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Anarchy Online - The Perils Of Pushing Products
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.
This happened to Sierra and Dynamix and Tribes2.
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.
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.
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
Thoughts on a Fortnight
Funcom: Playability / Puff Out Your Chest (not a flame)
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. 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.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
...it's very likely that Garriot's game will borrow a lot of internal code ideas from UO, and THAT will be its downfall.
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
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
--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
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
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
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
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, which is just starting to enter beta. Neocron looks like it's going to be a lot better than AO.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
There are three problems that I have been having that I consider inexcusable.
.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.
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
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.
-Frijoles-
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.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
Its a bit obvious that you're an AOL user. ;)
.. 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.
:)
You know
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.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
When I join a beta and I am accepted into it. I expect to be able to actually beta test the game, yes.
.. well so fucking what?
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
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.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
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.
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.
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.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Well everything you read here is true.. sadly to say.
... 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.
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
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!"
Apparently, they have publically appologized 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!
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Naked.
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.
Naked.
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.
Naked.
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.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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.
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.
-There are only soldiers, and men who wish they were soldiers.
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
---
I support spreading santorum
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.
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 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.
More Caffeine. NOW
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
Remember it, write it down, take a picture, I dont give a fsck!
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.
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".
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.
---
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).
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Releasing something as unpredictably huge as a massively-multiplayer roleplaying game is a horribly complicated affair. Suddenly, resources get slammed with not twice, not triple, but orders of magnitude more demands. And while I'm sure many network and software engineers would sneer and say they could manage theoretical scalability problems of this order easily, they either lying to themselves or not going to work for these companies.
The only MMRPG launce without massive problems on this scale was Asheron's Call, which had such lackluster sales, that they didn't have the same scaling problems.
I knew as soon as soon such a hotly-demanded game like Anarchy Online came out that tons of idiots would expect a bug-free game, when not even online game makers can provide such these days, and then bemoan about how horrible the company is working to fix *their* problem *NOW*.
I've have been trying to play AO since it started, and in just a week, they fixed a whole heck of a lot, and in the next few weeks, I expect them to fix more. When EQ launched, it was horrendously worse than AO is now.
...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.
There are articles here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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
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.
[
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 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.
[
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.
First 3 days? I don't know what EQ YOU were playing...Mine was down for around a week. EQ was doing HORRIBLE at launch. Not much better than AO, in fact. EQ was worse in my opinion. In AO only a few of the zones have problems, most zoens are fine. In EQ....every zone had problems. FNF (Beta 3)
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
I have NO idea who you talked to. But FC made NO significant changes to their netcode since B3.
Your Beta 4 CD? Beta 4 wasn't on a CD...were you even IN the beta?
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
FC NEVER said 110% playable. They said 110% sure that the billing system worked right.
The reason they took the press release down was jerks misquoting it.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
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'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yeah, Blizzard games are pretty tight as far as release goes, which is why I've never had an issue with buying them on the day of release. As a consumer, its not my problem if the company can't get their shit together and release a working product, except that I would piss away a decent chunk of change by doing so. There are plenty of apps which work fine out of the gate, so I'm certainly not going to break out the violins for a company that got in over their heads.
On a side note, I won't be buying any more Blizzard games, or any other games which require the CD to be in the drive. Diablo II instaled fine but just kept bitching about the CD being in the drive when I tried to run it, even when I switched the 8x in that computer for a newer 32x. I finally had to borrow my friend's 24x just to get the damned game to start. Eventually I found a CD crack, but I can't play online when I use it. I'll be damned if I'm going to give money to these friggin idiots who create games that can only be enjoyed off the bat by pirates who easily circumvent the protections that fuck the legitamate users. To any game developers who might be reading: what is the point of these stupid protection schemes which don't work and have never worked, other than to piss those of us off who actually want to pay for what we use and not require installing files created by some anonymous cracker? I have over 600 CDs, so it really sucks to have to go dig up a friggin CD just to play a quick game of Unreal Tournament before work. I just don't get it.
Deosyne
For an example of this, just head over to 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.
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.
- 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.Sorry, I didn't quite catch that. You sound a little muffled when you're bending over for game companies like that.
"I only spent $50! Why the hell should I get something that works as advertised for only $50?"
That's the reason game publishers are getting away with this sort of nonsense.
