Not much has happened recently since D3 just launched (with a couple problems). A lot of time at blizzard is seen to be smoothing out all of the problems so I thought I'd talk very briefly this week about online game launches and the like. I'll be starting with considerations that need to be addressed, how they've been addressed in the past and what sort of problems have come up in WoW and other games.
1) Competative nature of online gaming. The first concern is that everyone should have an equal footing going into the new content. In terms of D3 this meant making the pre-download available such that download and install concerns did not effect the race for the world first inferno clear. For Warcraft something similar could happen, and in my opinion should, in the sense that you might pre-install MoP and blizzard might just turn on access to the new content on release night. I.E. servers go down at maintenence on tuesday when everyone has already installed and when the servers are back online MoP is open to everyone who has it.
2) Global Play. I've taken the term from the D3 service carrying that name but I mean something slightly different. The earth is round, like a ball. This means that it's different times around the globe. Many people sleep during various hours of the day because of the different light levels. How does one handle the launch on a competitive level across so many regions. Historically blizzard has dealt with this by releasing the game at midnight in one of three regions, using again D3 as an example as it is the more recent launch. They launched in Asia, Europe and the Americas each at midnight in a timezone in one of those regions. NA servers went live at midnight PST where the EU servers had been up for the previous 8 hours. This seems to run counter to the idea that both regions should be on a similar footing for going at content. This is a problem that comes up with patches, not only with expansion releases. The reason that it's not a huge issue with expansion launches is that there is so much content the time lag becomes smaller. This does not mean that it isn't an issue, it's just that with a larger amount of content to run through the effect becomes diminished. This is going to be a large problem for a long time since there is no clear fair way to deal with the simple fact that the world is round and while we live across it, we all want to be awake during the daylight hours and that is how our society functions.
3) Availability. With the digital era this is not so much of a problem that's come up but since the game is competitive and people do want to get online as fast as possible the game needs to be available to as many people as possible early on. With digital downloads and games moving away from physical copies on CDs this is becoming a non-issue except in one specific case:
4) Collectors Edition. I could go on for hours about how much of a problem this is, or even DLC or other pre-order bonuses but since I'm specifically talking about a game that has free content patches and a long time between expansions, relatively anyways, I'm going to stick to CE. Simply put it's a more expensive version of the game that comes with goodies. There are a couple rules to the goodies including that none directly effect player power or convenience. They are mostly aesthetic with some being unrelated to the game directly. For example, blizzard has historically included art books and soundtracks in their CE packages. The extra stuff is almost always very worth the extra money being involved. The major concern is supply. Again, looking at the D3 launch since it's extremely recent, there was an almost inconceivable lack of supply. Knowing some friends who work at Gamestop I've heard stories of how many people are looking for the CE and not getting one. I myself looked pretty hard to find one. The only ones available by the time of launch were on ebay. There were some exceptions such as a couple that popped up from various retailers like newegg or wal-mart. In fact I've heard horror stories of some who have pre-ordered the CE and when they went to retrieve it, it had already been sold. Now, according to sources, there is a wild search for any available copies. If you are still looking for one I suggest you either get one from ebay (at double or more the cost) or talk to your local game stores and find out how long until unclaimed pre-orders are up for grabs.
5) Testing. Something that has come up a lot recently and I will likely spend another week talking about instead of spending a lot of time here, this is necessary and important. Some people are upset about MoP beta but this is a true beta and not just a demo the way many betas have been. A topic for another time.
You can see where my concerns mostly lie and why this is an interesting topic. Until next time, comments are more than welcome and thoughts on some of the difficult topics such as global launches are encouraged.
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