As promised, Mythic today released the list of CE servers that will be open tomorrow (with the caveat that they will add to this list as needed). Unfortunately, the list is short. Very short. How short? For North America, 5 core ruleset servers, 3 open RvR servers, 1 RP server, and 1 RP/RvR server.
With 60,000 CEs, it's not unrealistic to think that those servers can handle the load on Sunday. It is wildly unrealistic, however, to think that those servers can handle the load of all the CE buyers, plus all their SE preorder friends who log in on Tuesday, plus all their friends from the unwashed masses who log in on Thursday. Mythic has done a great job not just with building an amazing game but with handling the beta process and rollout, BUT - and this is a huge but - they will forever tarnish this game's launch if hordes of people have to reroll their CE characters to avoid massive queues on the few original servers. Unless there's a character transfer or server split option available immediately, this is going to be a huge problem.
Let's take a look at the Casualties of WAR: we have a few dozen people who are going to play like maniacs Sunday. I aim to sink at least 16 hours into my character tomorrow, and while I have to work some Monday, I'll get in at least another 5-6 hours then. I will not want to abandon that character. But more Casualties will be coming on board on Tuesday - figure that doubles the numbers on the server since other guilds will do the same, and you end up with queues. Now I have to wait to play. Maybe half an hour, maybe an hour - who knows? And all this before the game even launches. And then Armageddon comes: even *more* people come on board on Thursday, some of whom know members of Casualties or other guilds on our server and want to play there. The queues get worse, and *someone* is going to have to abandon a character they've already sunk a lot of time into or everyone is going to have to deal with hours of waiting just to play.
I sincerely hope Mythic realizes and corrects its error in the next nineteen and a half hours.
Yeah, I'm a bit concerned that they put in too few CE servers and too many SE servers, when by default people will go to wherever their early-bird friends went.
I guess we'll have to see.
Posted by: Ysharros | September 13, 2008 at 09:26 AM