Rivalwatch: Horizon Launch Problems???

[JonnyG]

Has anyone tried Horizons after launch? I know, I know, but I figured that at least one person wouldn't believe the ringing endorsements (http://www.mythicahq.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1353) that our forum members had for the game. I saw this on Game Rifts (http://www.gamerifts.com)Even though a free 30 day trial is offered, which requires a credit card to sign up, credit cards were charged for the first month. A vast number of North American credit cards were rejected (even though users had available funds) or had “Errors Processing Requests,” which directed would-be subscribers to renter their credit card info. Totally separate issue from the three digit verification number on the back of cards.

Those who did get into game were first met with problems trying to bring their favorite character names to life within the virtual world of Istaria, as the database of names during beta were not cleared out. So, names were already taken for both first and last which rejected new user name creations.

Inside game, doors were missing from buildings (to be patched in later) and certain mobs appeared as grey blobs as they are placeholder art.

One server already is reported to have a dupe bug which has crashed the games economy, screaming for player bans. Who can ban a few hundred people on opening day?

Items that were patched during beta, but not on the discs (due to gold being before the patches were put into place) missed the update patcher for live.

Land plots, prime real estate within game for players to build their virtual homes, have already run out. Could be tied to the dupe bug, or just really, really, really good power gamers!

After the first hour, you get to crash to the desktop due to huge memory links.
And this was just the first few hours.
Will developers ever learn, wow. I hope it's truly not that bad.

So is anyone truly sap enough to buy this garbage? Or to own up to it?

[Mi Tes]

Horizons was the first MMORPG in the last few years I have not bought on release. Not sure if I am just getting cynical or have higher expectations, but after seeing some of the comments, not regretting it at all. Will continue to watch and if in a few months it is ready, I might give it a try, but after trying SB and SWG at release and seeing Horizons in beta, I wasn't even tempted.

[BigJonno]

A vast number of North American credit cards were rejected (even though users had available funds) or had “Errors Processing Requests,” which directed would-be subscribers to renter their credit card info.

WOOHOO! YEAH! Get one back for the Europeans! :cool:

Seriously, though, it sounds like typical MMORPG launch day fun except for...

Inside game, doors were missing from buildings (to be patched in later) and certain mobs appeared as grey blobs as they are placeholder art.

...which is absolutely disgraceful.

[Harafnir]

That is just awful... This must be a new low in game launches, and I can just hope that people avoid it, just to let the message sink in that stuff like this should not be tolerated when costumers actually pay for the product.
Just the fact that people pay for things like this, and continue to pay for a game that might not be ready in another 5-6 months, is the reason companies launch things in such a sorry state. They can... They get payed anyway... (Hm, sounds like griefing)

The only way we can change this is to stop supporting companies that launch unfinished products. I guess that will happen when the competition is more fierce but.. I wish people had sense enough not to encourage such behaviour from publishers.

Edit: Changing it to Publisher then, but it does not in any way change the fact. They do it because they can. They do it because they get paid anyway. If there was a clear history of games that had been launched before finished, and they all turned into major losses because the costumers did not want to pay for unfinished products, then not a Publisher in the world woudl try that again.

They only do what the costumers signal is ok.

[Scout]

I wish people had sense enough not to encourage such behaviour from developers.
Usually it's the publisher that rushes the game out... i.e. Publisher: "We have a tight schedule to follow! This game must be out by Christmas!" Developer: "But we need another 3 months" Publisher: "I don't care! We need it in the market!"

MSGS has been pretty good about it so far (with the exception of their most recent MMORPG...)... Let's hope they let launch Mythica when it's ready.

[DX_Mage]

I tried to warn people not to get it but some people just have to learn the hard way.

I knew that there was a dupe bug (note I don't know how it was done) but I can't believe that they left that in. That is so incredibly stupid. I tried to imagine what was going through their head at the time they decided to let it slide and I passed out for a few hours as the pain of trying to do shave my brain down to the medulla myself was too much to take.

[Halldor]

I had a feeling this was going to happen. Seems like virtually every MMOG has been having massive problems at launch. The only real exception is DAoC, which launched smoothly (but was subsequently ruined by its parent company's thoughtlessness, but that's another topic for another day). SWG was AWFUL on launch day, as people couldn't even get far enough to register their credit cards. Anarchy Online was the worst in terms of in-game performance at launch...horrendous doesn't begin to describe that fiasco. Shadowbane...we've all heard the horror stories coming from THAT game. And the list continues.

