I’m about to shock even myself with the level of maturity and level-headed thinking here… I’m also about to contradict myself.
This whole SWTOR early start thing doesn’t bother me at all. Sure, I really, really want to play and it’s killing me that I can’t. However, I think of the alternatives. Do I want to sit in a 3 hour queue? Do I want laggy servers? I know I’ve said in the past that I’d rather sit in a queue than not be able to play at all. That’s true too, but it’s a little different when I know I can’t play because of my own doing. I chose to pre-order later. They told us, up front, that those who pre-ordered first would have first dibs. It’s really my own fault.
Nothing will stop the plethora of complaints on the forums about how horrible it is to throttle the launch numbers; however, Bioware opened up the head start two days earlier than their original five day plan. That’s accommodating. Stephen Reid has also posted that tomorrow they will let in more people than they did today, and even more the day after that. I’m willing to bet nearly every pre-order has access to the game on the 15th.
Note: Stephen Reid also commented on twitter that Amazon pre-orders might be coming sooner than originally thought. Check your shipping status.
Any complaints about letting players in with an eyedropper pale in comparison to the complaints you’d see if servers crashed or players sat in three hour queues.  I’m okay waiting another day or two to play smoothly, at the same time I thought I would originally get to play the game.
This might be my all-time favorite method for launching a major MMO, actually. We’ll see how things go when more people are added. Anyway, that’s just a little insight from someone on the outside looking in — watching Graev play.
I am somewhat annoyed that if they are planning to let a greater volume in tomorrow they are not just sending out another Wave or two TODAY 😛
I’m expecting access tomorrow personally as I ordered in the first week of August.
I think it has to do with gauging server performance as more people come home from work/school. A lot of people may have skipped work to play, but the majority will be logging in over the next three or four hours.
It sucks that I started to preorder on day 1 but then decided to wait a few weeks. But all in all I figure that I will be in by tomorrow night. I really hadn’t expected to be in tonight anyway. Even if I don’t get in until Friday I will still be happy.
People are going to fuss regardless of what Bioware does. I love how they did the Guild Deployment and love the fact that I can hope right on our assigned server (in my case Jekk’Jekk’ Tarr which is a sucky server name) and my guild invite will be right there waiting for me without having to swamp our officers for an invite.
Personally the staggard launch was a great ideal and by them adding a couple extra days to get the ball rolling it shows that they really want to get most if not all people playing in the game by the weekend.
So while I am a bit sad that I didn’t get in today and know that there is still a chance I may not get in tomorrow I am still happy knowing that when I do get in that maybe the server will not be in a huge queue and the starter areas flooded beyond the point of enjoyment.
Good things come to those that wait. And it isn’t like a day or two is going to make a huge difference in regards to reaching end game.
Right on Keen. At first I was like WTF why are they not sending any more out for the night. Then I realized, how many people are like myself and even if they got their invites will not be logging into until sometime later this afternoon/evening. So it makes sense to cut off at a certain point for the day. That plus I am sure they are watching server metrics closely tonight to gauge how many invites to send out tomorrow. Smart move on their part.
I thought I would be better with it than I actually am. I’m p.o.’d and cranky right now over the fact that my $60 wasn’t enough for me to have a lightsaber or a virtual girlfriend right now but 100,000 other folks do.
Meh, gaming can make me 10 years old all over again.
I’m sure a big part of the frustration is not knowing exactly when you’ll be able to get in.
If my buddies were playing a hot new game and I got told “you can play in two days”, I’d be bummed. But not as bummed as if I was told “you can play.. maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after that. Maybe not for three days. We’ll let you know.”
Having said that, I don’t think there’s any good solution for MMO launch madness. Giant queues suck. Activating accounts in waves sucks. Crashing servers suck. Too many servers that empty out a month later sucks. Whichever flavour of poison the developer goes with, all you can do is suck it up.
The issue a lot of international players are slugged with is the disabling of their “early game access” upon official launch.
Here in Aus, SWTOR will basically miss the entire holiday break, with copies not arriving until the new year.
A lot of people don’t get that much time off in a block to enjoy their favorite passtime.
If Bioware had said *upfront* that there would be no grace period, people could have made an informed choice.
As it stands, they pulled a massive bait’n’switch on people and it comes across as completely dishonest.
An appropriate grace period would be nice. That is another issue, though.
Arrrrrgh! People are playing Star Wars right now and I’m putting away the dishes!!!
Sorry. Had to get that off my chest. I’m better now, over it, etc.
“Nothing will stop the plethora of complaints on the forums about how horrible it is to throttle the launch numbers; however, ”
Actually no one cares about throttling in principle. Every complaint is “why throttle ME?????”
One of my friends let me know that we can pre-order physical security keys from Origin now & get access to some type of in-game vendor(cosmetics?).
The ToR forums are worse than the WOW forums for idiotic and asinine posts today!
I can kinda see why they did it but they were doomed no matter what they did. Limit the users they get bitched at, have queues get bitched at.
