes. However, claiming that your posts were deleted is always a good way to increase traffic on your posts, and many people do that. Or, they don't realize that the post still exists. Either way, Devine's post wasn't entirely constructive, and while the rules of professionalism are slightly different in my field of work, it does seem, as someone else pointed out, that the manner in which he aired his grievances, by way of using his position as a game programmer, unprofessional. The problem with AO, more than anything else, isn't the quality of the product. It is the manner in which the "community" (and I use this term loosely) responds to everything. There is no semblance of propriety or even common courtesy. People throw around terms like "fanboy" and "angry horde" in order to hide the weaknesses in their arguments (which are usually quite obvious). Neither the pro-AO side or the anti-AO side can manage to say anything constructive or truly applicable to the problems at hand. What is really wrong is not the game, but rather the reactions and interactions of people in the public forums related to it.

  • Re:*sigh* (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    EQ had very minor problems compared to the others. The logon server had issues at first. But the client has always been stable w/o memory leaks. The registration process was ready to go when the game launched (and encrypted - heh). The game itself, once you were in, played well in beta 4 as well as at the official release.

    So Microsoft and Sony can pull it off ...

  • Stodi's Review and Comments (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here are two excellent posts by a guy on the AnarchyOnline forum. Lots of people replied and bumped them up but Funcom didn't even comment on the issues in general let alone to the posts. Anyway, read ahead:

    Thoughts on a Fortnight [funcom.com]
    Funcom: Playability / Puff Out Your Chest (not a flame) [funcom.com]

  • I posted it because "major gaming sites" are biased, non-interesting crap.What Lowtax had written was funny, interesting and well-written, which is hard to find. That's part of why I like OMM [oldmanmurray.com]. I used those links because, IMHO, that was the best stuff I've seen on AO anywhere. It's too bad about his bandwidth - I didn't know that, and would have cheerfully removed, or reposted his links. But instead, we have this.
  • ...it's very likely that Garriot's game will borrow a lot of internal code ideas from UO, and THAT will be its downfall.

    I will maintain till my death that UO's server software is a big POS, sloppily designed, hacked until it barely worked, and left in that bastardized state without any further refinement.

    BTW: The asian game has its own unique problems... From what I hear, the police over there have special RL/PK units to combat the new phenomenon of taking RL revenge on an in-game PK.

    The real Threed's /. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.

    --Threed
  • And I thought you were speaking figurativelty (sp?). The developers vere like a cornered rat, and panicked and released the game too early. :>
  • here here - as an avid AC player, I have to say (as much as it pains me) that M$ and Turbine are doing everything right. When there were ping problem on servers, they opened new servers. The animation is for the most part flawless (except the Gear lamers) and with content that's CONSTANTLY updated in a good manner its the best that MMORPG's have to offer IMHO. As a Beta tester for AO - I have to say, I missed the interaction with the developers that AC seems to enjoy (all of them frequent the same message boards as us, and there's a monthly chat session for our shouts of UA LUB etc).

    I'm staying away from AO until I get reports back that its stable and most of all playable.
    Secret windows code
  • First off let me state that I was in Beta4 of AO. Gamers such as myself that are really into the MMORPG genre have been anticipating this game for almost a year. I signed up for beta a long time ago, and when I finally got the e-mail that I was selected for the last round of beta testing, I was overjoyed. After spending 4 days just trying to download the 600 MB file with the install (mistake number 1) that was only initially mirrored on a few sites (mistake number 2), I purchaced a CD from a friend (for cost of media). Finally got it installed and played fine until I entered the main city for Omni Corps (the "bad" guys). Through some short-sighted thinking (in my opinion), the game has your video card render THE ENTIRE CITY AND ITS CONTENTS on that zone that are within your view range. This meant that in order to navigate through this beautiful world, I had to do most of it running backwards so that I could only see the wall to the outside world, and not the actual eye-popping eye-candy. I could literally hear my Voodoo 3 screaming at me. Zoning was a nightmare, not knowing if you'd actually zone, or forget to zone, or get disconnected, or blue screen. Shopping was impossible with the NPC vendors as they would only talk to one person at a time, and they were in the center of the city, where EVERYONE else was.

    Coming from Asheron's Call, I'm not used to problems with lag. We have seperate shards based on where you want to play, not geographic region. There isn't 1 server for EVERYONE. Everyone should be split into shards, especially for the time being as I'm sure that their datacenters are going to be hard pressed to handle that much traffic (I actually ran it through my firewall, and it was using about 40% more traffic for normal play action [moving, running, shooting etc] than AC does).

    The point is that there are companies that seem to be able to handle it, and companies that aren't unfortunatly it appears that Funcom is not. I truly regret that since I *really* want to play.
    Secret windows code
  • Actually, if the game was promising enough, I'd be willing to buy a box in the store labeled "beta". A lot of people wouldn't, true, but this would be an honest way to accomplish the same goal. Especially if it was promising and said "free playtime during beta period". I have no problem with companies funding themselves through gamers dollars if they're willing to be honest about it. It wouldn't sell as well as a full release but there'd be quite a few people who would take them up on the offer as long as the playtime was free as well as the upgrade...

    --

  • I usually follow this sort of policy, except for Blizzard games. Sure, they have patches, but I've actually never felt the need for one, they just get foisted on my from time to time logging in to battlenet. I've never seen a Blizzard game that didn't work perfectly fine out of the box for a long as I wanted to play it without going online. I have friends who still play the 1.0 versions of the Blizzard games because they never do get online. Never have any problems, either.

    Of course, every Blizzard game ships way late.

    Everyone here seems to think if you don't ship early enough, your games won't see. They say the companies have to ship buggy products early or they'll loose money.

    Hmm. Blizzard doesn't seem to be hurting for money. In fact, they're the one company I'm willing to plop down any amount of cash for on a box with software I've never seen running nor read a single review.

    People who think you have to ship early and patch later are full of crap. Delay the launch, miss your Christmas deadline. Are you nuts, they say? But when has Blizzard ever made a Christmas deadline? Are they hurting for cash? I don't think so...

    I guess most game companies are just too stupid too live. Hopefully they'll go out of business before disappointing too many people...

    --

  • You never sell early if you can help it- even if you're going broke. You always sell when it's done.

    What if the user base they sold to figure out they've been sold a bill of goods (which is what appears to be happening right now...)- they're going to be leaving in droves and spreading the word about the game being a piece of crap.

    All they did was buy themselves a little time with a smallish cash injection- they've hurt themselves in a way that's going to be hell to get over. If they go broke now, they lost what was left of their reputation and they're broke.
  • Slightly offtopic, but am I the only person who remembers when anarchy-online.com pointed to a telnet BBS?
  • is a good thing you posted AC because you are NUTS. EQ's first week was a BOMB. 1000's of west coast customers could not get on at all. The support line was unavailable due to 'all circuits busy'. I recall getting a month free of EQ and an apology because they were NOT READY for the volume in any way shape or form. Sound familiar ? the only part that is really sad is AO did not learn a thing from any of the other MMORPG problems and they just fall in the same holes...
  • What MMORPG has launched without problems? With games like this, you run into a few things:

    The mass of players finds quirks and exploits them much better then the small beta teams. And no, Beta 4 wasn't huge.

    Server load can never be predicted. And when your a fairly new company with this type of game, you can't afford masses of servers until after the game starts to get popular.

    Everquest started like this, as did other games. Give them a break and let them fix things, instead of expecting perfection from this still new genere.

  • But AC still have "issues" introduced later. For instance, you can still attack through doors (melee), and the effect that the attacker sticks to the victim in lag has killed me many times. (No, silly shreth, I didn't want to move so close to that group of banderlings that they attack me!)

