If a game fails - don't you think the developers should hear why?

There's always more than one reason, you can make a good sandbox MMO, you can make a good theme park MMO, ultimately it comes down to the quality of content regardless, and whether it retains enough players.

We could talk for hours why certain MMOs 'failed' and we could come up with dozens and dozens of reasons for each game.
Then we can decide what actually counts as a fail, is it a huge loss of players? As a gamer perspective did swtor fail? Many would say yes, as a business perspective, it still has half a million subscribers and makes a ton of money through micro transactions, so what really is a failed MMO?
Different for the both of us.

Why should anyone get free access to something they've spent years developing.

Every TESO video and article online has comments of people who played the closed beta, and how they seem under the impression "beta" means final product. And say how they aren't going to buy the game because of bugs in the test. Afraid to say a lot of people don't seem to understand beta tests are to find bugs, alert developers, and fix them.

But in response to the op, is almost stereotypical for an mmo to have a shaky start. Hopefully it won't be a disaster like the SimCity bs.

Because they want people to stress test it?

ppl isn't the thread about let an open beta happen and not if u gotta pay for it....? So just post yes to open beta and nothing about money all the time

What I'm seeing is that after the beta event, many people is doomsaying or at least launching too much advices to ZoS.

Seems the beta didn't was successful to the masses. And I don't understand why. Maybe is because almost every mmorpgs player is sick and burned of playing mmorpgs.

People who don't care will break the NDA, some people were expecting a closed beta to be a free demo.
The people who have positive things to say can't, because of the NDA, but most of us will have expressed our feedback through the surveys they sent.

I do not see much negative beta feedback - it is mostly related to bugs and this could be reason why it looks like something went wrong.

For those who loved single player TES series then ESO might look a step back and they might complain a lot also, but MMO players or for just new players seem have very good opinion.

Vey true. Much doom and gloom surrounding this game for some odd reason. I never got to try out the beta because of my download speed so I'm waiting for the xbox one beta, but so many beta testers are saying the game is bland and boring. I hope not because I really want this game to be good.

MMO tend to have open betas as a way of doing the final stress test on the server and find rare bugs and exploits before they go live.

Other games does not but are not as complex and real time dependent. Plenty exploits in any TES games, in an MMO you can not have any at all.

Almost all MMO has server problems at launch even with public beta.

Public beta also work as an demo, main income is subscription not box sale so its less reason to sell the game to someone who don't like the game, troll for an month and don't continues.

Problem is that the ones who like the game want to be invited to later beta tests so they don't break the NDA.

Some people also has to high expectations, they want the feeling of playing wow the first time combine with to the feeling of playing Morrowind the first time, they will be disappointed.

Other like me want an mmo who is better than wow and its clones with an elder scroll feeling and is happy.

Yeah the fact is that some people simply won't like the game and will immediately scream about it all over the net but the hordes that do like it will respect the NDA and offer constructive feedback appropriately or at least remain quiet so they can beta test again.

Bad launches are not the exclusive province of EA, nor is it really possible to predict whether or not a game has a bad launch based on a beta test, open or not.

Diablo 3 (Blizzard) got plenty of beta testing and the servers STILL failed at launch. SimCity had three (I think) stress test events. Didn't help. People were particularly pissed off in those two cases, btw, because they were both sequels to games that had offline, single player modes... people felt they shouldn't HAVE to play online on a fallible server at all. And in fact SimCity has just announced an offline patch, a year later, heh.

Lil different with an MMO which HAS to be online. Plenty of MMOs have had server issues at launch and gone on to be successful, WoW being the obvious example

Anyway, my point is that there could be a bad launch due to servers failing; that doesn't make the game a failure, though. If it takes a day or a week or even a couple of weeks to get the servers stable, there will be a lot of noise at the time but it will be forgotten a year down the road. Best policy is to go in EXPECTING server issues at launch, regardless of what kinds of betas have happened by then. And if you think you can't tolerate that, wait a week or two to pick up the game, when you have heard it's stable

Totally separate issue from whether people LIKE the game when they get a chance to play it. Once again I'm gonna be bold and make a prediction: some will like, some won't. The dislikers are guaranteed to be very, very loud, and you can be sure they will think they're in the majority regardless of what the real numbers are, but in a few months ZoS will know how many people are still playing... and only then will we know how successful it's been

If that isn't cringe worthy.. I don't know what is.

Do you want faster Stamina Regeneration in PVP? Then download the all new "Your A Cheat" pack

Fingers crossed, i cant say i have no MMO to play(i am still really enjoying gw2) but i would like to have a really immersive world to enjoy and explore( and pvp in, i would have loved world pvp but i can live without it)

But yeah, hope this game nor any MMO that is put a lot of effort into is dumb

I hope they are taking steps to ensure a non buggy release.

For mmo players this game is refreshing...

It is different to what we have come to expect, we also understand what a closed beta is unlike console gamers.. They think its a demo of a finished product LOL

My opinion is an mmo is very very different from a single player rpg and theres a strange community that doesn't seem to understand a lot of the games choices because they don't play mmo's

But yes any mmo player I know who has tested the beta has positive things to say.

To the op: An open beta would be nice it seemed like there was a few quest bugs and some server issues (causing problems loading graphics maybe?) with the latest stress test but other than that not a lot was wrong which is a good thing... I do hope an open beta to really stress test the servers will happen and yes there will be queues and trouble logging in probably but that is all good news because the more we break the game the better they make the servers for release.

i am confused, are we talking a poor launch or failed game? if gamers are not ready to handle a less than perfect launch then i put the blame on them as this happens all the time. should it happen? probably not but it does so i say be prepared for it.

also diablo 3 had a horrible launch but in no way can that game be called a failure

Diablo 3 is a PR nightmare along with BF4 and Simcity 2013

Agreed. Another thing I don't thing some people understand is that the beta build isn't the only build that Zenimax has right now. They could be farther ahead, in fixes, then what they are letting on at the moment. It's never good to assume things in general good or bad.

D3 was a financial success, maybe, but boy was it a trainwreck.

the launch was the game was not as bad as people make it out to be. did not live up to D2 though but not many games can

Yea Sim[censored]ty Was way way worse. BF4 is turning into Sim[censored]ty fast. EA Execs investigated for fraud.

Like I said above, D3 and SimCity were both special cases.

They didn't HAVE to be online-only games, so when the online component failed, all the folks who had been asking for an offline mode all through development saw their worst predictions fulfilled.

That's not gonna apply to ESO (well... at least not among those folks who realize it's an MMO, which will hopefully be everybody ).

MMOs with server issues at launch survive and do fine, because their playerbase understands the issues

If it is going to be an actual, legitimate open beta (rather than the Try-n-Buy version of an Open Beta), then they need to open it up soon.