Yesterday, it became clear that Turbine was utterly unprepared for the ramifications of going free-to-play. They've been caught with their pants down. I don't like the idea that perhaps they were simply looking to make more money without preparing their hardware for the added stress on their servers, but sadly that seems to be pretty much the case. They have a few days to fix their shit and change my mind, however, and hopefully they will do just that.
So the actual problems: First of all, there are way too many people playing the game right now. Do I think this is going to continue? No, I don't. I honestly don't believe the game is good enough to sustain this surge of popularity. I think things will return to normal once the free-to-play shininess is gone. This added influx of players is also causing major server lag and server crashes. I ended up getting WTFPWNT in the game twice in a row last night because I was frozen in place by lag while a mob three levels lower than me slowly beat me to death. I could see the mob, and I could see it owning me, but I couldn't move or attack it. Brilliant.
It was frustrating enough that I just closed the game and did something else. How many people did the same thing, and just won't ever go back? There's a lot of lost profit right there.
I did go back, however, and this morning the lag was much better. That only lasted about 15 minutes though, as they took the server down for maintenance. At least that's progress — it was an emergency maintenance on the server and not a crash, so that means they are at least trying to rectify these problems. That's a step in the right direction, and enough to convince me to keep an eye on their progress.
Now playing: Snow Patrol - Run
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