When MMO's Disappoint

Out of all genres of gaming, one seems to consistently have the buggiest and most unreliable code and support.

That would be MMO's.

Last night we did not play our normal game of EQ2 with the family. My wife actually was the one who did not want to play. I decided to ask why she was not into it (as her main complaint she stated she was "Tired"...and men, we all know this is DEFINITELY not the time to ask questions...but I did it anyways).

Her real reason I found out is because EQ2 disappointed her.

Originally this started when we enabled each of our accounts. My son and myself all had these goodies in our claim window. My wifes account was missing quite a few claimable items. So, while my son and I had cloaks running us 25% faster than normal, here was my wife trying to keep up.

I sent this into support, which took about 4 days to handle the issue. But, it was fixed...luckily.

So, we went on our merry way. This past week was exciting as we all were working on the new quest/achievement that EVERYONE gets...the Level 20 quest in 14 days.

We all started at the same time, same day and made all efforts to complete this. On Wednesday night, my son dinged first. I dinged 20, and we all saw a window pop up congratulating us with gold and a trophy and our first real title.

My wife dinged 20...and nothing. We looked at her history, and looked to see if she had the title.

Nothing.

The frustration was just too much for her I think. She even logged in before supper for about 10 minutes and tried to enjoy the game, but finally said that EQ2 disappointed her.

This is one of the reasons she refuses to log into LOTRO, another game with bizarre issues. The laggy hitching issues we always had, no matter what we did (and I ALWAYS have top of the line equipment and keep my systems pristine and well cleaned of junk, yet, we always had this ongoing issue) irritated her. The fact the game had little niggling problems like animations and ugly models. Combat felt unresponsive and the UI just did not seem consistent...she decided she would never play again.

Look at Age of Conan. Still a buggy mess after the multitude of patches. We finally got to the point that during most of our gameplay, if we would run into a problem, we would just laugh and say "We were funcommed again". We also realized that this became more rampant as we reached higher levels. Thus, it was easy to say goodbye to a game that we all loved.

I understand MMO's are large code bases and there are just too many angles to consider when finally launching and running your game. But, when titles like WoW and EQ2 which have been out for years and years still have stupid issues that are unexplainable...how do you tell the standard game player, like my wife, who has played many single player RPG's, or even Guild Wars which consistently ran and displayed no major bugs that would make you want to quit...and help them understand "This is normal".

But, I also need to ask. Why should it be?

I know a lot of people will rant and rave with the stupid comment of "It's only a game". Yet, what would YOU do if you logged in one day and find out that an expansion you payed for was blocked off from you...for no reason, and that content was unaccessible? That happened to ALL of our accounts in EQ2 yesterday when I saw that my login screen which always said 9/9 addons, said 8/9 addons. And when I log into all our accounts management and see that each of us do not have access to the Shadow Odyssey pack, and SOE wants us to pay $20 to have it? Oh brother...another duel with Customer Support.

My wife finally did end up saying she will play again this weekend, but for last night, she had been hurt by a game she was really enjoying.

Why should she even have to feel this way?