Granted I have been playing since 8am this morning to it hasn’t affected me as much other than my guildies all not getting in today.
Good post. I completely agree with your points. I was up pressing F5 over and over on my email while watching Twitchtv streams and watching chats and twitter updates! Little bummed I didn’t get in earlier but overall I really like the way they have done this.
I preordered July 30 and they did say that first in first access. I’ll just do real life things for a while! Oh and try to rush through KOTOR 2 since I never played it.
@Anon Another aussie here << I know what you mean. Mines scheduled for Jan 3-13 lol. Play a game for several days then disabled for 2 weeks. I'll just make the most of my time playing other games/Xmas new year agendas!
I was surprised at first at all the outrage. I mean, BW is doing exactly what they said they would do for the launch. It’s not like they sprung this on anyone at the last minute. They even added a couple days for good measure. So where was all the outrage over the summer?
I would think that after all the times gamers have been burned by gaming companies in recent years we would applaud a company for following through with what they say.
The majority of today’s forum posts do make me weep for the future of humanity though. I would really hate to see how some of those people would handle an actual real life tragedy.
About the form posts:
My kids want Santa to come sooner too
I visited the forum once, found and addressed my own issue with 1 search and walked away: I had registered my pre-order but this was not showing on my account because the Early Access Code is a new code they mail you. It’s right there in a Sticky so I was shocked to see the amount of people raising hell about it.
I briefly thought “Wah my friends are playing and zooming up the level curve and I’m stuck here watching streams (thanks Graev)” then remembered that I’d been here many, many times before and within a few days all such concerns are forgotten.
After a few days the broken mechanics/class inbalances takes over 😛
My old WAR guild are in there already telling me the “Mage/Healers are very OP but not as bad as Bright Wizards”.
These are the exact same thoughts that I had. It sucks that I don’t get to play right now, but I think Bioware is preparing to have one of the smoothest MMO launches in recent memory. They get to evaluate issues such as server loads, needs of new servers, game killing bugs/exploits not caught by testers all with the luxury of having a fairly limited player base.
I like the idea that they’re trying to be smart about everything. Having a ton of servers available right now could spread out the players way too much. Plus it saves them a bit of money…
I don’t necessarily mind the methodology of why they did it, I simply think they way they handled it was a little lackluster.
The main thing that is bothering me is not being able to play with friends. Many guildies are already level 20+ – I won’t be playing with them. I had SO much fun playing with my husband during the beta, and was very much looking forward to launch. However, he will probably start today and I won’t. (He had ordered two copies from Amazon, but they wouldn’t send two preorder codes to one email address, and we didn’t realise it for a long time. So he cancelled one and I had to reorder it. Sucks.)
I don’t want to pug groups. There is a lot of forced grouping that you have to do in SWTOR for your class storylines, etc., and I really wanted to experience that with friends. So disappointing.
My only problem with this method isn’t that others are playing before me, but that a lot of people – especially on RP servers – now have 8 characters, only one of which they will actually play. The other 7 characters will sit there for months or even years just sitting on names that other people might want. Always bugs me that roleplayers always have to deal with namesitters never actually using the names they take.
Got my access email last night. On a business trip in Austin, TX till friday. Fail. Gonna drive over to bioware and personally complain about them scheduling thier prelaunch during my out of town trip.
It’s extremely seldom that I agree with K&G on *anything* (it’s why I read them, they’re my perfect counter point) but when we do agree…
Very happy to see SW getting credit for their brilliant ramp-up strategy. Leveraging pre-orders to both gain early capital and to ramp their servers up to full volume was genius.
[…] (okay, the spell-checker liked that one) my blog-o-foes seemed impressed; Keen went so far as to say “This might be my all-time favorite method for launching a major MMO, […]
I would of pre-ordered earlier but then I took an arrow to the knee. So now I’ll be one of the last ones in, since I pre-ordered on Nov 30th.
I was a bit annoyed until I could play myself. But the way they have done it makes the server rock stable and very pleasant to play. Not had a single dc, lag or crash the two days I have played now.
And they keep adding more servers and people every day.
Its just the longest que in history, its total bullshit, and ill never buy another EA or Bioware game
“I was a bit annoyed until I could play myself.”
Shocking.
‘Its just the longest que in history, its total bullshit, and ill never buy another EA or Bioware game’
Is there some law requiring at least one person to throw out this kind hyperbole in a comment thread?
In the meantime, a guild mates are already level 20+.
The staggered launch may not be a bad idea, but splitting guilds is one of the most stupid decision I’ve witnessed in 15+ years of MMO gaming. They could have done the staggered stuff without splitting the pre-made guilds.
I got in on Day 2 and my thoughts so far:
1. EU Servers/Bugs/Stability and all that: very good, I’ve seen a few EU servers with 15m queues but overall they so far seem to have neatly balanced capacity against demand. With 7 days of early access I’d expect nothing less 🙂
Our Guild got dumped on an inappropriate server so moved before creation. We got split as the original server is still flagged as our “Guild Server” and some have not even made it into the game yet.
