Mythic Head: Warhammer Online launch was "smoothest" to date

[modeps]

via BigDownload (http://news.bigdownload.com/2008/09/22/mythic-head-warhammer-online-launch-was-smoothest-to-date/):

It always seems to be a tricky thing to launch an MMO game. Servers could go down, patches could slow sign ups and other technically issues can keep a launch of such a game from being a good experience for both the player and the developer. In a new chat with Gamasutra, however, Mythic Entertainment head man Mark Jacobs is quoted as saying that the launch of their fantasy MMO Warhammer Online has been ""the smoothest launch" of an MMO to date.

Jacobs states, ""When you also look at our downtime -- only one patch in almost seven days -- that's a pretty tough record to beat when you look at the launches of every other MMO, including (World of Warcraft). Jacobs would not reveal how many players had signed on to play the game during launch week last week, saying only "...we had more people playing the game at the same time in North America than we ever had for Dark Age of Camelot (Mythic's previous MMO).

Would you all agree? I haven't heard too many people complain about it.

[Atorak]

It's been an extremely smooth launch for an MMO, I haven't had a single crash to desktop myself, lag has been almost non-existent, and I've been playing on one of the most heavily populated servers (Volkmar). The only thing that sucks is the server queues, but honestly, it's down to 20min or less even in peak times, and our server always shows up as "Full".

If there are bugs in this game, I really haven't noticed. Or rather, I've been having so much fun, that I haven't cared to notice? Mythic has been on the ball, and I'm happy about that.

[Kem0sabe]

Well, considering that DAoC only had like 10 people total playing it, i dont see it as a great achievement to have more concurrent players at launch in WAR. :)

I wouldn't say it was the smoothest launch in Europe, the constant crashes to the desktop, the absurdly long queues, the servers going down without prior notice... on prime time (looking at you Karak eight Peaks), the problems with the game refusing to authenticate if you were using certain routers, you had to open all ports for it to work, and that left your computer mighty vulnerable to attack.

Its been a rough ride in Europe, with GOA in charge. I dont understand how Mythic chose to go with these guys as the service providers, they are incompetent to say the least.

[Schnuks]

Definitely the best launch of an MMO I've played (UO, WoW, DAOC, EQ1,). Servers have never crashed, just went down for a scheduled maintenance once. They do appear to have quite a number of people with CTD issues and video lag though on really low end or high end systems. There are plenty of servers out there with no queues at all if you don't mind playing on them.

Nothing's perfect but the games been playable almost all week, can't really ask for more in a new mmo.

[karak]

Best launch I have witnessed.
Except Amazon fucking me over on delivery:)
But ya awesome start

[Borthcollective]

All servers down day after start, crashes to desktop, random lag, 2 RP servers, yep smooth start.

[Satarius]

I would almost give it to them, they've had a great launch, some queue problems, but nothing major, EXCEPT for the way they've handled the pre-order/head-start fiasco.

The short of it is they told players that pre-orders "Collector's Edition, you get to start on Sunday, Standard Edition, you get to start on Tuesday, the game comes out on Thursday, and you have until Monday to pick up your copy and register it on your account."

Fair enough, lots of people pre-ordered online and so will be receiving their copies today if they weren't pre-shipped, etc etc. A weekend to get everything sorted out, seems great.

Thursday they decide to shut off accounts who haven't registered their game on Friday morning. Tons of people with online pre-orders suddenly had their accounts shut off. If you retail pre-ordered and didn't pick it up Thursday, better hope that you can find a copy. They went back and allowed certain retailers til today (Amazon, a few others, etc), but it's still a BIG mess.

And over what, 3 measly days of play for what could be a few people abusing the system? I don't get it. Screw over the people who were interested enough to give you money upfront just to make sure you screw over the people who work at retailers and hijacked a pre-order key?

TLDR: Big pre-order fiasco that makes me doubt best launch ever.

[Rifter]

I would say it is the best launch I have witnessed. Though, quite honestly, thinking about EQ2, I can't remember any problems with its launch. (well, beyond it just kind of sucking in general). I thought WAR's launch, in the US was pretty smooth. I know there is a crash to desktop bug, but I don't know anything else beyond they have been working on it, which the one patch they did release supposedly helped.

