Age of Conan

I'm not even going to begin taking sides or point fingers at who is right or wrong but I saw this post from funcom on the official forums giving their reason for the Early Access program not allowing more players to register.

http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?p=2128152#post2128152

"Funcom has been working very hard towards setting up gaming server capacity to launch this game comfortably for all the people who want to play Age of Conan. We are estimating that on Day One, a very high number of gamers will want to enter Hyboria.

The Open Beta finished on Sunday and we have been prepping those servers to be used as Live game servers, with the first ones to be used for the Early Access Program. Once those are set up and ready, we’re doing final adjustments to the other servers to prepare for full launch.

We measured how much capacity we thought we would need for this program and registrations have been on pace for this capacity – until two days ago. On Monday the registrations spiked and on Tuesday they increased even more. Early on Wednesday the capacity limit was reached and automatically shut off. The entire program is now mostly sold out globally, with some local variation. We had no way of anticipating the spike we saw at the end.

Our goal for Early Access was always to provide the best possible gaming experience for the ones who would get into the program. We scoped servers and download capacity for the 15gb client for a set number, based on our best projections. Those have been soundly surpassed. We are of course extremely humbled by the fact that so many players can’t wait to play the game.

We understand that there’s been some unfortunate confusion about the pre-order keys in some markets. Early Access has been a special limited offer that was exclusively available through the Age of Conan billing pages once you registered your pre-order key. Just to clarify there are no ‘Early Access keys’, and all pre-order keys do of course give the exclusive mounts and item benefits to your account as intended.

Now we have few choices. We could shut down the Closed Beta and reformat those servers to set them up for Early Access instead, but the fact is that the Closed Beta is supplying extremely valuable information that we would not want to miss. Quality is always our first goal and we would not want to compromise that but rather focus on the experience for all of you at launch.

Our best course of action is to move as quickly as we can to finalize the adjustments of the full range of launch servers, and to concentrate on being completely prepared for launch. It is only a matter of days even for those who are not in the Early Access program to set foot in Hyboria.

We are looking forward to greet you there!

Yours sincerely,

Funcom Development Team"

wahaha

Now they are thinking of taking down the closed beta servers and allowing payed ppl in instead ?

Seriously - you guys thought that the first weeks would be something diffrent than extended testing phase ?   

Not sure what to make of it tbh. At face value it makes sense. But i cant remember the last time a game kept a closed beta right up until launch day. Can anyone tell me the last game that did that?

Shouldnt they be optimizing the remaining server clusters for launch day if they are using the beta ones? If they keep beta up till launch will they have enough time to switch them over to full access servers?

Originally posted by Janus35

Not sure what to make of it tbh. At face value it makes sense. But i cant remember the last time a game kept a closed beta right up until launch day. Can anyone tell me the last game that did that?

Shouldnt they be optimizing the remaining server clusters for launch day if they are using the beta ones? If they keep beta up till launch will they have enough time to switch them over to full access servers?

My guess is the closed beta servers will become the test servers but thats just a guess.

Well, they obviously don't have enough server capacity to expand Early Access. Even if the pre-pay orders are very high for this game, I doubt more than 50% of people who will try to play on the 20th pre-ordered. Of all the pre-orders, even with Early Access popularity exceeding expectations, I also doubt that more than 50% of pre-order customers wanted in to EA.

In other words, they have a hell of a lot of server capacity to add over the weekend if the official launch day on the 20th isn't going to be a disaster of Anarchy Online proportions!

They should already have all their Retail servers in place and ready to go. This is NOT a good sign, at all.

Yeah, that would be my guess too.  I think every MMO should have a test server where you can  try the new patch coming up. 

Also to be able to up your skills and items.

Originally posted by templarga

Originally posted by Janus35

Not sure what to make of it tbh. At face value it makes sense. But i cant remember the last time a game kept a closed beta right up until launch day. Can anyone tell me the last game that did that?

Shouldnt they be optimizing the remaining server clusters for launch day if they are using the beta ones? If they keep beta up till launch will they have enough time to switch them over to full access servers?

My guess is the closed beta servers will become the test servers but thats just a guess.

and an extremely accurate guess

Thread already said this..

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/179337

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

Originally posted by templarga

Originally posted by Janus35

Not sure what to make of it tbh. At face value it makes sense. But i cant remember the last time a game kept a closed beta right up until launch day. Can anyone tell me the last game that did that?

Shouldnt they be optimizing the remaining server clusters for launch day if they are using the beta ones? If they keep beta up till launch will they have enough time to switch them over to full access servers?

My guess is the closed beta servers will become the test servers but thats just a guess.

and an extremely accurate guess

Thanks! Yeah I am thinking that they can go ahead and get the EA servers up and running (which we know they are because of the name being released). This leaves the CB servers to test further patches prior to release (and yes a lot can happen in 3 days from EA to launch). And I think its easier for them to just keep the CB servers for testers (they are already designed for testing and it makes it easier on the devs).