Game Launches

Big Damned Chocobo

I have to start off this mornings post by showing off my pride and joy.  Some time ago Final Fantasy XIV put in a player reward system for recruiting new players.  Since then I have had a number of folks use codes to get themselves a +25% xp helm while leveling.  It seems as though one of them has finally reached the 90 days of subscription time point because in my mailbox there was sitting a Draught Chocobo Whistle.  This is a two player mount allowing any group member to hop up on the back of your Chocobo with you.  What makes it even more awesome is the fact that it does not scale down for small races.  This means unlike my real chocobo… this one towers over the landscape making me feel epic.  In theory it can’t scale as it has to support the largest of the player models… the Roegadyn.

If my calculations are correct this wonder of nature is thanks to the very awesome Solaria Neferim aka @CatInGlasses.  The only sad thing is that I could not bring myself to wait until she logged into use it.  It would have been fitting if my first passenger was her.  In any case I am super grateful to have this awesome mount, and while I have already thanked her multiple times…  I figured I would also post about it here in my blog.  There are a few times where this mount will come in extremely handy… as did my two player rocket in World of Warcraft.  Supposedly when they put in the marriage system they are also adding in a mount from going through the “Eternal Bond” ceremony.  I am hoping they allow same sex marriage…  which I believe they have already said they would.  Thalen and I are already talking about gaming  the system…  because we like free mounts.

Game Launches

Yesterday morning while I slept the second dark portal to Draenor opened, letting players spill into the unspoiled planet to begin the Warlords of Draenor expansion.  So as I slept and while I worked folks ground away madly trying to level to 100.  By the time I reached home last night two of my guildies had managed to push across the line and ding 100.  One of course questions why exactly they rushed to hit the finish line, given that they just spent over a year waiting on new content…  but that is beside the point.  For the most part the servers were largely unstable last night which has lead to much raging on the forums.  Maybe it is just that I have lived through so many of these at this point, that I just expect things to go poorly.  Blizzard is claiming that a major Distributed Denial of Service Attack is going on against their servers.  It may very well be, considering that they came out against GG rather vocally at Blizzcon… and those folks seem to really like resort to this sort of behavior.  By the same token it seems that every game launch lately has claimed to have a DDoS, which is a handy excuse because it means it is out of the companies control.

Ultimately at this point while I understand the frustration of the players, and I feel like Blizzard should have been better prepared…  most game launches are just not smooth at all.  Trying to be prepared for a stampede of wildebeests hitting your server, knowing that in a few weeks time most of them will have disappeared…  feels like sheer madness.  I think companies have done the math and realized that it is simply better for them to weather the first few days, because the most demanding players aren’t likely to be sticking around in any case.  The players who are in it for the long haul will sit there waiting out the issues and keep plugging away slowly.  Ultimately the problems seem to be revolving around the new systems they introduced like the Garrisons… and given time patches will arrive and problems will be fixed.  It has been years since there has been a significant problem in World of Warcraft that was not remedied within days if not hours.  All of this said, given the debacle that was the Diablo III launch…  you would think they would be better prepared for the onslaught.

Slowly Plugging Away

I had apparently quit messing around with the Warlords Alpha before they put in the Tanaan Jungle “fight for the dark portal” sequence.  I have to say I am sufficiently impressed.  The arrival through the Dark Portal feels like you storming into a new world, and establishing a foothold.  When we first stepped through the Dark Portal into Outland… the war was already waging and we were but a pawn in the larger plan.  This time we are a hero of the alliance and feel crucial to the war strategy.  Some folks have a problem with this, but I have enjoyed the fact that my stature seems to keep improving from expansion to expansion.  If you contrast the openings of Wrath where we were very much still a trooper, to the opening of Pandaria where we start as just another soldier and elevate towards a significant hero over the course of the first few zones.  Warlords of Draenor feels like it is aware of that past and builds upon it.

