I’m seriously fed up with the mediocrity (you could use worse words; I’m being civil here) of most MMO publishers’ patching systems for MMOs. The very least you should expect as a player, even back in 2001, should have been something akin to the PS3 / 360 patching systems today: the most basic “fire and forget” – you try to play the game, it does a background download, then popsup to tell you when to click to finish the install. That’s *it*. No more.
So, how should it be? Well…
You might reasonably expect, certainly by around 2005 (that’s 3 years ago), a more fancy patcher that does things like:
- lets you interact with the game while it’s patching (many games won’t allow you to access *anything* while patching sometimes not even the patch notes, which is amazing)
- gives you a progress bar for how things are going, and an estimate of how long it will take
- gives you an interactive list of all the features and changes in the patch, highlighting the ones that affect any of your current characters (e.g. big red text for if one of your characters has been nerfed)
- read the forums without having to open a browser, surf past the adverts, etc
Actually, though, what I really want – and hey, it’s 2008, so I’m not being unreasonable here, is this:
- chat to friends who are already in-game, especially those *waiting for you to finish patching so you can join them*
- do something useful while you wait, like:
- check your in-game message inbox
- surf the auction channels to buy and sell stuff
- create a new character (account creating usually doesnt require the main game client, it doesnt use any of the game world)
- do some crafting, or any other of the in-game minigames that could be pulled out as a standalone minigame
And, of course, most things should be solveable without any of the above, and instead having:
- do all the patch-downloading AND INSTALLING in the background while you’re playing
…although as far as I know only a very small number of MMO studios have architected their code design cleverly enough to be capable of doing this. It’s not rocket science, but most of them seem not to have decided it was worth the dev cost until way too late in the dev process to actually do it.
What it’s like today? Well, frankly, it’s crap. I could pull out many examples here (even the company I work for doesn’t have a patcher I’m satisfied with, even if it’s one of the good ones – it’s got good stuff like background automatic patching, but it’s missing a lot elsewhere), but one thing in particular wound me up today and inspired this post: Lord of the Rings Online patching.
I just got given the Gold edition of LOTRO. Took ten minutes to install completely from DVD. Finally get to the login screen, which tells me it cannot auto-update (huh? why not?), at which point it forwards me to a website with the following lovely instructions.
This is impressively bad :). To summarise:
- It doesn’t do one-click updating
- It doesn’t even download the patch file for you (sob)
- It doesn’t even HAVE a patch file for you – you have to get multiple patch files, by hand
- The patch files don’t check whether it’s “safe” to apply them yet – it’s up to you to install them in the right order
- …but the order has three different versions, depending upon which boxed version you bought and what you’ve updated in the past (or not)
Sob. http://www.lotro-europe.com/newspage.php?id=1804 (copy/pasted below – mmo publishers often delete the patch note + install pages after a while, so I’ve learnt to archive the stuff from them. Just try finding the patch notes for the last 3 Anarchy Online builds on the web – broken links from every news site :( ).
“Book 13: Doom of the Last-king – EU Standalone Patch Instructions
VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: This patch will update LOTRO clients from Book 12 to Book 13. It is advised you only apply the Book 13 Standalone Patch if you are fully updated to the current live version of the game (Book 12).
IMPORTANT: If you are patching from the retail client of the game (i.e. you’ve just bought the game), before installing Book 13 you will first of all need to fully install the Book 9, Book 10, Book 11 and Book 12 Standalone patches.
If you are patching from the Gold Edition of the game you will need to first fully install the Book 11 and Book 12 Standalone patches and then log in / out of the game before beginning the Book 13 install.
To do this, please follow the instructions provided on the links below:
Book 9
Book 10
Book 11
Book 12
Please note that installing these standalone patches in an incorrect order may incur installation errors.
The downloadable patch for Book 13 is approximately ~715MB.”
EDIT: it gets better. The Book 11 patch (which seems to be equiavlent to 1.05 – different dialogs call it different names, oh joy!) finished patching, and then … started all over again from scratch. Huh? What gives? And just before the second patch, it showed the main launcher program which claimed “you are at version 1.05” and popped up a dialog saying “do you want to upgrade to version 1.05?”.
Fortunately, I’d noticed a little DOS Prompt window lurking in the background, and I was suspicious enough not to do the obvious thing and cancel it, and checked the DOS box first. Inside that DOS prompt, it said:
Welcome to Codemasters Online.
Starting first part of the Lord of the Rings Online Book 11 patch!
Starting second part of the Lord of the Rings Online Book 11 patch!
Aha!
EDIT2: when you get to the LATEST latest patch – Book 13, a.k.a. version 1.07 (13 == 7, of course!) – things go pear-shaped again.
First of all, the main download site – gameshell.com – isn’t carrying the download for this patch. The easy way I downloaded the first few patches isn’t available this time around. Crap. And the primary download site requires installing some proprietary malware (* – I don’t know if it’s malware, I just know that when a website insists on “installing” a “downloader” in order to download the thing you REALLY want to install, and refuses to let you download the file you’re after … well, even as a developer, that’s not a path I’m going down).
And the next site down the list is member-only. And the remaining ones are very very very slow (2 hours to download the patch. ARGH!)
So, I tried the torrent. OMGWTFBBQ?! Codemasters knows about BitTorrent. Awesome!
Only … they broke the tracker. Doh. Still, at least it is downloading now. Finally. And there’s a 9.9 availability (i.e. almost ten complete copies of the patch in the network, which is good but definitely not great – depends how long Codemasters carries on seeding the torrents)
6 replies on “MMO patching: how it ought to be”
I’ve ranted this rant many times before – your post was well thought out and organized – so I forwarded it to my entire team.
Hey Adam,
That was so lame, and yet so funny!
But sad, really.
Bridget
As you are well aware, Adam, a better patching system would not only result in happier customers, but lower bandwidth costs for the provider, since they could trickle downloads and avoid peak charges. I think the real issue that needs to be surmounted is not any kind of technical problem. but getting upper management to have the appropriate vision. Painless and transparent patching needs to be seen as a critical feature, and not an minor accessory.
I just noticed that Joe Ludwig recently posted some post-mortem info on a design-survey they included in the patcher for Pirates of the Burning Sea.
Now, there’s a good use of the patcher! (bonus points @ Joe for doing the writeup about it afterwards as well :)).
[…] 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. […]
WoW’s updater works OK most of the time. I’ve stopped playing for several months – when I came back, it downloaded everything in the correct order. I was simply responsible for clicking OK.
That being said, MOST normal people (not gamers) will die rather than go through your LOTRO experience. So in an ideal world I’d rather play a patch-less game (e.g. web-based).