Open Beta Can of Worms
September 7, 2008
Good afternoon. I’m Syp Sypster, and you’re listening to the BBC News Hour. Why BBC? Because it gives us a chance to say “Pip pip, cheerio!” and not get treated like a cartoon breakfast cereal mascot. Today’s headlining story: the open beta, and all the ways it can kill you and everyone you care about.
I won’t have a chance to log on until later tonight, but I don’t doubt it’s a madhouse right now. Open beta servers are live as thousands upon thousands of new players cram in through the gates to get their one-week glimpse into the game.
Now we at WAAAGH! don’t normally concern ourselves with the affairs of Europe, mostly because there’s a whole heap of water between us and them, but it looks as though they got the short straw yet again with this event.
Over the past week, EU players were pelting forums and e-mails to GOA/Mythic with the same question: “When will the account center/authentication process be up?” As last week rolled by, you could sense the questions growing more and more desperate, like a condemned man crossing off the dates until his execution, licking his lips and darting his eyes to and fro. They kept getting a message from GOA that boiled down to “You have to have faith in us, they’ll be up and they’ll be working great in time”, and Mythic backed their play.
As an astute student in the school of procrastination, I knew exactly what would happen, and lo, it did. Today rolled around, the last possible second for GOA to get up the account management so that open beta players could put in their codes, and what do you know? The site got slammed by far too many users — over two million across Europe — trying to access it, and the authentication process failed somewhere around step three. That’s when GOA got real quiet and you could hear the collective rollings of thousands of eyeballs across Europe: “Of COURSE this is what would happen.”
They finally piped up and admitted to a number of other issues (such as the client not being stable), chalking them up to “well, this is beta, and that’s what happens in beta!” with a cheerful demeanor.
I’m sure things will get settled out in time, and I’m sure GOA’s working overtime to make it as smooth as possible. But the truth is that there is so very little patience on credit from the players to GOA, and they’re now officially beyond the benefit of the doubt. There is now just “doubt”, and that’s a scary thing to have a week-plus before the launch of a AAA MMO title.
Yup im in the process of the GoA “funtime” you could see it happening a mile off, why they didnt i have no idea?
wishful thinking maybe?
Ah well im working the night shift tonight so ill probably end up registering at 4am in the morning when most sane people have gone to bed ^^
My personal favourite in response to
Originally Posted by kharen
Let’s look at a worst-case scenario: the account centre doesn’t go up until just prior to OB starting. Then the sudden rush of traffic as everyone tries to register their codes at once brings it down entirely, and they don’t get it working reliably for several days (given that they managed to overrun scheduled maintenance of their website by over a day, that’s hardly a baseless worry).
Then half the OB is over and most people still haven’t even managed to enter their codes.
That is why people are getting antsy and want to be able to enter their codes ASAP.
we had GOA say
I’m looking at the traffic reports for our site at the moment. We are already handling far more visits per day than the number of OB keys in existence worldwide.
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1338033#post1338033
I think everyone, Us, GOA and Mythic knew this was going to happen but were powerless to prevent it so just had to let the crash happen, put up whatever you have for a Account centre and hope…
Shame really…. but lets see what happenes tomorrow- maybe some of us EU non CB testers will get in.
pip pip!
you know what i think is the icing on the bloodworm infested nurgle cake?
The fact that they say their login system is out for maintenance, while all they really do is let people in bit by bit instead of the promised “all at once”.
A big fat i told you so GOA.
what i don’t understand is they know how many people will be on today in the EU, the gave out the beta keys! they know the max amount of ppl who can activate keys ect…how did they screw this up so massivly?
Some of the GOA claims are ludicroius as well. Especially the ones regarding allowing players to arrive in “waves”. Absolute marketing rubbish and spin. A nice way of saying that our systems have crashed, and crashed badly, and we just can’t handle the numbers.
The UK is the base of the Warhammer IP, with a Games Workshop in every city. A large number of UK players have just spent a very, very frustrating day with no information at all from GOA and Open Beta codes that in many cases they’ve specfically gone out & sought to get by buying from specific vendors.
Open Beta is NOTHING about testing these days. It’s a computer games marketing tool. If GOA don’t realise this I’m rather worried that they have the Mythic EU Contract. Tomorrow morning, thousands of people are going to go to work/uni/school, and they’re gonna tell all their friends about how SHIT their day was today.
Marketing 101; A happy customer tells on average 3 people that he is happy with a product. An unhappy customer tells on average 7 people that he’s unhappy.
I want WAR to succeed, I love the IP, and I love what I’ve read about the game. I’m rather concerned however that GOA is seeming making such a mess of what should be a GREAT day for the game.
Unfortunately, today has turned into a frustrating write off for 350,000 Open Beta Code Holders, while 5000 Old Beta testers get to play.
