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Star Wars The Old Republic hit with teething problems

by Steven Williamson on 23 December 2011, 09:33

Tags: Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:EA)

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As is usually the way with MMOs, but still a great annoyance, Star Wars The Old Republic is plagued with stability issues and glitches that makes the experience far less than perfect in its launch week.

A patch will undoubtedly come, but current problems include long server queues, reportedly up to two hours, latency issues, and registration code glitches, which have prevented some subscribers from accessing the game at all.

Bioware’s senior online community manager Stephen Reid has addressed some of the issues on the official forums:

"As many of you know, we're experiencing high load and corresponding queues on some servers," he writes.

"This is to be expected during launch, as a high number of people want to play the game, and for long stretches at a time. We're monitoring all of our servers around the clock, and we're raising server population caps where required. However, to ensure our long-term goals of server stability and healthy populations, we do not want to raise population caps too rapidly."


Queues to enter some servers, even at off-peak times

Other problems include out of synch audio, graphical glitches and bugged quests, all issues we've come to expect from MMOs in launch week. EA has yet to comment on those customers affected by the registration code glitch, which has seen a number of players who preordered the game through EA’s Origin platform receive codes that don’t work.

Things will undoubtedly settle down, and long-term fans of MMOs will be familiar with the type of problems SWTOR fans are currently facing, but that doesn’t solve the immediate issues, which could see the game losing some potential subscribers before it's even really began.

For those who persist with Star Wars: The Old Republic, the rewards will probably be there, but when this much money is poured into a game (approximately $150 million) it’s no wonder so many gamers are frustrated.

Do you think it’s acceptable to launch a game that feels like it’s in beta? Or do you expect early technical problems with MMOs and have faith that things will be fixed?


HEXUS Forums :: 13 Comments

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“Do you think it’s acceptable to launch a game that feels like it’s in beta?”

It would only feel like a beta if you had no experience of what a real beta is like. By all accounts that I've seen so far it's a very polished game for the amount of content - it must have cost an obscene amount to get it this polished.

“Or do you expect early technical problems with MMOs and have faith that things will be fixed?”

Depends what they're going for. They had already warned of the population issues and it's a deliberate tactic (they would rather have queues than low server populations).

The reason so many players are disappointed is simply that so many more players are playing the game. It's got what, 1.5 million players? That's a ludicrous number! Use that to scale the complaints and it's a tiny proportion.
An MMORPG release that feels like beta and has long queues?

How refreshing and new (NOT!)
As someone who was there for the launch of WoW, and each of it's expansion packs after that..the release of TOR has gone like a dream for me.

I pre ordered on sat morning, and was playing by 2pm that day..no queues, no crashes..just straight in. I didn't log out for 12 hours (such was the addiction!), and then played again each day after that..not once have I hit a queue or crash, or even any lag.

Compared to the launch of WoW when I had constant crashing, lag, server queues, disconnections..a nightmare.

As I understand it it's mainly people on the very first wave of servers who are having problems - most people who joined the servers from the second or later batches don't seem to have any problems.
It seems to be specific servers. There's a list somewhere of which servers are having the longest queues
an mmo with launch-time teething trouble… how unexpected…