If you’re still anxiously awaiting your chance to get into the pre-launch Early Entry experience, you are not alone. Two of my friends who pre-ordered on the day the game was available for order got in on the first wave of the first day. A few other friends made it in later the same day and some others got in today but lots of people I talk to are still waiting. If you’re feeling like a straggler, don’t worry; your time is still coming.
For some people, this isn’t good enough. There are some very angry SWTOR fans who shelled out a great deal of cash up front to be able to get into the game as quickly as possible and some are mad they are not in yet. We were told by community staff that we would receive daily updates as each wave goes out until all pre-launch waves are done and we’re all in the game. Yesterday’s such thread turned into 748 pages of rage (or mostly rage) along with an official response from Senior Online Community Manager, Stephen Reid.
He says:
“We absolutely understand you want to get in and play the game early. It’s one of the reasons we expanded our Early Game Access from a maximum of five days to a maximum of seven days. However, there are a couple of important points to realize about today’s opening salvo of invites, and the procedure in general for Early Game Access and launch.”
Thank you for the obvious, Mr. Reid. He then jumps to the one complaint that has nearly everyone so riled up.
“First, Early Game Access and launch is not supposed to be a stress test”
He then goes on to explain this further before adding:
“For us, launch isn’t just about stuffing our servers with as many people as possible.”
And finally, he also says:
“The second thing to realize is scale. We invited more people to play Star Wars: The Old Republic today than many other MMO launches manage in their entire head-start process.”
Reid then goes on to explain to us how we should begin to see the wait time speed up starting tomorrow due to the fact that the surge of pre-orders happened right in the beginning before then slowing down:
“What this means is that tomorrow, you’ll effectively start to see the pre-order timeline expand. You’ll see people who have pre-ordered later than July getting invites. The day after that, more people will be invited. We’re actually planning to invite more tomorrow than today, and invite the same number again on Thursday – at which point we’ll be into the original ‘five days of Early Game Access’‘.
Last thing. Why aren’t we continuing to send waves over time? Two main reasons – one, because we need to see that the servers are maintaining stability over time; adding a lot of players in a short period (in other words, stress testing) can cause stability issues.
Two, our plan is to continue to add servers – but carefully, and in response to demand. We need to monitor that demand and roll out servers accordingly. A long-term recipe for MMO failure is to add a lot of servers early on, and then when population decreases, have to close those servers and merge them together.”
