Smooth Headstart?

January the 29th was the day STO officially launched its Headstart for all the faithful that preordered. Many hoped and many dreamed that it would be a smooth launch, that the servers would stay up, that issues found in Open Beta were resolved in a final massive patch... unfortunately the same people realized that STO will have a rocky launch and that at best the issues discovered in Open Beta would only be solved weeks if not months down the road.

Things started well. On January the 29th at 10 am ( 6 pm Gmt) the servers went up. Actually they went up a few minutes early, but that's a side bonus. They were laggy and they were crowded and yet they didnt crash... the first 30 minutes. With the number of people hammering the Log In buttons it was a small miracle that the servers managed to survive the first 10 minutes, let alone 30 minutes. Nobody was really surprised when they crashed. It was prime-time in Europe after all.

Forums were flooded with encouragement posts - "this is the smoothest launch ever"; "you should've seen the Champions Online crap!"; "be grateful this isn't like the Anarchy Online debacle" etc. People were genuinely happy that the game had launched even though the servers were down.

This sentiment would change over the coming days. Saturday and Sunday both saw scheduled and unscheduled "Server Maintenance" lasting several hours at a time. The mood on the forums darkened as Dev response was poor and well... cryptic. Issues had not been solved. Missions became impossible to complete for seemingly arbitrary reasons. GM response was late (understandable with the number of issues and complaints present) and usually not very helpful.

Finally the Devs implemented the only solution they could think of until they managed to get more and better servers: institute log in queues. On paper it was a good idea... but in reality the queues rarely budged, often your position in them went up rather than down and after hours of waiting you were still number 1121.

As you can imagine the forums were not so peaceful during the frequent server failures and the subsequent queues. Headstart was marketed as play time, not down time . If people can't use an item they paid for, they get angry.

On the other hand the massive problems come from the very large number of people wanting to try the game out. This basically means that at least for the near future, the funding for STO is assured. Great news considering the game was released early due to lack of funds. Hopefully this will provide the necessary resources for Cryptic to truly create a viable 2 faction (or any number of factions) game.

In conclusion, seeing as the official launch is tomorrow, here's a big "GOOD LUCK" to Cryptic and its servers. If they stay up during prime time tomorrow it will be a big PR plus.