Damn gnomish engineering... yet another failure.

8/8 here. Who knows when I'll get in though.

Hopefully this bubbles up to the devs. It's about the most decent post I've seen in the last 24 hours around here. Not a flame to be found. Who knew it could happen here?

Gee, you mean like on 12/20 after they bring the servers back up for retail? Hmm... wonder how they will handle it? Only 6 more days to figure it out...

Well of course it does... for now. You're running at a fraction of the load you would normally run at. Not really stressing the machines there, but you really won't know how the servers behave at anticipated load until they actually run at anticipated load. Not learning much by running them light. I suppose if you're using flaky hardware you just installed and wanted to do a burn-in, but that's usually done a bit before you drop it into a production enviroment. Not so fast there Buckaroo. Bugs come from code, not from systems. Now, if you're saying that the kernel code could be buggy then I suggest these servers should probably be set up on a stable release of the OS and be patched appropriately. If you're talking about game server code, then that's a whole different ballgame and that really ought to have been caught in a beta several months back. So, considering these updates to your Pros, does it still justify annoying 75% of your paying customers (whether their reasons for being annoyed are right or wrong)? I'd have to lean towards no...

Instanced starter worlds, like SWTOR has, also solves this problem (without blocking players from logging in). Enjoyed the comic though. I remember reading that one back when it came out.

You mean the same servers we're going to be allowed access to over the next x days? If the servers weren't stress-tested before last night, somebody is likely in big trouble. Anyways, by all accounts the servers were under light to medium load all night (according to reports).

Problem is, any server issues will only come to light once everybody gets in, which is likely to be a day before launch. Not a lot of time to fix stuff at that point, and a real kick to the teeth to those poor people who waited to preorder and got into early access last just to watch their server go down for maintenance. Also, we're just trading mob competition in the starter zones for guild level mismatches, lowered customer expectations, etc. Instanced starter worlds was supposed to resolve mob competition and zone load, so I don't see how the trade-off can really be justified. Besides, they mostly did a flood gate operation in beta and it seemed to work just fine. It's hard to understand why they're so cautious now, especially during Early Access when players sort of expect those kinds of issues. Personally I suspect the reason is more for 'media perception' than anything, but that's just me talking from beneath my tinfoil hat.

Of course the servers looked stable and the launch was smooth... they had less than 20% of the expected load on them. If they didn't look good we could all just pack it in right now. Ask again on the 19th and you might get a more accurate picture.

Sorry... nothing really to say thanks for right now. Thanks for letting me watch while you let a certain number of people in, while not letting me know when I might get a turn? no, not really a good 'Thank you' moment. Thanks for letting me watch the forums while people bash each other in a 3000 post thread that was supposed to be giving us status updates on 'waves'? No, definitely no thanks there. Maybe when I get in and am allowed to play the game I'll thank the devs for the great job they did on it, but I'm not about to thank the implementation team, communications team, or community team quite yet.

Here's the part I don't understand... if having everybody attempting to log in at the same time is going to cause such system instability that it could impact the entire game, how in the world do they intend on performing maintenance? One server at a time? Yeah... they could do that. Unless, of course, they wanted to do something with the authentication servers or something. And what about 12/20? We'll have the entire preorder group, along with an unknown number of retail sale players attempting to log in at the same time after they bring the servers back up. How is this any different? They won't even know what they need to do to plan for it because they haven't attempted it yet. Should we be planning on a 12/21 retail start since the servers may melt on 12/20? It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I think if it were me that I'd want to try my damnedest to break the servers during Early Access (when players aren't guaranteed access due to some crafty legalese) just so I had a good window to get them fixed in before retail when it really counts. They can let people trickle in now by the teaspoonful, pat themselves on the back and tell the media what a successful launch they're having, but it's smoke and mirrors. They haven't proven anything yet, except how well they can ignore upset customers posting in their forums. That's my take on it anyway. And for the folks who will inevitably want to post all the 'self-entitled' insults at my mere suggestion that BW may be doing this wrong; Sorry, just don't care. Thanks anyway.

Well, the stress test failed then.

And this is where Bioware truly failed. By withholding information and failing to respond, they allow their forum cronies to feast on anybody with a negative opinion. They allow these people to insult and generally harass anybody who doesn't fall into the 'this is fine' line, calling them impatient babies and entitled brats because they expressed their dislike of the process. Bravo guys, you're doing great at your self-appointed jobs of company forum ogres. As for the failure... Bioware has allowed it's community to be divided by this. They allow a civil war on the forums that, for me at least, has rapidly sucked the joy out of this launch (and yes, the servers are open to at least some of the public and it's not beta, so it's a launch). I spent the day refreshing the forums, looking for any info that might tell me when I might get in, but all I really did was wade through a bunch of snarky posts by people telling other people that they should feel privileged to even be allowed in sometime before the 20th, let alone be upset that there was no information. Again, great job of forum policing there folks. I'm sure Bioware appreciates your diligent work, and I know I appreciate you showing me what this community is really like.

So... if the server my guild was assigned to is flagged as 'Full', yet I haven't been able to log in because we're doing access in waves (and only the first few days of pre-orders are currently in the game), should I be concerned? Will I still be able to create a character on the server my guild is assigned to? And since I'm posting let me just say that, in my opinion, the wave concept is horrible. If the servers can't handle all the pre-order early access volume right now, how in the world are they going to handle things on the actual launch date? They knew how many players to expect... they had server load metrics from the betas... they assigned guilds to servers knowing the current membership counts of those guilds... how hard was it to make sure that there was enough capacity to handle the anticipated load? Didn't they already do at least some of that when they assigned guilds to servers? It's not like adding another server lessens the load on my now-full guild server, unless they have the ability to add capacity to a shard and if they have that ability then they should have added it from start. I'm just not seeing how 'waves' benefits anything. If they've done all of this to ensure a smooth launch they've only succeeded for the lucky few who've gotten in. For everybody else (at least, for those who expected to get in) it's been pretty frustrating. "Up to" 5 days. I get it. They didn't promise much of anything, but they added in early access as a pre-order incentive and the precedent set by previous MMOs was that you got in when early access started. You can refer back to the "up to" sleight-of-hand all you want to, but it's still an underhanded move in my opinion. This isn't "bonus" time; it's time I paid for by pre-ordering (or giving them my money ahead of time). It wasn't clear that I was getting a lottery ticket and not guaranteed access before 12/20. Is that my fault? Maybe I should have read that a bit better and not expected it to be the same as all of the preceding MMOs. Or maybe they should have clarified that and explained their early access plans a bit better. In any case I'll certainly be less likely to pre-order an EA or Bioware product in the future as a result though. I enjoy the pre-launch environment and the excitement that comes along with it, but this one is really wearing on me. I have a mental list (my opinions only, based on first hand experience) of smooth launches that starts with Rift and ends with Vanguard. WoW is in the middle somewhere. As stated, this is personal opinion and is based on server stability, ease-of-access (queue times), availability, etc. SWTOR is about half way down the list right now, and dropping like a rock. My opinion. If you don't like it, I really don't care.