The Horse You Rode In On

Well, other than Michael Jackson, Farrah, Sarah Palin, David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Mark Jacobs, Tobold telling certain readers to fuck off and Syncaine calling him an asshole, I guess its been a relatively slow news cycle of late.  Hence, my lack of posting.  If you don’t have anything nice to say (or at least interesting)…

Which means, of course, its time to return to one of the perennial favorite discussions of the MMO Blogosphere:  RMT.  The latest hobby horse to ride, the RMT mount.

Darren was a bit aghast at the cost of a permanent mount ($10) in the so-called free-to-play-RMT-supported Runes of Magic.  For the record, I haven’t played it, so I can’t comment on the rent versus own or ride versus walk necessity of a mount.  Wil, The Ancient Gaming Noob and WoW groupmate offerred a bit more of a shoulder shrug response.  Having just hit Level 77 in WoW and purchased Cold Weather Flying (and jealously eyeing) Wil’s epic flyer, its a subject near and dear to my heart of late.

Truth be told, while I’m usually more of the mind that RMT is the debbil, I think the RoM mount topic is a decent example of an RMT item and approach that could work in most games.  What the game companies need to keep in mind is that their RMT and game models should deliver value and entertainment to a broad audience with varied time budgets.

Simply put, the most legitimate use for RMT that I see in something of a traditional MMORPG is simply to permit substituting RL time for RL money, with a few caveats.  Coming from the subscription model MMO as a baseline, little violence is done to the business or game progression model by permitting time/dollar substitution.  I think RMT for gold sink items like mounts is probably a non-event.

In our little group, we have 5 dedicated individuals who have committed to playing together as a group from 1 to cap, visiting taking on all the instances we can in the game while level appropriate.  Our play time budgets vary wildly both among each of us and as our individual RL commitments vary.

Getting a mount at Level 40 in Classic WoW back in the day was a big deal for two reasons– its cost was not insubstantial and it greatly shrunk the world because of the increased travel speed.  For anyone on anything like a time budget, increased movement speed equals increased access to content.  If you have 2 hours to play and it takes 1.5 hours to taxi and walk there, it ain’t happening.  If you want to keep the player, you need to figure out a way to take out some of that sting.

Felsteed, Old School Style

Off-taxi travel is a content gate for most players.  Raising that money, or raising the money for an epic mount, or a flyer or an epic flyer for that matter, ultimately required devotion of time and little else to obtain the gold (and/or level) necessary to purchase mount and therefore unlock the content.  Despite having spent more than $800 on WoW over the course of 4.5 years (and having enjoyed it), my subscription longevity doesn’t entitle me to any special access to content (unlike LotRO which handed out bonus Christmas Mounts and which greatly enhanced my LotRO gameplay since travel cost, time and gold was getting hard to manage).

For those of us in our group with more time or inclination, coming up with the cash from mob or resource farming wasn’t too bad, but took time.  For others, that are more time limited, its always been a just in time stretch.

Dude, I'm Epic

Using the epic flyer as an example, if I really applied myself, I could probably log on and earn a few hundred gold a day without outlevelling our group too much in a relatively small amount of time each session.  At 200 gold a session, that would take about 25 sessions to yield the 5,000 gold for the skill and the mount.  If I played an average session every other day, that would be about 50 days or almost two months of just casual self-gold farming.  All other things equal, I should be ok with paying the equivalent of about $30 for my epic flyer (or the equivalent in game currency).

In a subscription based game (or hybrid), this kind of RMT is just simply accelerating the the next X subscription payments, where X is determined by each individual’s play budget.  As far as I’m concerned, this is pure win in a PvE game with a subscription component.  Revenue neutral to the company, time agnostic to the player and ideally impact neutral to the game itself.

Gonna Fly Now

Extension of the same argument would mean that I’d be ok with buying levels as well.  In the abstract dollars versus time exchange, I would be.  However, we don’t play in the abstract, so more care must be devoted to RMT transactions that have a more fundamental impact on the game experience, IMHO.

I’m conflicted on experience/level boosting.  Having alt-itis, I would love to be able to start a level 68 character and just experience Northrend having enjoyed old Azeroth fully and Outland (not so much).  For my play style, the progression is the game.  The journey itself the destination, so completely removing the journey with /level or purchasing experience outright seems to compromise the core gameplay to me too much.

