Warhammer Online Goes Live – To Two Hour Queues
Posted by Stropp on September 15, 2008Since I wasn’t able to lay my mitts on a Collectors Edition of Warhammer Online, I’m not able to start playing WAR until Tuesday evening my time (that’s provided the servers open for Standard Edition preorders of course.) However, a lot of my guildies from Casualties of WAR were fortunate enough to order, (or had enough foresight to order early,) a CE version and are currently playing.
Well some of them are anyway.
Over the last couple of days there was a lot of guild discussion going on about which servers we were going to roll on. We needed one each for Destruction and Order since there is a rule in place that prevents you from creating a character of the opposite faction on a server that you already have a character on.
Unfortunately, the server list that Mythic provided is rather thin.
To make matters worse, Mythic have also chosen to have somewhat low population caps on the servers. Normally this would be a good thing since it reduces the load on each server and makes the game more responsive.
But with 50000 Collector Edition players wanting to start on a handful of servers, it leads to just one thing. The dreaded queues of doom. Some of my guildies are reporting being in queues of two hours.
I can’t understand what Mythic are thinking.
They know how many copies of the CE have been sold. They know that CE buyers tend to buy because they are hardcore players who want to soak up everything about a game, or are players who want in to a headstart, or both. They know that Warhammer Online has received some really good reports from the majority of bloggers which would encourage people in to the game. And they are going live on a Sunday afternoon when everyone can rush in and not have to wait to finish work.
Yet they get stingy with the servers.
It boggles the mind.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Well, my experience with the queues was that they initially register stupidly high, then fall quickly. The first queue I saw say 19 hours! Then a minute later it jumped down to 47 minutes, and a few minutes later I was in. No more than 5 minutes of waiting.
That was around 1 pm et. Since then I’ve been on and off a lot and no queues.
I was playing Order though. Maybe things are worse for Destruction.
I’ve seen that happen too, in WoW. In this case I suspect that players see a queue with a 19 hour wait time and immediately jump to another server. It’s also possible that when a server reaches that sort of level, there’s some code to raise the pop cap.
Once players get established on their servers, the queue times will get more accurate I suspect. But by then, Mythic should have enough servers to service everyone.
I don’t think that Mythic actually gets real-time information at this point as to how many copies have been sold, as compared to how many have been shipped, which they’ll know from their own sales numbers. Actual sales chart data comes as the retailers release it and it gets collated into a single number….takes more time.
I didn’t realize that they don’t get the sales data quickly. I’d have thought that would be important info to have as soon as possible. Any idea of how long it does take for Mythic to get sales figures?
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