WAR European Beta: The Saga, The Opinion, The Only Solution.

Posted on September 8, 2008
Filed Under Deep Thought, Games, Rants, Warhammer

I got a key for the European open beta of Warhammer Online. After wating to be invited to the closed beta since signups began I was pretty chuffed at this.

Not so chuffing has been GOA’s handling of the situation that arose over the last few days. I downloaded the client without much fuss (except for it being in 7 chunks totalling 8.5 gigabytes, why?) and went to the site to authenticate my key. This is where the problems started.

Apparently GOA’s authentication servers melted. Here’s what GOA had to say after a few hours of them being down:

Our registration and authentication servers have been taken offline for maintenance. This means that it is currently not possible to create new accounts or authenticate Open Beta keys. During this maintenance we are processing all queued account registrations and key authentications. These services will be available as soon as this work is complete.

This was at 4:30pm CET yesterday, after I’d been trying to get my key authenticated all day and after the actual game servers went online. No apology, no “Sorry, we’re having some problems.”  An apology at this point may have defused alot of the invective that was beginning to flow, though not from me but we’ll get to that momentarily.

The next update was at 2:30am CET:

We have encountered serious problems with the authentication system since this morning, while the stability of the game servers, the speed of the patcher and the performance of the downloader have all been satisfactory. This issue, combined with an exceptional amount of traffic and a fault which was not identified during the extensive tests we ran on our platform has unfortunately limited the access to our servers to only a few of you along with our closed beta testers who had already been a part of the closed beta.

During the day, we have reconfigured authentication and database servers several times, both of which suffered under the huge number of simultaneous connections. The investigations and corrections we have done so far were essentially targeting the parts of the system which didn’t require a complete stop of the writing process in the database. This means we preferred to keep the database turned on during the day to let it work on the huge number of accounts that were in the process of being handled. This operation will continue through the night and when complete, we will shut down the database and reconfigure it.

If the operation works as anticipated, we can once again give you access to the account page and let you register your code for the open beta. We expect the whole maintenance to be finished late Monday morning.

Naturally, we will keep you informed of the development of this maintenance and we expect to give you an update mid-morning.

We thank you for your understanding at this very impatient time and we sincerely apologize for the situation.

There, at the end, is a sincere apology. Almost as if it is an afterthought, so maybe not quite as sincere as it could be. Insults, threats and slurs of varying flavour were now being thrown around in the Warhammer Alliance forums. Then, this morning, the CEO of GOA (or someone writing as him) post this:

Dear all,

I rarely address players directly, but I wanted to write you as too few of you have been able to access the open beta today.

As my team explained in the previous post, although we have opened the servers and corrected numerous issues during the last 24 hours but we have not yet solved the issue of saturated Open Beta key activations that we’re currently experiencing. I am sincerely sorry for this, and I understand all the frustration the situation has spawned.

Today was a dark day. We expected a massive influx of players, but reality was even harsher.
I personally commit that we will communicate to you as clearly as possible on the resolution of these current issues. My goal is to give Warhammer Online the success it deserves. Be ensured that all GOA teams, with Mythic’s support, are working hard to bring you the best possible game experience.

Best regards,
Ghislaine Le Rhun
GOA CEO

Off screen, a discussion was held between the gentleman above and Mythic’s CEO, Mark Jacobs, which he mentions in passing here. What follows is the entirety of that mention:

We had a number of conversations with them today about everything that happened. GOA messed up and their CEO has apologized and promised to do better going forward. While this isn’t enough to mollify everyone it’s still a good start.

Its not much, but enough to give me the impression that Mythic are not happy with GOA. This is not surprising in the least, but again more on that later.

The majority of that post, linked above, was aimed at the invective being posted on the forums. Which I think Scott Jennings has done a fairly decent analysis of over at Broken Toys.  I’m inclined to agree with a couple of comments on Mark’s post, its not his job to tackle things like this, he pays people to do that, unless of course that Mythic doesn’t have a community management team and that is also being handled by GOA. In which case he was quite right to voice his take on events.

