by Jeff Woleslagle on Aug 27, 2009
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A few days' head start has been a popular MMO marketing tactic
ever since Dungeons & Dragons Online offered the benefit in
early 2006, and is a rare instance where marketing and tech
objectives align. But is having a wave of your most
experienced and dedicated players go through the game long before
public launch players arrive the best thing for the game in the long
run? We'll examine the question in today's Loading... False Start.
You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the
result is the Ten Ton Pulse (
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/thepulse/" target="_blank">What
is The Pulse?).
Here's today's top 5 Pulse results:
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/41"Biggest Movers today :
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/2216"Important
Dates
At the Syndicate World Conference, SOE President John Smedley
told the story of the first 11 minutes of EverQuest in 1999. EQ had
10,000 concurrent users online in the first 10 minutes (a gargantuan
number for 1999, mind you), and all went smoothly until minute eleven,
when everything crashed due to an overage in bandwidth demands. That
the provider had sold a dedicated T1 line to SOE and 4 other businesses
in the San Diego area despite only having one actual pipeline was only
part of the reason. It turns out that all the work SOE had done to
optimize bandwidth had worked except for one important thing - someone
had forgotten to do the bits & bytes conversion, meaning that
EQ was using an order of magnitude more bandwidth than was needed.
MMOs have only become more complicated since EverQuest, which designed
by a 56-person studio in 3 years for an incredibly petty sum of $4.5
million (according to John Smedley in the same talk). You could build 5
EverQuests, inflation adjusted, for what
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/73369">Turbine is
suing Atari for. In-game bandwidth demands may not have grown
on the same scale as the rugged filesizes we see with more recently
released MMOs. To take some of the strain off of launch day (or perhaps
to use a game's most dedicated players as guinea pigs), pre-order head
start programs became popular when DDO announced the initiative prior
to launch in February 2006. It's one of those rare moments when the
stars align for marketing and tech, so Guild Wars and just about every
MMO since has followed suit. Two of the fall's biggest MMOs haven't
taken exception with the practice. Aion just announced their pre-order
program (2 days of character selection on Sept. 18th-19th followed by a
pre-order headstart on Sept. 20th-21st), and Champions Online's
headstart begins tomorrow (yup, that soon!).
I don't fault NCSoft or Cryptic for taking advantage of what's become a
popular marketing gimmick, but I do want to raise the question of
whether having a wave of your most diehard fans sweep through the game
two days before launch is the best thing for the game.
There are plenty of folks (more than you might think) that take
vacation days around a game launch and power through the content, find
themselves a guild, and get quite comfortable well before
the walk-in public, which would benefit the most from the
beta-fueled experience of the pre-order crowd, finds their way into the
game. I imagine that many of the public launch folks could be swept
into a more hardcore mindset if they were playing alongside the most
hardcore folks. As it stands, having a pre-order wave seems only to
widen the leveling gap at the most crucial point. That could have
long-term consequences too, as the most hardcore - the vocal minority -
clamor for more endgame content while the bulk of the playerbase is
still poking their way through the vanilla game.
What do you think? Is a head start a false start or a good start for an
MMO? Voice your opinion in the
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=45788">Loading...
forum.
From our
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=576">Champions
Online General Discussion Forum
style="font-weight: normal;">Champions Online Beta
Impressions
The
Champions Online beta is wrapping up in preparation for the game's
launch. Ten Ton Hammer's own Mattlow, JoBildo and Sardu discussed their
impressions
of the game's beta,
and now we bid you to do the same. Did Champions Online deliver the
fun? Are you sold? Or will you wait for the next big MMO launch to come
along?
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=45726">Tell
us and give us your own thoughts on the Champions beta.
==============================
Awesome Quotes from the
Epic Thread
"It's nice to hear the
positive highlights of CO instead of the usual
negativity on the forums or in some articles I've read. I think you've
done a great job pointing out the innovative points of CO such
as: no
killing boars (although you do kill some wolves and bears in Canada,
but hey they're Mutated Wolves & Bears!);
style="font-style: italic;">instant gratification (with
travel powers early, usable & useful powers early on in the
game); [and
a] huge amount of customization in your character's looks, powers, and
weapons."
- Validus
==============================
Have you spotted an Epic Thread on our forums?
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=32559">Tell
us!
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-Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team