Seriously...

[dremvekk]

Do i expect a free month from the cable company if for 2 weeks i had problems, yes i would.

Hmmm, you can expect it all you want, but would you get it? Not likely.

Before digital cell phone service came out a couple of years ago, all of the towers in my area were packed. You were effectively without cell service for 3+ months. Did they refund your service fees? Nope. Did they credit you with free minutes? Nope. Could you cancel since you weren't gettting service? Nope - you were under contract. How could they do this? The contract you signed when you got service has no guarantees of uptime. None.

If my satellite TV goes out, will I get credit for missed time? Not likely.

That's what those things called EULAs are all about. Like the cable company, phone company, or other company, games don't guarantee uptime. Feel free to demand a refund or a free month all you like, but they aren't obligated to give it to you. Your only recourse that you have is to cancel your subscription and take your business elsewhere.

[raul75]

*shakes his head* I'm astounded at how many people here appear to have zero previous MMORPG experience, or weren't paying attention (read: in a coma) during their previous experience. ($50 says someone posts within the hour saying they've played everything from EQ to CoH. Another $50 says they were napping the whole time) MMORPGs are often buggy on release and have major issues for the first several months, it's not uncommon. If you want to play a polished version, come back in six months.

There's a huge difference between developing for single player and online play, even sports gaming giant EA feels the pressure with their online games. (see the audible bug trivializing online play) Madden in it's last two incarnations have had catastrophic bugs in online play on release, think about that for a second. EA with all it's millions release their flagship franchise title with online play bugs.

EverQuest is another great example, EVERY time there is a major patch there are catastrophic play and display bugs. Within the last six months they had a full week and a half where players were falling thru the world, it was so bad they actually created a command to teleport a player out of the world. They also re-did the collision system that determines what objects a player can run thru. That change remained bugged for a couple weeks, teleporting anyone who got close to a wall five feet away, making things like banking, any sort of combat, or anything involving merchants extremely difficult.

Those are just two examples from one recent patch, I could go on for hours. It's to the point where there are several threads on various EQ message boards detailing "famous patch day bugs" in an almost nostalgic kind of way. In theory a released game should never encounter such difficulties, the reality is very different. If companies with massive financial backing like EA and Sony find it impossible to catch and resolve all bugs before they impact the players, it's astounding that Nevrax manages to keep the bugs as managed as they have been.

I understand everyone's frustration, heck, i'm frustrated too when I lose a couple hours of XPing or hit a huge lag spike while kiting. However, it's unreasonable to look at the performance of Ryzom and Nevrax in a vacuum. Compare it to similar games on the market, compare it to other online games of all types, you'll find this is very typical growing pains. Compared to many, they're relatively painless ones. It'll only get better i'm sure.

Tell you what I'll sell you a pair of old socks for $55 bucks and wait 6 months or so for shipping ok?
All games come out with bugs, but guess what? They have so much other content to do that you can wait for the patches to come. This one will die soon because there is nothing to do yet, other than kill x or collect x

[raul75]

Hmmm, you can expect it all you want, but would you get it? Not likely.

Before digital cell phone service came out a couple of years ago, all of the towers in my area were packed. You were effectively without cell service for 3+ months. Did they refund your service fees? Nope. Did they credit you with free minutes? Nope. Could you cancel since you weren't gettting service? Nope - you were under contract. How could they do this? The contract you signed when you got service has no guarantees of uptime. None.

If my satellite TV goes out, will I get credit for missed time? Not likely.

That's what those things called EULAs are all about. Like the cable company, phone company, or other company, games don't guarantee uptime. Feel free to demand a refund or a free month all you like, but they aren't obligated to give it to you. Your only recourse that you have is to cancel your subscription and take your business elsewhere.

Thats a lie. I have Drect TV, it broke down and could not watch any television for close to 2 weeks. Well I called them and they gave me a free month

[raynes]

Tell you what I'll sell you a pair of old socks for $55 bucks and wait 6 months or so for shipping ok?
All games come out with bugs, but guess what? They have so much other content to do that you can wait for the patches to come. This one will die soon because there is nothing to do yet, other than kill x or collect x

Have you managed to get your Kami or Karavan faction about 75?
Have you managed to buy an apartment?
Have you made it through the Prime Roots to see all the other lands?

