Bad-Launch

Latest

  • Warlords of Draenor launch woes featured on BBC's Watchdog

    by 
    Matthew Rossi
    Matthew Rossi
    11.28.2014

    We all remember the launch. Even Blizzard admits it wasn't the smoothest, to the point where we were offered five days off our subs and an apology from J. Allen Brack. That's not something Blizzard does very often anymore, and it signifies that yes, this was a pretty big deal in terms of launch screwups. Ironically, for some of us (like myself) it was a pretty smooth launch overall. But for some of us it was so bad that they complained to the BBC, as the above clip showcases. Incgamers has a long article about the show Watchdogs on the BBC that goes into detail about the piece and its conclusions for the Warlords launch. I feel forced to agree that Watchdogs doesn't seem to have tried very hard here - their example of someone not being able to play WoW is someone on an ancient computer running around Ashran, and he's level 100, so... he played sometime. It's definitely an interesting time to be a World of Warcraft player, as the ten year old MMO seems to regaining cultural relevance with a vengeance lately. I don't think anybody's surprised that the launch troubles have been a highly discussed issue, but this seems like a new extreme to me.

  • The Anvil of Crom: On Age of Conan's 'bad launch'

    by 
    Jef Reahard
    Jef Reahard
    06.18.2012

    I recently ran across an internet discussion featuring the worst MMO launches of all time. Age of Conan was in there, of course, and while I'm not going to tell you that the title's debut was perfect, I feel that there's quite a bit of misinformation stemming from the game's early days. Some of you may disagree and interpret this week's column as a fanboy defense of Funcom, but if you've been reading The Anvil of Crom for more than a month, you'll know that I take the devs to task far more often than not. The stark reality is that AoC's launch simply wasn't as bad as some people make it out to be.