Im not sure why Defiance is getting so much flack.

[MacDeath]

IMO, the game is a hybrid mix of Shooter and MMO. As such it's not a perfect example of a pure shooter or a pure MMO. People don't like what they don't understand so many don't like this hybrid.

Trion hasn't helped much with the rocky start and slow client side patching. Many of us were expecting more from Trion based on the early RIFT experience.

[Technodude]

LOL Lamerian is right. Why are you so up in arms about his opinion? I agree with him only people that play WoW now are kids looking for a very simple MMO to play. These people put down other games like Defiance and it would not surprised me one bit if other MMO companies pay these people to put down Defiance or other new MMO games that will be coming out soon.

Only because it is his opinion doesn't mean he is right. Aren't you guys bored of posting same nonsense every time a new MMO is released? how many WOW killers we had so far or how many MMO threatened WOW's dominance..let me count..errr....zero!

And what is with generalizations? do you know all 8 to 9 million players base to come to conclusion that ONLY kids play WOW? no wonder you agree with him, because both of you post idiotic nonsense.

[Oceanhawk]

This is an instance where a publisher did not force the game to market early. The publisher will not get their money back quick and then abandon the game developers to clean up their mess. SyFy and Trion Worlds are in it for the long haul.

The software architecture almost all programming is based on acts like a house of cards. You have to make sure everything lines up, or things very obviously fall apart. With thousands and thousands of lines of code, the potential for human error increases, as does the difficulty of finding the cause of the error (often not one line of code, but the interaction of several) and adjusting them without creating new errors. This is why almost every patch in MMOs requires an update to fix the problems it caused.

The complexity of Defiance from a programming perspective is really quite astounding. (I say this not to denigrate other MMOs, to be clear.) That complexity is compounded by attempting to simultaneously release patches for three separate operating systems.

I'm not trying to slam you but please don't lecture me on software development. I have a Masters degree in Software Engineering. I understand the complexities very well. I am not trying to say that I demand a perfect game launch or that a game launch is horrible, simply because a few bugs pop up after it goes live. That happens and will continue to happen.

What I am talking about is the sheer number of bugs this game had identified all the way back to Alpha when we let the Devs know about them. Yet the vast majority of those issues were ignored, on second thought lets not say they were ignored because they did acknowledge a lot of them, instead lets say they failed to properly prioritize their remedy.

We also told them about some design decisions that weren't well fleshed out but they too didn't get the attention they needed, poor chat system as an example. The point is that the game was rushed to market because of a hard date caused by the impending start of the TV show. That would have been an incredible feat to have pulled it off cleanly but the fact is they missed. The game came out in the exact same condition it was in in early beta.

I'm not even talking about the complaints some people have with the overall lack of content, I'm sure more will eventually get added. However for an MMO to be released where 3 weeks in people have already finished every single quest, story line, weekly additional content and all the other stuff in the game, then something is missing.

I'm still hoping the game will get fixed to where it should have been at release because I enjoy the concept. I would love to start playing again but I refuse until i'm sure there is something for me to do without the fear that I will lose hours of game play simply because the game decides to do a database rollback.

[Denim Samurai]

there's some bugs but I think most people appear to believe this game was supposed to be Borderlands 3 and I have no idea where they got that idea.

[Oceanhawk]

there's some bugs but I think most people appear to believe this game was supposed to be Borderlands 3 and I have no idea where they got that idea.

A lot of us would have been happy with Borderlands 1 in an MMO format

[Denim Samurai]

A lot of us would have been happy with Borderlands 1 in an MMO format

there's tons of games out there that reward players with significantly stronger characters for more time spent and/or more real money spent. This game eschews that mentality. If you want to compare this game to anything it's elder scrolls and GTA on a MMO scale which is something I don't see often and I'm having fun with it.

[Yenkin]

I would love to have money everytime someone says a game is going to be a WoW killer, so far WoW is still going strong and with a healhty player base that is far beyond even the nearest competitor. The only saving grace for Defiance is the fact that it is Cross Platform which really can inflate the number because it is not just PC based. I am betting the PC version is now seeing a health dropoff of players, That bug on Saturday night is not helping the game staying power.

[Ensu]

I'm not trying to slam you but please don't lecture me on software development. I have a Masters degree in Software Engineering. I understand the complexities very well. I am not trying to say that I demand a perfect game launch or that a game launch is horrible, simply because a few bugs pop up after it goes live. That happens and will continue to happen.

What I am talking about is the sheer number of bugs this game had identified all the way back to Alpha when we let the Devs know about them. Yet the vast majority of those issues were ignored, on second thought lets not say they were ignored because they did acknowledge a lot of them, instead lets say they failed to properly prioritize their remedy.

We also told them about some design decisions that weren't well fleshed out but they too didn't get the attention they needed, poor chat system as an example. The point is that the game was rushed to market because of a hard date caused by the impending start of the TV show. That would have been an incredible feat to have pulled it off cleanly but the fact is they missed. The game came out in the exact same condition it was in in early beta.

I'm not even talking about the complaints some people have with the overall lack of content, I'm sure more will eventually get added. However for an MMO to be released where 3 weeks in people have already finished every single quest, story line, weekly additional content and all the other stuff in the game, then something is missing.

I'm still hoping the game will get fixed to where it should have been at release because I enjoy the concept. I would love to start playing again but I refuse until i'm sure there is something for me to do without the fear that I will lose hours of game play simply because the game decides to do a database rollback.

My Masters was in Creative Writing. I only sat in on the Software Engineering Masters, so I'll hold off on the lectures. I agree with all the issues you point out in this post, and I too hope they will be solved. However, I haven't been affected by the rollbacks, and I'm still playing when I get the chance.

[skepticck]

...It's been a rocky launch and Defiance lacks the most basic of MMO tropes (player market, mail system, decent chat system, player storage, an actual social hub, et cetera)...

pretty much this ^^
this game needs a lot of work still, and when you get a patch that supposed to correct many bugs but doesn't and on the contrary introduces many more then its a bit worrisome, but since its still early days lets hope that the devs get better at really patching bugs and the QA team gets better at testing the patches.

[Jthreau]

Sadly, we live in a day an age where if its not "great" it is automatically "terrible."

"If you're not first, you're last."

There is so much truth in this quote that it really makes me appreciate the gaming days of the 90s.