Of course, experience progression is one of the things that keeps players apart.  I’d be much more amenable to buying experience boosting potions or trinkets that would increase the rate of progression for some period of time but still require participation in the progression game.  This is the kind of thing that would partially solve some of our static group’s challenges to “stay together”.  The laggards could simply buy a boost to help catch up.

To sooth my alt-itis, I would probably also be ok with unlocking a new starting level each ten levels of experience gained.  Once you’ve hit 20, you can reroll a level 20 character, same at 30, 40, etc. so as to not completely trivialize original content.

I would also be OK with all the fluff items that many RMT systems provide.  What I would avoid, however, is RMT for item-mall only items that greatly enhance abilities (i.e., Uber Sword of Uberness) that are bind on pickup or items that would have an unduly negative impact on the in-game economy (to the detriment of the non-RMT players).  Selling currency in game that can be used to participate in the in-game economy for both NPC purchases and player-based transactions (auction house sales, enchants, ports, etc.) has the potential to disrupt the economy quite a bit.

For gold sink items like mounts or experience, it doesn’t seem to me to be terribly distorting.  I suspect that the income effect from “liberating” the gold that would have been used to fund the purchase of the mount or other gold sink either finds its way into the player economy in terms of higher auction house prices (likely a boon for the non-RMT player selling on the AH) or negligible since the RMT player may play less since they don’t have to grind for a mount.  Over time, I’m sure inflation will still occur, and perhaps it would occur a bit more quickly, but these kinds of RMT are indirectly and probably wouldn’t significantly impact others game experiences negatively.  On a given server, how much impact does transferring in a level 80 player from another server have by paying Blizzard $25?

What RMT purchases should NOT be used for are the items that are traditionally bind on pickup– rare drops that serve as proxy achievements.  The Uber Sword of Uberness that only drops from downing the Big Boss Ubeross should retain both the value and the meaning it has.  In a PvE world, that would have no significant economic impact, but it certainly dilutes the achievement value and yes, the epeenery which, for good or ill, comes along with it which is part of participating in a massive game.

Looking Back on 2008

A few reflections on my gaming and blogging in 2008 with a few follow ups from last year’s post.

The Blog

On the stat line:

Total Hits: just over 100,000
Posts: 228
Comments: 825

My blogging has been a bit uneven this year which coincides with my equally unpredictable work pattern.  Feast or famine it seems, coupled with a few periods of just plain nothing much to say.

While the pace of my posting has remained about the same, its nice to see many more comments coming in.  Something I attribute largely to getting picked up on the VirginWorlds feeds and cross traffic from other friendly denizens of the blogosphere.

My top 5 referring sites were 1) VirginWorlds, 2) The Ancient Gaming Noob, 3) Tobold’s, 4) Kill Ten Rats and 5) Keen and Graev’s.  Many thanks to them and all who visit and comment.

Games in 2008

World of Warcraft. Our instance group slogged our way through The Burning Crusade to cap out at 70 just as burnout set in and before Warhammer released.  The group has been diligently pursuing its ultra casual, keep everyone together approach for more than two years at this point playing together just a few hours each week.  After diverting to WAR briefly, we are back in Azeroth with the Wrath of the Lich King where we’re having a good time.  I’m looking forward to continuing our weekly adventures with a great group of friends.

So far, Lich King has been much more of what I loved about the WoW 1.0 and much less of WoW 2.0.  Still, progress is fast and even for our group, we’ll likely cap long long before there is another WoW expansion on the horizon.

Eve Online. I’ve been mostly diligently pursuing my two box strategy with Eve having built my miner up to Hulk-capability and my hauler up to an Iteron V.  Along the way, I managed to get both pilots into Drake battlecruisers and have developed their social skills to the point where mission running and mining the mission spaces is a fun hybrid way to experience the game.

Wilhelm and Gaff and I were going great guns for a while but Gaff ran of to Norrath and then Middle Earth while Wil has caught the EQ2 bug on Guk.  So for now, I’ll continue to pursue my Eve objectives since it can be so forgiving of RL scheduling conflicts (the game you can play off line!).  Real time skill training FTW.

Everquest 2.  I was convinced to fire up EQ2 again as an alternative to WoW burnout and WAR disappointment.  Mrs. P and I followed multi boxing Gaff and Wilhelm to a new server and new guild where Jaye and Darren are resident.  Revelry and Honor is a wonderful group and they have a gorgeous guild hall.