I agree with Satarius about having pre-orders shut off prematurely. That was rather obnoxious. I think they could have left them up until Mon/Tue, and still gotten their money.

[Kweli]

Well im not excited about sharing this, but i played this game 9 hours straight yesterday (first time to do that since i was like 17 or something)

I only experienced one crash to desktop while loading... Other then that, i never had any weird type of issues i had with other MMO's during launch.

Im also severely enjoying this game

[Texas Speed]

<snip>

Wait, what? If the launch was last Sunday, why would it matter if you didn't register your head start before Friday morning, when everyone had access anyway? I know I'm missing something here.

[bean19]

I think it has been a very smooth launch, but there are a number of issues (not really peformance related) that are in the game. Warhammer Online has absolutely fascinated me. . . if you like RvR, this is an amazing title that should captivate you as it has me.

Still, there are a few blaring things that will have to be worked out with updates (though I agree they should have launched now as I'm happy to have the game as it is rather than waiting for it):


PvE mobs have a cheat in them to make them display on clients what they should do (run up to the player and hit them), which no doubt saves some bandwidth as this is what the mobs would do and there is not usually a problem with having the client simulate it. However, many classes get snare abilities that prevent mobs from moving. This leads to the mob running up to the caster of the snare and standing there because it isn't actually close enough to hit them (the snare works, it just doesn't display it because the client is told to simulate the mob running up to the player). This may seem cosmetic, but if melee players in the same group as the snaring ranged DPSer, they will recieve the message saying the mob is too far away. (only blaring combat bug I've seen to date, and it doesn't matter in RvR which is my main focus).
Some scenarios did not recieve enough testing or are just poorly designed. For example, The Phoenix Throne is a capture the flag scenario. Both flags are out in the open where ranged dpsers can easily attack people by them without getting close to melee players, which is fine in itself, but it takes 3 interruptable seconds to pick up the flag. Meanwhile, points are given out for kills as well as xp and reknown. This means that a team that turtles (only defends) can win the scenario easily because melee must approach them and their respawn is much closer so eventually attrition will swing the fight their way. The flag should pick up instantly. . . you already have to have your flag safe before you can cap, so this wouldn't lead to extremely short matches or anything.
Certain scenarios are much more rewarded than others. . . and for no apparent reason that I can tell. There is a murderball game called "Mourkain Temple" where your team must pick-up and hold a skull to earn points and/or kill the enemy team to earn points. It is fun, but even when we win by a large margin (500-100), the reknown rewards are nowhere near those that are recieved for winning Stonetroll Crossing (another very fun game that is too complicated to explain since it is not the point). They both last about the same amount of time to complete, but one is much more rewarding.
Open RvR is easy and rewards a ton of reknown. As long as the other side is doing some RvR, you can get a ton of reknown. Just get a group with a healer, tank, and DPSers and you can run out and take BPOs all day. Each one will earn you 600 reknown points whereas Mourkain Temple will only earn you 300-600 points and Stonetroll Crossing will earn 500-1000 points. Often there is absolutely no opposition for points though, and because Destruction outnumbers Order on every server, quite often there are not any or many BPOs for Destruction players to pickup.
Keeps are oddly designed. . . the keep lord is an extremely powerful mob that can take down a healed tank in under a minute. He is surrounded by 5 other fairly powerful mobs and none of these may be pulled from the room he is in. In order to engage him, you must have the tanks pull aggro and get your healers and ranged dpsers up the stairs , past this aggro and on the parapets. They must then revive your dead tanks who can then pull each of these one at a time. However, if you have any enemy players defending, this stairway that forces you into boss mobs is absolutely killer, and it is nearly impossible to get a large enough group to get out to the parapets so that you can a) protect the healers so they can ressurect those who fall in the attempt and b) successfully fight off enemy players who will also have healers that sit right in the middle of the boss NPCs. It shouldn't be easy, but you can't do it with less than a zerging warband unless it is almost completely undefended.
Crafting is a bit odd. . . I'm level 20 and the items that drop from mobs are making level 30 potions about half the time. I guess I'll have a nice stock for when I get to 30, but it is odd now. Also, there are a TON of different seeds and variations of seeds that must be grown in order to make potion ingredients, but their differences are often extremely minor or they have no differences at all. This leads to a lot of needless inventory clutter that would not occur if they'd just have one type of each seed.
The client closes so slowly that I always shut it off with Task Manager.


