A request for the next Expansion-in-a-box

Gama

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
103
Am I the only one who sees it as odd that in order to upgrade your account for an mmorpg game, who already have your credit card details, and you already have to download files/updates from, you have to wait for your local game shop to get their delivery for the game, and they go pay for it there...

Why can't there be an option in the Account section to enable TOA/whatever expansion, they would charge you for it, then your account would be enabled for the expansion, so all you would need to do is download the ToA.exe and patch.ini, connect to patch server, and be done with it. I know its a lot of stuff to download, but it has been available to download for the last 2 weeks atleast (volanteers testing it, im sure there arent too many other files to DL after you get that version), and its preferable to waiting until... march the 1st (amazon.co.uk's (goa's officail partner (!!!) estimated delivery date) or whenever the game stores get it in.

Or

Just have the CD's on the shelf the friday before you release the expansion. Its not as if installing it early harms anything, its created in a new directory, isnt it? and it would also help stop the Account section zerg-out, as people would be able to register between the friday and the wednesday its patched to servers.

I just find it odd the way they currently do it... its asif they want to make it as hard as possible for everyone...
 

living

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 25, 2003
Messages
553
would also save them alot of mony not having to make the CDs
 

Shaniah

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Jan 15, 2004
Messages
18
Been wondering about that for a while.
Getting Shrouded Isles the first day was hard enough, but it seems that for ToA we actually failed. Someone told me that they might not want to put a product in the store that you cannot play yet, but I see that as a minor problem...
after all, everyone who plays this game and is interested in ToA will know exactly when it goes live on their server, and most won't mind paying money for it a few days early. Or they could just put big orange stickers on the boxes in retail stores, "PLAYABLE FROM FEB 25TH ON ALL EUROPEAN DAOC SERVERS" or something like that.

anyway... good point.
 

Smurflord

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
697
Have to agree on this one, and this is a route that some of the new mmorpgs are adopting. It also makes sound financial sense too.

TOA retail: £15
£2 VAT
£5 store profit
£3 manufacturing and distribution
£5 to GOA

Or they could just allow you to buy a CD-key online, and pocket all £15.
 

Glottis

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 28, 2003
Messages
1,025
Would be nice indeed.
GoA could team up with a big company like Amazon.com or other European retailor, and then give 3 options to their existing customers.
1. Download the required files
2. Download the required files (and Amazon.com ships a CD version afterwards)
3. Buy in the shops

Takes some time to arrange the first time, but afterwards you will have plenty of satisfied customers.
Only problem is, GoA does not have our credit card details, a 3rd party has :)
As they assured us when someone was messing around with the Admin powers.
Also, it is nice publicity to be so much requested in stores, and those poor shopowners also need to make some cash :)
Regards, Glottis
 

Light

Loyal Freddie
Joined
Dec 24, 2003
Messages
692
seems really bent all this hassle etc trying to basically buy a cd-key from a shop :eek6:

local Game store reckons they won't receive it till friday
 

yaruar

Can't get enough of FH
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
2,617
Gama said:
Am I the only one who sees it as odd that in order to upgrade your account for an mmorpg game, who already have your credit card details, and you already have to download files/updates from, you have to wait for your local game shop to get their delivery for the game, and they go pay for it there...

Why can't there be an option in the Account section to enable TOA/whatever expansion, they would charge you for it, then your account would be enabled for the expansion, so all you would need to do is download the ToA.exe and patch.ini, connect to patch server, and be done with it. I know its a lot of stuff to download, but it has been available to download for the last 2 weeks atleast (volanteers testing it, im sure there arent too many other files to DL after you get that version), and its preferable to waiting until... march the 1st (amazon.co.uk's (goa's officail partner (!!!) estimated delivery date) or whenever the game stores get it in.

Or

Just have the CD's on the shelf the friday before you release the expansion. Its not as if installing it early harms anything, its created in a new directory, isnt it? and it would also help stop the Account section zerg-out, as people would be able to register between the friday and the wednesday its patched to servers.

I just find it odd the way they currently do it... its asif they want to make it as hard as possible for everyone...


It's probably a bandwith issue more than anything else. Compare a 20mb patch to an 700mb patch.
14,000,000mb compared to 400,000mb of data transfer with 20k accounts that's a 13.6 terrabytes of data more to transfer approximately which would place somewhat of a big load on the bandwith.
 

old.Whoodoo

Can't get enough of FH
Joined
Dec 24, 2003
Messages
3,646
Theres going to be roughly 50k+ people trying to DL 800Mb+ of ToA. How much whinging do you think there would be from this lot cause the servers are slow / busy?:eek2:
As for us testers, we got a nice 1.6Gb file to DL, theres only about 80 of us, and we had a week to do it.

