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Best RPGs / MMORPGs of 2004
The folks at RPGDot and MMORPGDot always run "game of the year" polls among their readers and staff members to determine the best interactive RPG experiences of the year. They've now run their course, and all the awards have been given out. For RPGs, they have the categories of Best Graphics, Best Sound, Biggest Surprise, Biggest Disappointment, Most Anticipated, Dream Game (mm...Torment 2), Best Console RPG, and Overall Best RPG of the Year. Vampire: Bloodlines, the dark RPG from the late, lamented Troika appears to have garnered many of the top honors. As for Massive Games, the categories included Best Graphics, Best Sound, Biggest Surprise, Biggest Disappointment, Most Anticipated, Dream Game, Best Expansion, and Best MMORPG Overall. World of Warcraft pretty much swept the categories for the genre.
I played EQ for five years, beginning with opening weekend on May? of 1999.
I was there. It started with a bang, was slow, and then they suffered router trouble. They were having 8,000 connections dumped at a time, and then their login server would choke on the big simultaneous volume (that they never expected).
However, it took them only two days to get that issue completely worked out. Then they began a process of increasing bandwidth, server count, and most importantly, backbone connections (adding ATT was the big step).
I know all these details because I was there. And more importantly, Verant actually communicated.
Blizzard, on the other hand, had a hellacious start. It was horrid for the first several days, and despite them adding servers rapidly, their backend db system just couldn't keep up. Everyone was constantly lagging up to several minutes each time they tried to loot something or deal with a quest mob.
This is in stark contrast to the performance of WoW during stress test, which Blizzard touted as being a huge win because of their 500,000 downloads. Then weeks after their public launch failure, they claimed "we never expected to sell so many copies (260,000)". Uh, that stress test wasn't an indication of interest?...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Spent all my mod points earlier today, but another vote for Eve-Online as best MMO.
The other MMOs can't even hold a candle to the complexity of Eve. In terms of economy and PVP they are well ahead the others in their genre. They've come the closest to emulating real life, and still having it be rewarding and fun without the traditional level grind.
Several months ago, Eve online posted an article describing the server cluster used to run the game. I can't find it at work, but I remember the hardware used was just staggering. At the time I think the cluster consisted of about 60 machines, and they've added 30 more since then.
This was to run ONE shard that usually holds between 10-12k concurrent users.
From what I've heard, the most overpopulated WoW servers push the 8-10k concurrent user mark EACH. (Usually when they crash) Let alone the other 80 shards they have running.
Then the whiners come out yelling "Fix the servers!" as if it were such a simple thing. I'd love it if Blizzard posted an article outlining the hardware they've got behind the game. It would be quite educational.