My list of things that are absolutely wonderful about the game would be about three times this size. It's imperfect, but it is an incredibly good game. I'm annoyed that the servers are down for maintenance as we speak, and that I'll have to go to class before getting my fix. :)

[bean19]

Regarding the server queues (they hotfixed the scenario queues that weren't popping on high populations ervers), they do this to try to get new players to go to servers that have lower populations. The servers are not stuttering or slow on "full" servers. They are simply putting a timer on them so that people will move between servers. They've even cloned characters for everyone on the highest population servers on to the lowest population servers so that they may move without losing their progress. The longest queue I experience on my high population server was during primetime. I had to wait 15 minutes to log on, and I still have to wait 5-8 minutes all the time now during primetime. . . but I get more scenario pops than I would on a low population server and that is extremely important to me. After the population has spread out a bunch, I expect them to raise the server capacity by 500-1000.

There are more draconian ways they could go about this, like assigning a server and only allowing you to choose if your friend buys a "friend code" (Final Fantasy XI). This method allows you to play with friends, guildmates, and family with a little hassle while achieving the same ends.

[Kem0sabe]

Regarding the server queues (they hotfixed the scenario queues that weren't popping on high populations ervers), they do this to try to get new players to go to servers that have lower populations. The servers are not stuttering or slow on "full" servers. They are simply putting a timer on them so that people will move between servers. They've even cloned characters for everyone on the highest population servers on to the lowest population servers so that they may move without losing their progress. The longest queue I experience on my high population server was during primetime. I had to wait 15 minutes to log on, and I still have to wait 5-8 minutes all the time now during primetime. . . but I get more scenario pops than I would on a low population server and that is extremely important to me. After the population has spread out a bunch, I expect them to raise the server capacity by 500-1000.

I had a queue last night that had the expected duration of 1 hour and 27 minutes... more than 600 people on the queue at that moment.

This has been going on since launch on the European servers and we as paying customers shouldn't be forced to move to another server or wait for god knows how much time without any answers on how they are going to fix this.

Its poor service to their customers. If this was any other business, there would be compensations, but its an mmorpg, and companies can do what they want because its online.

[bean19]

TLDR: Big pre-order fiasco that makes me doubt best launch ever.

Huh. . . I wasn't aware this was such a big deal. The game was available in most major retailers and at people's homes from most online preorders by last Wednesday or Thursday. I'm in a large guild and literally no one had a problem with getting their account turned off except people who had not gone in to get their copy from their preorder store. . . but they were able to fix it by going and buying their copy in just 30 minutes. There were a lot of people that got their copies online too and I know many of them got their copies before the "launch date".

[bean19]

I had a queue last night that had the expected duration of 1 hour and 27 minutes... more than 600 people on the queue at that moment.

This has been going on since launch on the European servers and we as paying customers shouldn't be forced to move to another server or wait for god knows how much time without any answers on how they are going to fix this.
Moving to another server is the fix. Not everyone can play on the same server. If you hate moving (even with a cloned character so you have no loss in progress), well it's likely that 600 other people won't hate it as much as you do, so they will fix the problem for you.

You do understand that this is a necessary service FOR the customers. If they just allowed everyone to pile on to one server, then this server would constantly lag and crash. In a perfect world, we'd all get to play on one server. . . but the technology just can't handle it (and you'd have to make instanced content or we'd be on top of one another and not having fun because of it. . . so this game design wouldn't handle it either though I guess they could modify it to work like Guild Wars). Would you prefer a more draconian method like forced server selection like that in Final Fantasy XI?

[Returner]

I'm playing and really like it but "smoothest to date" is complete bullshit.

[MasterEvilAce]

"When you also look at our downtime -- only one patch in almost seven days"

REALLY? I consider that BAD thing. There are sooo many things that can be fixed. I seriously consider that laziness more than anything.

