You might ask why I would wish to name my domain "some blog WAS here" as if I had already predicted my own down fall before even getting started so let me say right now that this blog's future is certainly already under fire. This is a mandatory assignment for CS 108 - Introduction to Game Studies http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/catalog/courses/CS108.html and not something that I myself dreamed up therefore my ability to continue posting after the class ends will be a direct consequence of my own will and not something I feel compelled to do for points in a class.
And now that we've got all that out of the way this is supposed to be a blog about gaming so let's talk about some of that right now. A game that interests me greatly right now is Star Wars - The Old Republic. I feel like this game will take up a lot of space on my blog and for very good reason: it's a documented case study of one of the biggest flops in MMO history. This titan of a game was supposed to be the World of Warcraft destroyer. Okay I'll admit that many games were supposed to be WoW destroyers (Guild Wars 2, Age of Conan, Aion, Lineage II, etc) but this one was different. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_games] It had massively open and beautiful worlds filled with a plethora of quests and every single quest was voiced over. Every quest! With voiceovers!
Recording that much audio was unprecedented and one of the biggest parts of SWToR and also one of their greatest challenges. But they pulled it off. Until launch day that is. Launch was an absolute disaster. Long que times, lagging servers, and a general lack of available servers meant that barely anyone was playing during launch week. Bioware (which got purchased by the very evil Electronic Arts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioware#History) responded by purchasing tons of server hardware and opening up tons of new servers but this response was both incorrect and way too slow. Because the initial bubble that SWToR and its hardcore fans (coming from Star Wars Galaxies, SWTOR's spiritual predecessor) had already created had already burst by this point. People were giving up on the game because the servers were down and they had all missed the initial point of getting hooked in earlier and quickly. This poor initial user experience meant that the massive number of new servers that BioWare had bought and all the new servers that they had opened no longer had a place.
But it gets worse because the people left that were still genuinely interested in playing SWToR beyond the fact that it was a new MMO that wasn't WoW were now all stuck on servers that had been largely abandoned and it took months for BioWare to close all the extra servers and consolidate players all onto a couple select popular realms. This brings in all kinds of technical problems as well as character naming confusions which no one enjoys dealing with and is overall a very very poor user experience.
SWToR is an incredible game. The classes are awesome, the professions are awesome, and it pioneered a ton of new creative mechanics but because the launch slipped and the bubble burst so quickly, very few casual or semi-interested fans got hooked and instead just went back to the games they were playing before which caused its downfall. I'll be watching it closely as I'm incredibly interested in its long-term viability as a game.
For now, let's immortalize the history of SWTOR's launch on this blog via images that I've procured:
Chapter 1: An Extremely Successful Beta
The SWTOR beta was a huge success and we can see that there were a great many popular PVP servers already cropping up on the beta upon which many people were dying to create their real characters on upon launch. This should've been the beginning indications that the game was going to be a huge success at launch and that Bioware / EA should be prepared with bigger servers.
Chapter 2: An Extremely Unsuccessful Launch:
Immediately after launch, everyone's hopes and dreams were crushed. Those same servers that many had planned to roll their first characters on after playing on the beta soon found that if you lived a normal life with school or work, you came home to those same servers full with massive queues, often with 1+ hour wait times.
Chapter 3: An Entirely Inappropriate Response by EAware:
EA, in their infinite wisdom thought: "Well if the servers are all full why don't we just make more servers?" This sounds like a good idea on paper but it's actually terrible for a number of reasons:
- People who were playing on launch already had characters on the servers that were full
- The fact that people already had characters on the same server with ALL their friends meant that they were dedicated and that as a group, they had already invested a considerable amount of time into a single, popular server
- This lead to people quitting rather than rerolling because no one likes making a new character all over again, let a lone a group of friends, anywhere from 2 or 3 to 10 or 15 and it was easier to just go back to their old game where they were already all established and organized rather than try to get everyone to reroll ALL over again on a different server.
- After the initial buzz of the game died down, mostly because of the terrible initial queues and massive amounts of frustration due to lag and general playability, the massive amount of people who picked up the game, most out of a general curiosity because of it's hype as a WoW killer, all started to go back to their old favorite games.
- What happened next was even more tragic: after creating an entirely huge number of servers, they suddenly all had no one playing on them because people were leaving in droves. Which lead to an even more catastrophic problem which was:
- EA now had to find out how to merge all of the dead servers into the more popular ones. This is a herculean task because there were all kinds of problems associated with not the least of which was people's character and legacy names were inevitably going to overlap and there is no inherently fair way of getting two people with the same name onto the same server because inevitably one of them is going to have to name change.
All in all the launch of SWTOR, in my humble opinion, should be deemed a massive failure. A game whose hype was insane and was being talked about daily on blogs and throughout various games in chat and between friends and guild members non stop. But a predictable inability to keep the servers up followed by too many servers without anyone on them followed by a slow response and massive denial on EA's part and failing to acknowledge that the game was dying lead to most people abandoning their $60 investment almost immediately. Let's all learn from EA's mistakes then:
- MMOs have the potential to grab MILLIONS of players right off the bat.
- Initial launch is CRITICAL to a game's future as it gets players invested early and heavily.
- Servers with people on them are IMPORTANT. If your server is dead, it's not an MMO it's an SMO (small multiplayer online) game and no one enjoys an SMO because they're hardly better than a single player game, if not worse, due to skewed economies.
- Timely and appropriate reaction to player population fluctuations as well as queue times is critical for an MMO's launch success.
- And this final one should be obvious but it appears that it needs to be stated here for at least EA's sake: if your servers are full during your beta, you can bet they're going to be full during launch. So DO something about it.