-Legion
-Legion
Along with gazillion other users I got an email that I was now accepted as a beta4 tester. It took me 10 days to finally get the CD from BURNADISC. The delivery can be made faster, but I didn't feel like burning more than $10 just for being a beta tester.
/., there is a norwegian law that you can RETURN FOR A FULL REFUND anything you buy, as long as it's not over counter in a store (varying from 10 days to 3 months after purchase if you never received an obligatory refund-note). You don't even have to tell why! Don't support buggy software any longer! Repeat after me: It's NOT your fault you bought buggy software. They're not your bugs, and you should demand quality from your purchases. Return buggy software products NOW.
Well, after those 10 days they had gone Gold. Wow. Utter sleaziness from their part is it not? I guess they went out of cash, unless they really LIKE shooting themselves in the foot. Why did they send the email in the first place? I had no real chance at becoming a beta tester at all. I just wanted to try it out, see what it was.
For those who actually bought this product: As I've mentioned earlier on
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Is that after the first couple of days... FUNCOM deemed it not playable... therefore they stopped the 1st month's subscription(which is included in the price of the product) till they said the game was 110% playable... this was basicly a press release from their OFFICIAL site. Funny thing is... and you'll like this... FUNCOM deemed the game playable, started the first month subscription AND TOOK DOWN THE PRESS RELEASE that said they wouldn't start the first month subscription till deemed 110% playable. Now as this is funny from the outside... it's not funny when you just shelled out 50 bucks for the game and the first month(which if you cancel your out 50 bucks) and here's the kicker... THERE ISN'T A WAY TO CANCEL(STILL)... and until a week after the game was out... you had to subscribe with a valid credit card thru their website... which wasn't secure(another minor oversight). When you go into a store to buy a game, you usually expect it to atleast work if you meet the requirements on the box. So I guess FUNCOM has gone against the grain... instead of paying or allowing free play for it's beta testers, they're now accepting $50 and 12.95 a month for you to test their product... without saying it's a beta...
in case anyone cares Graeme basicly starts off by saying "hey, i'm really good at this stuff, i think you did it wronge" and then goes into a subjective analysis of how he thinks the game works followed by slamming them for using TCP instead of UDP.
Personally i'm unsure of the TCP/UDP problem. after i read his plan i researched TCP loads on servers and found that many OS's can not handle more then 10k simutainus TCP sessions, still it seems that with the right load balencing it wouldn't be a problem.
For instance in AO there are hard zones. hard zones could be server transfers, if it is a phisical server transfer then you could be able to scale per server. it is very safe to say you won't have more then 10k people in one zone at a time, which would seem to make the UDP TCP discussion pointless. If there was only one phyiscal server for the intire game i could see the problem. if routers couldn't handle the traffic i could see the problem (btw there routers did have some major problems the first few days). Seeing that you can scale it by zone i really don't see the issue.
Also if one was to do UDP, wouldn't you have to put some type of sequencing and error correction yourself? - much like how RPC does if it goes over UDP? i can understand them not wanting to buffer the data (Nagle algrythim i belive) however you can turn that off.
so whats the problem with TCP?
-Jon
this is my sig.
Maybe id is feeling left out of the spotlight?
I ate my sig.
AO is pretty buggy, I'd admit that straight up. But, I've gotten in 8hr blocks of constant play a t times (don't ask about my current job situation unless youre making an offer ;| )
I was crashing quite a bit at first. 3 MB bios changes later (one i had when AO came out, did the latest, then downgraded) along with 4 videocard driver changes for my Geforce2 MX (someone suggested a downgrade to 10.40 which failed, going up to 12.90 didn't work, but 12.60 did)
The point of all this? I had to play with things quite a bit to get it working. And anyone who even glanced at the forums would have realized this was going to be the case.
Don't have the time to do what I did? Not happy with how things have been going? Drop out then. Wait for it to get stable.
I thought it was ironic that one of the id croud was making comments on what Funcom could do better... Since I never got Q3 stable on my system!! And yes I tried tweaking $#!^ to hell and back trying to make it work.
I am not recommending this game to any of my working friends... but all you .com dropouts are another story.
This game is amazingly beautiful at times... like when you've finished a night of team hunting and everyone just sits there talking about random stuff as a virtual sun or two rises in the background. Or when you zoom all the way out and see the spires of Rome.
