So over the last couple of weeks Lord of the Rings Online has made itself quite a mess to clean up. It’s not the kind of screwup that ends like Alganon where the game goes out for cigarettes and never comes back (sure, it’ll come back this year, I believe you), but people were trying to take part in server transfers that just… were not happening. You don’t need me to tell you about it, of course; MOP’s Justin has already written a great summary of how wrong everything went, and I’m watching from the outside.
But there is something in there that inspired me to a new column, and that’s an attitude you see throughout the whole thing: a question of who cares. “Oh, just don’t play for a while.” “Oh, just play on the old servers, it doesn’t matter.” “This isn’t a real problem in the grand scope of things.” It’s a disingenuous argument, and it’s where I think it’s worth putting forth a very important premise. If you are paying money for an MMO? The damn thing had better work.
As a broad principle, this is both uncontroversial and not exactly novel. You look at nearly every MMO and you will see the studio running it in such a way to minimize downtime and maximize playability. If you have paid money for a thing, you will get that thing as fast as the servers allow it. If the servers have to go down, you will be notified in advance, and if they remain down for longer than they are supposed to, players will frequently be compensated for it.
This is what is generally known as “running a business responsibly.” If you go out to dinner and order a vegetarian dish but get it served to you with a big chunk of ham on top of it, the first time it is a mistake and you should count on the restaurant apologizing, correcting your order, and compensating you. If it happens every time, though, you are going to stop going to that restaurant. Ditto if it happens once and the official response is, “Actually, ham is a vegetable.”
Now, we all recognize that MMOs are complicated animals that have about four million different things that can go wrong at any given moment, and sometimes errors happen. When Final Fantasy XIV launched Endwalker, the servers were hammered to the point that logging into the game was a lengthy affair if you weren’t logging in at incredibly odd hours. Delays and disconnects were heartbreaking. And what did the studio do in response?
Well… it apologized. And people were still mad about it. I was not particularly mad about it myself, but I was frustrated when I got hit by it, but at the same time I could tell that the people behind the game were trying to fix it as best they could.
“But why not just wait for a month and then play it?” Because the game isn’t on sale in a month; it’s on sale now. If the game is available for purchase and live right now, then the time when I should be able to play the game is now, and I’m doing it now because that’s what I want to do now. And pretty much every company on the face of the planet recognizes that this is the correct state of affairs and what should be happening.
This ties into a lot of early access controversies with games launching too early and people being told that they need to be patient, the game is still in early access, it’s going to be broken but you really can’t get mad about it. But if a company is taking money for the game, that game is released. You can say that it is still in early access all you want, but that doesn’t excuse the game being a complete mess or somehow not fun to play.
I have bought early access games for which it became very clear that the developers did not have a clear path forward or a vision for what the game should be, often leading to disastrous choices along the way that made the game far worse. And it’s all well and good to say that the games were still in early access, but that kinda makes it worse. You started taking money and you didn’t actually know where you were going? How does that make any kind of sense?
LOTRO has paying customers, ranging from longtime subscribers and lifers to people who have just bought a few things off the cash shop. The fact that these people were not only trying to get on the new servers and failing but also in a queue with non-paying players is ridiculous, but saying, “Eh, just wait until it’s fixed” leaves aside the fact that there are things on a new server with meaningful time differences. Things like names and kinship names may well be gone forever if you just wait. (It would’ve been housing, too, had SSG not disabled it.)
And you shouldn’t have to wait because the people who sold this to you are screwing up.
Being charitable to the folks running MMORPGs is, on a whole, a good thing. That’s not to say that every decision made in running a given title is the right one; developers still make bad decisions all the time. But recognizing that these are huge, complicated projects with lots of moving parts that can go wrong in hundreds of ways is to recognize that teams can be doing their best with the game and still make mistakes. It is not inherently malicious if things are not going quite right.
However, that charity has to have limits. The fact that people want to play patch day content on patch day is literally what was being advertised. Giving Blizzard the benefit of the doubt when patch maintenance gets extended is all well and good, but if the studio announces that World of Warcraft’s patch will be playable on Tuesday and the game isn’t back online until Wednesday, someone screwed up.
Is that the biggest problem in the world? Of course not. But that also isn’t the point. There is not some mythical level where these problems become sufficiently real to be problems. You should not be calling for an FBI raid of the studio offices over this, but you have every right to be mad and voice your criticism and even decide that you no longer want to support the game as a result of that problem and how – or whether – it is addressed and compensated for.
At the end of the day, that’s the deal. If you are in a position where you can wait and don’t feel the need to do something the day it’s available, great, good for you. I don’t feel the need to play certain games on the day of release. I certainly wasn’t taking part in the LOTRO transfers because I don’t play the game. I can wait until all the problems are resolved and then I can wait even longer!
But the people who do pay to play the game have every right to be pissed off that they were told to transfer on a given date only for the whole thing to keep going wrong. And they have every right to expect that the studio will find a way to make amends. Here, let’s listen to some Rihanna to calm down.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