    AO has quite a few lag issues (like not indicating lag very well), but it's only two weeks into release. The game as such is very playable when it works (for hours at a time minus the lag), and has far greater variety than AC. The only times I play AC now is whenever AO is down.

  • -High levels of character customization

    Yeah, everyone use the same templates. :-) I've lately discovered the exp-machine called Deception, but if I suggested it to others, some optimizer would jump in and say it's a waste because everyone knows you should save up for Item instead, because without Arcane and Item you won't amount to squat at higher levels. According to them.

    AO has way more customization options IMHO - but wasn't out two years ago.

    The most stable, lag- and bug-free MMORPG on the market for over a year and a half.

    Except in AC lag can get you killed. And the lag spikes aren't that infrequent, though fewer than AO currently. Of coursde, since each world only has up to about 2,500 players, it's unclear what would happen if the 20,000 players AO claims to support logged in to one of the eight AC worlds at the same time...

  • I'm not at all surprised that Anarchy Online is living up to the more negative aspects of its name. Frankly, things are looking better and better for its major competitor, Neocron [neocron.com], which is just starting to enter beta. Neocron looks like it's going to be a lot better than AO.

    --
  • There are three problems that I have been having that I consider inexcusable.

    1) The game displays a black screen on most ATI cards due to a problem with fog being set at 100%. There are temporary fixes, but most of them only work until you do something like walk out of the room that you were in. How can you not test a 3D game without testing ATI, NVIDIA, and the departed 3DFX?
    2) The install and patch process was terminally broken and their "downloadable .EXE patches" only made things worse by corrupting the base install. I finally made it work by downloading the first patch (11.0-11.3) installing it, then letting the auto update take it the rest of the way to the current version.
    3) The insecure credit card processing on their registration site--which has been fixed.

    I can live with the scaling and other problems because they are just part of the nature of the beast. If Sony and EA have scaling and lag problems how is a small development shop supposed to be able to do better. It is not like EA and Sony shared notes with FunCom on "how to scale your MMORPG."
  • Actually, according to what I've been told, they've now said the game is "110% complete" and are about to begin (or already have begun)charging monthly rates. I'm not sure what the big deal about the game is, anyway. Any game half as buggy as this is normally just forgotten about (ie. Ultima 9, and it WAS a good game) but this one keeps selling and dissapointing.
  • Granted, the company is not currently charging the monthly fee until the game is complete, but really, if they recognized that it wasn't complete, why go gold? Why ship?

    I've heard that they shipped when they did because funds were starting to dry up. I can't say whether this is true or not.

    But, I can see why they would ship it incomplete then. If there is no money, at least they can release and get some funds, then fix bugs and hope to survive rather than just giving up and going broke.

    I couldn't ever connect when I was a beta tester, so I don't know anything about it other than what I've read.
  • Osty typed: Was linking to SA really necessary? I'm sure there are other reviews out there that could have been linked, reviews on major gaming sites that expect this kind of thing. I won't say it's "bad journalism", because Slashdot has little to do with actual journalism. I will say it was a bad judgement call on Hemos' part to leave those links in the submitted story.

    This is why SA goes to goatse.cx now... The slash effect was literally killing their server. People visiting the site normally without going through /. will see the normal site.

  • Its a bit obvious that you're an AOL user. ;)

    You know .. a beta is .. guess what? A _beta_ :-) If you expect everything to work in a beta, or expect it to work at all - then you're stupid - plain and simple.

    To be quite frank, I can fully understand that funcom thinks its more important to fix the damn bug they've had 200 reports about, than to answer every single whiner out there. :)


    --
  • When I join a beta and I am accepted into it. I expect to be able to actually beta test the game, yes.

    Let me see.. You couldn't log in, you complained, and it was probably logged together with the other 200 people that suffered the same problem.

    Hmm.

    Why are you complaining that you weren't able to beta test the product? It sounds to me like you sent of your worries, and that they probably took note of it.

    That YOU didn't get a reply .. well so fucking what?

    I also expect that they will be responsive to the people show are testing the game for them. I sent them serveral e-mail about my problem and didn't get so much as a auto-response back.

    I guess you're one of the idiots that think autoacks are okay. Personally I'm more put of by those FUCKING IDIOTIC AUTOACKS than I am by not getting a response.

    ohwell

    newbies.


    --

  • Poor, poor Lowtax (Score:5)

    by Osty ( 16825 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:32AM (#89302)

    Not long ago, Lowtax had "Go the Fuck Away" week on Somthing Awful. He can barely afford the normal SA traffic (and by "barely", I mean "usually can't"). He's been fucked over by multiple ad networks, gone for 6+ months without getting a paycheck, and yet continues to put out "teh funney". And then Slashdot links to SA. Goodbye, SA, it was nice knowing you.

    Was linking to SA really necessary? I'm sure there are other reviews out there that could have been linked, reviews on major gaming sites that expect this kind of thing. I won't say it's "bad journalism", because Slashdot has little to do with actual journalism. I will say it was a bad judgement call on Hemos' part to leave those links in the submitted story.

  • my wife used to work for Harley Davidson financial, and the Harley Davidson Insurance, and I'm very familiar with thier sales model and upgrade cycle. There is a bit of a differance here though. There is a lot that goes along with buying a Harley, it is more than a motorcycle, it's a culture, it's a hobby, it's a lifestyle. I think that's a bit differant than a video game (though maybe not for some).

    Well, other than MS didn't do a ton with AC except on the network end (at least initially), from what I understand anyway, that does surprise me. Another differance with AC was the open beta which AO kinda sorta did with beta4 which was too short to really call it a Beta.

    The point I'm trying to make is that it's not just this genre of game that is getting released in an unfinished state. Even Black and White was released in an unplayable fashion for a lot of people. I couldn't play it when the game was released under win2k because of an error with the copy protection. This left me repartitioning my drive and installing 98 so I could play the game. Now, Black and White has been out a long time, and the official patch was only released today, I know this cause I just got the email about it today. So, overall, the MMORG's are the worst, but the game companies (software industry?) get's away with murder and people put up with it.

    I've met quite a few devious programmers, but I don't think it's thier decision to release the half finished game or application. I think the blame for that lies on the shoulders of the bean counters and marketeers. I just wish more people would vote with thier dollars and protest the unfinished program. Doing a lot of IT consulting it's amazing how many people think technology has to be painfull, whe it honestly shouldn't be.

  • I'd have to disagree with you there. While the motorcycle is nothing more than a motorcycle, try telling that to thier owners. The company doesn't dictate that culture or lifestyle, the owners do. How many bike clubs are there for Harley owners? Probably too many to list in this space. How many people have a lifestyle that partially or entirely revolve around thier "bikes"? A helluva lot. Now, is that because of the company? Absolutly not. I certainly haven't bought into the "synergetic-cross-branding-co-hosted-sponsership-m ega-deal-day" garbage. I've witnessed it by listening to the enthusiasm of the owners, and paying attention to what my wife has told me about the people she dealt with on a daily basis, the owners of the bikes, not the company. Owning a Harley for the majority is more than owning a motorcycle, and if you think that's false then you are fooling yourself.
  • You have to remember that by purchasing the game you have purchased a full months subscription. So, when you canceled it probably noted in the db to disallow your login when it runs the billing cycle next month. You should be able to play as much as you want till then. At least that's how other MMORPG's work (AC specifically).
  • I was in beta4, too, and suffered many of the major problems.

    The beta test wasn't just to beta test the game. It was to beta test the web servers, the registration server, etc, etc, etc.

    Those people who weren't able to download were needed to show where the web/ftp servers needed to be beefed up. People who couldn't register their game showed where the bugs were in the registration system. People who couldn't log in showed where the login systems were paltry.

    They -did- participate in the beta, perhaps in some of the most important ways.

