Nov 6, 2011

Posted by in Blue Milk & Cereal | 20 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Is The Duration Of Early Game Access What You Expected?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Just a few days ago, we finally learned some important details about the potential duration of the Early Game Access. Here’s the detail we were able to extract:

 “…Early Game Access may be up to 5 days. The length of your Early Game Access depends on the date and order in which you redeemed your Pre-Order Code…”

It’s probably safe to speculate that if you have pre-ordered TOR as soon as it was announced on July 21st or shortly after it, you stand a good chance to be in the first wave of players and enjoy the full five-day early beginning on December 15th. Personally, I think the five-day, gradual launch of TOR should help bring some much needed sanity and a smooth gameplay experience during the critical time of an MMO launch when others have faltered.

In most cases, a typical launch day for an MMO is usually associated with server instability, heavy latency, crashes and massive queues at peak times. Perhaps the only launch in recent memory that could be considered smooth would be the launch of the RIFT, by Trion games. The developers of the game being were able to adequately provide the community with server capacity to accommodate the influx of players, and respond well to any game-breaking bugs with almost instantaneous fixes.

Seeing as BioWare is implementing the Early Game Access period solely a means to a smooth launch, it should reassure the community that both BioWare and EA are striving to bring a high quality of service to the game we’re all waiting for.

So, does the length of Early Game Access meet your expectation? Are you satisfied? Let us know by answering the poll below!

Is the duration of Early Game Access what you expected?

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  1. About what I expected, hoping for longer but – as you do. =D

  2. Pretty much what I expected, now I just hope I will have all five days and not only one or two.

  3. I thought it would be at least 10 days due to the amount of pre orders.

  4. I’m glad someone is finally comparing the launch of this game to the Rift launch. If this game can have as smooth of a launch as they had its going to be golden.

    Most people don’t remember the launches for games like SWG, WOW, EQ, UO and all those other games that everyone has great memories from because every single one of them had horrid launches with insane que times and tons of patches in the first hours and days of the launch with even some complete server crashes.

  5. Onemoredale says:

    I guessed Early Access would have started somewhere between seven to three days before launch, so it was pretty much what I expected.

  6. It’s what I was expecting. I could swear I heard this announcement about the time frame about the same time they announced preorder. What I remember was the CE gets 5 days, the DD gets 3 and everyone else gets 1.

  7. I think that while this may be good for technical reasons, It is a HORRIBLE idea PR wise.. sure you will be happy if you make it into the first wave, but how about the people that DO NOT! It would be so miserable not being able to play when you know others are already in the live version of the game..

  8. It’s about what I thought. I was guessing seven days of early access.

    I just hope that they pull off a smooth launch. I was there for the launch of SWG and WoW, and both of those were dreadful.

  9. Brax Kedren says:

    A out what I expected. I figured with all the talk from Bioware about the launch needing to be the best it could be, then they would need the time to trickle players in slowly. Doing it over this many days lets them get Day 1 folks in, fix any issues they have quickly, then move to Day 2 folks and so on.

    The only place I see this being an issue will be on PVP servers where people hitting those servers after the first couple of days get ganked upon by Day 1’ers who have nothing better to do.

  10. It is about what I expected.

    I definitely hope everyone gets at least one full day of early access. Better still if it’s two. Otherwise I also expect the complaints to get quite loud.

    And here’s hoping the people responsible for the early access are aware that time zones exist, so that we in Europe don’t have to choose between sleep or starting to play.

  11. i didnt think rift was smooth my server crashed and after that i had a 24 hour Q time to get back in my server..

  12. It is what I expected. I did not expect anything more than 5-7 days for sure.

    I am curious if I will make all 5 days, I have a suspicion I will get 4 days. I preordered on day 1, but not until later in the afternoon several hours after it was availbale. I suspect so many people preordered immediately that I will be pushed into day 2. First day rush to preorder was probably HUGE and then mellowed out significantly. We’ll see.

  13. About a week was my guess and 5 days is pretty good. Any more time and you’d have 50’s looking for raid groups by the official launch date. Heck, (based on other MMOs)I’m sure five days is even enough for some people to hit 50 or get close. As a general rule, I never rush through content in a Bioware game. The stories are great and you’d miss too much if you didn’t take your time.

  14. 5 days is too long IMO, 2 or 3 days would have been plenty. A 5 day head start ensures that Bioware has tainted the race to any SWTOR world firsts for any content available at launch which is too bad, lots of hard core raiders are not going to like that. Hopefully the will not be doing early access for any of their expansions

  15. I wouldn’t call sitting though a 8-15 hour que for rift like i did a stable launch. Especally when the system didnt boot you for afking.

  16. It’s more than I expected. I pre-ordered the day it became available and the most I hoped for was about 3 days, say, weekend access for a tuesday release. Thursday access is jolly good news for me indeed.

  17. Though I am good with getting 5 days of access I am not impressed with the variable nature of potentially getting a single day. I am also not impressed with there lack of information on this whole process.

  18. I’m expecting the early access to be either a blessing for the pre-order group (myself included) or that they are used as crash-test dummies. The people who start on the 20th may actually have the smoother ride.

  19. Should have been longer. Of course I am basing this on other MMOs that were recently released that provided more then 5 days of early access. I was hoping around 15 days early access.

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