Nothing could possibly be more exciting than tearing open a brand new game, throwing it in your high end PC, and waiting for a lengthy patch. While MMOG's might require consistent patching, are we doomed to continue the waiting game for every established product? There must be a better way and inside we make a series of recommendations to improve customer satisfaction and efficiency.
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It's happened to every one of us at some point. You've gotten bored with your current MMOG and decide to try out (insert enticing product title) to see if it suits you. You walk into your favorite retailer, pick up a box, and rush home to tear it open like a kid on Christmas. After popping in the disc, you watch the installation for what seems an eternity as the progress bar crawls across the screen. Flipping through the manual is moderately satisfying, but game manuals aren't as beefy as they used to be, so after spending fifteen minutes on YouTube, the game is finally ready to play. Anticipation builds as the loading screen appears, but, to your disappointment, the megapatch begins.
I felt "sick" so i didn't go to work one day , just so happends it was warhammer patch day, andthe servers were down till 3pm , the time i normally get home from work....So i wasted a day on nothing
I really dig those ideas about patches. Some of these games are getting "older" which means lots of patches, which equals lots of boreng waiting time. Whch is why I keep all of my games on a seperate hard drive, in case I get the fancy to return to a world...I only have to wait for the patches since I had quit.
I don't think any of it will be happening, seeing as it isn't cost effective, but I certainly wouldn't mind blowing up some gobbies during a patch =)
I just get angry when a game holds my hard drive hostage. Even after I stop playing WoW...again... I'll be terrified to uninstall it so I don't have to spend an entire day patching when I want to play. There has GOT to be a better way.
And no, I agree it isn't cost effective but at some point it could start losing some potential returning customers. At the very least combine your patches so the patcher doesn't have to restart 26 times.
I'm definitely not a fan of megapatches at all. There's only a handful of companies who seem to understand things from the end user perspective at all from what I've seen, and that extends to install times for single player games even:
- EQ2 is your friend, because the last two expansions came bundled with all previous updates and content. If you take a break between expansions and then pick up the latest one, it'll be a longer install, but it also means less patching for your new purchase.
- Guild Wars is still light years ahead of everyone else - patches stream while you're playing the game so there's never any downtime. Sure, there's the occasional lag if you're in a heavily populated town instance, but otherwise it's worked like a charm. Still not sure why this hasn't seen widespread use.
- The Sims 2 is even on the right track with it's mini-game you can play during install. Again, why hasn't this ever become a norm?
What ends up really bugging me is the "play for free" weekend incentives to bring players back into Game X. 3 Days ends up being just enough time to install your dated copy of the client, watch the patcher crawl for what seems like an eternity and then finally log in for maybe a single afternoon if you're lucky.
I'm really curious to see how the console MMOGs plan on handling the whole process. As it is, people haven't been happy with the increasing number of mandatory installs for PS3 titles - then throw in server maintenance times etc. Patching could very well be the main thing that eventually keeps them from being successful in that market unless it's handled very differently than it is for PC users.
With beter network structures and 12 to 25mb connections becoming the average this will be less and less an issue, also since the amount of things that can be stored on a medium has went from 800MB to 4,5GB to 9GB to now with blue ray 25gb to 50gb on a disk, not to mention USB sticks and portable harddisks that are -cheeeeeaaaaaaap-.
Problem is with some game makers that find it needed that games have to be completely reinstalled to be ran again. This is completely pointless for MMO's and should not be intentionally put on MMO's. (This will always be needed if you let's say switch from XP to Vista as the .dll's no longer match)
Some games require a complete reinstall to be ran and others are portable boot friendly. Funcom games are the latter.
Not sure if it's intentional or not but i can easly put my entire 'Anarchy Online' folder on a storage device and when i want to play again just copy it back or run it from the storage device (running from DVD etc. = slow)
So the solution is simple it's time that game developer allow us to make back ups of the game data with a tool that is complete 'idiot proof' for those with no technical background.
As right now for some games it's easy to do for others it isn't due to the way it's build.
The Plague of Patches
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