Next up, in my continuing look at sign-up processes (trying to get MMO companies to ALLOW you to PAY for their products…) for MMO games: Nexon, and their free dance game, “Audition”.
Step one, download
This is lovely and easy. It’s a free-to-play game. You’d hope for this. The download is quick and easy to find at http://nexon.net, and at 1.5Gb it’s quick to downlo…whoa, hang on a sec. One point five gigabytes? WTF?
Now, I know that internet connections today are much better than they used to be. And no matter whether you use Windows or OS X, the standard free web browser (firefox) supports resuming of downloads. But … 1.5gb is a heck of a lot to be sucking down in one go. What about patches? How much of that will the user have to re-download as soon as they install it? Ouch. And, frankly, it was only a few months ago that FireFox’s resumable downloads started working properly (long after Audition came out).
Step two, install
Easy. Worked fine. The game client crashed the first time I ran it. The second time I ran it, it did some flash updating, and then killed itself. Ha. I don’t give up so easily – just keep on clicking until the damn thing stops doing new things before it crashes (I know how this stuff works. Experienced MMO person, you see? I have teh l33t skillz). Third time lucky, worked fine.
Step two-and-a-half, patch
Last time, when I was writing about Lord of the Rings Online’s patcher, I threw out a wishlist of things I’d like to see in a modern MMO patcher / installer, so I won’t repeat myself. If you haven’t seen that already, I recommend having a quick look.
Then have a look at the Nexon patcher (which is good, but plain – what it does, it mostly does simply and clearly, but … it really does very little):
…and notice how they’ve made it a fixed-height (non-resizable) window that is never big enough to contain the content inside it (i.e. it always has to scroll)…
They’re at least trying – they’re putting *something* into their patcher. But the big colourful advert part (the MySpace part at the bottom) is chopped off by default, and has four separate ads. That you have to manually click through (see the blue 01, 02, 03, 04 buttons in the second screen-grab above – and note that you cannot click most of them unless you first scroll the screen :)).
You may also notice the rather terrifyingly slow speed in those screenshots. Was I on dialup? Nope – 10+Mb leased-line (this screenie was taken in the office) – I think they may have some issues with their download servers. A CDN is generally a really good idea at this point. (although the Nexon.net website itself is awesomely fast IME – one of the fastes websites I visit on the net, always).