Quote Originally Posted by Yeargdribble View Post
This comes straight out of that entitlement mentality mixed with a good dose of ignorance. Like comma said, it would be ridiculous for them to build spend so much money to set up servers for a one-time ultra load that will unlikely last more than the first 2-3 weeks of the launch of the game. It's like buying 10 gallons of milk at the store just in case you might need them all before the next trip to the store when it's very likely you won't and they will just expire, wasting money.
C'mon, do you really believe what you're saying? Really? Sure you want to take into account that after x weeks/months your audience is going to be lower (*), but we're in early access, with even less players than you'll have during the first few weeks of release, and yet the whole na/eu platform is crippled. What is it going to be after the floodgates are open, then? There'll be even more strain on the instance servers, because they are used left and right and center due to all the quests that require spawning a mini instance of the map and the forced dungeon runs for quests, and having people in early will do nothing to alleviate that. What letting people in earlier does, though, is help spread them over zones, the regular outworld ones, which so far behave a lot more like they should compared to anything instanced.

Worse, you're submitting the most enthusiastic players (the pre-ordering ones, who give you money before you release your product) to the crap of copy-pasted maintenance excuses, who, instead of being thrilled and recommending the game, will be disappointed (or worse) and recommend others to wait until the fad's over (or actively tell them to forget it).

Right now, the whole instance infrastructure is under-scaled and unable to cope with the load of just early access, to the point they actively prevent players from even logging in the NA/EU servers. When I log in and I fail to get the server list, even though it's up and others are playing, it's not a weird connection problem, it's SE throttling very aggressively who gets to enter.

What annoys me the most though, is not just that it doesn't bode well for the next two weeks, it's that it feels like SE wasting a perfectly good system, and world, and even mechanics. Instancing key parts of quests is a bloody good idea, but if you can't make your hardware cope with it, dammit, you deserve pissed off fans.

People make this argument without understanding (or caring) how the business and logistics end works. It's pretty much the same with early or day-one DLC. People don't realize that there is a point that production on the launch game has to be finalized to go into printing discs and that the team may have time between that finalization and the launch to make additional content that couldn't possible be put on the disc. There's also the issue that the numbers tell them that most DLC gets bought close to launch by people who chew through the content and want me. If you wait months, less people care.
Amusingly, one of the biggest companies to produce a MMO (guess which) has the guts to flat out can a game and cancel it, or can a game and restart it from scratch, or delay a game/major patch until it's polished, because sometimes, you have to take the time, and sometimes, it just won't work and half-baking it is worse for your reputation than coming out and admitting it was a failure. And while it could be said of that company in the past that "patch day no play", that was 8 years ago, and it was most often fixed by the day after. Surely SE could learn from theirs and others' mistakes?

I guess a devil's advocate position would be that an MMO could potentially maintain more subs if they did account for huge numbers early on, but I really doubt that's the case in reality. The people who leave and claim downtime in the first month was an issue would've likely left anyway. Even if there is significant downtime in that first outing, there was probably enough up time for them to get a taste as see if they liked it.
(*) It feels to me like a weird business model where you expect high first day sales but not to loyalize your user base and instead rely on lack of caring and/or frustration to cull it to levels you can manage (levels which seem to be at "lower than the number of early accesses we have now"). Surely a high-audience of loyal players is better than a medium audience of loyal players, but it feels like they don't even care or don't even try. (Point in case being the number of servers : 25 for NA/EU, 25 for JP(/AUS) when the sales as of Aug 10 are 560k for NA+EU and 180k for the rest of the world. EU alone has more units sold than JP, but has to play on servers located in NA/JP)

They probably didn't and that's why they are leaving, or they are the type of serial MMOist who plays all the MMOs, but only for about 1 or 2 months. These were never long-term subs to be counted as a loss. So the ROI for server overkill just isn't there.
Just because some failure situation is common place doesn't make it okay, be it us accepting that "oh it's usual release issues" when you'd return that laptop within the day if it behaved like the servers do or them (MMO makers at large) not trying to find new ideas that will make serial MMOers want to stay.