[bgrifter]

Tell you what I'll sell you a pair of old socks for $55 bucks and wait 6 months or so for shipping ok?
All games come out with bugs, but guess what? They have so much other content to do that you can wait for the patches to come. This one will die soon because there is nothing to do yet, other than kill x or collect x

CoH has an abundance of content to keep people amused? EverQuest on rollout had more content than Ryzom? You're not paying attention to your history... Heck, five years later there's STILL nothing to do in EverQuest but kill x, collect y, hand in to z, or tradeskill. All of which Ryzom has.

The socks analogy is a flawed one, not a comparable product. If all sock manufacturers charged approximately $50-$60 for their product and took anywhere from six months to a year to ship, then you'd be a bit closer. Take a look at comparable games on the market, you'll find most suffered a far worse launch than this (shipping and billing issues aside, i'm speaking purely in terms of gameplay/bugs/content. that said, i'm hearing less gripes about availability and billing now, hopefully they're getting that smoothed out)

I can't emphasize enough that EverQuest (the dominant MMORPG on the market, thus I reference it frequently) deals with worse bug issues virtually every major patch they release. More than just inconvenience and downtime, bugs that have shut down the entire server for multiple days, or made the game completely unplayable for up to a week. (the "falling thru the world" bug is the one that stands out clearest in my mind because of how long it took for them to fix, a good two weeks to resolve that and the collision issues)

[aelvana]

Did you guys know MMORPGs have been around since like the 70s? They used to call them MUDs. They were EXACTLY what our games are, but just the text, with the additional commands "n" "s" "e" "w", as well as "look". When you moved or looked, you saw:

[Fairhaven entrance pier]
You're on the entrance pier to the Tryker capital Fairhaven. To your east lies the resource-rich Fairhaven beach. To your west, the city thickens and spreads out into busy piers and small shops.
EXITS: W, E
Da'rar Tearan is here.
Da'ashan Noda is here.
A suckling messab is here.
A suckling messab is here.
A suckling messab's corpse lies here.
Aelvana is here.

Other than that, identical games. Everquest was actually based in part off stock public domain MUD code -- the emotes are identical. These games have been like this for decades. I'm sure all old mudders remember =D There'd be exploits, code changes that had hidden bugs, everything we're used to in MMORPGs. It's just the nature of programming that constantly has fresh code introduced :)

Hope someone found this interesting at least :P

[bgrifter]

Hope someone found this interesting at least

I remeber the bugs in Zork. *grin* Or hackers abusing Legend of the Red Dragon...

[wicker]

I don't know how you guys figure it's a free month. I paid $50 for the game. That month is part of my $50 I paid. I would like to be able to use that month to enjoy the game.

[Fred1l1]

Did you guys know MMORPGs have been around since like the 70s? They used to call them MUDs. They were EXACTLY what our games are, but just the text, with the additional commands "n" "s" "e" "w", as well as "look". When you moved or looked, you saw:

[Fairhaven entrance pier]
You're on the entrance pier to the Tryker capital Fairhaven. To your east lies the resource-rich Fairhaven beach. To your west, the city thickens and spreads out into busy piers and small shops.
EXITS: W, E
Da'rar Tearan is here.
Da'ashan Noda is here.
A suckling messab is here.
A suckling messab is here.
A suckling messab's corpse lies here.
Aelvana is here.

Other than that, identical games. Everquest was actually based in part off stock public domain MUD code -- the emotes are identical. These games have been like this for decades. I'm sure all old mudders remember =D There'd be exploits, code changes that had hidden bugs, everything we're used to in MMORPGs. It's just the nature of programming that constantly has fresh code introduced

Hope someone found this interesting at least

Ahhhh brings back memories of Realms of Kaos and Gemstone III

[raynes]

CoH has an abundance of content to keep people amused?

I'd like to know about that also. That game has very little real content. Just a lot of go here, beat up that.