Time to stop apologizing for Guild Wars 2 because it's an 'MMO'

| Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Remember the hullaballo about Diablo 3 needing to be always online just to play?  And then the servers would go down and the game that you'd paid for was suddenly unavailable.  People were justifiably unhappy.

And yet the Guild Wars 2 Apologists, or GWAs as I will call them despite probably not needing an abbreviation, they say that the horrible GW2 launch with servers down and logins down and that hideous bugged model of the gigantic-headed short things, is just fine.  Pay money, not play game.

8 comments:

Ashen said...

Uh, the major difference is Diablo 3 is not really an online game, the online only requirement is just DRM and there's no reason the game doesn't have an offline option.

GW2 is a MMO. While that doesn't excuse them for mediocre launch, it's a completely different animal.

Macnol said...

Uh... horrible launch? I started playing Saturday (I don't see the point in losing sleep to be there at launch hour since I don't care about silly single adjective names) and I had practically zero problems impacting my gameplay.

The only issue was the buddy I was playing with in a party couldn't always get into the same overflow server I was, but that seems to have been fixed yesterday - and it sure as hell beats having to wait in a queue to log in.

Anonymous said...

Exactly. You expect that an MMO will know how to organize a launch...

Anonymous said...

I absolutely agree that a poor launch is a poor launch, and no excuses should be allowed, MMO or not. Launches should go well. I hope that means that I am not a Guild Wars 2 Apologist, or GWA (I think you need this three letter abbreviation because you are trying to make a label for a group of people you have an opinion on, not because it's an especially helpful acronym).

That said, I personally played trouble-free for the three days pre-launch and played OK today. It's a pretty good video game. Not the best I have played, not by a long shot, but pretty good.

I can see myself quickly returning to other multiplayer games though.

Cheerio,
Ruddles / Boxerdogs

Kring said...

There were some issues during PRE-launch. But I didn't notice any issue during launch (aka today). :)

Syl said...

@Ashen
I don't think that was the point Kleps was trying to make. different animal or not, a launch is a launch and it can be expected that the product you paid for is ready and playable. when it comes to MMOs us MMO players are very lenient; we just rationalize issues along the lines of "thats normal, its always been like that" and make excuses the way we never would for other products we buy. it's a double standard.

if I buy a pair of shoes, I expect to be able to walk, run and hike in them - not just to be able to tie my laces. you can argue that there's no way everything about an MMO launch can be anticipated due to its complexity, which is probably true - but then why did Trion manage just fine? I think we must draw a line for what's acceptable for MMO launches.

Syl said...

...forgot to add -

"I think we must draw a line for what's acceptable for MMO launches, lest we're not seen as desperate geeks ever so happy to get our fingers on just anything. I am not that: I am a buyer of a product and I'm allowed to have standards."

cheers.

rowanblaze said...

I wonder if reactions would have been different if ANet had said, "Hey, we're having one last stress test, but won't be wiping characters again before launch." Because, as Kring pointed out, the GW2 launch was Tuesday 28 August. Any access prior to that was not what you paid for, but extra.

While I wasn't exactly happy with the outages, and the continuing grouping bugs, I found other things to do with my Saturday morning—all of them online, in fact. I hope this doesn't make me an apologist for GW2 or any other game. Maybe you should wait to play until you hear all the bugs are smashed and the game is running like the second year of a car model run. (Never buy a car in the first year of the model run.)

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