Yet another fine "ILL DIE IF I CANT PLAY DAOC FOR 24 HOURS WTFPWND L33T H4X0R" thread, brought to us by the numbers q and y and the letter 4.
 

Gama

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
103
Well, when you pay the 3rd party for your subscription, they must send the info to goa, something like

Account: Jbloggs
Paid: 3 months subscription
Date: 10/1/2004

it shouldn't be too hard to get them to add the option like

Account: Jbloggs
Paid: TOA activation
Date: 21/2/2004

and then when goa recive the confirmation of payment, then send Jbloggs a link to download the .exe and patch.ini
 

Fana

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 23, 2003
Messages
2,181
Yes please! Ive been round to 5 different stores (all the local stores) here in sweden today trying to buy the expansion to no avail.
3 of them did not have it in store yet, 2 (GAME stores) did, but refused to sell it to me, even after I got them to phone their headquarters and confirm that stores in the UK had started selling.

And if you are going to have an "official" partner (cdon.com) please make sure they have the right release day - they have it listed as 27th. Which might even mean they wont send it out until then - which means those of us that ordered from them wont have it until after the weekend.

This is simply not acceptable for a mmorpg. Next time make it downloadable or make *sure* that all stores will release it on the same day.
 

Shaniah

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Jan 15, 2004
Messages
18
To Yaruar:

Do you mean the difference between downloading the complete expansion and downloading just the expansion patch?

Because that still leaves the option of just getting the product in stores a few days before the expansion goes live, so everyone starts around the same time. Which is rather important imo because everything will depend on group cooperation in this expansion. You'll want people to group with you to do master levels, artifacts, the leveling of artifacts. Comes down to a lot of work. I can already foresee the chat spam from people who missed Master level X while their guildies were doing it and are looking for a group... ohhh dear...

And Whoodoo:
no reason to be so hateful mate. Servers going down under downloads take a few hours or at the very most a day of your gametime. As it is now, people won't get ToA until Friday. Quite a difference.
 

plomien

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Jan 7, 2004
Messages
319
you can always do what they do with EQ, you download say 10Mb everytime you log on of the next expansion and you then just activate it when its ready by paying for it.

or as was said before release the cd's the week before but only allow activation on the day stipulated that way it allows the postal service time to get it to you as well
 

Archeon

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 29, 2003
Messages
2,047
As crazy as it sounds the way GoA are doing this is probably the easiest.

Gama said:
Why can't there be an option in the Account section to enable TOA/whatever expansion, they would charge you for it, then your account would be enabled for the expansion, so all you would need to do is download the ToA.exe and patch.ini, connect to patch server, and be done with it.

Like Yaruar said, its more likley an issue of bandwith than anything else. All those people leeching off the rusting Celeron might cause it to explode ;)

Gama said:
Just have the CD's on the shelf the friday before you release the expansion. Its not as if installing it early harms anything, its created in a new directory, isnt it? and it would also help stop the Account section zerg-out, as people would be able to register between the friday and the wednesday its patched to servers.

Might be an easier way in a manner of speaking... but then if you think about you'd probably get more frustrated with GOA if you had your copy of TOA installed but couldn't use it. Its safe to say FH has been fairly heavily spammed with TOA release related posts today, imagine that all week - people would probably be riotting in the streets by Thursday :D


Still i do agree that its silly the 'Offical' partners have a set back release date (though you could easily argue thats more incentive for people to go to GAME or sombody else, its Amazon's loss realistically) - still this whole thing is part of the New-Expansion package. People will whine about it (still remember person X making a whine thread at 8am in the morning on the release date about why SI wasn't working yet :D)

Just that people want to get TOA as soon as they can, i 99.9% garentee that by the end of next week all the 'FFS GOA i want TOA' posts will have been replaced with 'FFS GOA Emain is Empty!'

Peace and good Karma to all who read this post - most of you need it ;)
 

Korax

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Jan 9, 2004
Messages
335
Sounds expensive to send all dem boxes around, for that they could prolly buy a huge fat connection. We dont live in the stone age anymore, shouldnt be a problem with todays technology imo.
 

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