[MUD-Dev2] [Design] A rant against MMORPG installs and initial user experience

[Mike Rozak]

I just installed Vanguard today. What follows is a description of the install process. While Vanguard's install is worse than most MMORPGs I've tried, it's only mildy worse. For anyone out there working on a MMORPG, I suggest you read this. If you know someone working on a MMORPG, E-mail this rant to them.

Coincidentally(?), Runescape has one of the best installs of any MMORPG I've tried, and it has 900K paying players and 9M non-paying ones!


12:00 PM - Get home with the vanguard install disks. (After doing a 2 hour round-trip to the game store. I live in the outback! I also picked up groceries and ate lunch while I was in town, otherwise I would have started the clock at 10:00 AM.)

- Start the installation up. It shows me a picture of three flags, one obviously representing english (since it's a british flag, or maybe an Australian one). I click that. Some logos appear on the screen.

- I'm then asked AGAIN what language to use. I select English, again.

- Usual morass of install dialogs.

- It takes 20-30 mins to install from the first of two DVDs.

- When asked to insert the second DVD, I do so, but vanguard appears to hang. Ejecting the DVD causes Vanguard to realize that it was spinnings its wheels, and it tells me to insert a DVD again. Repeating causes the same problems.

- Since Vanguard warned me that my antivirus might cause setup problems, and I ignored the warning, I shut down McAffee and spend another another 20-30 mins reinstalling from the first DVD.

- I get to the "Insert DVD 2 again", but the same problem happens. It obviously wasn't Mcaffe.

- I'm more intellgent than the average bear though, so I spent ten minues copying the second DVD into a temporary folder and install from there. It works! (Most normal people would NOT think of that.)

- By the way, if it only takes me 10 minutes to copy a DVD to my hard drive, and my CPU was only at 20% during the install process, then why did it take 20-30 minutes to install the first DVD? You'd think it'd only take 10 minutes and my CPU would be "pegged" a 50%. The second DVD, installed directly off the hard drive, still only used 20% of the CPU and took just as long as if it were installing off the DVD.

- By the way, I search vanguard's online troubleshooting FAQ and see no mention about setup problems. I search for "install" and "setup" and find nothing related to my experience. Could I be the only one with these problems?

- Installation finished, claims to run DirectX install, which it doesn't, and exits without running the vanguard app.


2:00 PM -

- I run the vanguard app. It then pulls up a small splashscreen that downloads a new version of itself and restarts.

- I then get asked if I'm a member of Station Exchange. Since I had played EQII before, and actually wrote my password down, I type that in. (As I recall, signing up for station exchange was an ordeal in itself.)

- Right away, I'm asked if I want the $29.95 station pass to play all SOE's games. I say no. I'm then asked if I want to Spend $0.99 on some random feature. I click no. In the next dialog, I'm told that I'll be able to trial those features for free for a month, even though I clicked no in the previous one. This sort of marketing strikes me as really bizarre.

- I'm asked for CC details, etc. Setup asks for my state, despite the fact that I select "Australia" as my country... Australia has states too, but the US states are still shown in the combo box... (And by the way, Windows knows I'm in Australia, so why doesn't Vanguard use that info to default to "Australia".)

- I'm asked to type in a 20-digit password. The dialog box says it's located someplace on the box, but it's actually on the back of the user manual. I'm glad that I didn't let my parrot chew apart the Vanguard manual, like it wanted to. (I've had to hunt for passwords in many games. At least I didn't have to do an "eye test" like WoW, where I had to type in some curvy text on a plaid background.)

- Vanguard then spends 10-15 minutes rescanning the 17 gigabytes of files that it just installed in order to see which of them was out of date.

- Apparently, 500 MB(?) of them were. (A mere month after the golden masters were made.)

- After checking with the server, the login screen intially says that downloads will take 12 hours and 53 minutes to download all the patches! I almost have a heart attack. This quickly drops to 2 hours as the system properly calculates my download speed.

- I wait for it to download. Take a shower. Take a nap. Get a bite to eat. Play with my parrot, who starts ripping the cover off the box.

- For some reason, an hour and a half in, the download decides that someone pressed cancelled, which they didn't, and then decides to hang.

- I restart vanguard, retype my password, and spend another 10-15 minutes rechecking for out-of-date files.

- I now have 40 minutes left to download. (At least it didn't toss out all the pre-crash downloads.)

- Several false cancellations later, I finally get everything installed.

- Vanguard asks me to log in again.

- It then complains that directX isn't properly installed, and that I should re-run setup to get this fixed!

- I know that if I re-run setup, it'll take another hour to install from DVD, and then all the datafiles will have to be re-downloaded, and even then the problem won't be fixed. Therefore, I search the subdirectories and find the direct-X install and run that directly. This works. (An average person would have absolutely no clue.)