    I admit, the game got released about 2 weeks early, but FunCom didn't charge for those 2 weeks and has stated they will do "something" (no clue what) for those people who ate the disconnects and such the first week.

    Now that it's out and playable, I definitely don't expect much free time. How could I resist a fully 3 dimensional MUD with thousands of PCs all online.
  • Well everything you read here is true.. sadly to say.

    First we had 2 weeks of not being able to log in.. When you did finaly log in after a day of trying, you would crash in 5 minutes (!).

    Then they fixed some / most of those problems, and now you crash every hour, but the lag kills ... you walk around in the (admitted very nice designed and looking) world, you freeze up for 30 (!!) seconds, and de-lag to find out that you are dead, and your 4 hours of investing in game play went dead, you lost it all.

    Last, the sploits... ive seen the beginning of AC and UO, and its never been this bad yet. From item dupping, to risk-less XP looting, to being able to spend your 'level points' more then once.. This has resulted in a part community thats level 16'ish and trying to do it fair, and a part thats level 40+ without having to break a sweat.. very demorelising.

    More, they seem to break a lot of promises. First they promised NOT to start chargin until the game was working, now in its very broken state, they have decided to start charging anyways. Also to 'silence' the crowed a bit, they promised daily updates from developers, etc... which hardly seems to be lived up to..

    Basicly they broke every game and marketing rule out there for making a game a success...

    -- Chris Chabot
    "I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"

  • Public apology. (Score:3)

    by Masker ( 25119 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:17AM (#89308)
    Apparently, they have publically appologized [anarchy-online.com] for the difficulties.

    And for the folks saying that you should use consoles only for gaming: WTF? That's insane; you must be made of money. If I pay $1500 for a computer, there better damned well be many games that are not only savory and delicious, but nutritional, too!
  • Both will have HD/ethernet, the interesting question is will developers use these features to release patches and thus let more buggy releases slide? Will it be different per console since the XBOX has an HD built in?

    Personally, I also like the "finished" nature of console games compared to PC games, but I do like the PC expandability of games. I'm not sure either end of the spectrum is perfect.
  • Ouch. I'm ashamed to say that English is my first language, and I made a careless grammatical error. It sounds like you knew what I meant anyway, so I won't lose any sleep over it.

    I know the trick with games isn't to ship them bug-free, but to find a happy medium between shipping soon and shipping with all problems fixed. FunCom didn't find a happy medium - they released the game before it was playable by most people, from the sound of things. I know that's scared me away from trying a game that sounded good in the pre-release hype. It's also made me wary of any releases they may come out with in the future.

    Can I understand if they released the game sooner because they were running out of funding? Yep. But if I buy a game I'm not going to do it out of sympathy - I'll do it because I think I'll have fun playing it. If play gets interrupted by bugs, and problems in the game aren't quickly resolved by adequate support, then it isn't likely to be enough fun to be worth my money.
  • I think there's less of that going on now than there used to be. Daikatana's long development time, massive hype engine, and miserable eventual release taught a few people a lesson. Duke Nukem Forever saw a lot of hype a few years ago, and wisely dropped out of the spotlight when development starting dragging out - we're only hearing more about it now because it's closer to release.

    A certain amount of hype before a game is released can generate excitement over the title and get people talking about it, which can help sales when it gets released. You're right though, too much hype too early consumes money that should go into development, and drives expectations up to impossible-to-meet levels. It can also make gamers so sick of hearing about a game that they're less likely to buy it - Halo, for example, would have to completely bowl me over in a demo before I would spend any money on it now. I've heard too much about it for too long, and all the anticipation has drained away.
  • The lack of patches for console games can be a problem - I never went very far in Tomb Raider 4 for the Dreamcast precisely because the game froze or crashed more frequently than I could stand in a console game. Since there's no hope that the problems can be fixed in that game, it's extremely unlikely I'll ever get my money's worth from it. And thanks to store return policies for games, I could never return it - only sell it used.

    I'm sure there's more incentive for developers to thoroughly test games for consoles (particularly since they usually need the console manufacturer's approval before marketing the game), but that incentive is no guarantee of stability. Better if developers for all platforms just figure out that not releasing a product before it's finished will result in poor sales for current and future titles.

    And that will only happen if consumers remember which companies screwed them over with buggy products. Time will tell if that happens with FunCom.
  • Yeah, this sucks. Of course, /. seems slow to me today... so perhaps the forum goons are SA'ing /.?

    After all, I have seen a ton of goatse links in this thread.

    The forum goon known as Vitriol.

  • Sorry, I'm typing too fast, and mixing up my troubled game developers. :)

    'Funcom' created Anarchy Online. 'Cornered Rat' created WWII Online, a different, but equally poorly released, game. Just substitute 'Funcom' for 'Cornered Rat' in my above post, and sorry for the confusion. :)

  • Re:WWII: Online (Score:3)

    by Remus Shepherd ( 32833 ) <remus@panix.com> on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:27AM (#89315) Homepage
    WWII Online and Anarchy Online are currently neck-and-neck for 'worst MMOG release ever'.

    Anarchy Online has barely playable code, memory leaks, and crashes.

    WWII Online has barely playable code, terrible interface problems (three keys to fire a gun?), weird hardware requirements (can't drive a vehicle unless you have a certain kind of joystick!), and ridiculous bugs (gotta love those flying tanks.)

    Because AO's problems were mostly technical and WWIIOL's problems were mostly caused by poor design, I used to think that WWIIOL was in the lead for the title of Worst Release. But now that Funcom is thinking of charging money for AO -- and Cornered Rat is still allowing people to play WWII gratis -- I think AO is edging WWIIOL out for the Worst MMOG Release Ever. Who will ultimately win (or, really, lose)? Stay tuned.
  • I did not play AO's beta (I don't do betas), but I played the second day of release. Or rather I tried to.

    The technical glitches in this game are immense. Installing the game was tricky and difficult, and many people screwed it up so badly they corrupted their registries. Once installed, for days it was nearly impossible to log in. To open your account, they forced you to give them your credit card over an insecure web site. And the game crashed to desktop every five minutes or so.

    It's gotten slightly better. But there are still problems logging in, horrible memory leaks, graphic card incompatibilities, and problems moving from zone to zone (play areas are divided by zone, with each zone usually hosted on a different server. If you can't zone, then you can either be where the monsters are or where the resupply shops are -- not both.) And these are just the technical problems; game system imbalances and exploitable bugs also exist, as they do in all games of this type but seldom in this quantity.

    Although the game is barely playable, it is in no way finished software. Any software that misplaces 50 megabytes of RAM every hour and then crashes when it is forced to use a swap file is NOT ready for primetime. IMHO the game concept is sound and the underlying game is fun, but it's just not finished.

    But Cornered Rat (the developers) decided to release this buggy game on schedule, due to budget problems. Approximately one month from now they're going to start charging people $12.95 a month to play. Then we'll see how many people are willing to pay for horribly broken software.
  • This game has great potential, 10,000 simultaneous players, 1/2 scale map of European theatre, playing in any battle as any posistion, and being able to switch posistion. The big problem is that people are still not giving these games a chance. They don't realize that the programmers are not the one's making these choices.

    Basically WWII: Online's producer forced it out the door early too. (see: aplha stage) The game is meant to be a pay for play ($10/month), but they are very kindly allowing everyone to just play until the game is completely developed.

    WWII: Online isn't even feature complete. I feel for the programmers who have to take this morale beating at the worst time. I definately plan on buying it when it is complete, in about 6 months.


    ...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.

