On the 24th February RIFT began its ‘head start’ event. With 1 million Trion registered accounts, it was always highly likely as a result of a popular and successful open beta that RIFT was going to experience large numbers of players flooding onto the servers come head start. And sure enough, queue times to enter certain servers were and still are staggering…
My personal queue time was in excess of 8 hours (although I’ve heard reports of 20+) and considering the servers only opened at 6:00pm in the UK, having attempted to join immediately, I didn’t really want to wait until 2 o’clock in the morning to play. Four days later however and I have only managed to play for an hour. My queue times, as I want to play with my guild, have been so long that it hasn’t actually left me any time free to play the game once I have actually logged in. It’s a ridiculous scenario that leaves those who do work little option when returning home but to wait it out, while a significant number are resorting to scripts to prevent their characters ‘AFKing’ or logging out when not playing, which only makes the matter worse. That’s not to say that all servers have queues, they don’t, but many of us had no way of knowing it would get this bad. To make matters worse, Trion provide no server transfer facility resulting in my guild being split across 3 servers.
Its been an interesting experience reading the official RIFT forums and the reaction of the current player base. It must be said that the RIFT community forums leaves a lot to be desired at the best of times, but the blind faith and instant dismissal of justified criticism against those who dare to speak out against the server queue times is astonishing. Contrary to what the community may argue, it is not acceptable for a developer to so poorly judge server capacity and player intake. It would be basic maths to calculate the number of units sold (whether physically or digitally) combined with the number of servers available within European and American regions. This would then give a reasonable estimate of the expected participants of the head start event and how many are expected upon each server.
Some servers are inevitably more popular than others with Whitefall becoming the player versus player server destination of choice, resulting in coma inducing wait times. What is even more concerning however is that the game does not officially launch until the 4th March, suggesting the queue times are about to get a whole lot worse.
The purpose of a head start event should be twofold; to create an early spread of player levels between the head start and launch day window in order to reduce the number of players in starter zones and to test server stability and player intake. As it currently stands within the MMOG industry, this falls by the wayside in order to create a marketing campaign to secure units sold. As a result and having experienced countless MMOG launches, 90% of those intending to play the game purchase a head start copy anyway; completely undermining the entire purpose a head start.
In RIFT’s circumstance, I can honestly say I have never encountered queues like it, suggesting Trion have completely misjudged server capacity and limits. For all those defending RIFT with the predictable “moan more”, “it’s launch day, they are all like this” or “choose a different server” really need to stop and think. After your free month has experienced you will be paying a monthly fee for a product you are unable to play (unless you’re one of many resorting to scripts). Were you to wait an average of 4 hours a day in order to play the game, you would be losing 5 days play time a month, which I doubt Trion will reimburse on your subscription.
If you purchased a television from your local electrical retailer only to find you had to wait 4 hours before you could turn it on you wouldn’t be pleased and I don’t believe the sales clerk saying “It’s a new model- it’ll probably be alright after a few months” would be a sufficient enough excuse. You would be asking for a refund: so why should MMOGs be the exception?
It takes countless months to build a solid reputation within the MMOG industry and only minutes to burn it down. Trion are currently playing with matches.
Email the author of this post at lewisb@tap-repeatedly.com
At times like this I stop missing MMOs and content myself with singleplayer. I get angry having to wait thirty extra seconds for a ‘reserved slot’ to free up on a standard FPS server.
I couldn’t agree more Jakkar, but this is the worst I’ve ever experienced. The industry needs a complete reality check on customer service, especially when paying a monthly fee.
It’s practically ruined RIFT for me. As part of one of the most prominent guilds, being split across three servers, we are spread so thinly it’s just a huge shame.
To make matters worse, if we ride it out to see how bad it gets at release people will be even more reluctant to reroll as they’ll be such high level.
In Neocron they had over 7,000 players on one server without any problems: EVE has hundreds of thousands and WOW 20K+ as it stands I’d be surprised if Trion were pushing more than 5k a server.
A lot of gamers get this Stockholm Syndrome where they defend a developer regardless of how much they are abused. It’s like you are attacking their very identity when you complain publicly about the crap service. This sounds like a bad deal.
As someone who doesn’t play MMO’s, the idea of waiting 4 hours before you can even play the game is totally alien to me. It sounds like something I can’t imagine anyone would tolerate.
I mean, for a paid service, why should anyone tolerate it? A 4 hour waiting time is longer than alot of people would sit and play any one game for in any given session.. but waiting that long just to get in?
It’s absolutely bonkers and totally inexcusable.
The television analogy really hits it home, but still this industry has produced somewhat of an apologist culture; many of us do it even without knowing or meaning to.
But yeah, this sounds very frustrating. I doubt the publisher has the kind of money that Blizzard had in 2004 to refund every WoW subscriber over a week or more of time during the game’s first two months. Could end up being a lose-lose situation for both creator and consumer. Hopefully they can recover from it; you hate to see the tireless work put into any game, no less an MMO, amount to failure.
Got to leap in on you there Lewis – did you mean to type Neocron back there, regarding the massive player count? I’m afraid to say Neocron never supported that many players, and had an average server population at peak time during its golden age of 200-600 people on the main servers and 100-250 on the foreign language servers.
That’s another partof what made it so special – it wasn’t a massive, but a ‘fairly big’ – the player count, the scale of the community was managable for the human mind. Names and reputation mean something when the population is more that of a hamlet or village than a city.
I did Jakkar. Neocron at various points (before it moved to Dome of York) had on the original Neocron 1 servers over 5,000 players at peak times, which I’ve seen higher than 7,000 before. Saturn especially was incredibly busy. I’ve some screen shots of it somewhere.
Eventually during Neocron 2 however and the server merge (Terra/Mars/Mercury) the numbers decreased significantly.
Although I must add, I’ve only ever seen the server numbers dwindle to what you say, and that was long after DOY’s release.
Mein gott. How did I never witness that? I was there from the day the game was released and played 5-15 hours a day for almost six months on the main English speaking server. I was a Saturn guy initially but it got quiet and there were few English speakers at that point, so I moved to Pluto, I believe. I never saw above 800 players per server at the very peak of activity, GMT nights when the Americans were getting home from work, the Europeans playing late into the night and the brits in the middle.
How can this be? Bugged player-counts?
Who has 8 hours to wait for anything? Let alone a game?
Still, maybe that’s indicative of success, so let’s hope that they sort it out, and the game doesn’t go south.
Lewis–I don’t know why you are complaining. They SAVED you from hours and hours of your MMO addiction. This is why I stick to shooting people online.