I could type a whole lot or pretty much emphasis on what I'm about to say but, It's funny knowing what this thread would look like if the opposite was to occur. I.E votes would be opposite as well.
May the common sense be with you.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
I think the staggered launch was a good idea. I just wish they would of let everyone know ahead of time that this was the plan. It may have stoped alot of the whinning.
1. You can not stop the whining. Waste of time to try.
2. I am another old timer who experienced day one of launches, expansion, etc. over many years. It was normally pointless to attempt a login the first day. If you did get in, by some miracle, the next thing would be a server restart, or whatever. And (as an interesting contrast to the people crying about staggered launches keeping people separated) if you did get in, and were able to start to play, your friends and guildmates likely would not share your good fortune. Generally things calmed down by about day 3 or so, but that was no guarantee. Yes, launch/expansion day was a special experience.
3. Since I was an idiot and decided to wait to preorder until a couple of weeks ago....it doesn't matter to me at all, I am not going to play until the 20th in all likelihood. So I am free!! Nyah-nah-nah-nah....or something like that.
Yeah, you're right. The whinning will never stop. No one is ever happy. If they let us all in and the servers would of most likely crashed, it would be a different thread we would be posting on.
One day a server will crash. It's inevitable. What will happen then? Will they stagger us in queues?
People could, like, you know, read a book. The world doesn't end when their favorite MMO is unavailable, it ends almost perhaps, but not quite and in that liitle bit of 'not quite' they can 'Do Something Else'.
reminder... the launch isnt for another week. some people got in (not me) a few days EARLY on early access lol. and yet they still QQ (cry their eyes out )
www.insomniacsbar.com (my little bar that i own in florida)
I was also in the first batch at 7am yesterday to get access, but sadly couldn't play till after work.
And you know what?
When I got on, no queue, perfect server performance, no lag, enough players to group up when I wanted to but few enough to not have to compete for spawns.
Best and smoothest launch I have ever been a part of in 12 years of MMO gaming.
And it was 2 days earlier then I was expecting!
100% A+ in my book Bioware.
All you h8ters are just miffed you didn't pre-order and register earlier.
Christ. It's 7 days at the most. Ridiculous how this rolling early access is pissing so many people off. Like they'll never catch up...never be competitive in PVP or levelling. It all has to cap off at some point. Some are saying they can't play with their friends and will be behind. Really? If you can't wait for people you call friends and vice versa..then either you or the other party(s) involved are not really friends. Fuck one or the other. You can't tell me that anyone who was ever top players/competitors in any mmo always started right from the beginning. Get over it.
Surely if they were selling pre-orders on the basis of gaining early access it should be more than the day before official launch? I pre-ordered and was under the impression i'd get at least five days play, that's over this weekend instead of waiting for Christmas weekend, so it counts for me. Now it looks like I might get on on the 19th if i'm lucky. This isn't crying about it, it's being pissed off about being lied to and sold a pre-order under false pretences.
Surely if they were selling pre-orders on the basis of gaining early access it should be more than the day before official launch? I pre-ordered and was under the impression i'd get at least five days play, that's over this weekend instead of waiting for Christmas weekend, so it counts for me. Now it looks like I might get on on the 19th if i'm lucky. This isn't crying about it, it's being pissed off about being lied to and sold a pre-order under false pretences.
I'm truly not trying to be snarky (unlike my preceding post). Just saying that they have always stated you will get up to 5 days. Just before launch they increased this to possibly up to 7 days. At no time did they say at least x or at least y. It was always at most x or y.
(snip)I pre-ordered and was under the impression i'd get at least five days play(snip)
Do you agree now that they said "up to 5 days"? If so you have to agree that this is your problem of comprehension, not their problem of promising and not delivering.
Staggering was a good idea, but they're going about it all wrong. First of all, they should have made a clear plan of invites ahead of time, and sent out the emails early, so everyone would know when they're getting in. All this speculation is pointless, and no one knows when they'll get it. That's way more frustrating than it needs to be.
Second, the pace at which they're doing it is odd. I assumed they were just trying to avoid crowding of the login server and starter areas, but going about it as slowly as they are implies that they're goal is bigger than that. They're hoping to reduce total server load, maybe avoid queues, and that sort of thing. Problem is, in a few days, when everyone is in, they'll still be having those issues, because the first wave will still be playing too. They can't possibly stretch it out far enough that the intial waves die down before the later waves even get started.
So, after all this, it looks like they're still trying to launch with insufficient servers, like MMOs almost always do, and will have the same problems, on top of irritating a huge number of people with this staggering bit.
tl;dr: need a 3rd poll option
This ^ 110%.
