Yes its another railing against the unpreparedness and general ineptitude of GOA in the run up to the launch of Warhammer Online. If you don’t want to hear what I think they’ve done wrong now you can skip this one.
I was in the open beta and enjoyed it immensely, I would now like to take part in the full game when it hits on the 18th. I don’t want a pre-order, I don’t have to redownload the client as I already have it, and I don’t want any extra goodies, I just want an activation code for a new account. but the only place to get one is from EA (£34.99) or Direct2Drive (£29.95, but comes with all the pre-order crap that I don’t want and a download that I don’t need.)
I’ve also noticed that there are no high street retailers (in my town anyway) that are carrying or plan to carry the boxed edition of the game. Is this due to their reluctance to carry PC games (as in GAME who I hear are planning to drop the PC completely fairly soon or down to a GOA marketing bod deciding that having to organised the distribution of retail boxes and POS and all the other stuff that goes with a big game release was too much like hard work and wasn’t really necessary. I suspect its a bit of both but I would have hoped that GOA would have put a bit more effort into it. There are a whole load of people out there who would buy and play the game but haven’t had it all up in their face so subsequently aren’t going to bother.
What would really make my day is for there to be an opiton to buy an account on the actual WAR-Europe website rather than have to go through an intermediary, though to be frank I’d rather Mythic and EA were running the show over here and GOA had nothing to do with it.
On another unrelated topic: does anyone know of a better anti-spam plugin for wordpress than Akismet? I’ve begun notcing that some spammers are regularly fooling it and require manual spamming and legit commenters are being marked as spam. Any suggestions welcome.
Rant over, I’m going to kill some time in Spore (more about that once I’ve had a good run at it)