Between the message from GOA’s CEO and the latest post there were a couple of updates telling us nothing new and apologizing alot more. Then, finally we are told that we can register our beta keys and will be informed by email when they’re authorised. I’ve been waiting 5 hours for that email.

There is a history to this tale, a background which really makes you wonder why it happened at all. When Mythic first started developing WAR they were independent. They started developement and signed a deal with GOA which gave them responsibility for the European management and publication of WAR. Then EA came along and bought Mythic, turning it into EA Mythic. EA were given the responsibility for the US and Oceania management and publication of WAR. GOA were kept on to do the European side of things. The US and Oceania open betas are running fine and a great time is being had by all. The European open beta is in the situation described above.

GOA has a history of mismanaging MMO’s. The European servers for Dark Ages of Camelot gradually emptied as their mismanagement of that title lost them players to the US servers. That says alot, EU players were willing to put up with lag and queues simply so they could play the game, rather than play under the auspices of GOA. Mythic were warned of this on many occasions, with the example of DAoC being used in alot of cases. The fans, and future players of WAR voiced their concerns and were ignored it would seem.

GOA als has a history of ignoring the players of the games they manage, made evident by the calls for them to redesign the WAR-Europe website so it wasn’t so heavily reliant on Flash and also to open registration of open beta keys much earlier than the day of launch (of the beta that is, not the full game). These calls were ignored.

This from a company which describes itself thusly:

GOA is the videogames department of France Telecom’s “Content Division”, and benefits from seven years experience in the management of multiplayer online role-playing games.

A forerunner of this activity in Europe, its teams reconcile expertise with a passion for games and take advantage of France Telecom’s technical platform to offer the best of online games to European players.

You’d think they’d have learned from their seven years experience, wouldn’t you? And you have to wonder about the competence of France Telecom’s technical people if this is result of their expertise. They may offer the best of games but as has been seen in the past they often don’t deliver.

My suggestion to Mythic? Get rid of GOA and hand the whole thing over to EA. At this stage it looks like the only damage control that is going to work. Players have already lost what little faith they had in GOA and to ditch them now in not only in the best interests of Mythic and EA (guilt by association is not fair but it does matter) but it is in the best interests of the players (we who pay the bills.) and the franchise.

Warhammer deserves better. Its been part of alot of people’s lives for a long time, more so in Europe than in the US, if managed well and treated with respect this could make EA and Mythic an awful lot of money. Games Workshop (where do they stand on this debacle I wonder) have a following numbering in the millions in Europe and the reason that we put up with price hikes and almost annual reissues and revisions of the rules is because we know that they love what they do as much as we do. GOA has no such record, neither do Mythic or EA. If this is not fixed and fixed quickly Warhammer Online in Europe will die and its biggest market will be underexploited.

Sort it out Mr Jacobs, you will carry the can if you don’t

Rate this:
3.6 (2 people)

Comments

4 Responses to “WAR European Beta: The Saga, The Opinion, The Only Solution.”

  1. no imageSue Massey (Who am I?) on September 8th, 2008 7:01 pm

    Just wanted to say HI. I found your blog a few days ago on Technorati and have been reading it over the past few days.

    Rate this:
    		3.2
  2. no imageThomas (Who am I?) on September 9th, 2008 5:59 pm

    You put it very niceley together! I couldn´t agree more with you, Mythic has to ditch GOA ands fast if this game is gonna servive at all in Europe!

    Rate this:
    		2.5
  3. Pages tagged "mandrill" on September 10th, 2008 11:00 pm

    [...] bookmarks tagged mandrill WAR European Beta: The Saga, The Opinion, The Only… saved by 6 others     OkitaAoyagi bookmarked on 09/10/08 | [...]

  4. Mythic: All Is Forgiven, Open Beta Impressions | I am Keith Neilson on September 11th, 2008 6:17 pm

    [...] the farce of Sunday and Monday (for details see here) I’ve been playing WAR. From my experience I’m willing to forgive Mythic the error of [...]

Leave a Reply