population cap in OB

[wutae]

As everyone flames GOA, , i just felt like making a post for praising an action that was quite clever. Population caps. I said in a post before 2-3 weeks, that EA mythic, propably pushed their timelimits , so they can have actually players playing warhammer's pvp and have seen at least the majority of the game before Wrath of the lich king gets published. Why's that? because that way people will see the game and actually djudge before they leave or not leave for WoTLK. ok now to the main point, Open beta, in comparison to closed, it's not a class balancing or bug face. Open beta actually exists for stress testing the servers, that's the reason they didnt mind having an OB for only one week. When u use a new server, instead of having all the OB testers log at the same time. you can do what they did, let the people join with smaller numbers. To conclude, what you peeps would prefer, to go with smaller numbers, or let everyone get in, and have multiple server crushes, many roll backs etc etc? Everyone forgot the purpose of OB, TESTING. If everything doesnt work right. SO WHAT ? it's a testing. you are not playing right now the game that you bought. You are playing a beta version, TO HELP GOA HAVE SOME BETTER RESULTS , on live servers.



Edit: What the hell with blaming the service, right now they dont serve us, we serve them, for the reasons i said above.
Edit2: Moreoever i would love to add, that 99% of you people have no idea of how servers work. We all know that it would be a nice idea to let us register the cd keys at the website ahead, but who said that they had the server that would hold the accounts ready? Can you blame them, no? Cause the other option would be to w8 5-10 days more to get everything perfect. Then everyone would blame GOA for not opening their servers the same day with MYTHIC . ;o

Ok that's all, let the flame vs me begin :P

[sareth]

You mention testing quite a few times, i think thats what most people are just plainly annoyed at the fact there has been no testing, other than that of peoples patience. I am not in the least supprised by todays happenings, nor am i overly concerned, i know i'l get to play the game sooner rather than later i've waited years so i will be dammed if im gona let a day or two extra waiting bother me.

[wutae]

yeah but by testing, in OB means they are testing the login-registration-game servers as well. The problems that occured today, wont happen in actual release, so for the non testers the game will be flawless. I can still remember that in WOW we were having Game crushes, for at least 1-2 weeks?

[fiire]

im annoyed at the fact my preorder said i would be able to play oB and i probably wont now as there are thousands of poeple with keys

[wutae]

Originally Posted by fiire

im annoyed at the fact my preorder said i would be able to play oB and i probably wont now as there are thousands of poeple with keys

Nobody promised u that u will play from day #1 neither promised u that u will have an excellent service, they just promised u that u will be able to play OB. That's all. Although that's looks like cheating , this is the law of marketing, and the commercials propably dont come from GOA. Moreover, as i said before its a beta test, they didnt know that the things wont work well as well. But this is beta, relax go to bed, propably tommorow everything is going to be alright ( heh, a crush here or there is expected ) The more people login, the bigger the chances to have a server crush ;o

[arknor]

Originally Posted by wutae

yeah but by testing, in OB means they are testing the login-registration-game servers as well. The problems that occured today, wont happen in actual release, so for the non testers the game will be flawless. I can still remember that in WOW we were having Game crushes, for at least 1-2 weeks?

you miss IanC's post where he was going on about today beeing treated as if it were the release date for GOA?

[wutae]

Originally Posted by arknor

you miss IanC's post where he was going on about today beeing treated as if it were the release date for GOA?

yus AS IF IT , a beta test is a beta test and a release is a release, even if GOA and IanC had great expectations, we and them must always take in our mind the possibility that not everything will work as scheduled. THEN OB would have no meaning , are you going to hang them , because they believed that everything will be fine ? or are u gonna blame them that everything didnt work ok on a beta testing ?

[MrNadger]

Wutae,
I work on large scale server projects, with registration functionality and requirements of <1s response times from anywhere within the country. I've also been involved in betas, both open and closed, from DAoC times upto now.
If you want to see how a launch should go, have a look at the forums for when Age of Conan started. Yes there were some minor lag issues, and a great deal of competition for mobs, but that was about it.

This open beta has been appalling, and before you start off again on how it's testing and we're serving GOA, think on this... The beta was pushed as a bonus for preorder, tempting many an optimist (including me) into spending hard earned cash during a bad economic period.

