Just wondering...the North American Launch is on the 2nd. The European launch is on the 5th. If the servers are still messed up on the 3rd, do we just say that "the FULL GLOBAL launch isn't for another 2 days, so chill out?"

No but Fly by wire has been around for over 20 years. To name a plane the F-16, also stealth fighter is 25 years old and its fly by wire.

Yea, there is probably nothing they could do any better. Experience from other mmo's servers does not really help, I mean they are all different servers right?

I don't drip sarcasm, sarcasm drips from me.

So ride their nuts or don't. Either way I'm sure the game will be fine later.

Have you ever even played in an MMO previously? Bugs get fixed in time based of the priority level of the problem. Low priority bugs will be fixed in time. WoW is still fixing bugs; EQ1 is continually fixing bugs (Yes, it's still around after more than a decade). Your view on what is the problem will be addressed in time, just remember; they are working on more important problems right now.

If you don't want to experience these problems on a new MMO launch, don't buy it until a month or two after launch. If you absolutely have to take part in launch, expect to take part in the birth pangs as well.

I know it sucks donkey balls, but it is what it is and after having taken part in several MMO launches, I've learned to expect it. If I survived the launch of WAR Europe, I can survive anything (Game wasn't up until around a week after official launch date.).

100% agree. A paid preorder "headstart" shouldn't spend 80% of that time being down. I too have seen many MMO's launch....SOME downtime is expected, but not this much especially after CB and OB. The server has not been up solid for a full 48 hour stretch so all these "it's been up for 2 days nub!!!" replies are as close to the truth as O.J's lawyer.

Since im in the industry i can talk about this. it is not only possible it can be done, It takes proper planning and execution of that plan. You haqve to properly scope out. It also takes folks in IT that KNOW what they are doing. What normally gets in the way of this is budget. Most likely they are running on a shoestring budget and need the $$ from release to buy new servers and beef them up. the other item you have to consider is they most likely under spec the server due to cost. Sun servers arent cheap, even if running enterprise Linux if your admins dont have allot of experiance with them they will crash due to misconfiguration. Thats just the hardware side of it. Now lets talk software development. All it takes to crash a server is an improperly index databse. If the indexing is off or not properly done they coudl crash the servers by player load and by running a simple query. It could also be the code. Another is thier pipe to the internet. Hopefully they have at minimum a DS3, they really need OC3 or higher.

I've been apart of many MMO's, this one feels lik e SOE is behind the scenes pulling the trigger because the response from Dev team and relations folks are as lacking here as it was with SOE. Right now I'm Strongly considering asking for a refund of lifetime membership and purchase of the game. Not because of the game, the game when it is up is great. It's the innability to keep the servers up that makes me wonder how much play time i will have. I work 8-12 hours a day and when i get home this is stress relief for me. SO out of 7 days will it be up for only 3? Not worth it in my book and the LACK of communication from Cryptic gives me warm fuzzys inside.

EVERY company has this problem because the programming code is unique with every different software application. Here is a true story:

Some years back I worked for Hewlett Packard. You know the big major software/hardware company? The higher ups realized that those of us in tech support were running into delays sending out parts to techs and customers because of an old, antiquated piece of ordering/shipping software. The software had been designed for a third of the load it was carrying and kept going down for hours at a time.

Major pain when you are trying to beat Fedex deadlines for next day delivery.

Over an 8 month period a new piece of software was developed and tested. It was run through several trial periods to check for bugs, server load and other potential burps. This was a mission critical piece of software. It HAD to work right, the first time. One fine Friday we were told, "Okay, the new software is going live over the weekend. It will up and running for Monday morning. There was much rejoicing.

Monday morning we come in, we go to order parts, the entire system is DEAD. Much yelling at IT follows. Turns out the new software DUMPED and DELETED the entire parts database once it was fully on the live servers. The old software that had been resident had kept refreshing the database during the tests so no one noticed the problem. For a full week we could not send any parts to anyone in North America.

If a multi-BILLION dollar company can run into this kind of insanity what chance does any MMO have of a clean launch?

Yay someone finally quoted me ,but if we're simply going to talk about technical issues unrelated to the bugs, and the constant server "down for maintenance" messages how about this, How could anyone, any company, any Star Trek fan, not foresee the amount of people that would be logging into such a huge franchise driven game? Server overloads have been probably the largest reason given for downtimes, and as a Dev said during beta "we had to order more equipment to fulfill the needs of our player base due to the unexpected popularity of this game", again....star trek...the second largest complaint is the lack of communication giving an ETA on when those servers might be back up, understandably they dont have an exact time but thats why ETA is "ESTIMATED time of arrival". Foresight and communication could have and would still solve 99.9% of peoples issues during this launch/headstart.

Really? What does that have to do with it? It doesn't take developer knowledge to take a game disc and throw it out a window. Then what good is having developer knowledge about that game? None at all.

The thing is, in this day and age, people expect MMOs to perform just like console games from the word go and quite frankly, so do the developers. They all want the game to be picture perfect as well. It's the business of revenue and time that pushes them out with a game just a little too early, like this one.

Add this up with all of the in game bugs and bad design and UI problems and truthfully, by a wide margin you will find that this game is really in its last QA cycles. I don't develop games but I've been involved in/lead teams of software that's launched to 77,000 corporate users and in the corporate world this would be considered a decent disaster (you'd still get paid by the client though). In the console world, this would be considered a complete disaster. In the PC world, this would be considered a big disaster if it wasn't an MMO. The only excuse it has to lean on is "all MMOs go this way."

I agree with the OP. It doesn't change the fact that I mostly like the game and am willing to put up with it and keep playing. Just wish there was a workflow that would email me when the servers come back up so I don't have to babysit the generic, "it's down" page.