Leveling is much accelerated since my last visit.  I was enjoying myself with this year’s offering The Shadow Odyssey until RL conflicts and the inevitable schedule chaos that are the holidays interrupted our adventures.  I’m on the fence whether to keep our EQ2 accounts going since I’m not playing very much and the horizon is a bit fuzzy in that regard.

Warhammer Online.  I had little enthusiasm for WAR until the open beta and then I fell for it.  It was certainly something quite different from WoW and EQ2 at exactly the right time for me.  Unfortunately, as the month wore on, performance issues and dubious design choices made clear that it just wasn’t going to be the next big thing.  The open world RvR, when it happened, was great, but the performance of the client and the incentives were too undeveloped or misconceived to make it a good fit for our group.

Pirates of the Burning Sea.  I beta’d PotBS and gave it a luke warm reception.  I really wanted to love this game, but it suffers/ed from a few serious design problems.  When I left the game, it was apparent that the fundamental port contention system was in desperate need of a complete overhaul.  Its a beautiful game and I intend on checking back in a bit, maybe with Station Access.  The thing that really killed it for me despite the rocky state was the the lack of a real open world feel to it.  Instanced battle rooms with questionable entry mechanics made it feel too much like a game of boxes.

Likewise, the much vaunted economy was seriously out of balance and, imho, poorly executed.  I’m still secretly hoping someone makes an MMO set in something like the 1600-1700 age of exploration/fighting age of sail era.  Eve with scurvy please.

Age of Conan.  I beta’d AoC and while parts were promising, it became clear that Funcom was rushing it out the door.  PvE underdeveloped, system requirements too high, PvP not really implemented as well as game breaking bugs meant I was going to pass before release.

LotRO.  Generally unplayed this year.  With Moria out, I’m almost convinced to hop in and join Gaff in his return to Middle Earth.  Time will be the limiting factor, but I do intend to see Moria at some point.

Games in 2009

I hate to say it, but after the disappointment of 2008, I’m not really looking forward to anything in particular.  I’m interested in what 38 Studio’s has going on.  I’m interested in what Guildwars 2 might be shaping up to be, but details on both of those have been scarce.

Likewise, I’m somewhat interested in watch the two most cursed IPs develop as well– Star Wars:  The Old Republic and Star Trek Online.  Both seem to be in capable hands, but if past is prologue, we’re doomed.

Goals for the Blog

Keep on keeping on.  The key to any kind of writing is to actually do it.  It gets easier and it (hopefully) gets better the more you do it.  I’ve been less concerned about my frequency of posting and generally pleased with quality and the type and number of comments I get.

A blog is a blog.  It doesn’t need to be a daily news feed unless you want it to be.

Goals for Gaming

I’ll completely rehash my last year’s goals because they STILL apply:

“New Game #1. Find a game other than WoW in which to continue our group adventures. I love Thanksgiving, but I can’t eat turkey sandwiches everyday all year long. Some of us have a one game time budget, so it needs to be accessible and afford the opportunity to progress through the game in relatively small blocks of time– the mythical 2-hour casual gamer block maybe once or twice a week. If its that accessible, consider roping in some new blood for more fun and adventure. I’m not necessarily seeing anything on the horizon that fits the bill, but I’m willing to be surprised.

New Game #2. Find a game #2 that offers me a different experience than game #1 but that grabs me enough to cap out. I think you need to have a #2 that you can integrate into your game life in order not to burn out on game #1 or life for that matter.”

Thanks for visiting and Happy New Year!

MMO Stuffing

Gobble gobble.

The long Thanksgiving weekend saw no shortage of gaming.  No travel and a relatively low key holiday meant there was some time to sample all that was new this month.

Wrath of the Lich King

So far, the expansion has delivered and reignited my interest in WoW.  I note that Keen recently resubbed and this post pretty much sums up my experience with TBC.  As a matter of fact, having Outland to slog through is the reason I’m not playing a Death Knight right now.

I did manage to grit my teeth and recently get my hunter into Northrend.  Having a solo character (as opposed to my static group toon which we try to keep in synch with the group) is a great boon to explore, reconnoiter and generally see another aspect of the game without fear of level creep.  I’ve been working on getting fishing up to snuff and running through the quest lines in both Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra.  After this weekend, he sits just shy of 71 (having hit Northrend at 68).