And not to mention amazingly funny, like when it starts raining ingame and you hear people commenting about forgetting their umbrellas or jackets... or the other day waiting for groups to form at the bridge on Arthurs Pass, where someone shouts out "who brought the marshmellows?!". And where else can you watch the silliness of primarily grown adults typing /disco over and over?
Come on people! You're paying $8 for a crappy movie here in the land of rising gas prices... $12.95 a month is nothing! Compared to the amount of enjoyment for my dollar doing most other things... AO is a pretty damn good deal.
I ate my sig.
Now, I'm just grasping at straws, here, but I am fairly sure I understand why Funcom rushed Anarchy Online out the door, and, while it does frustrate me to no end, I am somewhat willing to accept the rationale.
/still/ boycotting Activision for a lot of their idiotic marketing decisions.
As anyone in the field is well aware, Venture Capital money has pretty much run dry for all but the most obviously successful startups. Funcom's upper management probably saw the status reports of Anarchy Online, during its Beta, and decided to release Anarchy Online, at its current state of RAM thirst, illogical combat physics and anemic servers, because they were most likely running short of money.
By selling off a hundred thousand units of a $49.00 game, they bought themselves time to fix all these bugs, instead of going insolvent and being snatched up by some larger organization, like Microsoft or Activision, which, in the gaming industry today, is a fate worse than death. I'm
Yes, it drives me nuts to have a copy of Anarchy Online on my hard drive, when playing it is a ticklish amalgation of crashes, bizarre bugs and rather good gameplay. When the game works, and the servers aren't lagged, and when I have the resolution up high enough that the interface doesn't give me tunnel vision, it is probably the best MMORPG out there, and the first commercial online game that actually has game mechanics complex enough to hold my attention for a while, if you exclude The Eternal City.
So, have some sympathy for the poor devils, and ease off.. They're patching as fast as they can.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
I love both PCs and Consoles and I really don't see them competing against each other for my money or attention. Of course I'm broke because of it, but that's another story.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
- OS's: many versions of Red Hat Linux and Windows have sucked ass the moment they came out, only to be patched later.
- Cars: When the Dodge/Plymouth Neon came out several years ago my wife looked into buying one. The consensus amongst car experts was that it is UNKNOWN whether the Neon will turn out to be a reliable car. Cars models that have been out for a while have a track record. Buy an accord if you want reliability. If you want a model that has no track record, then you may not get something reliable in the long run.
- Hardware: How many video cards have we seen get released with horrible drivers that were buggy as hell?
The solution here is to not buy the game the moment it comes out if you want reliable. Do buy it if:- You want to be a part of something from day one.
- You want a relatively high level character in the community.
- You want to be a part of the formative process in making the game better.
- You like to live on the bleeding edge.
This game is working as intended....from idsoftware, check to see what he has to say..:
http://www.webdog.org/plans/279/
This paid my last vacation, it mi
I admit that AO's launch was extremely premature, but 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. They've reduced lag and disconnects by a heck of a lot, although not as much as they claim imo, and have fixed numerous bugs that were plaguing initial release. At least for me, it seems that AO is on the way to becoming a great game.
Too bad the initial bad PR might end up killing them.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Why is it I always have mod points every time I log in to slashdot, except for today?
-------
Username taken, please choose another one.
still, harley has no problem selling every bike they can make despite the time delays and the quadrupled prices. it says a lot about the quality of their product dont you think?
It says much more about what their product is. No rational person on earth would claim that a Harley motorcycle is technically superiour or of higher quality than the upper-end models in the Honda product line. Harleys have become infinitely better in the last 15-20 years, but they're still no match for a good Honda.
Of course, that just means that only a fool buys a Harley because he thinks it's a good motorcycle. A perfectly rational person buys a Harley knowing he's not paying for the bike, but for something else. Like Nike, or DeBeers, or Coca Cola, Harley has been incredibly successful at selling that "something else" for a number of years, and I respect them for that.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
"The AO forums are filling up with negative posts (which are then apparently being deleted by moderators)"
.Plan... ;)
.plan update, before listing four major problems with the game, to be read by thousands and thousands of hardcore gamers who consider id, well, divine. Oops. :)
Of course, if you're an employee for a major game developer you can just leverage the Power of the
"I'm posting here because my posts to the Anarachy Online Community board get deleted," Graeme Devine writes in his latest
Just think about it: With a console, you CAN'T issure patches for a game.
