Video Game Tuesday: What’s Going On With F/GO?

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’ve got an open question to the people at both Aniplex of America and Delightworks. I’m asking What’s Going On With F/GO?

Huh?: So for my readers here’s a brief explanation. In the past few months, the Fate/Grand Order community in North America has been growing more and more upset with the handling of the game by Aniplex of America. In particular Albert Kao, the Localization director for the NA Client has been getting a ton of flak, not least of which occurred very recently when he handled the Anime Expo panel incredibly poorly and unprofessionally.

If you want some proof just go to the Grand Order subreddit and look at all the posts complaining about Albert and his absolutely unacceptable behavior at that panel. In addition many fans are upset at being treated like crap compared to other servers, like China, not to mention the blatant favoritism shown towards the JP players. The latest insult in a series going back to Thanksgiving is the fact that the playerbase was screwed out of 20 Saint Quartz, the in game currency that you can pay real money for, for the recent Anniversary. The issue with this is that the anniversary was pushed back from the actual anniversary date of June 28th to be announced at the Anime Expo panel. Another inflammatory move that makes no sense to many players of the game, including myself. There are possible reasons, but those reasons all come down to a series of events that could have been easily avoided if they didn’t do a certain thing. And that was announcing things at Anime conventions. But that’s a topic for next week.

So here’s my question to Aniplex of America, what the hell are you doing? Many people understand how poorly Japanese companies can treat foreign markets, the whole Gaijin bigotry plays a huge role in this. But this has gone on many times and frankly it’s insulting to not only the playerbase, who you ought to be keeping very happy, but also the people who you invited to your panels who were subject to a man who looked like he had just shown up after panhandling for a day in the seedier neighborhoods of Los Angeles heading the panel. Do I expect an answer to my question? Nope, because at the end of the day I’m just a small time gaming journalist who can be very acerbic at times.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.

Video Game Tuesday: Launch Day Madness

pokemon_go

Hey all for this week’s Video Game Tuesday I’m going to cover a topic most of you will probably be familiar with after last week. It’s all about Launch Day Madness!

What’s Launch Day Madness?: Well it’s just a made up term I use when talking about a launch of a particular game and the breaking of various things that occur on that day.

Like what?: Well, for one and probably the one most people are familiar with after last week’s launch of Pokemon GO, the servers are down, or busy. The reason behind this is fairly obvious, too many people at one time. Even if some people get in just fine it’s more due to their own luck, or foresightedness at logging in early, rather than you just being unlucky. If a game can’t handle the massive amount of people logging in when brand new content launches than the IT team behind the game has severely miscalculated the anticipated user base, or it’s increased influx. That was the case with Pokemon GO for most people that I know, and myself personally. I still haven’t caught a single ‘Mon myself yet. The server went down before I could catch my first one.

What else?: Well it could also be the website used to register users can be down, another thing people are probably familiar with after last week’s launch of GO. Sane reasoning, although not to the same extent, probably only up to 80% of the user base if it’s a new game. It can also be that certain parts of the game don’t work, like Instances in World of Warcraft’s The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King expansion launches.

Even if it’s not people having issue logging in, the servers might be unable to handle a certain amount of players in one area and that area’s server might go down. Like the Eastern Kingdoms going down during the Wrath launch.  Or it may cause server restarts causing people to quit the game and stop playing for up to a few hours.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday! Do you have a favorite Launch Day Madness story? Share it below!