Analysts can (and often do) get it wrong. I really wish I could give you numbers here but I have to respect my employment NDA so all I can say is when one of the biggest brands in the industry can exceed even it's own extremely lofty "best case" expectations that they thought there was no chance in hell of meeting - then it can and will happen to others.Originally Posted by Rostum
As for other industries there really aren't that many online services that will be hammered by a few hundred thousand people the minute the switch is flicked. The very comparable thing I can think of right now is ticket sales for major sporting events and concerts which have the exact same problems when they get hammered at the same time. Even things like the Google App store run incredibly slowly when a hot "killer app" gets released.
Let's not forget that Square Enix isn't exactly the best of gauging these numbers either when something like Tomb Raider which sold metric buckloads was considered to have underperformed.
You can even see in Yoshi P's posts the concurrency figures they were planning for, which were by no means modest in relation to 1.x and they still surpassed them. The gaming press argument may feel superfluous but it is very true that there had been a massive surge of interest in ARR between Phases 3 and 4 of the beta once the NDA got lifted - by which time a lot of the hardware and contingency plans were probably in place.
They've openly admitted that they got it wrong, the producer has even written a heartfelt apology for it, they are giving people an additional 7 days of free game time (which comes at a loss to their bottom line) in response to these issues. They are doing the best they can in response to the situation and to their credit aren't fobbing people off with bulltrout like EA and Maxis did in the wake of the Sim City launch. It's also a lot more than what Gameforge DE gave European TERA players in the wake of ongoing issues (to the point that TERA EU was at one point several patches behind the KR version and 2 or 3 patches behind the NA one)
I already addressed this in a response to your last post where you said this. ARR has only been out for a week. The GW2 in Europe example I gave it took them over two weeks to sort it. SWTOR at launch it was practically impossible for me and my friends to get online at the same time for around the first two weeks. Neverwinter I lost an entire days worth of progress due to server rollbacks they had to preform in response to an economy breaking exploit they hadn't found out about during testing.People keep saying that this is like every other MMO launch. It isn't. If it were this wouldn't be as big news as it is right now. I've been following a lot of major MMO releases over the last decade, and in this later half of the decade either none of them had any issues at all, or it only took a few days to fix those issues - not over a week or two!
Firefall is STILL plagued by problems and has been in open beta and willingly taking peoples money for far longer than A Realm Reborn has been on shelves.
Even WoW got hit by unexpected demand related issues when Cataclysm was first released and had a couple of very major bugs that had to be rectified post launch.
Then there's also other recent always-online client/server games like Diablo III and Sim City, that whilst not MMORPGs, have had similar incredibly bad launches.
Acting like ARR is a travesty the likes of which haven't been heard of in years is just frankly far from the truth.
Again I addressed your claim of there being "no communication" in my previous post.In the end, they should and could have been prepared to deal with this issue days after not weeks. However, I'm willing to bet this is just more internal issues in the company that have dragged on from previous management (like not communicating with the consumers at all, or just general lack of foresight and stubbornness (remember that Tanaka fellow?).
Server hardware doesn't suddenly appear out of thin air overnight. Especially when that hardware is being housed in a data center whereby things like contracts sometimes have to be re-negotiated or their technicians may actually also be busy dealing with other problems at the same time. It's not a case of pressing a magic button on a desk and everything is resolved.
Even the entire process of getting the hardware has to go through budgeting and approval first.
The thing is, there is a queue. I have been in it had to wait for it from position 561 before. However if the realm is at capacity and it already has a set number of people in the queue it will simply reject any further additional requests to join that queue. However due to the ongoing issues with lobby servers it can sometimes cause the queue to get dropped as well as the lobby and login servers themselves are struggling to keep up with the demand of people spamming them.I also just wanted to say that whilst the "AFK kick" feature won't relieve server stress, it'd still allow for more players to actually play the game than those that would just leave their characters idle for 8+ hours at a time. Sure, it's a short-term feature easy enough to implement, but it might have helped settle down angry consumers and angry reviewers. I'm also completely dumbfounded they don't have a working queue system, which would also help alleviate people's current perceptions (probably more so than the AFK kick feature).
A lot of reviewers are actually holding off on publishing reviews until these issues are alleviated. Even with all the issues the game is still getting largely favourable user reviews on sites like MetaCritic which normally get negative review bombed as soon as a situation like this has opened up.
The situation isn't great, no. It's frustrating, it sucks. However SE aren't burying their heads in the sand over it and waiting for it to blow over. They've communicated it, Yoshi-P himself has been very honest and open about it and they've already taken steps to compensate people for it. The issues are annoying and in an ideal world they wouldn't happen, but sometimes people get things wrong and rather than spurt out hyperbole and making sweeping negative assumptions I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. For now.
No-one's trying to argue that the situation isn't unacceptable or ideal - however a lot of people are trying to provide reasoned responses to your claims of "I don't understand how" or "I'm dumbfounded as to why."
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