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When will the servers be open for pre-order players ?
Arawon
Member Posts: 1,108
Has there been a firm commitment on the date ? When will the game be ready for pre-order players to pick it up?
Comments
Pre Order players will be able to enter the game on January 7th, two weeks before the official January 22nd launch date. Characters will of course carry through if you purchase the retail game and convert your account.
Rick Saada - FLS Dev & EPFBM
From what I could find... all they said is that you can start playing 15 days prior the official launch.
What I would also like it know is if there is gonna be servers located in Europe and servers located in the U.S. and if they gonna start at about the same date or not.
Ok Rick....so you can purchase a pre order NOW. When will pre-sales purchasers be able to actually get the game prior the early online log-in ?
My guess would be a digital download.
European plans are still being finalized, but we expect them to have access to the pre boarding party and the game at the same time as the US players. French/German/Spanish clients will all be available at launch, as will designated European servers.
Rick Saada - FLS Dev & EPFBM
So...DL and play January 7th for preorders?
Rick can you by any chance tell us about how many people can a server hold at the same time?
and in what country will the servers be located?
Personaly I love ALOT of peeps in the same world, almost half of the EVEs succes was possible because all is happening in the same world.
I know PotBS wont go just for 1 world but fewer bigger servers would be nice and the lag issues shouldnt happen with todays technology and bandwith speeds.
The number of people per world is more a design issue than a technical one at this point.
You want the world to feel full enough that it's "alive" and you can find people to play with (unlike, say Auto Assault), but you don't want to to be so crowded that you can't move without bumping into someone (say, Iron Forge on a busy WoW server). You want to have enough people to fully populate the niches in the player economy, without having so many that you don't feel like you can make a difference in the game world. Enough to have PvP targets, few enough that you get a decent shot at being in the 25 vs 25 port contention final battles.
So in short it's a fuzzy question with a fuzzy answer. The reason for the stress tests is to make sure that we can be stable with as many people as possible, so we can punt the issue of "how many" over to the design team. Isildur? (ducks)
Rick Saada - FLS Dev & EPFBM
It's kind of an open question. The uncertainty comes from the way we use instances to handle things like ad-hoc battles in the open sea. The only place where we've got serious limitations on population is the open sea, so we're doing a lot of guesswork to decide how much time people will spend, on average, in the open sea.
I probably can't get much more certain than 'more than 1000, less than 5000'. We had a fairly low target, but the stress test suggested we were being too conservative, and that we could easily support far more than we'd thought.
If you want to help us figure out the precise numbers, sign up at fileplanet for the stress test this weekend. The more people who log in, the more we can push to the very limits of our possible concurrency.
Awesome when you get Devs response so fast on a non-official forum about their game.
Shows you guys care and worms my heart
Lets hope we will see lots for the stress test so you guys can get the best feedback.
There had been talk of a massive "open beta" where people would get a chance to "try before they buy" and frankly allow POTBS to get tremendous word of mouth publicity prior to launch. Such as what LOTR did.This was not done earlier because the game was judged to be .....not ready a few months ago.Having not heard much mention of this ...is it fair to assume that this will not happen ?
PotBS devs (re: Rick) are pretty badass yeah... FL devs know that today's MMORPG market isn't what it was in the mid-1990s, you have to deliver the goods.
(look at the past few years' mmo failures)
Honestly, unlike alot of these stinkers PotBS could open up trial accounts and have a shit-ton of folks still get subs. (you ever see a trial for Vanguard? no, b/c it sucks).
That being said, this topic peaked my curiosity about pre-orders... will beta accounts be wiped again before pre-order or will some folks carry over?
We will wipe the servers before the pre-boarding party begins (1/7/2008), when all the pre order players get to enter the game. All the servers are getting reconfigured for launch anyway. Any characters from the pre order play will carry over to retail (assuming you sign up).
Rick Saada - FLS Dev & EPFBM