EQ2

Spent sometime in Norrath working on my arasai bruiser.  The leveling curve is frighteningly shallow now and I’m considering doing a little two boxing with my wife’s account.  Her RL project has taken priority over our group activities, so I didn’t spend too much time in game overall.

LotRO

I haven’t been actively playing LotRO in quite a while, but the recent Moria expansion has me intrigued even though I have no characters near the level cap.  I haven’t bought the expansion yet, but I did manage to clear on character slot (only 5 allowed pre-expansion!) and toyed with the idea of rolling a Warden or Rune Keeper.

Of course, not having been on in a while meant a big patch job.  The other thing I was interested in was whether the game’s performance has improved any.  Despite having more than adequate hardware, it still tends to be hitchy and laggy.  After finding a few video voodoo resources with tips to reduce hitching, etc. I did get some significant improvement though I’m still hard pressed to get the framerate consistently north of the thirties in town.

Nothing accomplished other than checking in, but now that I’m patched, I may venture forth a bit.  I still enjoy the environment and look forward to seeing the game evolve.

Eve Online

Eve took a backseat to WoW and EQ2 recently but managed to make a resurgence this weekend.  I’m making steady progress toward my modest goals and though I hadn’t been in game in a bit other than to queue skills, it didn’t feel like I was picking it back up cold.

Warming up the mining lasers and digging out the spreadsheets felt comfortable and familiar.  And Eve is the game you can play when you’re not playing it…

I really am a two MMO max kind of guy, so I’m not quite sure what I’ll do at this point.  WoW is certainly at the forefront because of the group’s ongoing activity.  I suspect that I’ll keep Eve going since its one of those things I can do on a laptop sitting on the couch when I don’t feel like diving into WoW or EQ2.

So many games, so little time…

A Map Makes a World

I’ve forever been mesmerized by maps. You map people out there are already nodding your heads. Its the E gene in my Bartle EASK personality.

I know I spent more time studying the maps in the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion than I ever did reveling in Tolkien’s, ahem, poetry or songs… In my table top days (modules, blech), when I was GM, the world always started with a map– a world of mystery in which to reveal adventure. Dark and wild forests, high frozen wastes, searing deserts, storm tossed seas, windswept isles and perilous journeys in between…

The geography creates half the story. Consider the Caradhras Pass and Moria.

One of the things that grabbed me on day one about EQ’s Norrath was the map. As a wee noob, I could make the death defying run from Ak-Anon to Qeynos and see first hand the wide and dangerous world. Simply, the world was a place and that place was subdivided into wonderfully diverse and mysterious zones, all interconnected (zoning or no zoning, it still had the feel of being one world).

The map created that sense of space on Day One.

One of the things I’m missing a bit from Warhammer is the same feeling of one giant world. I’m told (though I haven’t tried) you can run from the noob zone to a capital city. I’ve no doubt it can be done with a certain amount of dying. Part of that feeling comes less from the way the game is designed (3 factions with four tiers of progression, each with matched pair zones) and more from simply the way the world is presented in the map.

The Warhammer map is kind of a chopped up affair. Somewhat sensibly, the default view is your zone view. But there are three relevant viewpoints for Warhammer maps– zone, “Campaign” or “pairing” and world. Unfortunately, switching between these views is a bit clunky, only marginally useful and frankly very unworld like despite the fact that the zones are contiguous. To go from viewing the Empire starting area, you need to either select a different campaign pairing from a menu selection in the upper right or select world or pairing view from buttons below the zone map.

In a Google maps world, I would hazard a guess that most users have some expectation to be able to zoom in and zoom out by simple left and right clicking. In a post-WoW world, I’d hazard a guess that MMO players would expect to be able to left click to zoom in and right click to zoom out to shift their frame of reference. Its not trivial whats lost in the translation.

The WoW world map is made up of actual clickable zones. Even if all the landmass isn’t accessible within them, each zone butts up against all the others (and is depicted as such) or is separated by some immersion consistent barrier (i.e. the ocean). Zone, right click, continent, right click, world, left click, other continent, etc. Like nested dolls, they all fit together. Ditto for LoTRO. Ditto for EQ2.

WARs zones are depicted as merely boxes on a world map underlay or they’re circles connected by dotted lines on the pairing map. Quite frankly, I feel like I’m living in boxes despite the fact that the world is quite broad and interconnected and the main roads (mostly) “line up” between them. Even though the world is much more WoW or EQ2 like (contigous zones) the map makes it feel like Age of Conan’s world in boxes! The truth is, Norsca connects directly with Troll Lands, so why the dotted line of mystery?

