21 Oct and In.

Yay, thank you.

Alas, Public Forums typically are a breeding-ground for those who profess in giving grief and complaints, but what is seldom perceived is that these same virtually anonymous public spots are rarely used to thank the individuals who work tirelessly and selflessly behind closed doors, in the public and out of the public's eye. A prime example is Mr. Reid, Bioware's Senior Community Manager for Star Wars the Old Republic. He has used his Twitter account to reply to 100's of questions a day, and lately has been pulling in work shifts, from his home and office, ranging as high as 19-hour work days. Having worked in Support myself and in the video game industry, 19-hour shifts helping out as many people as you can is a grueling and often thankless job. But those that excel at this work ethic take great pride and joy in helping as many people as they can. The Enterprise IT computing staff, forum moderators, toll-free help-desk staff, testing and bug fix co-ordinators, programmers, developers, executive staff, and many others are likely pulling huge shifts to deliver US - the clients - the best experience they can provide in an incredibly short time-frame. The Early Game Access launch, in my humble opinion as an IT/IS Enterprise Support individual, is a bold move and spark of genius that will set the standard for future competitive launches. Was it issue free and a perfect launch? Activating shy of (an estimated) 2-million pre-orders in 3 days is a colossal task, and exceptionally complex to orchestrate on 75 different levels. I applaud the Bioware Staff who have burnt themselves out working for us in the past several months to bring us this title, just in time for Christmas and the break. Thank you.

IMHO - Bioware added the 2 'extra' EGA days to simply HANDLE the July.21 pre-orders. It'll take them two days (of behind the scenes crazy-amount-of-work) to organize, generate, script, execute commands that activate accounts and mailto:'s their details, for 620,000-odd people for July.21 Physical and digital pre-orders. The remaining five days, will cover the remaining 5 months - WORST case. Based on numbers i've guestimated on, they could do it in half that time. Anyways. Not trying to rock the boat - just my own perspective and outlook.

Except that the poll was for Weekend + general testers, 750,000 that had access to Tester forums. Tons did not buy first day. I didn't. Every friend I know who get into testing didn't except for one. So your logic is flawed. Bioware didn't only select Day-1 Orderees for testing- they selected a whole pile of people at random. We had entire threads where certain weekend people hung out. The beta forums were busier than the live forums. When there were polls we had 1000's of people vote on then. The samplings were accurate, and very informative. It's too bad they were wiped out. Anyways. The math and data is out there. Rest can be extrapolated based on sociology and psychology and human behavior, technology trends, and mass consumerism etc. It really breaks down to 4-500K July.21 pre-orders. Beta servers handled 750,000 people on a dozen servers. We're doing 8x that server count with half the population. They could easily add 400,000 per day. Extrapolate. They should be able to deploy all EGA accounts by Dec.16 end-of-day. Which is why I'm not getting my briefs in a knot. I KNOW i'm getting in. I know i'm playing Dec.20. If I get in before-hand, awesome. If not, no big whoop. I have a year or four to enjoy the game.

Btw, before the Beta/Pre-EGA forums were wiped, someone had a Poll up asking the Beta (weekend + General) testers when they pre-ordered, and a large sampling of people voted on the Poll. About 55% of respondents answered July 21st. The remaining 45% of non-July.21's were spread over the remaining 4 months (since this was early December for the poll), at about 8-12% each month. November had more than the other months, as did August. Nov being 2x Testing weekend month, so many who did not per-order -- did. So, if you take the above info into the math or the fold, and with what I've read on S.R.'s Twitter page, and the known number of about 936,000 physical pre-orders and an estimated 400,000 digital pre-orders, i'd have to say that: - December 13: Waves 1-5 of EGA dealt with 70% of July.21 Pre-orders. ~420,000 EGA accounts. - December 14: Waves 6-10, to deal with remainiing 30% of July.21 P.E.'s. ~190,000 EGA accounts + remaining July orders (~80-100,000 EGA accounts) + first week of August (~ 50,000). - December 15: Waves 11-15, to deal with remaining 150,000 from August, 200,000 from September. - December 16: Waves 16-20, to deal with October 180,000 + November 220,000. - December 16: December orders, totalling about 58,000. Bonus wave to account for last orders. Any PE's bought between end-of-day Dec.16 and Dec.19 evening, are given 1-day PE EGA. This is based off what i've culled from Twitter account postings, VGchartz weekly and monthly totals, Deltas, and estimated digital pre-orders. So take with a grain of salt, but that's how I see it happening. I've PE'd Oct.26. I'd be happy with Dec.20. I'll take Dec.16. But I'm not freaking out. Dec.20 is a certainty - if I get time before that, then great. 11.11.11 Squadron.

I know 3 people that played weekend betas on Macs on Bootcamp - on MacBook Pros and iMac's. Win7 + OS X Lion systems, nVidia GPUs. I don't think Bioware/EA will even contemplate a Mac OS X version until likely late 2012, and if game is very successful, to justify porting it, or hiring Aspyr or Cydia port or other. Sadly, being a Mac User since 1983, I game on a PC. Either bootcamp-it on your Mac and fork out 149-349 for Windows 7 64-bit (depending on flavor, or upgrade), or for 2x that, buy an OEM PC box with PCI Express, upgrade vid card, and it ships with Win7. Issue with Macs is that unless you have a Mac Pro or iMac, the Mac mini and MacBook/MacBook Pro's on-board non-discreet video isn't powerful enough. I've tried SWTOR Beta 11.11.11, Nov.25th, and Dec.2nd on 9400M and Intel HD 3000 and it barely runs at 800x600 with more than about 12 fps - on CPUs ranging from Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz - 2.4 GHz, and tried it on latter Intel Integrated on a Core i7 2.7GHz. The GPUs are very lacking - optimized for battery efficiency and making the OS run smoothly, but not for gaming. So, even though there are 10's of millions of Mac Users, only a fraction actually have iMacs or Mac Pros with sufficient GPU processing power to handle SWTOR. WoW runs fine on any Mac from 2008+, but SWTOR isn't WoW. Demands are far more taxing.