[Borthcollective]

I'm a huge fan of this IP, but what they have done to it has assigned them all a nice comfortable place in hell.

[Koi]

The launch has been pretty smooth overall. Game performance however, not so much. I have a pretty decent system and I can barely run the game on the lowest settings with everything off without the game chugging (and that's just standing by myself in the 2nd zone for the Order - don't get me started about pvp). Something definitely needs to be optimized with this game, seeing that I had a relatively smooth experience with the Preview weekend they held a couple weeks back.

[Silverbaine]

lol wait? this was released?!
*runs ot the store*

Man my friends and i were looking forward to this, i so failed on the starting line for this one.

[Drayven]

I'm playing and really like it but "smoothest to date" is complete bullshit.

The smoother release goes to what game?

[Kem0sabe]

The smoother release goes to what game?

I would say LotRO had a smoother release than WAR.

[Klade]

I haven't played every MMO out there but WoW had a smoother release then WAR. WoW had some sever issues but thats pretty much it. I can't walk halfway across a zone without seeing some pretty glaring bugs in WAR. Plus theres been some server issues as well as ques.

And god help you if your logged into a "full" server when you crash. The game returns you to that server and if you want to switch servers to a less populated one it must first log you out of the "full" server which sends you through some sort of que as well! It took me 15 minutes the other night just to switch servers and about 8 client restarts. (And yes this is the North America version).

I love the game but smoothest launch it is not.

[Rifter]

I haven't played every MMO out there but WoW had a smoother release then WAR. WoW had some sever issues but thats pretty much it. I can't walk halfway across a zone without seeing some pretty glaring bugs in WAR. Plus theres been some server issues as well as queues.

And god help you if your logged into a "full" server when you crash. The game returns you to that server and if you want to switch servers to a less populated one it must first log you out of the "full" server which sends you through some sort of que as well! It took me 15 minutes the other night just to switch servers and about 8 client restarts. (And yes this is the North America version).

I love the game but smoothest launch it is not.

You must have played a different WoW launch, than me. I remember crashing while IN THE FRIGGEN 1 hour queues. I remember a lot of servers had a queue of more than 1 hour, and you COULDN'T clone across to another server. You could only start a new character on a new server. WoW made it, DESPITE horrible bugs.
Please refer here, for issues MONTHS after WoW's release (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2005/1/17/).


Not to mention, once you logged in, the HORRIBLE lag... where your screen would freeze, and entire zones would just die. You could still chat, but your zone was gone, and you would roll back... and that happened OFTEN for a long, LONG time. Hell, WAR's open beta was much more smooth than WoW's launch.

If you are having stuttering problems on Vista, turn off Superfetch:

Steps to disable Superfetch:


1) Open your Control Panel
2) Open Administrative Tools
3) Open Services
4) Find the Superfetch service in the list
5) Right click on the Superfetch service and select Properties
6) Select 'Disabled' from the combo box labeled 'Startup type'
7) Click OK
8) Right click the Superfetch service again and select Stop

[Kweli]

I haven't played every MMO out there but WoW had a smoother release then WAR. WoW had some sever issues but thats pretty much it. I can't walk halfway across a zone without seeing some pretty glaring bugs in WAR. Plus theres been some server issues as well as ques.

Nice try man... I remember looting something, and having to wait 10+ minutes before my character was free to do something else because of the loot lag....
You must have thought Burning Crusade was "WoW launch"

[Primus]

The only bugs I have experienced are animation related and have not really effected my enjoyment of the game. I am really likinging the game, public quests are a really fun way to grind and develop a community. The PvP introduction pretty much out the gate was surprising as well.

I am in a med Order and med Destruction server and I have had no queues to log into the game, but the areas are still bustling with players.

So far so good, and a few months down the line it should just get better. I do not see myself buying Lich King.

[Klade]

Nice try man... I remember looting something, and having to wait 10+ minutes before my character was free to do something else because of the loot lag....
You must have thought Burning Crusade was "WoW launch"

Actually I was in the WoW open beta then played again at release for... golly at least a year. I canceled a few months before Burning Crusade only to bring my account back up again a month after Burning Crusade was released.