I have no idea why they wouldn't at least send out an estimated date for your entry into the early access. Even sending out a message giving you what wave you would be in would suffice, that would still give them wiggle room to prolong the waves if they needed to while keeping such changes transparent to their customer base.
Reading the official forums it seems that some people are unhappy about the 24-48 hour queue that Bioware has created while attempting to avoid an actual in-game queue for players. I was well aware when I completed my preorder that I would likely not have the full 5 days early access, so I am not upset at Bioware like others on the official forums seem to be, but I can sympathize with them as some of the ways they are handling this early access period is frustrating. The most distressing thing in my mind, is that the Community Lead would rather up his followers on twitter than post on the official forums and try to triage the issues that their community has with how this is being handeled.
For starters they opened up the early access an additional 2 days early, technically no one would be playing atm(its not the 15th) if they stuck to their first schedule. Second, if they let a flood of people in, crashed servers etc all the people complainign about not getting access already would instead complain the launch sucked. I would take a staggered good launch with stable servers over a loud crash and boom. Its a lose lose but they made the right choice because no one down the road will be able to say TOR's launch was crap.
I'm truly not trying to be snarky (unlike my preceding post). Just saying that they have always stated you will get up to 5 days. Just before launch they increased this to possibly up to 7 days. At no time did they say at least x or at least y. It was always at most x or y.
If you haven't been following the game closely, "up to 5 days" is pretty misleading. That's never how preorder early access works, so I can understand if people didn't think much of it, and assumed it just meant 5 days. Then adding two days, only to deny almost everyone during those two days, can just make it even more confusing. Until you wade through all the forum craziness to figure it out. I can also understand not everyone wanting to do that.
Then to top it off, the launcher STILL doesn't give an appropriate error message. It says you don't even have a valid account. If there's anywhere you want to make sure you're communicating effectively, that would be it. Not Twitter, FFS.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
I wasn't even planning on playing SWTOR initially and so didn't follow it too closely, yet somehow I've known since what, July or August at the latest that Early Access was staggered based on Pre-Order Date (of course, I'm also somebody who reads instructions and manuals, so maybe the lesson here is "Reading Comprehension FTW!")
Since it looks like they are ready to bring up 45 new Servers (hopefully tomorrow) and the pace they are now letting people in hints at all pre-orders being in tomorrow or Friday, I think they did a great job of honoring their Early Access commitments.
Also, something I haven't seen anybody else suggest (but I haven't read absolutely every post across all these threads either :P) but have people ever considered that the 2 days they added and the staggered start could've been a reward from BW to those loyal enough to support the game with early pre-orders? I think that says a lot more about BioWare than a bunch of self-entitled whiners with poor reading comprehension.
It's not just concern over the server stability. It's not like they were crashing during the stress test. They just had long queues, and a little lag. However, flooding the newbie zones makes a bad experience for the player. During the early part of the stress test, you could walk from quest objective to quest objective, because so many people were running through at the same time, everything was already dead. I think it is good for them to spread people out a bit, for a better player experience.
I also doubt there will be a sudden flood of people on the 20th. People that are aware of the game comong out on the 20th, have most likely already preordered. I think the influx on the 20th will be small in comparison.
If they had let everyone in at once, people would have complained of 8 hour queues and constant server crashes.
Damned if you do, damned if you dont.
I agree, I question the method of how they determined "early access" and also they did have stress tests. Game is to go live in 6 days and if the preorders are a concern then we are screwed.
If you don't like a game don't play it, and quit running to MMORPG.com to trash it.
I was also in the first batch at 7am yesterday to get access, but sadly couldn't play till after work.
And you know what?
When I got on, no queue, perfect server performance, no lag, enough players to group up when I wanted to but few enough to not have to compete for spawns.
Best and smoothest launch I have ever been a part of in 12 years of MMO gaming.
And it was 2 days earlier then I was expecting!
100% A+ in my book Bioware.
All you h8ters are just miffed you didn't pre-order and register earlier.
I couldn't agree more, I'm angry at myself for not pre-ordering earlier. But I'm not whining about it, you all remind of this guy when i read your whiney posts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1it45QagN8
Something people also overlook is that everyone is the most excited the first hours and days that they log in. As time goes by the excitement is tempered and the amount of log in time slowly begins to decrease. The hardcore will play 24/7 for the first month but the rest of us will play12/7 or even 10/7 for the first week and by the end of the first week will likely be down to a 5/7 or less.
That means that the first week a given population will have say 1 million hours played. The 2nd week that same population might only have 750k hours played and so on. This means that the amount of sever load created will be the highest the first week and likely the first month and slowly begin to decline as people get into a normal playing routine...even if there are the same number of subs the number of hours played will decrease.
