The breaking-in period

In about a month we'll all be frolicking through the Never-Never-Land of Warhammer, feasting on sugarcanes and gumdrops. You'll be talking in guild chat about who's character is more sick from eating candy. I hate to break the NDA the day before it's supposed to drop, but here's one little tidbit : both factions have a public quest area made entirely of chocolate!

The real question is : when you first log on, and prance about this fairytale world of Princesses and Unicorns for the first time, will the servers be able to handle it? Will login servers go down? Will the game even work at launch? Will you be able to level your crafting and start working on your 1,000,000 rabbit kills unlock? How smooth will this launch be?

To help us put these heady launch times in perspective, let us go back in time almost four years. Let's go to the most successful MMORPG launch to date. World of Warcraft : Age of Forty-Man Wipening. How did that one go?

I won't keep you in suspense : server performance sucked. It was so bad that Blizzard had to focus on server fixes instead of game content for the first few months.

I was on Mannoroth, one of the original PvP servers. And lag and stability were bad, really bad. It took three or four months for the server to really start staying up every night.

Then, with the server problems solved forever, Blizzard premiered their first big content patch, introducing the Blackwing Lair raid instance. The very first encounter was this crazy thing where your whole raid group of 40 people fought like 50 mobs at the same time and it was insane and fun.

Neat feature too -- you could tell when another guild on your server was doing that encounter because it would lag every other BWL raid instance. It didn't matter much -- BWL wasn't totally complete when it was released (neither was Molten Core, the first raid instance, for that matter). Blizzard just had a door after the second boss that would not open. And that second boss was broken for a while so everyone got to relearn him when he was "healed" of his crippling lag issues.

Well, how about the honor system? Let's talk about that. The first honor system, the honor system the Blizzard talked about pre-release, was going to reward PvP and control griefing. So you could roll on a PvP server and have fun with PvP against same-level players, but it would protect you from high-level characters ganking you! That's an awesome idea right? It's so awesome I rolled with my wife and friends on a PvP server.

But the idea of anti-griefing systems was evidently not that awesome, as Blizzard eliminated it when they finally premiered the honor system six months after launch.. Yaay! I really liked their reasoning too : they were worried about low-level characters griefing high level characters. I know I was always worried about lowbie gankers when I played. They were a freaking epidemic.

But once the (now old) honor system was implemented, it was sheer bliss, right? After all, it rewarded quantity of participation, not quality. So if you were on a PvP server, the best players could hit Grand Marshal and get the best Weapons and PvP Gear in the game! As long as by "best players" you mean unemployed people who would literally play for a hundred hours a week in a question to see who could "participate" the most!

I guess what I'm saying is this : Mythic is going to have to try really hard to not have the smoothest MMOG release in history. Collector's editions could start exploding and burning down city blocks, and it would still be better than WoW's release.