This is true today, but probably not tomorrow. The birth of having broadband on your console box is an open invitation to gaming companies to sell the game quickly, because they can always patch it if necessary. But we all know that this is a serious problem with the software industry to date. Its business pushing software too far. But, alas, I digress...
--
"That's one small step for man..." "STOP POKING ME!!!!"
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
But in fairness to PC programmers, Console programmers have a specific platform with specific specs to program (and debug). With PCs, you need to support a very wide range of hardware/drivers etc. I would guess that AO might have been more stable if they could have said everyone needs video card X with driver Y running on operating system Z etc. But I would assume that most people would be against that.
LOL - Yeah i know it does get in the way, but I have two kids (one only 16 months old) and I am Director of Internet Solutions at a mid sized company, work 45-50 hours a week and spend another 10 hours driving back and forth...you obviously sleep too much...keep your sleep down to 4-5 hours and you too can play 4 hours a day :-)
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
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...It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
Out of curiousity, is anyone aware of any reviewers who've actually said they're going to wait to review it?
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.
sounds like Funcom didn't really listen to their beta testers, when they said there were networking problems...
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I beta tested Anarchy Online for about 5 months. About 3 weeks ago, an electrical fire knocked out my computer via a nasty surge. After getting a new motherboard and such I tried to log into AO and play, but couldn't because it had been released and my account wasn't active anymore.
:)
WTF were they thinking!? The servers were barely keeping up with the beta testers. The game was very laggy at times, the chase camera likes to get stuck in corners and people's crotches.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good game, but I'm getting sick of overblown budgets causing good ideas to fail.
Personally, I think they should fund game companies like the Japanese reusable rocket space programs.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Yeah, but unfortunately this doesn't necessarily result in sturdy console games, but rather buggy games that _really_ piss people off.
I'll stick to a PC for gaming. Except for Grand Tourismo 3!
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
Actually, coincidentally when their game servers would go down their webservers would crash as well. Maybe it was a router thing, but I kinda doubt it. Maybe their webservers are sleeping with the game servers I dunno.
"Stop saying 'Don't quote me' because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying" -KMFDM
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.
"Stop saying 'Don't quote me' because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying" -KMFDM
Funcom have demonstrated that in keeping with the history of MMORPGs, it is not possible within the current economic model of game development to ship a complete working game. Every MMORPG has been plagued with a disastrous launch, and each one has had to spend its first months trying to get the code into shape, and the game balanced.
The reasons for this are many, but the first is simple. MMORPGs are extremely complex, and the cost involved in developing one are higher than game companies are willing to invest. The rest is more complex. The scale on which they operate is certainly an issue. It is obviously really hard to accuratly test how the servers, and ultimatly the clients are going to behave once the system is loaded up with tens of thousands of players. You can try and simulate it all you like, but you can't be sure that the simulated players are behving anything like real ones would. There is only a very limited extent to which you can predict the behavoir of crackers, but we all know that they will be there. From those intent on getting that extra bit out of the game by finding loopholes in the system, to those who want to try and bring the servers down by any means at their disposal.
Now I come to the WorldForge bit. This is an area where I think Free Software or Open Source can really work. By developing a system under constant scrutiny we can ensure that the technology is resistant to crackers and cheaters by design, and bugs in fundamental code can be eliminated early on. By releasing very early code as simple games, like our Acorn effort, accurate metrics can be obtained on how well the code scales, and directions which don't scale can be abandoned early on. But one of the greatest gifts we can bring here is patience. We really can keep on working on this until it really is ready. We don't have to promise ship dates, or meet the demands of the marketing department.
By building a generic system, and careful use if licensing we are creating software that real game companies can use to generate real revenue, without the enormous expense of developing and testing a huge codebase on their own. Who knows, maybe one day most MMORPGs will have the WorldForge logo in corner.
For example, Twisted Metal: Black (PS2) hasn't crashed on me and required a system restart nor have I fallen through the bottom of the screen and fallen through "magic 3d space" on the Tokyo Megaplex level in SSX (PS2)
what's more, I certainly am glad that there are no bugs in console games because unlike with a PC I would have no way of updating the software in the event of a bug.
What annoys me is that the whiners focus on the short-term technical problems, when the important thing is the game design itself. The technical problems get sorted out, but if the game design is poor, then it's wrecked forever. Personally I like what they've done with the design.
