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

[Matt Chatterley]

On 26/02/07, Vincent Archer <archer at frmug.org> wrote:
>
> According to Mike Rozak:
> > - 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.)
>
> Duplication quality woes. The first expansion of World of Warcraft
> suffered from this big time, notably in europe. A lot of CD #2, mainly
> in Germany, but not just there were borderline unuseable. With luck, and
> two-three attempts,
> you could copy them on the disk, and run the install from disk, but the
> install program would fail trying to read the disk from the CD/DVD
> reader, and abort with a big error message.


Not only MMOs suffer from this. NWN2 for example - would not install from my
DVD drive. Because the Star-Force copy protection (I think it was star force
anyway) refused to recognize my drive as valid. I actually had to fit a
different DVD drive (luckiliy I had a "spare" in another PC), before I could
install and play the game.

Then the installer bailed out a couple more times just for luck.

> - Apparently, 500 MB(?) of them were. (A mere month
> > after the golden masters were made.)
>
> Usual for the course. It happens with every single MMO: the first patch
> is always huge.


Again - not just MMOs. This happens to all software these days.

Bandwidth is cheap now. A lot of companies acknowledge this, and I feel as
if the mentality has changed to something along the lines of "Oh well. If
it's crap when we release, we can always patch whatever we like later..".
Software developers tend to get lazier as hardware (and the access to it)
becomes easier/cheaper.


> - 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 think I still have a link to a screenshot saying that it will take 17
> days to finish the install of Half-Life 2 :)



LOL. If memory serves, the play time is less than that!

Cheers,

Matt