Celestry Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 This is what has been tried in the past, as far as I remeber. 1. Everone in approach. This gives massive queues, server crashes, and wating for reboots. Nobody is happy 2. The too many server approach. Makes it easy for everyone to get in. Then 6 months later their server is a ghost town, and the company starts merging servers. Nobody is happy 3. The staggered approach. People getting early in the stagger are happy. Some people are patient and ok with things. Some get nerd rage and spend the next 2 days badmouthing the game. Maybe 70% are happy. I personally do not see another approach to launching an MMO. If you have one tell us, tell the world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HelluvaJedi Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 What's behind Door #4? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Failheals Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 I'd let the players decide how they wanted to do it, let them destroy the servers/gameplay for a few days, tell them their way didnt work, reroll servers, and do it right. lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ruan Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 With the combined resources of BioWare, Electronic Arts and Lucasarts I'd pay for enough servers up front to handle twice as many players as my most promising projection estimates. Seriously, what's a few thousand dollars for servers & bandwidth in comparison to the development costs? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JekTerrik Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 This is what has been tried in the past, as far as I remeber. 1. Everone in approach. This gives massive queues, server crashes, and wating for reboots. Nobody is happy 2. The too many server approach. Makes it easy for everyone to get in. Then 6 months later their server is a ghost town, and the company starts merging servers. Nobody is happy 3. The staggered approach. People getting early in the stagger are happy. Some people are patient and ok with things. Some get nerd rage and spend the next 2 days badmouthing the game. Maybe 70% are happy. I personally do not see another approach to launching an MMO. If you have one tell us, tell the world. What's wrong with server merging? 2 seems good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatduck Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 what everyone is really thinking: step 1: let me in step 2: don't care Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nazam Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 While letting everyone in at once is known to be 'crazy' its often because the companies don't prepare properly for the mass amount of people wanting to play their game, at least the servers are pretty stable by day 2 and EVERYONE IS IN. The stagger idea isnt a bad one - at least in my opinion - it just seems they are going about it in a very wrong way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Juumanistra Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 What's behind Door #4? A staggered launch in which admission is granted on the basis of preorder date, with an e-mail going out two or three days before EGA opens up explaining the scale of the endeavor and outlining broadly the timeline they intend to use for shepherding folks into the EGA. If we're being optimistic, it'll include what tranches of preorder dates they hope to invite during each day of the staggering. There'd still be nerd rage and plenty of teeth-gnashing, but at least you'd be able to then separate out the quality complaints from the flotsam. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daddle Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 1: make it not an MMO (seriously, too many companies are trying to make an MMO, and half of them would be better off as a single player game, including this one) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ptwonline Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 Everyone in at once (or divided into 2 groups: pre-orders and main launch), reasonable number of WORLD servers but many, many extra physical servers for each world server to handle the extra numbers per world. Phasing to prevent overcrowding in zones. As numbers dwindle you can remove hardware from each world server if desired. World servers won't be barren since you put in such high numbers on each one to start. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Celestry Posted December 14, 2011 Author Share Posted December 14, 2011 What's wrong with server merging? 2 seems good. Trust me I played a game where there was server merging and it was a mess. People were very very unhappy. It is even worse for PvP servers since it is very hard to balance factions to begin with. When you are forced to allow character transfer as part of a merger deal, server balance really goes to hell. Plus in a wider market server mergers are seen as weakness and the game is not doing well because it is contracting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azmundai Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 (edited) Staggered is great in theory. The execution stinks tho. I would first: Know the Timezone of each email / accountRequire each account select a window (time frame) to be elidgible for. They only get 1 choice.Know which guild and which server the guild was on for each account.And finally, randomly draw from the entire pool.Run invites 24/7 Or at the very least, I would lock the people from day 1 out on day 6, day 2 on day 7, and ensure everyone was in by day 5 ... thus making everything equal. Edited December 14, 2011 by azmundai Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wubanos Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 1. have people enter, first pick side then pick server type, then see the server selection, pick server and create character. 2. have enough instances of the first 3-4 maps to avoid overcrowding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yfelsung Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 I wouldn't make an MMO. I'd take all the gameplay mechanics of an MMO, ditch the open world and just have like 150 dungeons ready for launch, 25 PvP zones and like 20 raids. In the end, the open world is empty and everyone is just doing those 3 things anyway. Why waste time and money on the open world? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rupscal Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 I would do it in waves, but tell people an estimated time. All things considered, this has been awesome - and no, I'm not in ... I'm Dec. 3. I'd might go more, but smaller waves throughout the day - from morning to West Coast prime time - and get more people in, but meh. The day Rift launched, I just gave up and waited until the next day to get in. Even then it was chaos. It took 2 - 3 times as long as it should have to get through some of the initial quests, because EVERYONE was on the same quest. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emekk Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 I would do 3 but do more than 4 *********** waves per day Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarbeard Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 In a perfect world my 72 ford pinto has a flux capacitor so I would get it up to as close to 88 as a pinto would go, and get some sweet future hardware that can handles millions at once. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Celestry Posted December 14, 2011 Author Share Posted December 14, 2011 I agree, in theory that staggered seems to be the way to go, but I would have spelled out very clearly that buying on this date you will get in on this day much earlier. I understand this may not have been possible at purchase, but it would have been possible about 1 month out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robisowe Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 Everyone in at once (or divided into 2 groups: pre-orders and main launch), reasonable number of WORLD servers but many, many extra physical servers for each world server to handle the extra numbers per world. Phasing to prevent overcrowding in zones. As numbers dwindle you can remove hardware from each world server if desired. World servers won't be barren since you put in such high numbers on each one to start. That might require some load times between zones, but works for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pirate_Ron Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 While letting everyone in at once is known to be 'crazy' its often because the companies don't prepare properly for the mass amount of people wanting to play their game, at least the servers are pretty stable by day 2 and EVERYONE IS IN. The stagger idea isnt a bad one - at least in my opinion - it just seems they are going about it in a very wrong way. that's not necessarily true. I was in the Rift EGA and the biggest complaints were crashes and queues. The root cause was that everyone was rolling on a set group of servers, no one was rolling on the empty ones. So we had half the servers filled to capacity with long wait times, and the other half as ghost towns and a bunch of angry people with level 5 toons unwilling to move to a new server and would rather complain about the queues. it really just proved that you can lead a forum rage nerd to a server but you can't make him roll on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yorelx Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 Stagger but invite people 24/7... Having an 18 hours window where the servers are basically empty is what upset people. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rupscal Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 what everyone is really thinking: step 1: let me in step 2: don't care Not me. I'd rather wait a few days and get a clean launch instead of crashes, everything full, etc. My guess is that if you are going to play an MMO in the future, get used to it. This is one of the best ways to bring people in that I can think of. The implementation/communication just needs to improve a bit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mssux Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 I would launch it with free rainbows for those that pre-ordered first Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pirate_Ron Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 I'd launch it the same way this launch is going, but I'd keep people from being able to post till their EGA was granted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ecrofeht Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 what everyone is really thinking: step 1: let me in step 2: don't care ^^ This Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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