If people want space-shuttle class software that works flawlesly first time, they'd have to pay a great deal more than $50.
Ok, I have been playing now since it opened the other Thursday, and it is really a beautiful game. When it is up, I have really had a lot of fun on it, unfortunately thats the downside right now. They apparently didn't plan nearly well enough for the number of people who would be on the game, and now are paying the price for it. The other problem is issues with the mission generators issuing missions where the target you are supposed to assassinate never does pop, or you are unable to actually enter the building that the target you are after is actually in (Playshifting failed error..).
That said, I have actually gotten in some game play. I have gotten the first set of bars in Omni-Tek and am rising through the corporation I guess. The entire concept of Omni-Tek versus the Clans, etc.. is a great concept, and just the fact that I can build cyborg implants into a character, run nanoprograms, and eventually access the grid through my computer programming skills is enough to keep me around on the game just to see what it is like. I bought Everquest and was there the first day, and I suffered through the ups and downs of it in a similar way. I stuck around there off and on for almost 2 years, and I'll probably be this one for the time to come. The somethingawful site is feeling the effects of Slashdot, so I'm unable to check that article out, but I figure you always have to give these games time. Anyway, they haven't actually started charging us yet for our monthly fee, or the original free month, so its all good!
bbh
I have been playing AO since Beta 4. Before that they had a NDA. I must say, that I've been playing it, as difficult as it may be at times, and it has improved greatly. Granted I am upset that they released it in the shape they did, but they didn't start the free month until 3 days ago. They kept the customers in the loop of what's been going on, so that's another plus for them. I am sure they'll pull it off, and pull it off well.
I was accepted for beta 4 of AO and was disappointed to find that my CD did not work, and that I would not be able to play the game after I was told the CD key issue would be fixed.
I did some reasearch, some calls to Funcom, and finally got a hold of a Funcom employee on IRC.
What he/she told me was unbelieveable. They had shipped CDs with invalid CD keys for the final product, made horrible changes that involved new net code that they were fully aware would not support even a third of the users who had pre-ordered the game, and other info.
I posted this info on their forums and got flamed into oblivion by current users in the beta saying that I was just upset and trying to make Funcom look bad cause I didn't get in the beta.
Well, oddly enough, I was also planning a review for the game and wasn't able to make one. I guess it was one positive review they didn't get.
Oh, and last I saw of the users that flamed me, they were on the AO forums complaining about not being able to play.
Dare I say "I warned you!"?
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.
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But, by reading all these posts, it seems to me that the vendor has actually suceeded in creating some Anarchy Online.
(Or, at least some Online Anarchy...)
For not releasing the GNU/Linux client alongside the Windows version :-).
StarTux
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....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
You'll have to forgive my ignorance but I've never studied economics/management etc.
Just one question: Why do companies hype games so much MONTHS before they're released, and in some cases (it seems) MONTHS before the programmers even have a plan.
What do companies gain out of this? Investment....I doubt it.
Advertising....nope, that costs money rather than making it.
Product placement is the only thing I can see as an advantage of MASSIVELY EARLY hyping, but then when the game goes sorely wrong and things go belly-up for the company they need to do some maths:
Profit (from idiots who bought a buggy product) - advertising costs (for stupidly hyping the game too early) and salaries etc.
So in most cases, this type of business scheme should lose money and should be avoided at all costs. Isn't that the type of thing that managers should know?
But then again, I never studied economics or management.
-Nano.
Well, maybe AO still has a chance...Ultima Onlina opened with a huge amount of bugs, and is still played fervently today. To a lesser extent, Everquest had a few early problems, but not as bad as this. Which begs the question: Did they run out of money and need to sell games to keep everything going? This doesn't sound liek something I'd like to put my money into...
Fuck, even in the future nothin' works!
I've been having similar thoughts ever since WWIIO and AO were released, and with the HD and network additions to upcoming consoles... but you have to keep in mind that console developers know exactly what type of hardware the game is going to be run on. If you release a buggy product, you can't really blame it on hardware issues!
Even if they could issue patches, the fact that you had to release a patch for a game you designed to work on one very specific hardware design is not a good sign!
Of course, I have a feeling (and common sense would seem to indicate!) that these problems are more marketing related than developer related, and I have little doubt in my mind that we can look forward to many buggy releases for consoles as they become more "updateable". Oh well.