Thankfully I double-checked before progressing my character so was able to do a quick delete and restart.
2. The Game: it feels pretty much ready and polished and there’s some good little features like the map magnifier, mission drop-boxes and so on. The interface feels solid and familiar.
But frankly I am finding the game a bit dull. I reckon without the full voice acting is the only thing so far that really lifted it for me. I just felt none of the early-game excitement and addictive hooks that I’ve had in even terrible games like Aion. It’s a worrying sign when I went off to do other things (including other games) during the opening levels which normally have you glued to the screen with early exposition, set-pieces and crucially a generous reward schedule.
Combat feels as detached as I feared it would, the cartoon graphics of the characters don’t help, especially with big discrepancies between some animations and their damage events. If they can’t put blood in they need more solid targets with more sense of impact.
Having said all that I played until I got a Lightsaber and then specced for Dual-Wield so “more investigation” is required 🙂
I understand it’s the launch, and everyone wants to get in ASAP because it’s “The Launch”.
But you’re 100% right about why it’s better NOT to get in early launch, and this is why I didn’t even buy BF3 until a few weeks after its regular release.
“Early Release” = “Post-Gold Beta Testers”, both for the game and for the server load. Chances are if we had access to the game right now, it would not be a pleasant experience. Bioware is thankfully trying to make the “late testers” experience a solid one, and they’ll likely be paid back with more loyalty.
6 months from now, people will remember one thing: Not the people the game launched with, but the number of people they retained after the first 30 days.
Okay now I’m a little bothered. Wave 3 to Wave 4 didn’t even cover a week.
Okay they have COMPLETELY failed…
Over 2 hours in game queue time for my guild’s servers once you got accepted by their retarded system?
I’m not kidding – I can provide screenshots.
They COMPLETELY failed their purpose. It’s actually WORSE than any other MMO launch. Idiots.
This is one game that you DO NOT want to have the misfortune of getting a disconnect in. Having waited 50mins in a queue today (not a worry did some rl chores to fill in time) I got in the game, I was about to start a flashpoint with a friend…
Disconnected… Sure no worries, relog instantly… 790 in queue 1hr wait. Having played many mmo’s at launch over recent years its really poor that there is no grace period to log back in. Like Rift for eg. You get d/c, but it will remember where you were in the queue/log you right back to character screen if you had already bypassed the queue.
So if you do experience a disconnect, take a deep breath and know that its time to find something else to do for a while. (if your on a server like mine with a queue anyway)
Oh.. and I feel for all the people in a queue who just got booted due to a 2-4hr maintainance lol. Thats got to hurt.
I love this early access suggestion from Killed in a Smiling Accident:
“The Sith Lord’s Dilemma A system developed by Sir Lord Darth Vader of Cheam himself: at a random time, with no notification, a button appears on the player’s account screen to activate headstart. Each time a player checks the account page, an hour is added to a queue before they can log in to the game…”
Good times 🙂
Holy crap just did a quick count and they got some 125! servers available already. About 69US and 56EU.
Curious if Blizzard might be forced to do some more servers merges soon to avoid low population.
Be careful Verus: every MMO has a crazy explosion of players at the start, a huge number of servers open and the chat is full of “OMG this game will kill WoW” comments (which are then followed by endlessly talking about WoW instead of the actual game they are now playing).
This game is no different except that being finished, BioWare and Star Wars it might actually be true for once.
WoW won’t die but it’s going to take a big hit.
But I think announcing Kung-Fu Pandas in the Mist was the real start of the decline….
I was able to play first minute, no queue, no issues, still a few minor bugs like quest you cannot complete.
Some improvements compared to beta with some annoying stuff gone.
I have to leave you for an appointment on Balmorra
Best regards
I’m really happy with how they’ve handled it. No server crashes, just queues. Well done.
fanboys o_O That was by far the worste headstart ever!!!! Why wasnt it possible to tell people upfront the time of their access? No way to plan progress groups that way. Idle and wait for nothing. I gained access 1h after it opened but I still feel it was real bullshit. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSb8lESo6hU)
Now whats way more important is how it ended. We joined a server provided to us due to the guild-program. That server is on the toplist of max capacity servers in europe. Today we have queues of 1400 and beyond. So the “no queue” of your original post is bullshit. But wait theres more! If you crash you are put at the end of the queue again! Isn’t that FUN? So 4h!!!!!!! waittime just to crash in a freaking laggy (partly buggy) zone (TARIS!) and to wait 4 more hours.
No guild bank, buggy guild roster, buggy raid UI, no LFG chats (or even 30-40 chats etc.), the missing crash/dc savety (at least a working one) … basics every mmo has these days..
Rift as the last major mmo was WAY smoother, way more polished…
I still play SW:TOR any day instead of boring and poorly designed Rift…
But I agree, this launch was an utter joke. And I’m afraid the worse is yet to come, the 20, when the floodgates are really opened.