After playing Horizons in beta, I can say that the game was about as ready for prime-time as Kirk Johnson was ready to face Vitali Klitschko in the ring last Saturday (Johnson was knocked out in the second round after landing all of SEVEN punches total in the fight and coming in grossly overweight and out of shape). Content was sorely lacking and there were all sorts of gameplay problems, with major memory leaks being first and foremost among them.

I'm with Mi Tes on this one...if some MAJOR changes get made in next couple months, I might think about it. Till then, it stays out of my home.

[Micajah]

I have some big gripes about publishers, developers, and MMORPG's, but that's an editorial for another day. I'd just like to comment on the dissapointment I've heard many of my friends voice about Horizons. How long did it takes Horizons to even think about launching? 4 years? Shadowbane had the same problem....taking 4 years to develop and launching with an aged graphics engine and terrible lag, etc etc etc. These two games promised the world and gave us far far less.

Personally, I'd rather have a development team give us an honest answer about their goals (want to have the best crafting, combat, guild exchange) and stick to their guns. What are your thoughts?

[JonnyG]

Micajah,

Yeah focus is important. We've seen a couple things to indicate that the devs are focused with Mythica, hopefully that focus will end up being a better game.

But in this case, old graphics is a problem with RPG's period, whether they be online or not. They take so long to develop that the engine is outdated by the time the game ships. Not a lot that you can do to solve this but try to bring the game out on time, which bites in other ways we've seen. A recent trend is to develop graphics engines that even todays computers aren't able to max out. People then complain that they can't max their PC out and get decent framerates, but at least you're ready for a year from now.

If people are complaining about graphics when a game comes out, look out, MMRPG's are supposed to last at least a couple years, think how much graphics change in 2 years.

Lag is another story, and seems to be an issue for all releases. I played the beta of Horizon's and it had tons of lag. I'm surprised that they didn't fix this before release, but it comes back down to releasing early.

Let's hope that the Mythica team is watching Horizon's launch and learning.

[Nidhögg]

Doors - There were never planned for release and I have not seen anything to indicate they are planned any time in the future. It is a design decision.

Dupe bug and economy - their fix was to wipe the money of anyone who had more than 99 silver. This was done regardless of how that money was obtained as they figured that anyone with more than that must be exploiting.

Grey blobs - it is a art/texture loading issue. Those are not placeholder art, they will be rendered correctly when the art/textures get loaded into memory. They are placeholders, but the real art will show up if you wait (not saying that is appropriate, just informing)

Missed beta patches - I believe that is fixed now, dunno

Anyway, it does not seem to be a horrible mess like some make it out to be. These seem to be pretty typical launch woes and appear to be handled in a timely matter. That said, I still am not going to play it after spending 4 months in beta. IMO, it is not fun enough.


Re: publisher vs. developer -- whatever the actual goings on behind closed doors, David Bowman, head of the dev company, has said numerous times that he is in charge of when HZ gets released and that it won't release until he says it is ready. In my book, if you take a very strong stance like that (very in character for DB) then you assume the responsibility no matter what actually happened.

I believe that the folks at AE are suitably satisfied that they are releasing a game that matches their design goals. It remains to be seen if that translates into financial success for them.

[JonnyG]

You always have to take these things with a grain of salt. People love to complain.

[Jotun]

quote:
A vast number of North American credit cards were rejected (even though users had available funds) or had “Errors Processing Requests,” which directed would-be subscribers to renter their credit card info.


WOOHOO! YEAH! Get one back for the Europeans!

Seriously, though, it sounds like typical MMORPG launch day fun except for...

-------
Thing is, apparently every failed create account request did pass billing info, so some people apparently were charged a bunch of times then had to deal with the hassle of cleaning that up. A couple of people are starting to say good things about the game.

[DX_Mage]

I remember when AC was released. I waited two weeks for the registration rush to get over. When I played AC at release there were a few glitches here and there with land blocks not loading correctly and that you had to log off and log back in to fix it but on the whole everything looked fine. I had the grey blob stuff simply because the system because my video card at the start didn't have enough memory not because they hadn't loaded yet. But this is just simply inexcusable. The duping, the graphics glitches (some excusable some not) the inviso kill you before you can see'em critters.

