Lessons From WAR’s Launch
The development team for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning deserves a big congratulations. They managed to get the game to a very good state in time for launch, fixing major bugs like unattackable mobs and addressing detrimental combat annoyances like abilities not being ready yet. But, no launch is perfect, and so far I can see a few things we can learn for future MMO launches.
Announce your launch servers as early as you can.
Allow guilds, friends, and coworkers to plan out the server they will call home as soon as possible. Announce all of your servers that will be available at launch as soon as you can (a week of notice seems optimal to me) so your community can start with a solid foundation. There’s nothing more frustrating when you start a new MMO than finding out one or more groups of your friends started on another server and having to reroll.
Have a backup plan to help get friends together.
For example, give players free character transfers during their first 30 days. This way, even if you do unintentionally roll a character on a different server from friends, you can all get together. Plus, you don’t have to reroll and feel like you’ve wasted effort on your characters. And, make players aware of this backup plan before they start playing.
Give players a grace period before entering their keys.
If a player has a preorder code, let them play for a reasonable period of time after launch before entering their retail key. I would give them a grace period of a full week, so if launch is on a Thursday, don’t make them enter their keys until the Thursday of the next week. Players don’t deserve to be punished for choosing a slow shipping method or for their retailers being slow — let them play the game!
Yes! Yes! Preach it, brother Ryan!
I can’t agree more. A good launch I think is more about excellent customer service at this point. Sure it might be successful if you get a couple hundred thousand people to buy the game, but is it really a good sustainable launch?
If players start their careers in your world with a bad taste… believe me… that bad taste will stick with them throughout the first year or so of gameplay. When other things go wrong that bad taste could very well be the thing that tips the scales towards: “Let’s go, this product sucks and this company doesn’t care about me anyway.”
Bit confused, are you saying Mythic should have done those three things, or that they did and here is why they are important?
Reason I’m a bit confused is they announced servers a bit late, the second suggestion they did but it was not very clear HOW they would do it, and as far as I know, they do have a lengthy leeway time for codes.
I agree that all three are important, just wondering how you are relating them to WAR.
Agree 100%.
Allowing friends to easily get to the same server is especially important. Two of my friends quit FFXI very early on because of the way server selection was handled. I wasn’t home when they rolled their characters, and the only way to ensure your friends are on your server is to give them a “World Pass”. They didn’t want to reroll when I later told them how I could get them onto my server, so SE effectively lost two customers due to a poorly designed system. In fact, I can’t imagine how anyone thought that was a good idea in the first place.
Anyway, while it obviously isn’t that big of a problem in other games, player’s would still definitely appreciate anything that makes it easier for them to play with their friends – especially if they don’t need to sacrifice progress they’ve already made.
I am now stuck on Skull Throne (tied for most populous server) / Destruction, because that’s what my guild chose. We’re waiting for the server to clear out so we can play… so is everyone else.
I feel like this is going to be resolved when enough people are driven to quit that the population goes down, not when people reroll. Their whole server copy plan is ridiculous.
That said, it’s the best game to come out since WoW/Guild Wars. I’m happy with it – I think WotLK is going to smoke it (and for those of us who have played the beta of that expansion, deserves to – just more wow this is not), but it’s a good enough game that I think it deserves to do well, and they’ve got my money.
Well an argument against announcing servers ahead of time is that it gives people more time to make those intensely crowded servers like Skull Throne. Mythic did a great job offering the transfers.
If you had a head start they should definitely give you time to get your package. It’s dumb what they did. I don’t pre-order games on the internet because of this.
On your backup plan, if you have the services available, 1 free character transfer good for X days is a cool thing to give each new player. Like it.
Syncaine: I’m saying these as lessons learned from things Mythic did wrong:
- They announced the servers too late. And when they announced them, they announced 7 core servers instead of the 20ish they ended up launching with.
- They announced one backup plan (free character transfers) then implemented another (server cloning).
- You have to have your retail key attached to your account as of 7AM this morning, just a day after launch. Some friends of mine don’t have their retail copy yet, and can’t play the game.
Draegan -
Transfers would have been good. They DID NOT offer them. Instead, they cloned whole servers yesterday.
The problem is that when they cloned the servers, everyone said, “Well, other people will transfer and I’ll keep playing.” Then by the time it was apparent that nobody was switching, you had gained a couple levels and switching servers would have set you back again. This problem will be progressively worse – I think it would be fair to say that by Sunday, almost nobody who hasn’t yet switched to a cloned server will be switching.
It’s just a bad decision, period.
Interesting on the retail code issue. I had read somewhere that they were giving a “reasonable” grace period until maybe the 22d or so? I see their FAQ just says reasonable. Next day sure doesn’t sound like much grace.
How is it a bad decision? I might not of worked as much as they hoped but it isn’t bad. Giving people options is never BAD.
I told Mythic pretty much nearly everyone one of these things months ago in my intereactions. Unfortunately, well… the results are obvious.
Gonna shill for Mythic here for a moment.
You know, people could have also rerolled after the first two days indicated some servers were going to be nuts. CoW did it. It’s not like you had a lot of time invested in a new character and losing so much work. 2 days? Really? The fault here lies more with the idiocy of players than it does with Mythic. Mythic gave people an option. Players chose to stay and are now whining. Well GG. Obviously any server with guilds like HA, Carnage, Old TImers Guild, etc are going to have a lot of active players. It makes Volkmar appealing as a player.
But is it truly worth waiting in line?
Absolutely not, and people who did not do it only have themselves to blame.
One other thing should be added to all launches…..A spam filter option. Not just /ignore, but something like what was implemented on EQ2.
All sounds resonable to me. Especially the part about the preorder keys. I know several people that got bit because of it.
Personally I never preorder games or purchase right away… I’ve been burned so many times because of bad launches, that I always wait a week or two after the release of a game before I purchase and get it. With WAR I waited a week and talked to a couple friends to see how it was doing before I bought it.
I still have bad dreams of Anarchy Onlines release … lol
How is it a bad decision? I might not of worked as much as they hoped but it isn’t bad. Giving people options is never BAD.
Spending time on a “solution” which had little to no chance of working is a bad decision.
The game is fine. I’m enjoying it on my Chosen. It’s not superlative but it is one of the better games to come out in recent years and I’ll be playing for a while at least. Some of Mythic’s decision-making has been a mite silly though.
^ should have made it clear that I was quoting Draegan with the first line.
Great points Ryan.
These are things that all developers should learn and plan to do immediately. The launch was smooth but those little amenities would go a long way.
My server’s queue time has been steadily climbing since launch >.< was consistently 250 at primetime last week, 250-300 over the weekend, up to 350+ last night (including over 300 at 1 am)… ugh.
Transfers, please.
Y’know… I’m remembering a game called… let’s see… what was it? Ah. Everquest. A server called Fenin Ro. A lesson that was learned about anouncing server names TOO early.