Trying to stick to a schedule while enjoying a highly anticipated game's pre-launch is a bitch, I'll just bump Friday and Monday's collumns to this Friday and Monday and blame it on something plausable, like still working on layout, or the wrong prescription glasses I got last week.
Aaaaanyway...
Guild Wars 2 head start began 3 hours early last Friday which caught me a little off guard because I was watching this cool Day Z Event. It may have cost me a name or two, but with 19 characters to play around with I made do.
Everything seemed operational. I created my characters to my satisfaction and then went to bed, because I am on that 8-5 desk jockey schedule. Sadly when I woke up at 7am the game was down for maintenance and a rollback. When it finally came back up I was able to get in and play and really enjoy the content. Unfortunately there were some problems in the launch that cannot be overlooked.
Before I point out the flaws I want to take a paragraph to trumpet some of the successes. First, it's obvious this is not their first rodeo, Arenanet knows how an MMO should run, and how MMO communities tend to behave. The server options were made well. They set artificial caps on server populations to force players to spread out. When all the servers were full, they ratcheted up the caps a tick or two and waited for people to sift into the newly created space. They did not foolishly create an extra 12 servers. In the short term this is creating a lot of "you have been moved to the overflow server" messages, but in the long run it will lead to richer communities. Launching the game 3 hours early was a good call too, it prevented their log in server from getting slammed all at once. Outside of a few short maintenance windows servers have been up since that initial launch time. The same cannot be said about all of the game's features though.
World v World maps have had their share of problems, mostly corrected after extensive downtime on Saturday. Some worlds are still dominating, hopefully this will sort itself out as Arenanet cycles the matches at a faster than normal pace.
Guilds were borked on Saturday morning after the maintenance. Guild invites haven't been working for guilds that were created prior to this, and some people were removed for their guilds. Having broken guilds in GUILD wars seems bad to me. This seems to still be a problem, particularly for large guilds.
The Trading Post has also been non-functional since sometime Saturday...I don't know how well it was working prior to the point it went offline, but I suspect not well. This has been very frustrating for the crafting community because they want access to nubletts...err....other player's crafting materials that they are probably selling to NPC's for 3c a piece. As of Today, this has still not been fixed.
The lack of an iOS Authenticator has led to a surprising number of account hacking. I am leading that story, let me correct. There have been a lot of accounts hacked by Gold Farmers, a mobile authenticator could have prevented this sort of attack on some accounts.
Hacked accounts weren't the only bans going out over the week. Arenanet is taking a hard line on behavior. There is a fun reddit thread out there on the subject. Offensive names and harassing treatment of other players in public places (map chat for example) has resulted in warnings in the form of 3 day bans. I applaud them on this effort, but I remember another MMO who's naming rules included "no dude or leet speak" and "no celebrity names, or real world titles/military ranks" who realized somewhere around the 3 million player mark that this was more work than it was worth and just let the community deal with it. If this stays a thing, and people who call other people offensive and racist terms in chat, or bully and harass in other ways are thanked for their $60 and shown the door; I look forward to pleasant community.
There have been some rumblings about leveling curve. I have several friends who I play with and each of them seemed to kind of run into a problem around 15-20 where they were outpacing the content. Ahh...but what is the content? It seems that many players are stuck thinking of renown hearts as quest hubs. They go, fill it up and then move to the next heart. That's not really how GW2 is designed. If that's how you want to play it, more power to you, but you'll need to travel a little more and do more than your own racial starting zone to fill in the gaps. But further exploring the maps and digging into the crafting system can result in a significant shift.
I would give this launch a B-
The Guild and Trading Post problems that persist 5 days later put an ugly blot on what otherwise has been a pretty solid experience.
If you are still on the fence, I say probably wait a week for these last few problems to shake themselves out. If you are looking for something to play, though, the game itself has been a blast so far. I will give a more complete review after I've had a month or so to soak it in.
No comments:
Post a Comment