Diary of a Beta Tester, Day 3

You might be wondering why Day 3 and not Day 1. We’ll get there. First, let’s answer another question – Beta Tester for what? Well, a game that I have been looking forward to for some time, not necessarily for a reason. The game at hand is Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.





I haven’t played World of Warcraft on Day 1 so I don’t know how it went, but people say there were some major problems back then. I’ve played Age of Conan from Day one, and it was a bit annoying, as they started the servers some hours later than initially announced. But, other than that, and ignoring major gameplay bugs, everything went pretty smooth. And, if you come to think about it, some years have passed since WoW was released, and there were other MMORPGs thrown in there, and all had launch problems. You might think people learn from this shit – they don’t…
WAR entered Open Beta this week and, since I preordered the Collector’s Edition, I had a key for this. Basically, Open Beta is there to see if the game servers can hold the tide of players eager to try the new prodigy from Mythic/EA. From the beginning it smelled to me that shit will go bad – the European version was handled by some fuckers called GOA. Never heard of them, and when I say fuckers I’m using a kind word – a better one would be uber idiots… or something like that.





To shorten the story – the fuckers have a site that you can use to create accounts and register and manage your shit. It’s made in flash, so it moves slowly and you can’t understand anything from it. The Beta was supposed to start on Sunday, and the idiots though they could handle shit, so people could register their key on Sunday morning and start playing in the afternoon. That’s some fine thinking – if you have 50-100 players, but not when we’re talking thousands. Needless to say, on Sunday you couldn’t do anything on their site – you couldn’t create accounts, if you managed to create one there was no chance you would get a confirmation and, if by some unknown twist of luck you got the confirmation, there was no chance in hell you could register you key.





So, basically, instead of testing the game servers, they where beta testing the account managing mechanism. The site flooded with apologies – but shit still didn’t work. They also had the nerve to say that “Yeah, we have a problem with the accounts, but the game servers work fine” Dude! Did the thought that only 2-3 players managed to log in so fat?? Funny how the next day, when more players managed to register their keys and enter the game, the game servers crashed. I had nothing against this, as this w3as expected, and this was the purpose of beta… if you can get there.

Well, finally, today I managed to get my account working. And the game seems pretty cool, although still shadowed by WoW. I’ll come back tomorrow with some more interesting shit on this.

-MasterX
I summon the Dogs of War.