I dont expect that this kind of staggering will have a huge impact on that total equation - however - one of their stated goals is to maximize the populations on each server at the front end and keep the total number of servers needed to a minimum to attempt to avoid that inevitable population decline that happens in the 2nd and 3rd month. This population decline can come about simply due to people playing less and not even cancelling any accounts.
This of course all depends on how they have their sever tech set up and the ability to scale server cpu based on usage and ultimately allow more people into a single server by simply increasing the computer power to a server cluster. If they can adequately scale a server in such a way they can keep a critical mass on each server by simply expanding the computational power of each server cluster and when pop begins to decline ramp that power back down and hope your left with enough pop to support each server. This realy only works if you have a lot of instancing within a game which allready segments a pop down to reasonable levels and all you end up doing is going from 1000 instances down to several hundred instances and the individual player is not likely to see much difference on their end.
Comments
I could type a whole lot or pretty much emphasis on what I'm about to say but, It's funny knowing what this thread would look like if the opposite was to occur. I.E votes would be opposite as well.
May the common sense be with you.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
1. You can not stop the whining. Waste of time to try.
2. I am another old timer who experienced day one of launches, expansion, etc. over many years. It was normally pointless to attempt a login the first day. If you did get in, by some miracle, the next thing would be a server restart, or whatever. And (as an interesting contrast to the people crying about staggered launches keeping people separated) if you did get in, and were able to start to play, your friends and guildmates likely would not share your good fortune. Generally things calmed down by about day 3 or so, but that was no guarantee. Yes, launch/expansion day was a special experience.
3. Since I was an idiot and decided to wait to preorder until a couple of weeks ago....it doesn't matter to me at all, I am not going to play until the 20th in all likelihood. So I am free!! Nyah-nah-nah-nah....or something like that.
---------------------------
Rose-lipped maidens,
Light-foot lads...
Yeah, you're right. The whinning will never stop. No one is ever happy. If they let us all in and the servers would of most likely crashed, it would be a different thread we would be posting on.
People could, like, you know, read a book. The world doesn't end when their favorite MMO is unavailable, it ends almost perhaps, but not quite and in that liitle bit of 'not quite' they can 'Do Something Else'.
reminder... the launch isnt for another week. some people got in (not me) a few days EARLY on early access lol. and yet they still QQ (cry their eyes out )
www.insomniacsbar.com (my little bar that i own in florida)
I'm extremely happy with the server staggering.
I was also in the first batch at 7am yesterday to get access, but sadly couldn't play till after work.
And you know what?
When I got on, no queue, perfect server performance, no lag, enough players to group up when I wanted to but few enough to not have to compete for spawns.
Best and smoothest launch I have ever been a part of in 12 years of MMO gaming.
And it was 2 days earlier then I was expecting!
100% A+ in my book Bioware.
All you h8ters are just miffed you didn't pre-order and register earlier.
I think he means in the future.
The only thing I can think of is how would people have reacted if the game was made by SOE and then alowing people in like this.
Christ. It's 7 days at the most. Ridiculous how this rolling early access is pissing so many people off. Like they'll never catch up...never be competitive in PVP or levelling. It all has to cap off at some point. Some are saying they can't play with their friends and will be behind. Really? If you can't wait for people you call friends and vice versa..then either you or the other party(s) involved are not really friends. Fuck one or the other. You can't tell me that anyone who was ever top players/competitors in any mmo always started right from the beginning. Get over it.
Surely if they were selling pre-orders on the basis of gaining early access it should be more than the day before official launch? I pre-ordered and was under the impression i'd get at least five days play, that's over this weekend instead of waiting for Christmas weekend, so it counts for me. Now it looks like I might get on on the 19th if i'm lucky. This isn't crying about it, it's being pissed off about being lied to and sold a pre-order under false pretences.
I'm truly not trying to be snarky (unlike my preceding post). Just saying that they have always stated you will get up to 5 days. Just before launch they increased this to possibly up to 7 days. At no time did they say at least x or at least y. It was always at most x or y.
This ^ 110%.
I have no idea why they wouldn't at least send out an estimated date for your entry into the early access. Even sending out a message giving you what wave you would be in would suffice, that would still give them wiggle room to prolong the waves if they needed to while keeping such changes transparent to their customer base.
Reading the official forums it seems that some people are unhappy about the 24-48 hour queue that Bioware has created while attempting to avoid an actual in-game queue for players. I was well aware when I completed my preorder that I would likely not have the full 5 days early access, so I am not upset at Bioware like others on the official forums seem to be, but I can sympathize with them as some of the ways they are handling this early access period is frustrating. The most distressing thing in my mind, is that the Community Lead would rather up his followers on twitter than post on the official forums and try to triage the issues that their community has with how this is being handeled.