  • Funcom was having database issues on their forums which were temporarily eating posts. But after I read the .plan I went over there to look, and lo and behold his thread was there getting bumped to high heaven.
  • just not yet... Let me explain. I played EQ for a year and a half, and then the beta AO(4). When I first got the retail product i was frustrated, disappointed and angry. Now I am just frustrated. This game is better than EQ. It has bugs but the developers *ARE* fixing them. I have seen things improve. Last night was the first night that was playable enough to have fun. I was considering deleted my account and waiting a few months but now I think I am going to stick it out. AO (Funcom) is having the same probs as EQ, yes they should have learned from EQ. I will say this. They do post a daily update, and they admit the bugs they have. They want the game to be the next big thing also. My point is, don't listen to all the hype, good and bad. Play the game, and realize AO was born out of the need for something better, and it will be patch after patch after patch. Already, the graphics,sound, and variety exceed EQ -- too bad it crashes, lags etc... AO newbie, sticking with it.
  • The number of players that have logged on to the game has exceeded our expectations by far - five days after release we had 35,000 registered accounts!

    Everquest currently has 400,000 active players. Forethought anyone? What kind of company plans to not be able to handle 8% of the load of their major competitior?

    Truffle

  • Asheron's Call launched with the upmost smoothness, doing everything it set out to do. Bugs have been found and bugs have been exploited- but the game has always been playable, stable, and without the crippling lag associated with AO and the early days of Ultima Online. Asheron's call got the following stuff right: -Ongoing storyline and new monthly content -High levels of character customization -Beautiful far-off vistas and the freedom to explore them -High levels of developer/player communication -The most stable, lag- and bug-free MMORPG on the market for over a year and a half. If they could just make the actual gameplay itself interesting and encourage social playing a bit more, I bet it would dominate the MMORPG market.

  • Not really a surprise (Score:4)

    by werdna ( 39029 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:20AM (#89322) Journal
    These games clearly chewed off WAY more than they could, attempting to simultaneously manage a game, a story a communications facility and an overwhelmingly highly representational and large-scale graphical simulation product.

    Why are these products failing where their text-only counterparts held so much promise?

    Duh! The text-only counterparts focused on what they could do, and did those things as well as they could.

    The key to gamemastering multi-player gaming is to get the hell out of the way and to let the players entertain one another. It is why the dumb-as-dirt games such as Diplomacy are so hot in terms of game-playing experience.

    The game isn't important if you let the people do what people do best. Formation and breakup of coalitions in a dynamic environment is one of the most exciting things humans do. And its breathtaking fun, win or lose, so long as the stakes are manageable. Get the hell out of the way, and your players will love you, thinking you designed a magnificent game, even where the underlying game is no cleverer than rock-paper-scissors.

    Facilitate interaction and providing for growth in such an environment without crunching the first rule is challenge enough, and this is what separated the adults from the kiddies in the text-only game designs. This was among the hardest game design problems of our generation, although very few people noticed, and those who solved it left seminal clues how game designs should move on to the future.

    But what happened to single-platform RPGs next happened to their multi-player counterparts: graphic heat. Computers, finally capable of meaningful representational graphics and real-time interaction with graphical worlds brought more numbers, to be sure, to play those games. But the question is really, for how many did the attraction to these games "stick?" (After all, it is the long-term fees, not the package price that holds the greatest commercial promise for MOLRPG.)

    Stuck in a world of their own choosing, the game players left because the game sucked. The best gamemasters left because the game could not be game mastered, and the interaction suffered because of the inherent limitations of the (albeit awesome) technology in permitting the kinds of growth and management necessary to make it work.

    NOONE TO DATE has understood the separation of concerns necessary to make these products work. In my (here's my "old fart" credentials) past, the single most amazing games were the multi-player and outrageously distracting, but awesomely simple in comparison, games on the PLATO system. Nothing before or since has captured, at least, my passions for the game as did these. And it is because it did everything well, rather than trying to do all of everything now. The graphics and game designs were modest, the interaction was suited to the game and communities lived well.

    Someday, someone will do this right. But not for awhile, regrettably, given the publisher's misreading of the market and their concommitant propensities to do things the wrong way. It comes from trying to do these games as concept products: Doom on a large scale, and so forth.

    Some things don't scale. You need the vision first, and then exercise sound design and engineering techniques to implement this under the guise of a competent director.

    Unfortunately, these products are producer-driven, not director-driven. Until they figure it out, these products will be doomed to (at least critical, if not commercial) failure.
  • I bought WWIIOL the day of release. Network problems prevented anybody from playing the first week. They've had the same problems as EQ, UO and AO, not ready for prime time.

    The difference is, you can see that Cornered Rat Software (the dev of WWIIOL) is actually making progress. And the flame wars in their forums easily match those on the AO forums. The developers of WWIIOL are actually reading postings in the forums, and participating in the discussions. I've never seen a posting from the AO staff anywhere in their forums.

    WWIIOL has the potential to be a truly awesome experience. They're just not there yet, nor have they said otherwise.

    See ya on the battlefield

  • WWII Online has barely playable code, terrible interface problems (three keys to fire a gun?), weird hardware requirements (can't drive a vehicle unless you have a certain kind of joystick!), and ridiculous bugs (gotta love those flying tanks.)

    The code is very playable, as long as you're not expecting Quake.

    If you're gonna mention interface problems, talk about the radio. The three keys to fire a rifle are pretty damn realistic. Raise gun to shoulder, look through sights, fire gun.

    I've played this game with four different joysticks, never had a problem. Two were MS USB Sidewinders, 1 Saitek, and 1 Logitech.

    And I haven't seen a flying tank since the first few weeks.

    Am I defending this game? Yes, because I feel it has the potential and I'd rather see it get there, rather than see it go down in flames.

  • I don't know... I'm pretty sure the SA screen shots speak for themselves. Also, Lowtax tends to be a really honest guy (if awfully, terribly humorously blunt).
  • I don't remember for sure, but I think the license expressly forbade reviews? Actually, come to think of it AO4 beta was looser. I think they wanted to create some noise...

    Even so, for all we know, their buisness model was to dup people into breaking their licenses and then sue them for "losses"...

    My own take? Neat game, but I stopped playing after a few days. To buggy for my limited gaming hours.

  • It is a frightning trend brought on by net access (Score:3)

    by Wariac ( 56029 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:50AM (#89327)
    I remember buying games, installing them and playing for months (or longer) without ever installing a patch. Of course, up until recently ( say 5 years?), if you wanted a patch, you called or wrote in and if there was a patch, they would mail it to you.
    Now that distributing a patch is a easy as throwing up a link, It seems to me that software companies are now saying, lets ship now and fix the bugs in a patch (AO, Tribes2, B&W, and many other products, not just games).
    And while I am on it, gaming sites like Planet<whatever> never seem to have anything bad to say about these games. I wonder how much $ (if any) they get from the game publishers to help pimp their stuff?

    Anyway, This is just a frightning trend. How many people here wont buy a game until a few patches are out? When was Quake2 finaly solid? It was the 20 release right?
    It doesn't seem to be the Dev's who release the crap...it is the bean counters screaming "we gotta ship soon!! We will miss our profit window!"

    Anyone else notice this or am I insane (certainly possible ;))

  • Games such as UO, AC and EQ which were released YEARS ago went far more smoothly. No they weren't perfect, but at least the client mostly worked once the inevitable network congestion problems were overcome.

    The excuse "it's a big project, this is hard, noone has done this before" has worn damn thin after being repeated by so many people who should have learned the lessons of others.

    One would expect new iterations of the MMORPG line to get better, not worse.

    This is inexcusable.
  • You pay much more than for a car, that should play games too...

    Computers are not a good platform for gaming because of the hardware variability. This creates huge headaches of developers and detracts from the quality in a big way.

    Consoles should be the only gaming platform IMO.

  • Not Cornered Rat (Score:3)

    by Illserve ( 56215 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:26AM (#89330)
    Cornered Rat Studios put out WWII Online. Funcom did AO. But I can see how you could confuse them, WWII has many of the same problems. The minimum requirements are 128MB of RAM, but most people will tell you that it's unplayable with that.

