How Should You Deal With The Launch Rush?
The launch month is usually a tumultuous time for new MMOs. In the post-World of Warcraft landscape, there is one undeniable pattern in the first month of new MMOs: probably about 50-75% who play your game for the first month will not be staying past those first thirty days. Whether it is because they are going back to WoW or to whatever other game is not important. The simple fact remains that more people will leave in the first month than stay.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Some may blame the "WoW tourists" and others may blame game breaking bugs while some others may blame hype and the game not living up to the expectations set by it. However, none of that is really important to this topic.
Let us just pretend for a minute that the universal rule for new MMOs is that after the free thirty days, you will lose one-half to three-fourths of your user base. Let us pretend that there are no ways about this rule and no matter how complete and polished your game is, it will always happen. How do you plan for that? There are three methods that come to my mind that recent games have used.
Warhammer Online decided to launch with about fifty servers. With the amount of boxes they sold, the servers were decently populated for the first week or two. Once the people started leaving, servers were shut down en masse. There were multiple server merges and now the game is down to about five servers. All seem fairly decently populated, but it is about one tenth of what they started with. They saw a lot of bad press for the mass server closures, but would have also seen bad press had they only started with five servers.
Aion went the opposite route. The game opened with ten servers. Some servers saw queues of between four and eight hours. After about two weeks, NCSoft opened up a handful of new servers as well. The queues settled down after a couple weeks when the people started leaving, but for the first week or two there was quite a bit of negative press on how NCSoft should have better prepared for the launch. Now, however, all the twelve or so servers they have are sitting at a relative stable population.
Darkfall used a different method when they started their game up. Being that they are not releasing a triple A title, they used unique means of distributing their game. Purchase of the game was only done through their online store and for the first few months, they only allowed a certain amount of copies to be sold a day and only for a small time-frame each day. They received a bit of negative press for this because it seemed like they were not letting people who wanted to play to even buy the game. Also, since it was more of a niche title, the exodus numbers might have been different. In the end, they limited the amount of people able to buy the game per day so that they could better handle the server population from day one.
Are any of these methods superior to each other? Are there any better methods to handle the launch rush and exodus?
To me, it seems like NCSoft did it best with Aion, but even still I wonder how many people were turned away from the game because they heard about the terrible queues.
If you were to go play a new MMO on launch day, what method would you prefer?