@Jaxith They've been working on it(in some capacity) since before Amalur was started. They decided no one would care about it if if they didnt flesh the world out first(how successful would WoW have been if it didnt use Warcraft characters? still a hit(most likely), but not nearly as well as they have done), so they decided to make KoA first, in a attempt to get players to care about the world.

As bad as it is, you really cant prevent these kinds of issues with high profile launches unless you have waaaaay too many servers, because after the initial 2-3 days the demand drops majorly(because people get back into "normal" play routines instead of all day every day, as they do when a new game comes out), and if you handled the load easily then you have way too many servers, because the demand after that is much less, which means you wasted a bunch of money on servers that you now have no use for.

Unfortunately with online-only games this is only going to become more common.

Makes me wonder if a 3rd party company could make a decent living renting hardware to the developers for the "launch window", that way developers would have the hardware to handle launch without having to outright buy them.

@QOSMSTR He isnt(apparently) angered at mobile games specifically, but at the business model most of those games take("free" to play, pay to win). I would imagine he would dislike a console/PC game that used the same model.

@vochelli Exploiting a glitch is the same as "hacking", it gives you a competitive advantage. Now, if this could be triggered through normal play, i'm all for just rolling stats/points/wins/etc back to pre-glitch levels, but IIRC, this had to pretty much be an intentional glitch, which is worthy of bans, IMO.

It also sends a strong message:

If you find a glitch, DO NOT exploit it for your own gain, REPORT IT, because YOU WILL BE PUNISHED if you exploit it.

@sephirothsfan02 This wasnt an accidental misuse of game mechanics, this was clear-cut exploiting a glitch. if this could happen to someone and they be totally unaware of it, then i would agree they shouldnt be punished, but when it's clearly a INTENTIONAL exploit, they should be perma-banned. also, i agree that most places dont test games very well, but you cant expect a game to be 100% bug free(hell, even old NES/SNES games had glitches you could exploit, and they were MUCH simpler), especially when it's being played by millions of people and has a competitive side to it(which means some people will try to win by any means, including finding and using obvious exploits).