There should be a lot more truth to their advertising. I think that by the time its playable that I'll be playing Mythica beta by then =)

Bugs in beta are expected and even funny sometimes but on release you would expect that more than 50% of them would have been fixed. I didn't really mind that much playing with bugs it was the fact that they didn't seem to do anything about most of the bugs. If they had an explanation as to why some of the bugs hadn't been fixed (time and tech) I would have accepted that but they didn't. That and some of the design decisions were simply DUMB.

[Pollux]

I have no regrets. I knew after playing beta for two days that this is going to suck big time. But then again, there were fanbois talking about Horizons as "the savior of MMORPG's"...

I warned everyone...

[Halldor]

The original Horizons idea was outstanding and could have been a landmark. Instead, David Bowman and company ousted David Allen and pushed Horizons out in its current form. Ah well. Long Live Mythica!

[DX_Mage]

boy whouldn't that have been something if David Allen's name was HAL?

[DX_Mage]

What no one here gets it?

[JonnyG]

Right over my head DX. :)

[DX_Mage]

David Bowman who founded AE gets locked out of the ship with no spacesuit. Think of Allen as the HAL 9000. :wave: You need a whooosh right over my head smilely =)

[Bograt]

I beleive one of the devs plays horizons, not sure who it was (sorry) but he had no problems logging in and quite enjoys it

[JonnyG]

I enjoyed it to an extent. But it didn't hook me enough to keep playing.

[will-2-kill-U]

man! what a drag...i feel really..really bad because i suggested to a friend of mine at work to get this game and now to hear this bad news about the launch of Horizons makes me feel like i should reimburse him for paying for the thing.. matter of fact i have not seen him in a few days:hide: i was going to get it too..but i bought Gothic 2 and have just scratched the surface of that game...man..what a bummer

[Bograt]

most mmorpg's havbe a few problemsa at launch, its to be expected, DaoC had what most people consider the best release, and that still had its problems

[Lokii]

LOL!!!! They left a dupe bug in that people know about?? Heh. In my gaming experience that = first nail in the coffin. They dont get that bad boy fixed, and I mean SOON, and its gonna hateraide their performance something fierce.

[DX_Mage]

I like the sig Lokii =) mind if I steal it for the VN boards?

[Yigg Yous]

oh come on, you cant say SB was the worst, the horror stories and the whole thing actually made me laugh a lot. I played the game for a while and it wasn't too bad, until my guild broke up. I just didn't like the method of losing your guild status if you teleport to City A....that REALLY pissed me off. As well, I didn't like how there weren't many wars, and if there was they took mabye 5 hrs to complete.

[Taedrun]

I was in the Horizons Beta, and I knew it wasn't ready for release when they shipped it. This doesn't surprise me int he least, and I know a couple people who did buy it that can confirm the sketchy launch performance.

I know from personal experience (namely AC2 and Horizons just from recent memory) that I would far more accept a delayed release, than a buggy/lagged/unready launch. Heck I followed SB for 3 years of its development, and Horizons for 2 1/2yrs. It was a painfully slow, grueling wait, but I was hoping that it would be worth it. It turns out to not have been worth it.

We all realize that MMOG development is time intensive, team intensive, and most of all expensive. Publishers want to get a return on their investment into the developers. But rushing a game to market will not solve their cashflow woes, and can most certainly hurt overall sales... further deepening the monetary losses.

Please MS, by all means, take the time necessary to make Mythica the game it very well could be, and we all desperately want it to be!

[Lateralus]

Take Diablo 2 in example, its still pretty popular today and it was released a very long time ago, most people left it but if you ever went back there is still a huge bustling community and Blizzard never rushed that game and it turned out very good :)

(Minus the countless hacks and exploits, cheats, dupes, and account/item sellers on open b.net of course)

Please for the love of god, have a strict policy for cheaters, exploiters, and most importantly scammers. Recently on anarchy online, I had an item worth about $90 buck in real life and I had it stolen from me by a noob, grr. :mad: :cussing: :pissed:

[Elvis]

Did you actually pay $90 for some item in a game or were you just going by the rates that people who play the game "appraised' it at?

The development, production and support teams aren't really responsible for stolen in-game items. Technically (unless specifically stated in the EULA, and I've only heard of 2 MMORPGs that do or will do this) those items never really belong to the people who play the game anyway.