Star Wars: The Old Republic early access detailed
BioWare has shared more details on how it plans to roll out early access for pre-orders of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Now that Star Wars: The Old Republic has a release date, those who have pre-ordered the game might wonder when they're getting their promised early access to the game. Now BioWare has shed a little more light on how the first-come, first-served access will work.
A forum post from community manager Stephen Reid (via Eurogamer) explains. "While we aren't ready to talk about the exact timing of when Early Game Access starts (that depends on a number of factors including Game Testing and pre-order numbers), we'll announce that before the start date," he wrote. "Our planning accounts for allowing people to download the client before the Early Game Access start date, too."
But as BioWare mentioned when announcing the early access, this will be on a first-come, first-served basis; those who redeemed the codes early will get earlier access. "The next obvious question is 'I pre-ordered on Day X, when do I get access?' While we cannot answer that for everyone, I will say (as I did in July) that those who pre-ordered early will be getting Early Game Access, well, earliest." If you haven't pre-ordered yet, you can still gain early access by plunking down your money now. "As I've said before the difference between 'early' and 'later' should be a matter of days, not weeks."
Reid says the progressive early access is to "gradually ramp up the population of our servers so that on launch day, the general play experience is as pleasant as possible." This echoes comments from BioWare co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka about limiting supply at launch to keep the servers running smoothly.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Star Wars: The Old Republic early access detailed.
BioWare has shared more details on how it plans to roll out early access for pre-orders of Star Wars: The Old Republic.-
I don't think this will work at all. Given the current (massive) problems that Origin has and the Battlefield 3 beta not being abailable to 90% of the people who paid for early access. Combine that with customer support which, at the moment, is only answering around 2% of the queries correctly - 3% are answered by nonsense as if talking to a turing machine, going by the mass of quotes out there, and the other 95% aren't answered at all.
Live chat is particularly funny - You get to wait for an hour in a queue that moves at a snails pace, only to be told that there are no advisor available once you get to position 1. The last time i dealt with support i got an answer within a few hours of sending a mail, but that was 3 years ago.
So yeah... I wonder if this 'plan' for TOR will actually work out like people think it does. Seems like the company is run by people who don't even know the difference between bits and bytes.-
Everything DICE has ever done has been absolute shit from a customer support point of view. I don't think it's fair to compare DICE and BioWare customer service even though EA is the mutual publisher.
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DICE, as far as i know, never did their own customer support. They also outsourced their server stuff to EA since at least Battlefield 2, which is how they got their reputation for bad server browsers. They only develop the actual game itself, most of the stuff around it (marketing, multiplayer infrastructure, customer support) is outsourced to EA.
My original comparison was valid under the assumption that Origin was necessary for TOR, however, ]aratex[ below me here has corrected me on that. Bioware has it's own problems imho (losing their identity to the lure of cashflow), but otherwise they've been pretty decent.
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EA/Origin is not at all involved with any of the process. (They've specifically said that you won't need to have Origin installed at any point in order to play TOR.) The download, servers, and support are all through Bioware.
So just because EA sucks at launches doesn't mean TOR's launch will fall flat.. Of course, I can't promise it won't, either, but there's some hope.-
Oh, my mistake! I thought TOR required Origin aswell. If not, well, then ignore the relevant parts of my first comment :)
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Just got a beta invite in my email!
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Of course if you're going to do that - correct the original story - http://www.shacknews.com/article/70351/bioware-explains-old-republic-staggered-release-free-to-play-popularity
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There's no need for a correction. Nothing presented in that article is incorrect.
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Thanks for the feedback, Jonathan.
The forum post from the BioWare rep confirms that everyone who pre-orders will get early access. The original story, which was misunderstood, references Dr. Ray Muzyka's own quote that talks about "limited supply" at launch -- which is to say, from December 20 on. It wouldn't make any sense to say "at launch" and mean "before launch."
For some reason, a fan thought we were claiming that pre-orders wouldn't get early access, and asked on the BioWare forum. It's a bit of a strange misunderstanding, but as Andrew pointed out, nothing in our report is incorrect.
Hopefully that clears things up.-
BioWare's long-awaited MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic finally has a solid release date of December 20, but you won't necessarily get in on that day.
You're implying that if you have a copy ordered, you will not get in on the 20th. Unless you think that people who haven't bought a copy should be trying to get in on the 20th.-
I understand where the misunderstanding comes from, Jonathan. I'm just telling you what was intended. We were referencing limited supply at launch, not pre-orders or early access. That's why we didn't use the phrase "pre-order" or "early access," and why the link leads to this quote from Ray Muzyka:
"We are taking all of the necessary steps to make sure The Old Republic has a thriving community built on a stable online foundation from day one, including limiting supply at launch to ensure that players easily transition into the servers."
In other words, if BioWare makes 50,000 digital copies available on December 20, and you order number 50,001 on December 20, you're out of luck. It was referencing that established quote to lead into the story about how that was a step to assure the launch goes smoothly. I wish the article hadn't been misunderstood, of course, but the piece itself isn't incorrect.-
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Oh, trust me. If I'd known it would lead to a 30+ page thread on BioWare's forum, I would've phrased it that way. But, that's the ins and outs of writing, I suppose. You can't always predict how something will be interpreted, and it made it past both me and the editorial stage feeling pretty clear. Just one of those unavoidable situations that you dodge as often as you can, I guess.
Thanks for reading. -
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JESUS H CHRIST LET IT GO NOW FUCK.
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The only detail I care about it when I'll be able to start playing, which they did not answer.
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Yeah, how is this a "news" story when there's no new information? =/
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