09.30.09
The NCSoft Launcher…
I’m going to try and keep this short, for your sake. However, as much as I’m enjoying Aion at the moment (and I do think it’s a great game), I really despise the NCSoft Launcher.
In my opinion, it is useless overhead we are incurring each time we wish to load our favorite game. You could argue that it does keep your NCSoft games up to date and it is able to repair corrupt game files, but I think these two don’t nearly make up for the shortcomings of this annoying little program. First, most games these days do a check for updates when you launch them or, in the case of MMOs, when you log on to the game servers. Second, although a repair shouldn’t be necessary, it would be easy enough to incorporate this into a standalone program that users can run as needed.
The launcher itself seems to be the cause of many of my issues lately. I can’t count how many times in the last week it has thought that Aion was not up to date (when it was) or that it encountered an error the last time it was run. Both of these have made it necessary to choose to force the game to play without checking for updates or repairing, since I know damn well that nothing is wrong with it.
Aion has crashed on me on occasion, but I don’t find it bothers me as much as the fact that when you log off or get disconnected from the game servers, you end up back at the launcher and have to reload the game in order to log back on. The game takes a considerable amount of time to load, and if it was already loaded why do I need to head back to this annoying little program to reload it and make sure everything is just peachy before I can play again?
I’m happy that NCSoft decided to remove GameGuard from the Aion release (for now anyway, we’ll see about that later on), but I really don’t like their launcher. I don’t own any other NCSoft games*, and I don’t really understand the purpose of this program other than to annoy me each time I want to play Aion. Why should I have to load a program before I can load my game? Especially if it provides no added value to the experience?
* As an aside, I may have once described in great detail how much I disliked Guild Wars and it’s expansions to the developers and NCSoft PR folks at E3 one year.
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Undeadpriest Said:
September 30, 2009 at 11:40 am
Yea I have noticed it to be a lot like Steam (although not as pretty) and the Sony Launcher. I think the idea is great if you have multiple games but just for the one yea it is pretty crappy, of course WoW does have a launcher as well (I never disabled it). I have found it annoying when you try and connect to a server and you are unable to, how it boots you out of the game entirely and not just to the server select screen. Also, how by default they load AionOnline.com every time you exit. Why would that be the default behavior?
As far as the game goes I am liking it currently I have a 14 Cleric and a 13 Gladiator and I like them both, although I could use more diversity in the clerics attacks. Spamming smite while waiting for cool downs = sleepy time. Although I am only lvl 14 and have not done any serious grouping.
Paul Said:
September 30, 2009 at 12:07 pm
So if Aion drops patch at 3 AM, will it automatically download instead of logging on after work and having to wait for the patch download (and wait for the queue)?
Theladas Said:
September 30, 2009 at 4:41 pm
The log in/quit paradigm is crap, I agree. I don’t have a problem with a launcher in and of itself: it’s a nice, modular component to the system. It’s never cleaned up, though – a proper launcher would end its process as soon as whatever it is supposed to launch launches. Aion’s launcher doesn’t behave in this way, though; it persists through multiple launches of the same entity, likely because of the log in/quit paradigm.
log in/quit paradigm = once you log into a system, the only way out is to quit and restart the system.
by contrast, log in/log out paradigm = once you log into a system, you can freely log out (and log in with another access key) without restarting the system.
Why NCSoft is using the archaic log in/quit paradigm, I have no idea – it makes me a little sad inside. My best-guess is that the launcher has persisted for many years, so redesigning it now feels like unnecessary work (the paradigm works, however clunkily). Plus, there’s the advertising aspect: every time you log in, the other MMO names they offer all appear before you eyes. I’m sure some people stop and think “Hmm, I wonder what L2 is really like?”
@ Paul: no, the launcher is a static process. That is, once it connects to the server, it checks the local game version against the server-side version and updates as necessary. After the initial update check, the process is idle until a user tries to connect to a given game’s servers. When that connection is opened, a second, one-time version comparison is made and updates follow accordingly. Thus, there’s no dynamic internal design that checks the servers for updates every hour, say. That would be some cool functionality to add, though.
Middea Said:
September 30, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Might be worth checking out:
http://help.ncsoft.com/cgi-bin/ncsoft.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=7386&p_created=1251311939