When you flip perspectives, you lose the sense of interconnectedness of the zones. Within a zone map, I’d like to be able to click to go to the immediately adjacent zone without going “back out” and “back in”. This is particularly cumbersome in the RvR lakes where the lake and objectives are spread across zone boundaries (separate discussion about whether having a battleground span a zone boundary is a good idea…).

A perfect example is the Tier 2 Empire/Chaos pairing of Troll Country and Ostland. In the RvR lake there, there is a battlefield objective (Monestary of Morr) and a keep (Stone Troll Keep) in Troll Country and another battle field objective (Crypt of Weapons) and a keep (Mandred’s Hold) in the adjacent Ostland zone. Mandred, the Crypt and the Monastery and the warcamps are a very short distance from each other.

Each faction has a warcamp conveniently located nearby and battles often zerg from one objective or keep to another depending on where the attackers and defenders might be tied up. Its quite a pain to see if a battle is happening just down the road which is technically in another zone by opening your map, selecting the pairing map, selecting the next zone and then clicking into that to see if there are any RvR battles going on, ooops shanked by a Witch Elf, gurgle dead.

Question whether it would have been a better design decision to make RvR lakes an indepdent zone between each of the pairing zones… Discuss.

Then there’s the mysterious criss cross between Tier 2 and Tier 3 in Empire/Chaos. Not being Tier 3 yet, I can’t verify what’s going on, but I’m getting a real EQ/Boat on the Ocean of Tears feeling about those zones…

Another aspect of the disjointed clunkiness of the map is the loss of navigational sense. Here, I’m mostly thinking of Saylah’s post regarding the defense of Altdorf. Altdorf is, ahem, a challenging city to navigate. That’s made more difficult by the fact that the Altdorf map, even if discovered, offers no labels for major landmarks, let alone zone access points.

Case in point. I’m a noob, Destro is making their move on Altdorf, I’m in Altdorf, and even if I’m aware of the attack and that I’m supposed to go to defend the Reikwald or the Reikland, where do I go? The Altdorf map offers no clue. Had I not happened across a swirly when I was looking for the entrance to the Sewers, I wouldn’t have been aware of it. Apparently, I’m not alone.

All of the activity in Altdorf revolves around market square, the flight master, the auction house and bank, etc. Even the noob “Tour of Altdorf” quest doesn’t take you near the War Quarters which are gigantic and largely deserted. A better depiction of Altdorf and its physical placement in the world answers that basic navigational issue. Where the hell is the gate to the city?

Its an irony of an RvR game that a faction’s capital city is entirely unaccessible to the low level player EXCEPT by flying in. Just like when we fly to a city we’ve never been to, we have no real sense of geographical place in our minds. Airports, taxis, buildings, traffic, hotels, but what lies beyond?

Consider EQ2 or WoW where all noob roads eventually lead to the big city and its sense of awe and wonder. No wonder all those peasants stay inside the walls, its a dangerous world out there! Goldshire it ain’t.

So that’s my rambling directionless Friday rant on WAR maps. Anybody else get the same feeling? The maps shape my virtual world view and my worldview feels like a bunch of boxes even though I know its not the case. I’d love to see some tweaks to the map to “bring the world together” a bit and make RvR FEEL like there’s a real R there.

News from the Front

Warhammer Online:  Age of Reckoning officially launched yesterday.  The collector’s edition people have been in since Sunday and the cheap bastard mere-pre-order folks like me since Tuesday, but still, live official release in a new virtual world is still an event.

Since pre-orders were sold out at Humongous (aka Fry’s) near me, I ended up going to the dreaded Worst Buy.  Worst Buy only had a couple pre-orders stocked back by the carbon paper and cuneiform scribes, so I anticipated the worst when full release came around and I would have to go back to get the retail box.  Kudos to them, they actually had 88 on hand (85 after I left) though I had to ask the clerk where they were.  Rather than the corner next to the 8-Track tapes, they had actually move a whopping 5 of them up to a front end cap.

Success.  I had a copy on release day.  Not that it mattered much as EA Mythic had learned from other war stories (no pun intended) about getting boxes out to people on release day and providing a reasonable grace period for rolling start pre-order customers.  Still, I wanted to be done with the entering of account codes and not worry about turning into a pumpkin if a retailer screwed up.