Have have just read the new post as to their version of events and its nothing like what has happened. I am sat in line now with 100,000 + beta invites to maybe get into the OB – my CE codes other peoples SE codes all worthless because they wanted to make a Spectacular free mass invite to people..
I’m in the US and have nothing to do with any of this. But even I saw it coming from a mile away. My heart goes out to my mad-badger, European brethren
WHA put up a consolidated feedback thread to focus all the anger over this into some productive posting listing the problems and solutions:
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76708
It’s pretty ugly. The rating scale is universally 1’s, and while some of that can be attributed to the pain of OB today, that doesn’t excuse things in my opinion.
I was willing, for various reasons, to cut GOA some slack in the build up to today. It was cutting it fine but figured that what teething problems that emerged would be easily dealt with and things would roll on relatively smoothly.
Perhaps I was delusional but this is the worse possible start for WAR in Europe. You are totally right Syp in that there is no credit for GOA to fall back on here. They needed today to go relatively smoothly, within reason, but pretty much made sure that would be impossible. When you throw in the misinformation and completely wrong attitude in responding it’s just horrible.
Hey Syp,
Was hoping you’d give a little post to us eu readers to, ty for that.
It really is just a huge mess now in europe non of the CE buyers got into the OB, just the CB testers are playing it right now, so i guess you guys can imagine the anger from alot of ppl across europe.
The best way of making clear how annoying this whole thing with GOA is asking you guys to imagine how you’d feel if Mythic postphoned the OB till GOA had their act together.
Think it wouldn’t be pretty in the US to then.
this has been building up for months now with a rubbish website with no “decent” news for EU customers and then knowing through a forum (not the news page) what was planning to happen about leaving everything to the last minute.
Not to mention the whole misinformation in the first place which crashed the server. EU players were told to reregister a new account in order for them to input the beta codes so it was no wonder 350K+ people trying to reregister accounts all at the same time messed everything up.
Im very dissapointed as once again i am a CE buyer who bought his beta keys and have not got in.
I hope that all you NA players have been enjoying WAR ive been following ur guides SYP for while for the characters and cant wait for you to get onto the dark elves as i might not be able to play them for a while
I can’t believe that in the UK it is now nearly midnight. The registrations were supposed to go live at 9:30AM, with people being let in ’some time mid-day’, which they later changed to ‘around 5PM’. Up until now, the dreaded error 414, the account registration not even being available, and the whole site running dreadfully slow has prevented just about anyone from accessing the system for nigh-on 15 hours.
To make it worse, the volume of people who, on the back of posts like this, have gone to WHA to read the official comments has DDoS’d them off the net… leaving us with little offical recourse than the pointless postings proffered on the front page.
And to think – I could have bought the game for £25 from play.com, but no – I paid £33 from Direct2Drive to get into the open beta.
I so want them to get this right…
Well I don’t know much about server and database maintenance, but I can’t comprehend why GOA waited till later in the day to just SHUT DOWN the account service and work on their problems. I mean they do understand the fact that each of the 100k+ beta players will be hitting refresh about once every 5 seconds until something in the registration page changes, try to confirm their account, fail with a time out error or similar, then go back to refreshing the page. Instead, what we got was a message from GOA basically saying “keep trying”.
Downloading the client right now. Got a key from tentonhammer.com. I’m think I’ll probably have to cry myself to sleep if I can’t get in.
Just checked and Ten Ton Hammer still has keys. Now GOA just has to get their heads out of their bums. There’s a lot of p*ssing and moaning on their forums, too.
http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=518
[...] you a rough idea of what happened. For a more precise textual description see Syp’s entry on Waaagh [...]
I could write lots of scathing stuff but today I a no longer angry, now I am dissapointed.
Can you guys in the US imagine how it feels to see your side of things building up nicely, you get an account center to test before it becomes crucial, you get bonus weekends to play, all in all the release of Warhammer is a great ride.
The European release gets nothing beyond poor communications and buggered up open beta release.
How does Mythic think it can compete with WOW in Europe, as an earlier poster said 300,000 people went to school and work today and told all there friends and colleagues that Warhammer in Europe is screwed and going on GOA’s past performace (which it has shown is still how it does business) will not get any better.
26 hours later and the registrations are still not working, I dont know whether to laugh or cry.
[...] Europe’s gamers, it was a dark day for the rebellion. I talked about this a bit previously, but the Cliff Notes version is that: tons of people tried to register/log into the game, various [...]
GOA not only dropped the ball, but they pooped on it, and then threw it in the face of (potential) customers.
I can’t believe Mythic did business with such an incompetent company. EA should of been handling things worldwide. And that’s a sad thought when you say that you’d rather have EA handle things.
Just a huge mess.