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.
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.
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People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
- Leave the cities
- venture out to the countryside
- hunt. HUNT?!
- level?
You have definitely saved me some bux. If a game says it is sci-fi, I expect to damn well pick up and leave the stinking planet, not go on a squirrel hunting expedition. I suppose I could live with the leveling bit, though to my mind, Chaosium's 2nd edition Runequest was the ultimate RPG - and it didn't need no steenking levels.You either believe in rational thought or you don't
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
That's exactly what the problem is with AO. They know that releasing a finished product will result in poor sales because it is so late.
Is your company running tools written by ma
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).
Is your company running tools written by ma
Did anyone PLAY Asheron's Call when it was released? Heck, has anyone played it SINCE it was released?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
"This does not bode well for earlier adopters of Windows XP."
Probably not. But perhaps they will get used to all the instability, crashes, and GPFs.
Oh wait, they have all that now. So where is all this innovation that I keep hearing about?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
I will never again buy a game right after it comes out. I's only buys games that have been out for a minimum of three months. I learned my lesson after buying Tribes 2 and B&W for $50 a pop. $100+ poorer and I still had spare time on my hands? Unacceptable!
http://www.starwarsgalaxies.com
Mark
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
True there are serious flaws in the game called Anarchy Online, however, it is perfectly playable for the people who have some sort of common sense. All you have to do is go AWAY from the cities where 1000+ players are standing in a ring and shouting "where? who? what? I am clueless!", if the game was as bad as you lot claim it to be, how can people be level 40+ already then? I have played 12+ hours in one session without crashing, and being an old mudder, that is not bad in any sense. That said; Anarchy Online was released too early, I think all programmers here know about salespersons versus programmers in software houses. One would think you lot know this.
Here we have a "software-as-a-service" model that is releasing software without fully testing it because it is believed that the final development and bug killing can take place in the field.
This does not bode well for earlier adopters of Windows XP.
-1 X -1 = +1 is stupid and evil. --Gene Ray
There is a definate client side memory leak. The client likes to use all 512MB's of ram in my box over the course of about two hours, then it swaps to disk like crazy and the game freezes, crashes to desktop and then you wait 5 minutes for the OS to release the memory. Now, this isn't just my experience, I've witnessed this process on two of my friends computers also, we all have differant hardware, and differant software configs yet we all have the same problem. The bigger problem with this is that Funcom's public message from the devs yesterday stated that they don't see a memory leak. If you your going to use your player base as beta testers you should probably listen to them, which doesn't seem to be happening. Speaking as both a gamer and as someone in the game industry who has worked in QA: If they say they don't see a leak, then they probably don't. Even if the problem is very common among your circle, that doesn't mean that it's easy for the dev team to reproduce, and without reproducing it, it's hard to find exactly where the problem is. When I was in QA, I sometimes spent several days of work trying to reproduce particularly elusive problems. Even with detailed user reports of how they can reproduce the problem, there's no guarantee that it will happen on the machine that the company tries to reproduce it on. Sadly, it's just not practical to send a programmer with a debug kit over to actual users' houses to find that sort of problem. That said, there are professional debugging tools and methods which should have been able to find and/or prevent these problems. Like all the big MMORPGs to date, AO has shipped in what I would call an un-shippable state.
Patching a console game is a far more difficult prospect. One, you would need a device similar to a Gameshark to actually implement the patch at boot time. Two, you'd have to find a way to make the patch match up with the code's internal checksum (if any-- I know Zelda 64 and Zelda: MM used encryption to protect the code). Finally, you'd have to have a permanent storage (i.e. not a memory card) medium for the patch to be stored on-- for XBox it's not a problem, but GC doesn't offer permanent storage, and PS2's HD is optional; without shelling out the $$ for the HD, the buggy game is near useless.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. and as for that .... if u could log on to AO's servers u will be lucky if u don't get kicked out within 5min....
SuX for U .. ...--||--..To Many BuGs To litTle TimE..--||--...
"Well, if you don't want your relatives and friends to die, help me spread the news." -Alex Chiu
I've seen plenty of posts on this subject implying that MMORPG's are not ready for prime time. I just wanted to point out that one or two 'failures' (AO / WWII) does not mean that there aren't plenty of other successful titles out there. 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.
There are very few real things in this world...this isn't one of them.
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.