What's going right/wrong with launch...

[Morfiend]

Queues suck, no doubt. But all the people raging about this need to settle down. Its release day, and the kids are out of school. The queues will be gone, or at least minimal, in a week or two.

[01101010]

Queues suck, no doubt. But all the people raging about this need to settle down. Its release day, and the kids are out of school. The queues will be gone, or at least minimal, in a week or two.

True enough. However, for those people who have been plugging away at it all week, to come home after work to a 2-3 hour queue... well I can understand the frustration; given the fact they released new servers on retail release and those sit fairly unencumbered while the ones from pre-release are rammed. For all the gating BW did at first, you'd think this would have been somewhat avoided.

And no, I really do not give a shit about a queue right now... I expected it at some point. I will just roll a republic alt somewhere else to fuck around with since I do not know any of the storylines on that side yet.

[sam, an eggplant]

Fuck that fake mature higher-ground bullshit, I paid for the game and I expect to be able to play it. EA fucked up and deserves to be raked over the coals.

Player volume didn't come as a surprise. They knew exactly how many players they'd have during the pre-order week, and they were unable to handle the players that they literally  just let in. There's no excuse for that. No valid explanation other than simple incompetence.

Now that the game is released, you could argue that volumes are no longer predictable, or at least not to the same degree. If they had handled capacity better during prerelease, I would be inclined to swallow that explanation. But now? No way. They fucked up, and you need to stop apologizing and start frothing at the mouth. Or at least quietly simmering away like most of us.

[Numtini]

It's kind of sad that with all the guild assignment stuff and such, it doesn't seem to have really helped any. I thought that would really balance some of this out.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I could buy SWTOR now, it IS a game I'm interested in playing but I'm waiting a couple months for people to stop hammering the newbie zones and queue times.  If I bought on day one and had to wait an hour to play I'd not be a happy camper, I bought skyrim and was bashing heads 5min into booting it up.

[01101010]

It's kind of sad that with all the guild assignment stuff and such, it doesn't seem to have really helped any. I thought that would really balance some of this out.

I concur. I really thought they would do something akin to what Square did with FFXI, only with guilds instead of players. *shrug* Oh well... Everything stays the same...

[Mrbloodworth]

I could buy SWTOR now, it IS a game I'm interested in playing but I'm waiting a couple months for people to stop hammering the newbie zones and queue times.  If I bought on day one and had to wait an hour to play I'd not be a happy camper, I bought skyrim and was bashing heads 5min into booting it up.

Honestly, after the queues, the zones are rather roomy as far as population goes.

[Ingmar]

Yeah I would hardly call it crowded. The queues seem more like an 'encouragement' for new people to try a different server than anything else to me.

[sam, an eggplant]

It's not overcrowded at all, and (so far at least) the game is perfectly playable, once you get past the queues.

If the conspiracy theory is true and they're trying to "encourage" people to start characters on other servers, why not push accounts with characters over level 15 on that server to the front of the queue? Pretty simple solution. But they didn't do that. Nah, there's no subterfuge here, they're just trying to keep the game playable for people that get in. Which is great, except hour-long queues are inexcusable.

[Morfiend]

Fuck that fake mature higher-ground bullshit, I paid for the game and I expect to be able to play it. EA fucked up and deserves to be raked over the coals.

Player volume didn't come as a surprise. They knew exactly how many players they'd have during the pre-order week, and they were unable to handle the players that they literally  just let in. There's no excuse for that. No valid explanation other than simple incompetence.

I'm pretty sure thats exactly what Mythic did with WAR. 

Also, im hopped up on cold medicine and cant tell if I fell in the sarcasm or not.

[kildorn]

So I just got home, and no QQueue on charlie sheen at all yet. Go east coast!

[Lantyssa]

edit: Looking at the status page, the entire problem seems to be summed up as "we didn't think RP servers would be that popular." They seem to have a pretty normal percentage breakdown of pvp/pve/RP-pve, but the RP-pve servers are all heavy/full while the pve servers are about balanced between high loads and light loads. Turns out a game with a heavy story emphasis may pull RPers out of the woodwork. Or they're all people named MalReynolds who want to avoid servers with stupid player names.

200k+ pre-NGE SWG lovers.  200k with all the bugs.  Now take the people who couldn't put up with all the bugs and ever-changing systems...

[Teleku]

I haven't actually hit a queue once while logging into the game.  Of course I'm PST, but still....

