EverQuest or NeverQuest?

989 Studios' EverQuest hit the wires on Tuesday and over the course of the weekend those same wires were down. The problem: As gamers were playing or trying to access the game, they were either unable to connect or their connections would fail as they played. The solution: Fix the problem before gamers start talking about Ultima Online.

While there doesn't seem to be an ETA on when the problems will be alleviated, the problem comes as a severe blow to the introduction of the newest massively multiplayer game to hit the Internet. Unlike many companies, 989 Studios and EverQuest's developer, Verant Interactive, Inc., have been very vocal about discussing what the problems with the service are and what the companies are doing to fix them, and they have been doing so all weekend.

On an EverQuest fan site, Verant Interactive president and CEO, John Smedley, left repeated messages giving status reports regarding what his company was working on. The major problem apparently lies in a connection error at UUNet, the Internet service provider, and a connection between its San Diego router and a core ATM router in Los Angeles. Because Verant is located in San Diego, this makes the problem a bigger one since most of the network feeds into one building. Yet this is not a new problem. From an engineering standpoint, Origin and its massively multiplayer competitor, Ultima Online, learned quickly that a distributed network makes for better connectivity, no matter what type of hardware you have. With a distributed network, if one part of the network goes down or something happens at the building that houses the equipment, there's a backup system elsewhere. In short, this lesson should have been learned by now.

Regardless, UUNet is currently working on the problem by replacing hardware and moving traffic from that line (there are four major UUNet hubs in LA) to others for the time being. And gamers have some limited contact with the service for now, but the system is still prone to problems.

There have been some problems with the chat server that caused users to receive messages stating that they hadn't subscribed to the service. Smedley says users have not been deleted from the database, and the problem comes from the massive amount of people trying to instantaneously log on after being disconnected.

In the last message Smedley left with the fan site, he closed, "I really want to bring one point home with everyone - we are working nonstop on this. We won't rest until things are stable again. We never had these kinds of problems until this UUnet thing happened... but I suppose the fact that we just went live meant we were due; ( We make no excuses - those are the facts and we're sorry about the problems. All we can promise is we will work on them until they are totally fixed."

Questions directed to Sony regarding more information on the problems went unanswered at press time.

UPDATE: Verant says that UUNet has instituted a short-term networking solution until early on Tuesday morning when a permanent solution should take care of the connectivity problem. GameSpot editors have said that they have noticed improved connectivity over earlier attempts at getting onto the service.