    Apart from the frequent bugs and crashes, the game only includes of a fraction of the features listed on the box (including such trivial details as Naval Combat) and is in no way a completed product.

    Sadly, alot of people bought it anyway, and the financial message to game developers is "go ahead and release your unfinished product, they'll buy it anyway".
  • From the forum thread:
    As for reviewing the game: We will send out review copies soon, but we would like to ask that you hold back on a full review until we have solved these problems.
    Part of what I do for a living is write reviews of games -- I love gaming, have been doing it for years, so I am more or less able to judge a good game and a bad game.

    Anarchy Online people: The minute your product hit the shelves is the minute that we, as an industry, get to review your game. What, it still has problems? Then it shouldn't have been released in the first place. Period.

    ---
  • While your arguments about bug-fixes are valid, you have to consider the fact that PC games and console games are really different.

    I'm a big PC-gamer, and while I'll still shell out 200 dollars for a console that I only want one game for (Rogue Squadron for GameCube), there is no Homeworld or Dungeon Keeper II for consoles. (and, if they are, they are ports. Ports Suck.)

    I'm trying to avert a PC v. Console war. I think their will always be both, and both have many advantages. But, in some sort of dao of video-gaming, neither will destroy the other in the near future (if/until convergence, blah blah blah).

  • Unfortunately YOU, the game review community, rolled over and played dead. Gamespy, gamespot, all the other magazines I depend on to keep me from wasting $50.00 and hours of my time on inferioir products clammed up and said nothing while thousands of their customers shelled out cash on a defective and shoddy product.

    Mandates like this mean NOTHING without game sites willing to implement them.

    It's time for a REAL game site/magazine since the established brands have proven themselves pawns of the publishers and not champions of the people. I mean really -- gamespy and gamespot scooped by somethingawful?

  • The mass of players finds quirks and exploits them much better then the small beta teams. And no, Beta 4 wasn't huge.

    No, it wasn't huge, but they were finding hundreds of problems during the beta that were still unfixed when they went gold. I've seen a lot of messages saying that "You can't find all of the problems in beta, you need the full load," but that would assume that they had fixed the problems they found with the smaler beta testing load, which is still entirely untrue.

    There remains the question, however -- if the company was going to fold, and noone would have gotten to ever play the game, is it better that the company funded itself from gamers' dollars?

  • i was a beta tester... (Score:5)

    by AugstWest ( 79042 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:06AM (#89336)
    ...but they couldn't even get that right. after downloading the 600 meg beta, installing it, creating an account and finally logging in, I was told that there was a financial problem with the account. Interesting, seeing as how there are no financial aspects to a free beta testing account.

    After 3 weeks and repeated emails from myself and hundreds of others, I never heard back from Funcom and gave up.

    But, along the way, I visited all of the forums, and alt.games.anarchy-online, and discovered that I really didn't want to get involved anyway. Right up to the day before they "launched" people would spend hours getting to the goal of a mission such as picking up an object and returning with it, only to discover that they couldn't pick it up.

    People are getting trapped in rooms without any way to get out, even after quitting, suiciding and restarting. The lag is often interminable.

    Granted, the company is not currently charging the monthly fee until the game is complete, but really, if they recognized that it wasn't complete, why go gold? Why ship?
  • You have a good point, but a traditional console isn't very well suited to this kind of game. Patches in online games can provide more than bug fixes. They can provide new content, as well as new features. It also allows the developers to rebalance the game as it becomes necessary, and in a robust evolving environment, rebalancing is necessary.
    Don't take this post as an endorsement of AO's actions. They were horribly unprepared to release their product. If what I read was correct, they didn't even have a secure web page set-up when they started to collect their customer's credit card info. A lot of their problems they have also blamed on network configuration issues. This points out that this type of game has a lot of issues to deal with that your typical console game doesn't, however it's the business they chose to get into, and they should be better prepared to deliver the product they have both promised and charged for. I personally considered buying AO and trying it out, but I became suspicious when I saw that they were charging around $50 or so for the game. Other games of this type retail for around $30. When a unproven company is promising the world, and is trying to get more cash up front, you're better off waiting until they start proving themselves.
  • No they weren't perfect, but at least the client mostly worked once the inevitable network congestion problems were overcome.

    I haven't palyed UO in over a year, but it still had some network congestion problems, and server crashes were at least a weekly occurrence when I played (not long after the Renaissance expansion came out).
    I currently play AC. In highly populated areas of the game world LAG (to which I'm assuming network congestion is a contributing factor) is still a problem.
    No online game is going to be perfect. There are always tradeoffs between performance and features. In it's current state AO doesn't seem to be really playable yet. They have what could be considered a beta system in opperation, but aren't ready for prime time. It also sounds like they've run into cash flow problems, and in the economy's current state they likly couldn't raise more cash without shipping the product as-is and trying to fix the bugs live. I hope they wake up and realize they can't charge people the monthly fee for the product they have right now, and let those who purchased the game play for free untill they get it going. Maybe the cash they get from the game sales will keep them going long enough to finish the product, and maybe they'll survive the well deserved black eye they get for releasing early. I'd like them to succeed, because I like the game concept, and would hate to see the efforts of the game developers that have poured their lives into this product go to waste. On the other hand, maybe the failure of AO would teach game producers a needed lesson about shipping a product this far before it's ready.

  • More Information (Score:4)

    by szcx ( 81006 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:37AM (#89339)
    PlanetCrap [planetcrap.com] has been following the AO debacle since day one.

    There are articles here [planetcrap.com], here [planetcrap.com], here [planetcrap.com], here [planetcrap.com], here [planetcrap.com], here [planetcrap.com], and here [planetcrap.com].

    Hope this helps.

  • I played AO for a few days. I didn't really mind the bugs and noticed that the number of disconnects decreased after about a week. It was apparant to me that the folks at Funcom were trying to fix the product. Unfortunately, I wasn't too thrilled with the game anyway, and I cancelled my account.

    Even though when I log in and attempt to cancel my account, I am told that I no longer have an active account, I find that it is still possible to log in and play the game. I don't, but there is nothing other than disinterest stopping me.

    This concerns me. Client validation should have been tested and fixed before release. Frankly, in a game like this, it should be a first-class issue. When something this simple and fundamental slipped through the cracks I have to wonder what is going on inside the rest of the code.

    Maybe I'm overly pessimistic. I would love to see AO succeed, but I'm starting to doubt whether the product can be salvaged before the fanbase is alienated.

    AEH

  • *sigh* (Score:4)

    by Moonshadow ( 84117 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:01AM (#89341)
    Somebody obviously hasn't learned that releasing a buggy product receives BAD REVIEWS and NEGATIVE FEEDBACK! Censoring that feedback isn't going to change the quality of the game. If there was more time spent improving the game rather than trying to engineer public opinion, they wouldn't have this problem.

  • What would you say if you bought a car and the rear windows didn't roll down?

    I'd return it. You can return software, too, but most people don't. However, if you look at Consumer Reports, you'll find that the first year of a new model car is usually quite poor compared to following years: the syndrome of 1.0 versus 1.1, 1.2, and other updates.

    Software that doesn't work right is called beta, and only Microsoft gets to charge for it.

    Yes, it's a strange world where it's the norm to have EULAs that disavow any suitability to any task, and to dismiss any liability in the face of damages caused by their products.

    You mention Microsoft, so in fairness, I'll troll the other way as well. I think of Linux as being in perpetual beta. Any distro is just a bunch of current snapshots of works in progress, instead of a concerted effort to get a coherent set of features together in one place. Without group cohesion, all I can hope for in a linux distro is that all of the snapshots are relatively stable, if not orchestrated. That said, I use Linux half the time, and Windows half the time.