The other thing that the introduction does extremely well is introduce you to the title characters of this expansion… the Warlords of Draenor.  One by one you encounter the various characters from the wallpaper as you fight to gain purchase in this new realm.  By the time you finally reach Shadowmoon Valley or if you are Horde Frostfire Ridge…  there is a sense of urgency that you must prepare for the incoming Iron Horde invasion.  The game does a good job of instilling the player with a sense of purpose and a reason why they are here in the first place.  Unfortunately a lot of this was completely wrecked by the fact that the servers were barely playable last night.  There was a point fairly early on where I got completely derailed by the fact that entire regions of the map were locked in a time frozen state.  Moving forward into another region would suddenly allow time to catch up, all of which became extremely disconcerting… but I am sure over the coming days this will clear up.

Poetics Ho!

Instead of hanging out and waiting on the servers to improve, I logged figuring I would lessen the server load by at least one… and played some Final Fantasy XIV.  I managed to pull together an Expert Roulette group with my friend Spiral Sun and Warenwolf healing.  This and a couple of Syrcus Tower runs managed to push me to my goal of 825 tomestones of poetics, and the Ironworks Trousers of Fending.  This takes Belghast Sternblade my character on Cactuar to ilevel 111 which makes me extremely happy.  In addition to that I managed to pick up another Sands of Time and another Oil of Time, which will always come in handy.  The only negative thing is that I still have yet to get the Dragoon pants from Amon.  At this point it is more a point of pride than anything, because I have more than enough Tomestones of Soldiery to just buy that set of pants.  For the time being I figured I would just save up until I hit 1300 and get another weapon… since the 110 weapon seems to be the most beneficial item you can really get.

I still need about 100 Poetics bookrocks to cap for the week, but a few more expert roulettes and I will be there without much issue.  Right now my weekend is going to be a bit of an odd one.  Tomorrow we are travelling to Oklahoma City to look at a laptop.  A few weeks ago mine started having issues, and in spite of all of my trouble shooting… and posting on the Lenovo forums… I have yet to find an answer to resolve it.  Unfortunately it is also about six months out of warranty.  I did however like it so much that I am looking at a slightly newer model.  The cool thing is that the second video card that is in my current laptop, will fit in nicely with this new model, as well as give me a swappable BluRay drive.  In any case I am doubting I will get in much play time tomorrow other than what I happen to do during our normal podcast time.

Perspective and Experience

This morning I am thankful for the gift of perspective and past experiences.  There have been more than a few rage-y posts that I have made over the years regarding the launch of new games and new expansions.  The one that I remember the most recently is the 1017 debacle that was the launch of Final Fantasy XIV.  After a point it becomes easier to resign yourself to the mantra “this too shall pass”.  Companies always fix problems, server loads always lessen, and leveling is not a race.  I think one of the smartest things that Blizzard could have done was remove the concept of a World and Server first for the purpose of leveling.  It encourage players to engage in self destructive behavior, burning themselves out within hours of a new expansion releasing.  My hope is that while there are obviously some players rushing headlong towards oblivion… that this will cause players to level at a more sedate pace.

While the server frustrates are real, and they seem epic at this point…  I am thankful for the perspective that in the grand scheme of things…  this can’t even be termed as a rough launch.  With the recent launch of Rift’s Nightmare Tide expansion… I quite literally lost 24 hours of progress made on my characters and tradeskills when they suffered a catastrophic hardware failure that caused a rollback.  With the launch of Final Fantasy XIV they were so wholly unprepared for its success that the game did not even include a queue system, and players were force to set up hardware macros to keep trying to log in… and as such unintentionally DDoSing the lobby servers.  When World of Warcraft initially launched it was a good solid month before the game was really reliably playable.  I remember waiting thirty minutes in the mines around Elwynn forest for loot from a kobold corpse to show up in my inventory.

Sure you might have a queue on your server, but it is nothing compared to the reported 20 hour login queues that players experienced during the recent launch of ArcheAge.  Nor does it really compare to the fact that when the Landmark paid alpha rolled out…  I rebuilt my claim four separate times before I actually managed to get one that stuck around for more than a day… as they kept having to wipe the voxel data due to bugs that caused corruption.  Admittedly… that was an alpha, but one players paid to get into…  and caused equal amounts of frustration.  All of these things taken into account… I can’t even call this a bad launch yet.  Granted over the coming days things are either going to improve… or they are going to  get drastically worse.  In either case I will re-evaluate, but for the time being I am thankful to have the presence of mind to just go play something else for awhile.