[Sobelius]

Fuck that fake mature higher-ground bullshit, I paid for the game and I expect to be able to play it. EA fucked up and deserves to be raked over the coals.

Player volume didn't come as a surprise. They knew exactly how many players they'd have during the pre-order week, and they were unable to handle the players that they literally  just let in. There's no excuse for that. No valid explanation other than simple incompetence.

Now that the game is released, you could argue that volumes are no longer predictable, or at least not to the same degree. If they had handled capacity better during prerelease, I would be inclined to swallow that explanation. But now? No way. They fucked up, and you need to stop apologizing and start frothing at the mouth. Or at least quietly simmering away like most of us.

Nothing personal but, really?

What my inner curmudgeon wanted to say was:

Fuck this fake shove-it-up-your-ass-BW rant and emo-eye-liner-pity-me request to conform to an asstard's idea of what it takes to get riled up. I'll fucking froth at the mouth when I'm good and damn ready and not a fucking moment before and not because some pussy-mouthed dickwad has got his panties in a bundle because of playing a make-believe-pixellated cartoon for a goddamn week and can't stand the idea of having to either wait to play or dealing with the insane misery of rolling an alt. A month from now you'll just be scratching that oh-so-angry-because-I'm-simmering cheese scum off your balls and rolling it between your fingers and sniffing it while wondering what the hell you were so upset about in the first place.

[Bunk]

Nothing personal but, really?

What my inner curmudgeon wanted to say was:

Fuck this fake shove-it-up-your-ass-BW rant and emo-eye-liner-pity-me request to conform to an asstard's idea of what it takes to get riled up. I'll fucking froth at the mouth when I'm good and damn ready and not a fucking moment before and not because some pussy-mouthed dickwad has got his panties in a bundle because of playing a make-believe-pixellated cartoon for a goddamn week and can't stand the idea of having to either wait to play or dealing with the insane misery of rolling an alt. A month from now you'll just be scratching that oh-so-angry-because-I'm-simmering cheese scum off your balls and rolling it between your fingers and sniffing it while wondering what the hell you were so upset about in the first place.

Dang, that's way to long to put in a profile quote, and it would just seem wrong to edit it down in any way.

[Mattemeo]

If your inner curmudgeon has a newsletter, I wish to subscribe to it.

[luckton]

It's 1734 hrs EST where I am.

I just logged into Shein.  No queue.  Your arguments are irrelevant.   

[Sobelius]

Dang, that's way to long to put in a profile quote, and it would just seem wrong to edit it down in any way.

No. Brevity is the soul of wit. That was witless, but fun. I love talking in faux-F13-speak every now and then.

BW and EA could have done much better at planning, but it's not the end of the world. I have no knowledge of who's really doing what over there, but I still think their MMO newbness is showing, but they're doing OK overall.  Someone over at TRION (whether that's Hartsman or whoever) has more MMO-savvy chops, but even they have issues from time to time.

Sometimes the people closest to the game development can't see the gaping customer-service or customer-experience issues, or they minimize them because, deep down, they don't know how to solve them. No matter what you do, from capping server side percentages (a la AION), to preventing any new characters from being created on a server, to making everything one giant universe (a la EVE, with laggy over-populated trading hubs), you don't satisfy everyone. The holy grail is "100% uptime, 100% lag free, queue free, play anywhere I want, any time I want, with whoever I want, in whatever way I want. And it better be cheap. And now, dammit." Who could deliver all that -- at once?

[Azuredream]

Just encountered the memory leak issue on Taris. My main character is effectively locked out, as I CTD within 10 seconds of logging in. I'm told if I can manage to untrack all the quests the issue will go away but after a bunch of failed attempts I gave up. Looks like I'll have to play an alt until they fix this rather gamebreaking bug.

[luckton]

Taris memory bug should be fixed tomorrow.

[sam, an eggplant]

Nothing personal but, really?

That's all very clever, but "it'll be better in 2 weeks" doesn't amount to a whole heck of a lot when I want to play now. They always say you should express your feelings, so let me say in the nicest possible way that telling me to calm down and wait gives me the urge to somehow reach through the internet and shove my fist down your fucking throat. But hey, thanks for not being sanctimonious and taking the higher ground. Much respect for slinging it down in the mud with the rest of us.