  • normal balance between Producer and Director (Score:5)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:17AM (#89344) Homepage Journal

    I'm not defending either camp, so put away that (-1: Troll) click for a second.

    The Director always wants to get it done right, taking forever to do it.

    The Producer always wants to get it shipped, even with a few flaws.

    These are naturally at odds, and the MMORPG market is no exception. When external beta testers get involved, however, they act as an extension of the Director: fix this, fix this, it's not ready yet. The Producer has to intensify the push to release the product before it's perfect but while it still has a market. Every week of development can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and if there are scheduled marketing agreements in place (say, retail endcaps), it's ruinous to blow your deadlines.

    The MMORPG genre has a couple other wrinkles that Hollywood doesn't usually have, that complicates these roles.

    For one, an Internet-age game can be patched or upgraded AFTER it is released. So 1.0 sucks, that's nothing new. 1.1.6b.alpha.release3 is where it gets better.

    For two, the beta testing crowd is a fickle bunch. Some stick to the new product for a long time, while some flee for the Next Big Thing(tm). They're not the core audience. See my writeup on Everything2 about the Life Cycle of an Online Community [everything2.com] for my three-act summary of this phenomenon.

    Three, the shelf life of an Internet game is far longer than a movie or a solo game. Movies are in the dollar theaters and videotapes in a few months. Solo games are in Wal*Mart bins in a few months. An online community takes that long just to get up a good head of steam.

    As Guy Kawasaki (ceo Garage.com) said, "Don't Worry, Be Crappy." You have to ship to make money. You have to get Revision One out there so you can see HOW to make it better, instead of noodling around in the workshop forever.

  • All MMOGs are/will be like this (Score:3)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:53AM (#89345)
    Problems like this have occurred in ALL released massively-multiplayer games. This is because these games cost much, much more to develop and test than other games, and so the only way to ensure a profit is to just pick a date and go live, regardless of the state of the game.

    It is getting better, though. When Ultima Online launched, the entire game economy was destroyed within days. Connection and crash bugs were unavoidable. Even to this day, they don't have all the kinks worked out.

    The same can be said for EverQuest. EverQuest's early days were nightmarish, and the game quickly earned the nickname "NeverQuest," because players could not log on much of the time, and those that did were usually disconnected quickly. It took them several months to deal with those problems. Beyond that, the game has always suffered from a myriad of internal bugs, client bugs, quest bugs, and a host of other bugs. The EQ bugs, however, don't even compare to the bugs in UO.

    Then along comes AO. They have a lot of problems, but at least many of their customers can get in and play. Crash bugs come up here and there, but nothing like UO and EQ. People often report gameplay to be a satisfying experience.

    This is the nature of the beast that is online gaming. It will be this way for a long time, until there are a few established players in the field with a good, easily reusable code base and good testing methods.
  • UO was in a constant state of beta test (Charging users $10 a month for the privilidge) for as long as the Linux client worked. And you couldn't just stand around and chat or practise your skills without some obnoxious fuck coming along and pickpocketing you or trying to kill you by manipulating the game (or both.) It got really old really fast.
  • Hmm. I don't do Windows but if Loki ever rolls out a Linux client, I might be interested in picking it up again under those circumstances.
  • Three, the shelf life of an Internet game is far longer than a movie or a solo game. Movies are in the dollar theaters and videotapes in a few months. Solo games are in Wal*Mart bins in a few months. An online community takes that long just to get up a good head of steam.

    For an example of this, just head over to Tanarus.com [tanarus.com]. This is a really great tank game that has been around for about 4 years now (that includes a year-long open beta). Once they came out of beta, they charged $10/month to play, and earlier this year decided to make the game free again. There's probably two reasons for that: 1) the game has been around so long that a lot of hardware and bandwidth costs have either come down significantly or been paid off altogether, and 2) the game is now subsidized by the company's other hot property (maybe you've heard of it? EverQuest?). I think that the game has done amazingly well, considering that the marketing budget was virtually non-existent from day 1; it has survived almost entirely because of the loyal following it got from its open-beta period.

    Getting back to AO, though... coming out of the starting gate with a ton of negative reviews is a kick to the groin that the AO folks probably aren't going to recover from without doing a major overhaul and releasing it as AO2.

  • Not only that, that's false!

    All MMORPGs have not released badly, certainly not as bad as Anarchy-online. A simple counter-example is Asheron's Call, which had few actual playability issues. The lag was not horrible, and there were a few esoteric bugs (duplication bugs) and other things that got worked out quickly.

    EQ had a very rocky start. UO was even worse, from what I hear.

    However, these games were released YEARS AGO. Current games have to be able to compete with CURRENT products, not the pioneers of the genre. Imagine releasing Doom today. Imagine the sound as it flopped completely. Now imagine what's going to happen to AO if they don't get their network and server code up to snuff with today's games. The ONLY thing they got going for them is eye candy (very good eye candy, btw). Hopefully, they'll get the rest of it working to make a real game, instead of the somewhat painful version of today or the joke of a release a couple weeks ago. And hopefully they'll do this before they completely lose their fanboi playerbase.

  • Funcom has been responsive (Score:3)

    by bugnuts ( 94678 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:27AM (#89356) Journal
    I am a critic of AO, but not an unfair one. They released it early, making it an extension of the horribly short beta4 stress tests that should've found and corrected most of the problems. Perhaps they ran out of money, who cares. However, they have been scrambling to salvage what they could. Bad business decision, noted. Now, judge them by the game of the "real" retail version, once they started the clock on the prepaid month.

    Currently, the game looks like this:

    • The missions are stable, where you can pick up and return the objects, find the people, get the rewards, etc.
    • The zoning is mostly stable, from what I read on alt.games.anarchy-online. [alt.games.anarchy-online]
    • The lag in the cities is rather bad.
    • Monsters can attack through walls.
    There's another thread about them using TCP in all of their communications. This is usually considered a Bad Thing (tm) in MMO games due to the potential lag issues when a packet (even an unimportant or obsolete packet) is missed. This is a technical issue that bit them hard, and will again, bare its nasty teeth in the future. Any good network programmer should've known that TCP would cause its own set of lag issues.
  • but they couldn't even get that right. after downloading the 600 meg beta, installing it, creating an account and finally logging in, I was told that there was a financial problem with the account. Interesting, seeing as how there are no financial aspects to a free beta testing account.

    I'm glad to hear I wasn't the only one this happened to. That was enough to convince me not to bother buying the game. I'm sorry to hear how correct my decision was

    --Ty

  • When I join a beta and I am accepted into it. I expect to be able to actually beta test the game, yes.

    I also expect that they will be responsive to the people show are testing the game for them. I sent them serveral e-mail about my problem and didn't get so much as a auto-response back.

    I've done plenty of beta testing in the past, and I hope to do more in the future. This was the worst interaction I've ever had with a company I was testing a product for.

    What you described above sounds more like an alpha test to me. Things are susposed to be functional one betas start. It's susposed to find the bugs in the system, not the flaws in the design.

    --Ty

  • >Monsters can attack through walls.

    That's the case in Everquest as well, in most areas. And Everquest isn't even beta.

    Everquest decided that they didn't want to bother with having to write fast code to run on the servers to path the monsters through the front door, so they didn't bother.

    This means that monsters attack and kill from OUTSIDE, and YOU CAN'T FIGHT BACK. Many times I would get killed in a shop from a lion or other monster from outside, without any warning at all.

    So I gave up playing Everquest. Sometimes I almost miss it; and then I remember 'details' like this...
  • Then you should do what I did before I stopped buying any games that don't come from the good folks over at Loki. Simply put don't buy a game untill you see the review from someone you trust. Back in the day that was PC Gamer or a good friend. Think about it if you see that a movie has no previews for reviewers odds are you are not going to go see it on opening day and you are going to get what you deserve if you do. Same thing with games wait a while till it is done (ie. patched.) Then buy it apply the patch that you knew you would have to when you bought it and have fun. Till then play Falconseye.