I didn't have nearly as many problems with WoW's beta as the above poster described. I never had a login que in WoW but then again I wasn't trying to play on the most popular server I could find. In the few years I've been playing WoW I think its crashed to desktop only a dozen times total. Maybe thats just my particular combination of hardware but it ran great for me. My only issues were server side. I did have that waiting to loot bug of course but it was pretty sporadic, I usually would only see it about once every 6 hours of play time on average I would guess.

Compare that to WAR where when I login I may or may not be where I logged out, I may or may not get immediately stuck on a pebble in the ground. I will absolutely see people running up hills, disappearing at the top then reappearing at the bottom to run up the hill again, over and over.

[Kweli]

Compare that to WAR where when I login I may or may not be where I logged out, I may or may not get immediately stuck on a pebble in the ground. I will absolutely see people running up hills, disappearing at the top then reappearing at the bottom to run up the hill again, over and over.
wow, we had opposite experiences with BOTH games...

[Borthcollective]

Compare that to WAR where when I login I may or may not be where I logged out, I may or may not get immediately stuck on a pebble in the ground. I will absolutely see people running up hills, disappearing at the top then reappearing at the bottom to run up the hill again, over and over.

The more I hear of other people's experiences the more I know it's the same old crew at Mythic that were shit poor programmers back in DAOC's day.

[Rifter]

The more I hear of other people's experiences the more I know it's the same old crew at Mythic that were shit poor programmers back in DAOC's day.

I'd like to point out, it is what... 10 to 1 versus his descriptions. I agree, it IS Mythic... and there are some minor issues... but nothing like DAoC as far as I can see, and for the most part, the lagging animation is odd, but I don't see it THAT much. I find the game itself, rather polished and solid. Klade is definatley not playing the same game I am... nor did he play the same WoW I played, at launch.

[karak]

wow, we had opposite experiences with BOTH games...
Ditto for my group. We played the 8 of us and it seemed to work really well. Can't say we had any issues.

[TyphoidMarty]

I had way more problems at WoW launch than with WAR. Knock on wood, no crashes to desktop so far and generally very little lag.. though occasionally stuttering animations make me wonder if my NVidia 9600GT is a little long in the tooth.

When WoW launched I was not on a heavily populated server and I experienced a lot of lag, zone resets, enemies gliches - hell even looting was a chore. Heck I remember PA revoking their christmas award and agreeing completely.

I am looking forward to seeing what WAR becomes.

[AlwaysOn222]

Maybe the US launch was smooth but the EU launch was anything but smooth thanks to the evil that is GOA. Server wait time 1 hour + and you could dissconnect while waiting and guess what you get back in line for more waiting!! If you could get in to the game there was crashes ingame and memory leaks and various bugs. Imo they released it way to soon it should have been released early next year instead. But I guess they wanted some of the holiday sales before the release of WOTLK.

[Drayven]

I think some people are really forgetting just how bad the WoW release was. You say you can't walk halfway across a zone without seeing bugs (i'm curious as to what bugs those are btw) but at least in WAR after walking halfway across that zone you don't get rubber banded back to where you started ;) The WoW release had alot of lag and server instability. So far WAR has had a few CTDs and some mob pathing issues but really nothing devastating. As far as MMO releases go it's the smoothest I've experienced.

[MasterEvilAce]

Last night we tried to take a battlefield objective and failed because the objective count reset and none of the objective objects respawned to get the count up.

Today tried to take a keep, many problems, we failed due to glitches..
Went to a different keep, different area and failed again.. different glitches.

PVE seems fine.. PVP seems buggy as all

[sparkfizt]

The game has a wide variety of technical issues that you never saw in WoW. WoW had it's headache for the first few days of launch but then healed up pretty nicely. The biggest issue I think warhammer has against it is polish, there's bugs everywhere if you just look. Most of them are fairly minor (except for us that cant run the game) the next month will tell if this game will succeed or end up exploding AoC style (i personally doubt explosion)

[vallor]

WoW launch was terrible. Even on the mildly populated server I was on at the time the loot lag was awful.

