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The team at Massively.com recently published a list of the ten worst MMO launches in history, which surprisingly enough, include some titles that are now overwhelmingly successful. While a troubled launch doesn’t immediately predict failure for a game, it does make things a bit harder.

Among the ten worst launches in MMO history, Massively names the following:

• Aion, for a failure to anticipate demand. The servers were overflowing on launch day, and many players were simply too annoyed to come back once things leveled out.
• Age of Conan, for a failure to make the 1-20 experience on par with the 20+ game play. Those who made it to level 21 were shocked to find a barren wasteland of a game with more bugs than finished elements.
• Final Fantasy XIV, which we’ve talked about quite a bit here on MMORPG1.com. FFXIV is readying to release a 2.0 version, but most industry insiders believe that it will come far too late to revive the flagging title.
• World of Warcraft. WoW players in 2012 may be shocked to hear that WoW had a less than stellar launch back in 2004, but Blizzard committed the same mistake as NCSoft with Aion. Demand was simply far outreaching the server capacities. WoW now has about 250 servers just for North American players, with many more available to Europe, Asia, Brazil, Oceanic and Latin America.