For starters they opened up the early access an additional 2 days early, technically no one would be playing atm(its not the 15th) if they stuck to their first schedule. Second, if they let a flood of people in, crashed servers etc all the people complainign about not getting access already would instead complain the launch sucked. I would take a staggered good launch with stable servers over a loud crash and boom. Its a lose lose but they made the right choice because no one down the road will be able to say TOR's launch was crap.
looks like their servers just blew up
http://www.swtor.com/server-status
or maybe all the offline ones are new servers? not sure
New servers.
17 EU, 20+ US.
How many people do you reckon they can host/will they invite?
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
If you haven't been following the game closely, "up to 5 days" is pretty misleading. That's never how preorder early access works, so I can understand if people didn't think much of it, and assumed it just meant 5 days. Then adding two days, only to deny almost everyone during those two days, can just make it even more confusing. Until you wade through all the forum craziness to figure it out. I can also understand not everyone wanting to do that.
Then to top it off, the launcher STILL doesn't give an appropriate error message. It says you don't even have a valid account. If there's anywhere you want to make sure you're communicating effectively, that would be it. Not Twitter, FFS.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
I wasn't even planning on playing SWTOR initially and so didn't follow it too closely, yet somehow I've known since what, July or August at the latest that Early Access was staggered based on Pre-Order Date (of course, I'm also somebody who reads instructions and manuals, so maybe the lesson here is "Reading Comprehension FTW!")
Since it looks like they are ready to bring up 45 new Servers (hopefully tomorrow) and the pace they are now letting people in hints at all pre-orders being in tomorrow or Friday, I think they did a great job of honoring their Early Access commitments.
Also, something I haven't seen anybody else suggest (but I haven't read absolutely every post across all these threads either :P) but have people ever considered that the 2 days they added and the staggered start could've been a reward from BW to those loyal enough to support the game with early pre-orders? I think that says a lot more about BioWare than a bunch of self-entitled whiners with poor reading comprehension.
It's not just concern over the server stability. It's not like they were crashing during the stress test. They just had long queues, and a little lag. However, flooding the newbie zones makes a bad experience for the player. During the early part of the stress test, you could walk from quest objective to quest objective, because so many people were running through at the same time, everything was already dead. I think it is good for them to spread people out a bit, for a better player experience.
I also doubt there will be a sudden flood of people on the 20th. People that are aware of the game comong out on the 20th, have most likely already preordered. I think the influx on the 20th will be small in comparison.
If they are your friends, they will wait on you a few days until everyone can experience the game together.
I agree, I question the method of how they determined "early access" and also they did have stress tests. Game is to go live in 6 days and if the preorders are a concern then we are screwed.
If you don't like a game don't play it, and quit running to MMORPG.com to trash it.
Yeah ok, in my line of work we call that "it briefs well".
If you don't like a game don't play it, and quit running to MMORPG.com to trash it.
I meant post-launch. Millions more people are going to be joining.
I couldn't agree more, I'm angry at myself for not pre-ordering earlier. But I'm not whining about it, you all remind of this guy when i read your whiney posts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1it45QagN8
Something people also overlook is that everyone is the most excited the first hours and days that they log in. As time goes by the excitement is tempered and the amount of log in time slowly begins to decrease. The hardcore will play 24/7 for the first month but the rest of us will play12/7 or even 10/7 for the first week and by the end of the first week will likely be down to a 5/7 or less.
That means that the first week a given population will have say 1 million hours played. The 2nd week that same population might only have 750k hours played and so on. This means that the amount of sever load created will be the highest the first week and likely the first month and slowly begin to decline as people get into a normal playing routine...even if there are the same number of subs the number of hours played will decrease.
I dont expect that this kind of staggering will have a huge impact on that total equation - however - one of their stated goals is to maximize the populations on each server at the front end and keep the total number of servers needed to a minimum to attempt to avoid that inevitable population decline that happens in the 2nd and 3rd month. This population decline can come about simply due to people playing less and not even cancelling any accounts.
This of course all depends on how they have their sever tech set up and the ability to scale server cpu based on usage and ultimately allow more people into a single server by simply increasing the computer power to a server cluster. If they can adequately scale a server in such a way they can keep a critical mass on each server by simply expanding the computational power of each server cluster and when pop begins to decline ramp that power back down and hope your left with enough pop to support each server. This realy only works if you have a lot of instancing within a game which allready segments a pop down to reasonable levels and all you end up doing is going from 1000 instances down to several hundred instances and the individual player is not likely to see much difference on their end.