And how can anyone not remember this? http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html

WAR has it's warts but outside of the inability of their retail partners to get copies to pre-order clients before they turned off the headstart the launch seems to have good smoothly. I know 4 people still waiting on their amazon order which tracking show in the midwest distro centers still.

Lag has been mostly OK with most of the problems I've seen being with the client/server prediction. Server up time is very good.

I wish I could say the same for the gameplay; bugs do abound though nothing I'd call a show stopper. Outside of the simply weird things (one of my characters gets randomly flagged for RVR even when he's by himself in the middle of nowhere) there are a metric ton of things that make the actually process of playing painful. Order is universally outnumbered making open RVR a retarded zerg fest that order can't possibly compete with.

While you can move to other starting zones many players won't (I had no idea how to move when I started) the starting classes in a race aren't as well balanced as they could be. Some races are lucky enough to be pure class heavy while others are often a mix of hybrid classes. For example empire doesn't have a pure tank or healer which gives the chaos side a huge advantage in the beginning.

Anyway, there are a LOT of things that bother me during the course of playing (who designed that stupid crafting interface?! Who thought not having a "social" icon in the menu bar was a good idea?) and there are bugs.

But it didn't stop me from playing for the better parts of saturday or sunday.

[bean19]

Last night we tried to take a battlefield objective and failed because the objective count reset and none of the objective objects respawned to get the count up.

Today tried to take a keep, many problems, we failed due to glitches..
Went to a different keep, different area and failed again.. different glitches.

PVE seems fine.. PVP seems buggy as all

Are you on an extremely high population server? I've played a LOT both pre-release and post-release and I've never encountered these bugs. I would be pissed if they were present, and I'm so glad they are not.

[vallor]

The game has a wide variety of technical issues that you never saw in WoW. WoW had it's headache for the first few days of launch but then healed up pretty nicely.

There are people blizzard that would disagree with the "few days" statement. Mostly the network engineers and programmers that didn't get a day off from Thanksgiving till pretty much Easter because they couldn't keep the servers plowing along.

The problems with WoW connectivity really didn't go away for over a year past launch, and even then they still cropped up frequently that the entire networking team kept their pagers.

On the brightside, once in game the few bugs that didn't get polished out were rarely distracting enough to squash the joy you got from the servers staying up.

[lockwoodx]

All servers down day after start, crashes to desktop, random lag, 2 RP servers, yep smooth start.

Oh you bought age of conan too?

[sparkfizt]

There are people blizzard that would disagree with the "few days" statement. Mostly the network engineers and programmers that didn't get a day off from Thanksgiving till pretty much Easter because they couldn't keep the servers plowing along.

The problems with WoW connectivity really didn't go away for over a year past launch, and even then they still cropped up frequently that the entire networking team kept their pagers.

On the brightside, once in game the few bugs that didn't get polished out were rarely distracting enough to squash the joy you got from the servers staying up.

Yeah I feel like I have to give WoW some degree of leniency for the server issues at launch. They printed roughly 200k copies and expected so sell through those boxes in 6-12 months. Instead every box sold within 2 weeks, this completely floored the servers they had prepared for launch because they did'nt have the capacity for the 200k players. This is of course all their fault, but understandable considering large MMO's at the time (in the US) were what, 400-500k players?

I have trouble really remembering how rough things were since for the last 3 years WoW has been completely rock solid. I cant remember the last time my client crashed, and I've seen my server asplode like twice in the last year.

I expect a lot of the blizzard rememberances are through rose tinted goggles, since it was a lot of fun and relatively bug free once you made it past the crashing and queues.

[MasterEvilAce]

Are you on an extremely high population server? I've played a LOT both pre-release and post-release and I've never encountered these bugs. I would be pissed if they were present, and I'm so glad they are not.

Yeah :-/ ... Badlands... as I hear it we're the worst next to Skull Throne, which was our original decision

[Micasa]

Yeah I feel like I have to give WoW some degree of leniency for the server issues at launch. They printed roughly 200k copies and expected so sell through those boxes in 6-12 months.

They had record numbers for their beta and record numbers of pre-orders. They don't get cut any slack for underestimating demand after doing it TWICE before the game came out.