- I re-run vanguard, re-logon, and get to a page where I can "Create a character" or "change my settings". I have no characters, of course, so why would I want to do anything except create a character?

- I go to change my settings since vanguard has decided to set my resolution to 1280x1024 DESPITE the fact that I have a widescreen monitor. (How many people would notice the the aspect-ratio mismatch? Most would notice it subliminally and think that vanguard's graphics suck.) Widescreen monitors are NOT uncommon. It would only have taken a developer 10 minutes of coding to check the pre-existing monitor resolution (CM_SCREENX and CM_SCREENY) and use that! (Many other games have done this to me too, and I have no idea why no-one in the test team picks up on this.)

- Furthermore, assuming that the video had been properly set up, I should have been asked to create a character right away. There's no point in asking questions when there's only one answer.

- I am then thrown into a race/class selection page that is lacking documentation and would be fairly confusing to anyone who hadn't played a MMORPG before.

- I select my race and class, figuring out that greyed out versions of the low-saturation race/class icons mean that I can't click on them. There isn't much visual difference between greyed out and clickable.

- I then have to change my character's appearance. There are more sliders than I can poke a stick at, none of which make any signficant difference to my character's appearance. I choose a Fox character because people on F13 said (as I recall) that the area that the Foxes start in is really wierd, so I thought that would be interesting. You'd think a Fox character would have a large variety of striking fur patterns (such as the one in my thylacine video from my last post), but they don't. They're all more-or-less dull brown, and they don't look like foxes at all.


5:00 PM:

- Finally, I'm let into the world.

- I thought EQII's character rendering was amusing when it would draw naked characters first, and then a few seconds later add clothing and armor. Vanguard draws the eyeballs first, and then adds the character a second later!

- I'm thrown into a rather boring valley, with rather boring elves standing around and sporting shields over their heads. Shouldn't I be in Fox-ville? (I must have mis-read the F13 rants, because this valley wasn't that wierd.)

- These elves are reminiscent of EQI, back in 2001. They don't move much. There's no lip sync. There are random voice-overs that have nothing to do with the quests they hand out. Where's my eye candy fix? I played Oblivion 9 months ago(?) and EQII over 18 months ago, and they both have talking NPCs with lip sync. Oblivion's characters even look at you whent they speak! (Although they give you a rather insane look.)

- There isn't really a tutorial. If I hadn't played countless other MMORPGs just like this, I'd be completely lost.

- My first quest does NOT involve killing rats! Yay! Instead, it involves PICKING CLUMPS OF GRASS! I'm excited now. (Sarcasm.) Compare this to Oblivion where you escape from prison by following the Emperor, and then watch him die.



If I hadn't paid A$80 for the game (plus A$35 for petrol) and spent FIVE hours getting it working (plus 2 in the car), I'd have quit right there and never touched the game again. Since I spent so much effort (and a bit of money) installing the game, I'll give it a few more hours.

Here's my advice to anyone writing a MMORPG:

1) In the future, most MMORPGs will be downloaded for free. They may include a monthly fee or RMT, but players won't pay to download them, and only the top 4 or 5 latest MMORPGs will be on store shelves. (Vanguard was only on the Darwin store shelves because I pre-ordered it, and it had a budget of tens of millions of dollars! For the record, Darwin's EB Botique had lots of Burning crusade and WoW, lots of empty boxes for LOTR, and the dregs: half-price boxes of EQII, Lineage II, DDO, COV, and one or two others I can't remember. The single copy of vanguard in the store was waiting in the display case for me to pick it up.)

2) The download had better take only 15-30 minutes, if that. I accept that the download might only include the intro section of the game and that after completing the intro, users might need to spend some more time downloading (preferably while they're playing the intro.)

3) Install has to just work, and not require users to press OK fifty million times. (Not to mention being bug free.)

4) No complicated character generation process. Race is obviously a must. Ask the player's class AFTER they've been playing for awhile.

5) Once users start playing, the game needs to grab them in 15-30 minutes. Users need to see right away what makes the MMORPG special. If they don't, they'll stop playing after the first half hour. (Since they haven't paid any money yet, haven't spent much time downloading, and didn't even have to drive to the store, they won't have much invested in the game.)



If I were organizing the Austin game conference, I'd have a MMORPG installation contest. Place a representative (CEO or lead designer) from each company on a virgin computer and see how many hours it takes for them to install their own MMORPG. Let audience members pelt them with rotten tomatoes to ensure a quick install. Every time the install process crashes, give the CEO/lead an electric shock through their chair, keyboard, or mouse.