Account page visited, retail code entered, subscription plan adopted and that was it.  Utterly painless.  Unlike most of my SOE experiences, a) it was done in less than two minutes and b) I felt reasonably sure that I had actually done what I intended to do.

I logged in about 7 pm pacific, deep in the heart of U.S. prime time to see what there was to see.  On the Order side, I had an initial log in queue of about 28 people with an estimated time of about 2 minutes.  And, about 2 minutes later I was in.

Surprisingly, on Averheim at least, the noob zone was not wall to wall though there were plenty of people around.  I wandered around just to see if performance was wanting and was delightfully surprised to find very little lag even in crowded areas and I had no crashes.

Being Thursday, the West Coast members of our little WoW group converged with no particular agenda at the appointed hour to see what there was to see and do what there was to do.  Without any particular plan, we ended up spread across a few levels (3-6 at the start) and in three different starting areas (2 in the Elf zone, 1 Dwarf and 1 Empire).

We skyped up and decided since we were in far flung areas (and being noobs) we should just queue the party for the Khaine’s Embrace RvR Scenario and play there rather than burn travel time to find each other.  A nice feature of WAR since you can join the scenarios from anywhere.

After a few minutes since Khaine’s Embrace was not popping for us, one of our other group members who was in an Empire Zone queued us for Nordenwatch.  Another nice feature– any party member can queue the group for any scenario they have available.  Since at that time 3 out of 4 of us were in Elf-land, having someone in Empire let us simultaneously queue for two scenarios.  Had we known we could do this, we would have had our dwarf brother queue for the Gates of Ekrund before he left Dwarf-land as well.

Despite the ease of getting peeps from across the far flung world in multiple queues for RvR scenarios, something must have been up as absolutely ZERO scenarios popped in the 2+ hours we were in queue.  Had we been level 20 on release day, I might have said, ok, we’re too far ahead of the population curve.  But we were all between 3-6 starting the evening.  Every retail Day One noob should have been queuing for the noob scenarios and doubly so for the Destruction side so Order should have been popping like popcorn.

Alas, no. So I hope it was merely a launch day bug with the scenarios.

Still, in our “free time” we collected quests and migrated our way to the Chapter 2 public quests in the Blighted Isle.  Two of our group managed to find the flight paths in their home zones and make their way to the two of us starting out in the Elf lands.

A brief moment here to comment on yet another barrier to grouping that doesn’t exist– in a WoW world, while the humans, dwarves and gnomes could find each other fairly easily via the tram between Stormwind and Ironforge, the poor Elves would have to suffer the trials of the damned to brave the journey across the Wetlands and through Dun Morogh to get to IF.  Simply not so here.  While something of the sense of immensity of the world might be sacrificed, the trade off in terms of mutual play time is worth it to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I remember every exhilarating lowbie trip across the Wetlands, but I also remember countless hours of wasted travel time that everyone spent in an effort to converge for a nights adventures.  Various group travel paradigms have mitigated this in WoW somewhat, but WAR does this out of the gate in a way that is not trivial while also not so significant a hurdle as to dissuade one from the undertaking.

When united, our little group spend a good deal of time biding our time with several nearby PQs.  The one thing that bugs me is that I haven’t figured out if there is an easy way to determine if other party members are on a quest.  If there is and I missed it, then I’m an idiot (and it wouldn’t be the first time), so tell me.  Otherwise, I’m a bit disappointed that while WAR has done so much to facillitate group collaboration, it still requires an inventory check of quests with fellow party members though a combination of “do you have quest X” and share quest X, a already has quest x, b is not eligible, c has completed quest x, etc.

I still thing EQ2 has the best solution for this I’ve seen with its “shared” quests display when in a group.  Mythic, please fix this soon.

Other than those minor quibbles, and the potentially major one about scenarios not popping, launch day was extremely smooth, stable and incident free.  For me at least, it was utterly devoid of drama and showed no particular stress.  Good job Mythic.  From my perspective this should be a launch to be remembered for how it should be done.  I think it was smoother than the LotRO launch and probably had more folks trying to pile in.  While I saw Destruction side queues of up to 380 on the server screen, nothing in game indicated that full servers were struggling to keep up.

I assume that this weekend will be the real test as everyone everywhere will be trying to get in game, but for now, a wholly succesful launch from my perspective.