  • Graeme Devine fights back (Score:4)

    by table and chair ( 168765 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:27AM (#89384)
    "The AO forums are filling up with negative posts (which are then apparently being deleted by moderators)"

    Of course, if you're an employee for a major game developer [idsoftware.com] you can just leverage the Power of the .Plan... ;)

    "I'm posting here because my posts to the Anarachy Online Community board get deleted," Graeme Devine writes in his latest .plan update [planetquake.com], before listing four major problems with the game, to be read by thousands and thousands of hardcore gamers who consider id, well, divine. Oops. :)

  • The big problem is that people are still not giving these games a chance. They don't realize that the programmers are not the one's making these choices.

    Why would I bother giving a game a chance if it's barely playable? I honestly don't care who was responsible for a terrible game, whether it's the programmers or the publishers who rushed it out the door half finished. If it's terrible, it's terrible.

    I feel for the programmers who have to put up with all the crap that comes along with an intensely buggy product, but I'm not going to waste my time or money on a half-finished game just because it *might* be playable eventually.

    If a game really has potential, then I wish the developers/publishers would just be a bit more patient and release it when it is fully realized. That's one of the biggest problems with computer games these days -- they're rushed out the door incomplete with 100 MB patches the day after release.

    Whatever happened to the id "motto" from back in the day: "we'll release it when it's done." Nowadays, it seems to be "we'll release it when it's half done, take some money and get around to the other half eventually." (Not that id games haven't had their share of patches, but at least I could get Quake up and running on the first try as opposed to 3 weeks.)

    J

  • As was I... (Score:3)

    by chrome koran ( 177357 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:49AM (#89389)
    and I won't deny that there were a lot of problems on release...the most I have ever seen in an online game.

    However, FC has made a ton of improvements in two weeks. For all of you saying that the game is unplayable and you can't do anything:

    • I built one character to level 11, decided I didn't like it, started over and built another to level 15 already and I don't play more than 4 hours a day
    • I have completed over 20 missions and have the tokens to prove it...they pretty much all seem to work for me now, though they didn't all work in beta
    • My son has a level 21 character
    • My son's best friend has a level 22 character
    • I have seen people online who are already above level 30
    So apparently some of us seem to be able to play. The biggest problems most of the whiners have are...a)they don't update their video drivers...b)they stay in and around the cities with the 10,000 other lamers who refuse to listen to advice. If you leave the cities and venture out to the countryside and small towns, you can hunt, buy equipment, and generally level to your heart's content with minor lag problems. Yeah, I still lose connection...about once every 3 or four hours...that's acceptable for a new online game. If all the morons would get out of the major cities like FC has advised them to do until lag is under control, perhaps they would be able to play the game too. In the meantime, I'm just glad they are there and staying out of our way...
  • While it does disturb me that Funcom is requesting people hold off on reviewing it, I seem to recall a comment made in earlier Slashdot game review article where, due to time pressure, reviewers are often forced to review (and work around) the bugs in a late beta version, rather than having the luxury of the finished product. If that's the case, then I can't see reviewers actually holding off on a review until some indefinite point that could be months after the product has already been in stores.

    Out of curiousity, is anyone aware of any reviewers who've actually said they're going to wait to review it?

  • the incredible variety of issues that came out with release has allowed them to pinpoint errors that would have taken months of beta testing, even open beta testing, to uncover.

    What I've heard from beta-testers seems to indicate numerous bugs that were discovered during the beta were left unfixed for the product launch.

  • Re:i was a beta tester... (Score:3)

    by Erasmus Darwin ( 183180 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:10AM (#89392)
    Granted, the company is not currently charging the monthly fee until the game is complete

    As was mentioned in the second SA review (I believe it was there -- I read the review back when it was originally posted to SA), Funcom has started the meter, so to speak. Around July 9th or so, everyone's regular free month (as opposed to the indefinite "We're not charging until bugs are fixed" period) has started.

  • a Harley, it is more than a motorcycle, it's a culture, it's a hobby, it's a lifestyle.

    Umm no: Its a fucking motorcycle. It is *not* a 'lifestyle' or a 'culture'. These things cannot be bough, no matter what the synergetic-cross-branding-co-hosted-sponsership-me ga-deal-day told you. Advertising and Marketing @ Harlyey does not define culture or lifestyle - they sell motorcycles... nothing more, anyone who thinks differently has bought into their self-serving brain-washing.

  • Gah. (Score:4)

    by Vain ( 195850 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:01AM (#89399) Homepage
    As if FunCom's servers aren't getting hit hard enough, everyone has to go and slashdot them. *sigh*

    I'll never get to play.
  • Somebody obviously hasn't learned that releasing a buggy product receives BAD REVIEWS and NEGATIVE FEEDBACK! Censoring that feedback isn't going to change the quality of the game.


    Someone mod that back up, he's not a troll.

    Censoring feedback? Screaming at customers? Banning them for disagreeing with you? But it works for Everquest [everquest.com] made by Verant [verant.com] and Ultima Online [uo.com]...why not AO, too?

    If there was more time spent improving the game rather than trying to engineer public opinion, they wouldn't have this problem.


    And if people didn't stop buying games they Knew weren't ready, they should not buy them or continue to support the companies. WWII online was so bad, and was returned so much that some stores put up signs saying they would not take returns under any circumstances!

    I really am surprised that given the number of us geeks who game, there aren't more stories on slashdot about the general idiocy and crappiness of MMOG staff and software and hardware. Ignorance is bliss, or in the case of these companies, profitable.



    -Mynn the Museless

  • Bad sign... (Score:3)

    by MWoody ( 222806 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:16AM (#89412)
    Um, is it a bad sign when Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com] scoops Slashdot?

    Juz kiddin', folks. But seriously, this whole mess is inexcusable. I mean, I can almost kinda sorta understand (if not excuse) single-player games that are pushed out the door by half-wit marketeers. After all, basic economics deem that there is a point where you'll sell less copies if you wait (say, past the holiday season) and fix everything than if you release a piece of crap immediately. For someone with no real love or respect for the video game industry, it's almost a no-brainer, issues with customer trust and sales of future games aside.

    However, this is an online game! And a pay-for-play one at that! They knew they'd have to deal with these customers day in and day out for months, and that these poor souls would be especially angry since they're charging over time. They knew the financial success of the title hung from the continued good graces of monthly billed gamers. Did nobody sit the top brass down and discuss the whole plan with them? Somewhere, somehow, someone who sincerely needed the "hard, cold bitch-slap of truth" was neglected.

    Ah, well, live and learn. On the bright side, really makes Diablo's launch look good, no? ^_^

    One last side note: Take that "something awful" site with a grain of salt; IIRC, they only give bad reviews.
    ---

  • Man, no wonder I get creamed (CS) when I try to game after work and putting the kid to bed. This job thing is getting in the way....
  • They're not exactly stupid.

    No reviews means
    Customers are not informed means
    Customers do not know how bad it blows means
    Customers see it in store and it looks cool means
    Customers buy it!

    ...and then find out LATER. My best friend wasted $35 on this thing cause of all the hype and MAN is he pissed. I wonder if there's any possibility that FunCom has violated truth in advertising, if only the spirit and not the letter...?

    -Kasreyn
  • What if the user base they sold to figure out they've been sold a bill of goods (which is what appears to be happening right now...)- they're going to be leaving in droves and spreading the word about the game being a piece of crap.

    Yes, but that's not what they're concerned about. If they run out of cash, it's "game over." If they get an injection of cash that carries them through what should have been the beta period, then they'll probably make out OK eventually.

