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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..
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...
The first evening went about as well as the first afternoon. It went nowhere. I picked up the game at about 10:15 am EST and proceeded home to wait for the servers to go live at 11. The sub servers were slammed and their little built in browser applet was a P.O.S. The forums were filled with posts to put the link in a regular browser so that you could go back and refresh but that didn't help other than to let you see two or three different screens rather than the same error screen over and over. Then everyone kept screaming Mozilla. Some folks had better luck with it but they were few and far between. Fast forward 9 hrs, 50 games of Counter-Strike, 2 hrs of Diablo II and 5 chapters in the new Harry Potter book and I finally was able to give them my credit card number, hooray :-(! I managed to get in two 20 minute sessions that basically consisted of me running around a huge city emoting "Where the hell do I go now?" Both of these sessions were on different servers and both were cut short due to disconnects. They say that they're going to give us yesterday free and not count it on our subscription. Should they even need to say this? I think not! The database problem that is causing the problems now might not have been forseen, but the subscription issue is just retarded. If I'm supposed to get a free month for buying the game, why can't I just use that? If I haven't forked over some loot for a subscription by the end of the 30 days, lock the damn acct! Either that or implement a presubscription page a month before the game comes out to eliminate the initial problem. Anyway, 24 hrs into the SWG experience and I have to say I'm having a lot more fun with C-S and D2.