So yesterday I told you about how great the three day pre-release was, right? Well, I'm not quite sure how they managed it, but somehow someone managed to introduce so many bugs, game breaking bugs, into the game between Monday night and Tuesday night that the game was almost unplayable yesterday. And parts of it totally WERE unplayable. I'm rather disappointed, I've got to say. So here's what's wrong:

Follow up:

First the social server doesn't recognize guilds. Something minor, you might say, but with a game world as huge as this one is, being able to connect with people through guild chat is important to me. Highly important, in fact. There is currently a bug in the system where if you try to talk on guild chat, it tells you that you aren't part of a guild. Someone tried leaving the guild and coming back and they couldn't get back in the guild due to bugs, either. Again I'm grateful to my own particular guild because we use voice chat, so I could still feel connected...but how did someone manage to break that which was working less than 24 hours before?

Then there's groups. Somehow groups are just randomly disbanding themselves. There's no discernable pattern to it, no one action which prompts the group to break up. It just happens periodically. This one never happened to me personally because I didn't try to group last night for long, but I heard about it often enough.

Oh, and then anyone with Nvidia graphics cards, you might be totally out of luck right now when it comes to playing. Quite a few people I've heard of with Nvidia cards simply can't log in despite the card meeting or exceeding the requirements.

And, lest we not forget, for a while last night if you weren't logged in, you were out of luck for at least a good while, because something they were doing to the account servers made anyone who tried to log in get a message saying they didn't have a valid account. Still don't know when/if that got fixed.

And somehow last night the lag was worse than it had been the day before, even out in areas where no one else seemed to be. I'd find myself mid combat and suddenly everything just stopped responding for 15 to 30 seconds at a time. And that is a LONG time in combat. So I decided to give up on combat for a while and go harvest. Only problem was that every jute (tier 1) spawn outside Tanvu had been harvested and respawned as cotton (tier 2) and I couldn't do T2 yet. Bug or intention, I don't know, but it is screwed up.

So I finally gave up around 9 last night. (Helped that House and Boston Legal were on last night, so I had something else to do.) With the thought of having an open mind about it all, I went to log in this morning.... to no avail. In a rather dumb move (IMO), someone decided that 3 am PST would be a great time to patch... EVERY SINGLE DAY. Every day at 3 am, the game servers will all come down, be it for a patch or just a restart. Again, this I just don't get. First of all, 3 am PST only works well for those on PST. East coasters who get up a bit early and hope to play for an hour before work out out of luck. The game is coming down just about the time most of us will get up. EU shouldn't be too bad, being the middle of the day for most, but still, it's daytime hours there.

My thought is that if you absolutely MUST patch at the same time every single day, make it midnight or 1 am PST. This allows PST players a few hours at night to play before the servers shut down (and gets them to bed at a decent hour so they aren't cranky ), EST players won't miss the game at all really because they should all be in bed and not up yet by then. EU players will end up missing that early morning hour that I talked about, but have much more time at the end of the day without interruption.

Of course, ideally the patch would happen at one time for US servers and another for EU (midnight PST or GMT respectively), giving pretty much everyone the same "down time" across the board. Even more ideal would be to have the servers not go down at the same exact time every time, but be on a sort of "rolling" downtime. Monday they'd go down at midnight, Tuesday 1 am, Wednesday 2 am, Thursday 3 am, etc. Other than emergency patches, patches would only happen at such and such time on Sunday night's, for example. This would give everyone only a couple of days a week to gripe about rather than it being a daily occurance. But maybe I'm too logical to work in the gaming industry.

Ultimately I just wish someone could take a game from beta to launch without breaking more things than they fix. Obviously Sigil isn't going to be that "someone", and we will just have to wait it out until some pretty major problems get fixed. Maybe that's why the game has been down for 3 rather than 2 hours now?!? /em looks hopeful