    Remember, they aren't looking at what happens over the next year and a half. They are looking long-term. Ultima Online has been around for nearly 4 years and it not only going strong, but growing. Ultima Online had some pretty serious issues when it finally released as well (and it was pioneering the MMORPG genre, so it was even worse then), but they managed to fix it up quite nicely. I'm sure that the AO people are hoping for the same thing.

    The other thing to remember about a company that is out of cash and about ready to go under: they never do what is "right" for their customers or their employees. They do what they believe will give them the immediate influx of cash to have the company survive, even if it means cutting off their arms to do it.

    Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups. [thedaythatcounts.org]
  • The excuse "it's a big project, this is hard, noone has done this before" has worn damn thin after being repeated by so many people who should have learned the lessons of others.

    That's why I can't wait until Richard Garriott's new company eventually releases their MMORPG. Most of the people who work for him now are former Ultima Online and Ultima Online 2 developers. They've been through it, and they know how it works. And Garriott is the kind of guy that (assuming the company lets him) will make sure that it's very playable and clean before it gets released (his more recent problems with UO and Ultima IX were largely related to EA's pushing). And I think that they'll have the financial stability to be able to pull it off because their first project isn't going to be their game, but instead porting and supporting one from a Korean company (that is insanely successful in Asia).

    So they picked a relatively simple but cash-generating venture for their first attempt so that when they get around to making their own game they will have the money and tons of experience with different MMORPG systems. Great idea, eh?

    Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups. [thedaythatcounts.org]
  • As an example, Asheron's Call from Microsoft. 30,000 players and an average concurrent userbase of over 2000 per 'world'. Heck, even Everquest is still going. Asheron's Call has been in continuous operation since 1999 with content and feature updates EVERY MONTH.

    Microsoft may be the distributor, but they sure didn't code it. Do you really think that MS could make a product that would support 2000 concurrent anythings?

    Besides, you left out the grandaddy of them all: Ultima Online. The original and still the best, it's been chugging along for 300,000+ users (makes Asheron's Call look like a drop in the bucket!) since October of 1997. And they have regular content/scenario updates as well.

    Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups. [thedaythatcounts.org]
  • BTW: The asian game has its own unique problems... From what I hear, the police over there have special RL/PK units to combat the new phenomenon of taking RL revenge on an in-game PK.

    Yes, I've read similar articles. There is apparently some organized crime/gang influence in the situations that you describe. However, I think that is perhaps more of a cultural issue than a game issue.

    Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups. [thedaythatcounts.org]
  • UO was in a constant state of beta test (Charging users $10 a month for the privilidge) for as long as the Linux client worked. And you couldn't just stand around and chat or practise your skills without some obnoxious fuck coming along and pickpocketing you or trying to kill you by manipulating the game (or both.) It got really old really fast.

    I never played on the Linux client (wasn't even aware that there had been one), but I'm not surprised that development for it lagged behind that of the Windows client. That's been par for the course for years on most software that originates on Windows.

    As far as the in-game halfwits go, that problem has been largely done away with when they split the worlds in facets. There's one facet where anything goes, and another where you cannot PK and stealing doesn't work. It's pretty simple to travel between the two with your character, so most of those problems have gone away while still allowing the player to choose which style they enjoy more. Nowdays the worst problem you tend to encounter is a foul-mouthed punk, but you'll get those in any game and they're easy enough to ignore or block.

    I started playing when the game was released in 1997 and only played for a couple months because I kept getting PKed and it was painful to play over a 24kbps dialup connection. I got back into it about a year and a half ago and have been going strong since.

    Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups. [thedaythatcounts.org]
    • With a console, you CAN'T issure patches for a game

    Want to bet? Wait for X-Box to raise the bar for everyone. Not in the first releases, but when the flood of under-resourced PC title conversions starts (two weeks, fifty bucks and all the pizza you can eat), they'd better have a patch strategy in place.

    • It seems to me that software companies are now saying, lets ship now and fix the bugs in a patch

    That's precisely what happens. I know for a fact that when Braveheart went gold, the team went straight onto patch work, and had a (vital) patch ready by the time the box hit the shelves. They'd actually planned for this. The game was broken out of the box, and this was considered acceptable.

  • Well worth reading, thank for that.

    • I know the network code for Quake3 inside out (well, I re-wrote it) [...] I wish I had the source to this to help fix it because I want to play!

    I hear you, buddy. The AO developers will be trembling, shambling wrecks by now. They're probably beyond even caring about what they're doing. They really should take Graeme up on his offer.

    • TCP should be used for some stuff and UDP for other stuff, this is common in online games (such as netTrek).

    Yay Netrek! [netrek.org]. But it's a stonker of a point. Netrek dealt with these issues ten years ago. Jeez, AO guys, you only had to ask.

  • Honestly, every time I see a company get away with releasing a still-beta, unstable piece of shit and bill it as the stable, final release, and then charge you a nice chunk of change to boot, I feel more inclined to just chuck my windows machine and buy a console for gaming.

    Just think about it: With a console, you CAN'T issure patches for a game. That means that you have to have it right the first time, and you can't get away with rushing a half-finished game out the door and thrust it upon unsuspecting buyers.

    Also, I admire Somethingawful for not kissing major game publisher ass to gain favor with them. This is in contrast to most site which, like Lowtax said, will do almost anything to get "inside looks" at unreleased games. Journalistic integrity is not in their vocabularies (although it probably isn't in CmdrTaco's, either).

  • > And if people didn't stop buying games they
    > Knew weren't ready, they should not buy them or
    > continue to support the companies. WWII online
    > was so bad, and was returned so much that some
    > stores put up signs saying they would not take
    > returns under any circumstances

    When I signed up and paid 45-50 bucks for Anarchy Online I presumed I was buying a working product - it doesn't even run on my ATI 128GL which is a fairly standard video card. (I get a nice black screen)

    I then spent an entire day trying to patch the beta version to a working version - it simply failed most of the time, I ended up following ridiculously obscure instructions (posted by a player, not anyone official mind you) on the AO bulletin board to eventually get it to work. (things like clicking Cancel at certain points etc, rebooting your machine at others)

    All in all, I'd like a refund of my money and I'll consider purchasing it when its working properly, but of course I can't do that apparently - well, I can if I contact my credit card company and complain that I haven't received "working goods".
  • It's too bad about his bandwidth - I didn't know that, and would have cheerfully removed, or reposted his links. But instead, we have this.

    You may not have known about the bandwidth, but you've gotta know [slashdot.org] about his lack of ad cash [slashdot.org] that pays for said bandwidth. Donations to make up for lack of said cash would probably be an acceptable apology:)

  • This never happened with Everquest. (Score:3)

    by Philipv1 ( 467269 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @12:37PM (#89459)
    Just to set the record straight for a lot of those people saying "This is nothing new, even Everquest had these same problems.". FALSE.

    EverQuest, when it was released was a SOLID game. It has class balance issues and a few exploits to be taken care of for the most part. The client was rock solid, as were the servers. The game worked flawlessly. HOWEVER, the first *3* days EverQuest was released to the public they has SERIOUS BANDWIDTH issues! The login server was flooded (/.'d) so bad it reached its peak and wasnt allowing people to filter on in. When you finally got in, you were disconnected shortly after because their ISP couldn't handle the load and the lines were constantly up and down. After 3 days of this, they had more than enough bandwidth for everyone and REAL playtime ensued. From there the rest is/was history. Tweaks, Nerfs, Class Balances, and a few DirectX problems, but other than that the game hs been *rock solid* since launch. I know, i've been playing 6+ hours a day, every day, since those first 3 days. And you know what? The game is by far one of the best ever still to this day.

    What Anarchy Online is totally different. They released the game with buggy clients and buggy servers. This should never have been allowed.

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