[Kageru]

If folks are leveling just to level for the endgame, yeah, I can see dying out in a month or two.  That's part of why I'm taking it slower.  

However, if you want to see all the class story lines it'll be a bit more.

They seem to be countering this by pointing out that the entire development team (including voice actors) will continue to work on the SWTOR and nothing else, and the launch-beardy Danno Erickson (honestly, that beard of his looks like one of inspector Clouseau's less convincing disguises...) pushed the point in their launch video - basically more content is coming and fast.

I'll be intested to see how much and how fast.

This has never, ever, worked. Even if it is the full team they had years of development time for content that is being consumed in a month or two. To believe you can keep ahead of the player base with high quality content is destined to fail. The extent to which their end-game can mask repetition and keep people motivated to keep investing time will be the interesting test.

[El Gallo]

Can't accept any new quests, 77 pages of people with the same problem, some for days now. Customer service response is to put the word "blueberry" in your ticket. Seriously fucking clownshoes.  http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=20021

Counterpoint: quest layout/flow in this game is vastly inferior to WoW in every way, so maybe the game is doing me a favor.  It's like they were designed by someone who thought vanilla Barrens was awesome, but would be even better if the objectives were spread further apart and the zone was littered with impassable walls all over the fucking place. 

[Ingmar]

Taris is really the only zone I've noticed shitty quest flow/walls in. (Republic side anyway.)

[Threash]

Could have done better at planning? no, they plan for queues during launch.  The traffic now is magnitudes higher than it will be at any other point in the history of this game, queues are the norm.  The other option is the warhammer solution, launch with ten times as many servers as your game actually needs.

[Murgos]

8:30 pm EST day 1 of retail, 210 in queue which it says is <15 minutes.

Hardly the end of the world.

e: I'm timing it, so far I've advanced 50 places in 3 minutes.

e: 14:55.3  just made it.

[Fraeg]

eh, it is an MMO, it just released, there is a line to check out the cool new ride just like at Disneyland.

Did I miss something? When did we start not expecting a cluster fuck at the launch of a major MMO?

[Ingmar]

After all the queue qing (ho ho ho) I was expecting a long wait, and there was no queue at all. 

[fuser]

With this in mind, we wanted to notify everyone of some consistently high population servers. These servers are closing in on their absolute population cap (the maximum amount of players who can be on the server at any given time) and will likely have a queue to enter even at off-peak play times.

We strongly advise you to not create new characters on these servers, unless you are prepared to queue to play.

Character transfer is a common request for these servers. The ability to transfer your characters is being worked on, but there is no ETA on when it will be available.

Welp my friends guild already have slated to move away from The Fatman, people have rolled on other servers and people with a few days of /played is now grumbling as The Fatman has over an indicated 2hr queue.

Really wish they had soft capped at 50-75% at prelaunch on servers to better prepare the load for launch, its a total mess now and I have a level 25char that's pretty much a writeoff. 

[Wolf]

it seems like Origin has run out of codes for the digital copies 

[DraconianOne]

I keep reading people talking about RIFTs flawless launch and how it was the paragon of pre-access/launch planning.

So was the RIFT that had launch day queues a different game or what? I'm confused.

[apocrypha]

One small clownshoes moment... when signing up I made a typo in my CC billing address. Noticed it before hitting confirm, but after I'd entered the CC details.

There is no way to rectify it. You can click "Change" next to either the CC which lets you select or enter a different card, but you can't enter the same CC number again as it says that it's not unique. You can click "change" next to the billing address... which does exactly the same as clicking change next to the CC. No option to edit the address or re-enter the same card with corrected details.

In the end I gave up and just hit confirm with the wrong address assigned to my CC. Went through without a hitch. Be interesting to see what happens when it comes time to actually bill the card!

[Merusk]

Knowing how "secure" transactions are, so long as the #'s right it will probably go through.

[Fabricated]

What's weird is that I'm in Goon Squad and our server hasn't had long queues whenever I've tried to log in in the afternoon. I mean, and this is a server with two Goon guilds, and a NeoGAF guild.

[ajax34i]

Um, when I log into swtor.com and go to My Profile, I can click on Subscription, then Show Billing History, then there's an EDIT option by the credit card, and clicking it pops up a sub-window that lets me fully change everything - name, address, etc.  Alternately, under swtor.com My Profile, I can click on the left on the Contact Information Complete!!! graphic and change my address, phone number, etc.

Not sure why it's not working for you.