Staggered release, bad idea or blessing in disguise?

[TCEd 0]

Not sure if any of you guys have seen what has happened over the past two days or if you even care with ARMA2 soon to release in the UK, but AA3 (America's Army 3) released yesterday & it was a total debacle which has thousands of players mad as heck!

The Free game put out by the US Army, which has went through a lot of changes to update the game to today's standards of good GFX & gamplay & was highly anticipated by loads of gamers, has been struggling to say the least.

They had announced some time back that you could even pre-load the game through Steam, which most players did, including myself. Only when the game went online, there was such a large number of ppl downloading, activating, authenticating & trying to play online, that the servers couldn't handle the load.

The game stalls, you can't get past the first or second training course, you can't get onto most of the servers for multiplayer & to top if off, the Dev's on their forums are playing the quite game, some have even deleted their bio info.

This all gave me a new appreciation for what may be the smartest thing BIS has done with their staggered release of ARMA2. I know that most of us don't like it, we tend to get upset when some folks have it & some don't, but I wouldn't want the same thing to happen when I tried to fire up ARMA2 that has happened for AA3.

So weather it was just good ol' know how or just the way the ball bounces for BIS, I'm now kinda glad that by the time I get my copy on the 26th, servers will be running, some bugs will already be fixed & the game is proven as reliable out of the box.

Thanks BIS, weather you meant to do it this way or not.

Edited June 19, 2009 by TCEd

[Shinobi575 10]

the game may not stall like americas army but its huge as hell, over 10 gigs downloading at 1 meg cable with about 30,000 other USA ppl downloading at the same time is Lulz worthy.

[Raznor09 10]

i have a feeling there wont be as many on this game as on AA3. AA3's release was bad, everything screwed up, the entire dev team was fired. i think the end is near for that game.

[doomguy64 10]

the entire dev team was fired

Source?

[Raznor09 10]

check it out on the steam forums for AA3 they have the link there i think, my internet is coming to a halt becuz im dling 6 of the 12 arma2 files at same time

[doomguy64 10]

Yeah I found an article on it

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/48427/Americas-Army-Development-Studio-Closed

Damn that kinda sucks, I briefly played AA2 on and off didnt mind but hopefully AA3 will be able stable again.

[Raznor09 10]

from the little i have been able to play of AA3, the training has been redone with alot more training areas and thigns to do. the graphics are nice, but the whole auth server thing taken a dump has practically paralyzed this game. peoples stats do not save, most of the servers dont work, and bugs...well of course there are bugs!!!

[Zipper5 74]

Lol with the dev team fired how are they going to update it?

And you know, I actually agree with you TCEd. Stuff like what has happened with AA3 is all too common-place nowadays and gets people really pissed off at the game. With ArmA II being released at different times in different places it evens out the load, allowing for there to be much less problems like AA3 has had.

[K-bohls! 10]

Mythic used bit torrent to distribute their game(warhammer online) while it may be used for unspeakable things it is a really efficient way to distribute games. I'm not sure if thats how steam distributes games though.(an answer would rock)

for those who don't know bit torrent is its when some people(well call them person A and person B) get a different part of the game "A" will copy his part and give it to "B". "B" will copy his part and give it to "A" this is done on a huge scale which is where we get the term seeder and feeder.

[Raznor09 10]

when i think about it now, AA3 being available through steam was probably the worst thing they could have done. they should of just kept it he way it always was

[jonneymendoza 10]

i think using torrents to download legit hyped games is the best way to go imo. i so wished steam had a similar method of doing so. maybe have a built in custom torrent engine on steam where you can use it only to download steamed games.

The way BIS has distributed the game is ok but to me if they just used torrents and rented out huge servers for a week or two, distributing the game to everyone globally would have been fine.

There hasn't been much advertising and marketing out of Arma 2 and if you don't read forums and game websites clearly, you wouldnt know Arma 2 existed.

i made an Arma 2 thread a few days ago in AV Forums and many didn't have a clue whatsoever that this game existed!

[Depleted 10]

The dev's were fired and the development moved closer to the AA3 headquarters, quite sad to say but they done a pathetic job.

Before i couldn't even launch the game at all, now i can and i can login and edit settings but when i try to load a training mission the game locks up. - 18 hours with the new dev team and already we have progress.

[Majormauser 0]

It may get me to buy the same game twice...

[CarlGustaffa 4]

The part that sucks the most of being 'left behind' is not being able to discover anything. When I get the game, everything feels like 'old news'. A massive amount of potential joy can never be realized...

:missing smiley of myself blowing my brains out:

[An Fiach 10]

FYI they weren't fired. For those that don't know this is typical Army behavior. You can bet most of the issues are due to Army brass making decisions they aren't qualified to make and instead of allowing the Devs to stay on until the problems are worked out, they sent them on their way with a fat check. This is how bureaucracy works.

[TCEd 0]

when i think about it now, AA3 being available through steam was probably the worst thing they could have done. they should of just kept it he way it always was

Actually Steam did it's job, it wasn't their fault that the Dev's or who ever was in charge of the main database & authentication servers, didn't have things ready to receive such a large number of players. I know that some want to blame Steam for the way the pre-load didn't really work properly, but again, this was due to the encryption & authentication process that got all scrambled.

Steam has nothing to do with that part of the game, they were used only as a means to download the game. You don't even have to run Steam to play the game. Sadly though, that's how it goes, AA3 ppl mess up the release & because Steam was involved with the download/instillation part, they get blamed.

Edited June 19, 2009 by TCEd

[Baff1 0]

Mythic used bit torrent to distribute their game(warhammer online) while it may be used for unspeakable things it is a really efficient way to distribute games. I'm not sure if thats how steam distributes games though.(an answer would rock)

for those who don't know bit torrent is its when some people(well call them person A and person B) get a different part of the game "A" will copy his part and give it to "B". "B" will copy his part and give it to "A" this is done on a huge scale which is where we get the term seeder and feeder.

AA3 deploytool uses P2P also. It worked well for me. Not perfect perhaps, but much better than the Fileplanet queues of the last release.

[Trauma.au 10]

I don't think a staggered release is the way to go, it's just that they (AA3 team) did not expect over 20 million to be trying to get it and play it at once, they just were not prepared.

It's not that you can't do it smoothly that way, its that they didn't have enough servers. It will smooth out soon enough though, but undoubtedly a rough start.

[moosenoodles 0]

The steam community and many other similiar types will rape anygame to bits alot faster than standard ways of selling your game if its pretty mediocre in coding/bugs etc etc.

Its like handing your multimillion pound buissness to a 4 year old and expecting it to keep running.