Star Wars Galaxies Technical Difficulties

Thanks to several readers for pointing to a SWGalaxies.net post summarizing the multiple technical difficulties on both registration and game servers for the PC MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, which launched within the last few hours. The registration servers were down or extremely slow through the afternoon of the 26th, and official word was "..a combination of hardware failures and some other unforeseen technical problems resulted in a severe load on the registration servers." These issues were resolved later on the 26th, and many were able to register their characters, but unfortunately all of the game servers are currently (11.30PM PST) down, as Sony "..found a serious problem with our database that is being worked on as we speak." We'd recommend watching the official site for more information as it happens..

Comments

This makes me happy

[Mortanius]

I'm a longtime Anarchy Online player (although I have taken a few vacations, the most recent a 6-month romp), it used to bug me to no end when people would get on the public channels simply to rant and rave over how horrible AO was back in the day (it personally didn't bother me a whole lot, it certainly pissed some people off to no end though) and that SWG was going to be akin to the Second Coming. Seeing SWG fall flat on its face at launch makes me so happy. I know none of the fanboys will equate this at all to the problems that AO (and every other MMOG out there) had in its initial stages, but at least it's a bit of justice for me.

I also glanced over the videos of SWG on one of the larger gaming sites (no clue which it was), I find it hilarious how glamorous they try to make the game look. The video I watched was basically someone running a quest. They talked to a couple people, one NPC (I assume) went with the character while they hunted another NPC down. A big, dramatic firefight ensues. The two NPC's and the PC go at it (read: stand still in the field) with their pistols, while the player's doing all kinds of sweeping moves with the camera and such to try to make the fight more interesting than it was.

There's been a longstanding problem with MMOG's (at least MMORPG's) in that combat is always a pretty central part of the game (tradeskills in some are right up there though, but typically the tradeskills facilitate combat, so it all comes back to that) and it's really pretty difficult to make combat interesting... It's evolved from the early days of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior where you'd have your good guys lined up on one side of the screen and the bad guys lined up on the other side, you tell everyone to ATTACK, sit back, and watch the fun. It really hasn't changed too much since then, either. Sure, it's gotten much prettier and a little more complex in terms of setup, but once your characters start doing their thing, there isn't a whole lot for the player to do. I wait for the day that someone finally comes up with this brilliant idea to really draw the player in to combat... AO at least keeps me somewhat involved since my character sucks enough that when soloing I need to frantically heal myself while trying to keep a constant flow of damage heading towards the object of my frustrations...

So impatient

[AvantLegion]

Typical online RPG birth:

1. Game goes "live".
2. Players flood the servers.
3. Shit breaks.
4. Impatient nerds flood every line of communication with complaints.
5. More shit breaks. The nerds become as problematic as the original tech problems
6. Stuff starts to work again.
7. GOTO 2 (repeat a few times)
8. A month passes, and then the not-so-nerdy players sign up with no problem, and cruise into the game painlessly.

Re:To be expected

[Drunken_Jackass]

So the fact that nothing runs as expected is supposed to be expected? That makes no sense!

Here's the thing. This isn't a first gen MMORPG. This is what, a third generation game? Have they learned nothing from the past failures? I mean, they limited distribution for the first week/month to avoid having a glut of users trying to get on and crash the servers, and it's not like they can't do a little math to figure out how many users they should expect.

This sort of behaviour has become commonplace, and as a result will never be fixed. The sad thing is, they're only hurting their real fan base with crap like this. I guess somewhere someone said, "Well, these are the hardcore guys that have been waiting three years after 2..3..i forget how many delays. They'll do anything to play this game, so we can do whatever we want the first week. They'll still be there."

Piss poor.