[Rune_74]

No problems whatsoever...oh wait one of the of the quests was bugged for an open quest it sort of reset halfway through but worked the next 5 times no problems.

Game is a ton of fun:)

[sparkfizt]

Found an interview where blizzard discussed how the demand outstripped expectations. Keep in mind when WoW launched against EQ2 the prevailing attitude was that EQ2 would trounce it. They then proceeded to be the over 9000lb gorilla in a month.


Paul Sams: Well, I think with North America, because that was our first market, we expected that there were going to be some challenges - and there really were. I mean, in a matter of a week, maybe even less, we hit our year one numbers for North America, that we had planned for. I shouldn't say 'planned for' from the perspective that we didn't have additional capacity, but rather that as part of any business, you build your P&Ls [Profit and Loss - Ed], you build your plans, you make your hardware purchases and you do all the different things necessary to be ready. Our first weekend numbers were so gigantic - and our first week and our first month, for that matter - that it... I don't want to say that it took us by surprise, but in some respects it really did. We expected for large numbers of people, just not that fast. We were able to respond and provide additional hardware very quickly, because we had another full datacentre ready to light, so we were able to do that and to get the capacity up.

We were also very careful about the amount of software we put in the channel, not only in North America but also in Europe. As you mentioned, there have been some out of stock challenges. Those out of stock challenges are based on the fact that we're only putting a certain amount of product in the channel, the idea being that we don't ever put too much into the channel where we don't have enough capacity to support that. The worst thing we could do is to go and ask for customers to pay us some of their hard earned money, and then for them not to be able to connect.

There have been times where there have been some queues here and there, and that's been because concurrency was, on a percentage basis, higher than is normal. In doing the whole planning process, we had to look at historical data from other companies. We looked at what their typical concurrency was as a percentage of their overall subscribership, we used all those things - we kind of padded those a bit, and we also looked at historical sales trends... We did all the different things that intelligent businesspeople would do to effectively plan for such a launch. The challenge is that the demand was so much greater than any other company had experienced, not to mention beyond the padding that we put on top of that.

We said, okay, let's for the sake of planning just assume that from a numbers perspective, it's equal to the biggest thing out there. Then let's add to it, and say let's be ready for more. Well, when you do that, and you still have demand that outpaces that... [laughs] That's challenging! And so we've had to work very hard to deal with that. It's a high-class problem, but a problem nonetheless, and it's required a lot of sleepless nights by all of us, working around the clock to make sure that we properly support the customers.

We've done it pretty well in some respects, and in other respects we've gotten our bumps and bruises - but I think that many of the challenges that we've faced are things that have been solved, or are in the process of being solved, or we now know how to solve them. I think the stability from the server perspective is much better in each of the territories - there were a couple of server stability problems we were having with some of the code, which was a problem we were having a hard time finding, but we've identified that and as a result, stability is much better. It's such a complex system, and there are so many people that are trying to play, that it's very difficult to effectively deal with all of those things, all the while trying to give people a positive experience while we're trying to fix those things.

I think we've done a relatively good job. We want to do better than we have; we have plans and aspirations and goals to be much better than we already are. I think that we've done a pretty decent job, but I would also say that Blizzard has the desire to be the best in class in the service that we provide and the overall experience. I think we've created a great game, one that personally I like playing better than the other MMORPGs out there, but from a service perspective we have more work to do and I think that we'll get there. It's a commitment from our management that we intend on providing best of class service as well. It's just something that's taking a bit more time than we anticipated because... Well, trying to service that many people is hard!

[Rune_74]

Gotta tell you guys klinging to warcraft....warhammer slays it for fun...I mean there is so much to be had here.

[thomasc]

Guild Wars release was the bestest.

[Returner]

I would say LotRO had a smoother release than WAR.

yup
.....

[Mason]

Keep in mind when WoW launched against EQ2 the prevailing attitude was that EQ2 would trounce it.
Link us to someone that made that argument anywhere outside the SOE forums.

As I remember it, WoW had a freakishly large pre-release community, the WoW beta was already dominating the MMO landscape months before release, and nobody could get past how boring and plasticky EQ2 looked in comparison.

I'll buy that Blizzard underestimated demand, but let's not rewrite history.