The beta has gone horribly pear shaped and the direct result is people cancelling their orders and either trying to move to US servers, or canning it entirely. GOA either didn't care about the fiasco which was obviously going to hit them and was frankly expected by anyone who's played games hosted by them before, or just didn't see it. Both options bode very poorly for the future EU Warhammer experience.
The biggest mistake in the OB launch? A negligible amount of information, with paying and future customers left completely in the dark. The community support officer, to give fair credit, stepped up and admitted they hadn't told us anywhere near enough about what was going on, and if this whole phased cap thing was the original plan, why didn't they publish the timeline in advance? Leaving tens of thousands of irate customers to flood Freddy's servers instead of trying the gaming event of the quarter probably means that the project management posts are now included in the "We're hiring" link on the side of war-europe.com

As for the stress testing, GOA have known for years that their fancy flash screens can't cope. This has been pointed out many times. We're now in a position three weeks before the go live where the gameplay servers were only allowing one or two thousand players on and the registration servers are being ground to a halt by what is likely to be fewer people than will try on the real launch. If GOA are going to put in the resiliency and continuity of service resources required to prevent this at the real launch, they're going to have to forget about sleeping, and the beta servers will probably have a hell of a lot of downtime. On the other hand, I don't see them spending the money required to do it properly, so it will probably be like the bad old days of DAoC.

[fiire]

Originally Posted by wutae

Nobody promised u that u will play from day #1 neither promised u that u will have an excellent service, they just promised u that u will be able to play OB. That's all. Although that's looks like cheating , this is the law of marketing, and the commercials propably dont come from GOA. Moreover, as i said before its a beta test, they didnt know that the things wont work well as well. But this is beta, relax go to bed, propably tommorow everything is going to be alright ( heh, a crush here or there is expected ) The more people login, the bigger the chances to have a server crush ;o

it says guaranteed open access beta, and i dont think it is with all the crap thats gone on i cannt see alot of us getting on OB

[Xanthea]

Originally Posted by wutae

Nobody promised u that u will play from day #1 neither promised u that u will have an excellent service, they just promised u that u will be able to play OB. That's all. Although that's looks like cheating , this is the law of marketing, and the commercials propably dont come from GOA. Moreover, as i said before its a beta test, they didnt know that the things wont work well as well. But this is beta, relax go to bed, propably tommorow everything is going to be alright ( heh, a crush here or there is expected ) The more people login, the bigger the chances to have a server crush ;o

From your point of view...

No mmorpg company can EVER be held responsible for any upcomming issue's...cause? they cant help it...just a game,internet,servercrashes can happen live with it,,How would they know that? how could they predict there be so many logging on?...etc etc etc....

[Bahumat]

I feel sorry for GOA because I really wanted the beta launch to go smoothly. There are so many people who 'bash' GOA for all their problems, but it would have been nice to see everything go smoothly.

I've whined about GOA before, but I thought I would give them the benefit of the doubt for a new game etc. I just hope it gets sorted out soon before more people lose hope.

[Scorba]

Nice bit of trolling! This is a marketing disaster for GOA. Of course there will be bugs, lag and other problems with Beta but this is way beyond what it says on the box (which many of us paid for). But if at 10am Sunday GOA had been posting the stuff they are now doing we would not be seeing half the flame. What has poured petrol on the fire is the poor customer service, the very thing that people were worried GOA would fail on.

It was clear there would be real difficulties with rolling out the game and registration at the same time. Ok they got the test they wanted but it showed them them up. It showed up there complete inability to give good customer service.It took them 7 hours to get any explanations out and 15 hours for honest and complete posts whilst their 'customers' sat at their computer wondering what the hell was going on. They wasted our time because they couldn't admit they had cocked it up.

Sure hardware and software can fail in Beta but their is no excuse for why Customer Service failed to keep us properly up to date with what was going on. That may not be the CSR's fault, if they don't know what the problem is, they can't tell us (though even saying that would have helped), but something was seriously wrong with the way they handled yesterday.

[Tharion]

Seeing that the regpages are made in Flash and stripped html-site would been a better choise for the pages handeling the registration.

This they learned back in the days of DAoC expansion releases.
Why did the go back to using Flash when they know it cant stand the stress?

Yes it's beta, im not pissed at the service, I sat all day yesterday re-living the past and laughing at the superb information about the problems they had at GOA =)

Cya ya'll ingame.

[dee777]

I believe a good amount of oldschooler's frustration stems from partly blaming themself. You know the saying: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me", eh? We all (me included) should have known better.

Another good amount of bad feelings could have been avoided by better communication work. If CSMs start to publicly discuss the semantics of "equal service" vs "identical service" and what exactly counts as "having access to beta", then I believe that will raise some customers anger, especially when they were (I am not saying that is smart, just that people do it) sitting in front of their 414errors all day long.

I still keep my fingers crossed for WAR as the first few hours of betatesting yesterday promise one hell of a game.

[Draylor]

Originally Posted by Bahumat

I feel sorry for GOA because I really wanted the beta launch to go smoothly.

Yeah, I feel sorry for the majority of their staff.

All it took was for 1 halfwit to decide September was an appropriate delivery date for the login/key setup mechanism when some folks have had keys since as early as March/April and what shouldve been smooth (albeit with long queues on the servers) turned into a clusterfuck with GOA types appearing to put in 18+ hour working days.