We have our clients downloaded, and are ready to rock …
We’re pleased to announce the schedule for next week’s Open Beta! On Sunday, August 16th, all characters from Closed Beta will be wiped from the servers in preparation for our Open Beta. When the servers open at 10 a.m. PDT on Monday, August 17th, everyone will have a fresh start, and you’ll be ready to experience the game from start to finish!
Servers will be taken down nightly from 1:00 a.m. PDT to 3:00 a.m. PDT for scheduled maintenance. Other than that, you can play all week long until the 24th. At 10:00 a.m. PDT on Monday, August 24th, the servers will be shut down and wiped once more in preparation for the game’s release. The “Early Start Program” begins on Friday, August 28th, and allows select pre-order purchasers an opportunity to get a headstart on the rest of the world by playing the game a few days before the official release. In addition, all Early Start participants will get to take part in a world event, where special enemies will drop unique items which will only be available until September 1st.
Woot!
Okay. I gave in and pre-ordered. : ) No one’s doing flight from the get-go over here though. At least I’ll be able to access the beta and the early start weekend.
By the way, how long did you guys have to wait between ordering the game and getting emailed the code to download the client?
It was a few days, at least. I don’t know if that was delay in processing or if they didn’t start sending the codes to anyone on pre-order until that day.
I signed up for the Fileplanet membership to get the open beta. The preorder offer for the closed Star Trek Online beta with the 6-month or lifetime prepays finally got me. But I have to at least play the thing in beta before I commit to doing something like that. Might need a new video card, too…
Hope to see you in Millennium City! 🙂
Got the code. Got the client. Got quite a high level of frustration that I can’t play it until Monday! 😉
Got the irk that the Fileplanet downloader keeps bugging me to tell me it can’t unlock the thing yet. Playing CoH in the meantime, just to keep limber.
And so we wait…
The file should unlock at 10am PDT today, which translates to 5pm here, I believe. I’m working at home today, so should be able to kick off the installation and patching while finishing off work, then can hopefully start playing around with it for a couple of hours when I’m done.
As everything’s going to be wiped again at the end of this week, I’m probably going to focus on figuring out the different power sets and general gist of the game so that I can start properly during the early start weekend. I don’t really want to spend a lot of time levelling a character that’s going to be deleted in a few days.
I’m quite looking forward to it now! 🙂
My beta client is unlocking now! It’s about an hour early! 😀
If you’ve been playing CoH, make sure to invert the mouse, otherwise it’ll control opposite of what you’re used to!
Thanks Artillery. I’ll be sure to try it in about three weeks, when my client may have finished patching! 😉
Seriously though – 1.2% in two hours. That means about 200 hrs left. Do I leave it going and hope it speeds up over night or give up and try it again on Wednesday, which is the next chance I’ll have to play. Decisions, decisions…
Yikes!
We’ll be briefly swinging by the house to trigger the downloads on our machines (assuming they’ve gone to sleep in the interim), but we can’t start playing until later this evening even if the client patches before then, since we have Back to School Night tonight.
Thanks for the note on inverting the mouse, Arty.
So far: worst. beta. rollout. ever. 🙁
I’ve never been on a MMO beta rollout ever before, so I have to take your word for it. I think the main problem has been limited comms from the Devs.
OK, that was frustration, but LOTRO was much better. I don’t recall having problems with COH, but I wasn’t on beta and it’s been awhile since I played it.
Mostly, it’s the lack of good communication that’s killing this experience. They don’t say anything for a long stretch, and then when they do it’s to make excuses like “we didn’t know how many people would hit the servers” when only people with beta keys are allowed in… Well, keep track of how many you issued…might be a rough estimate. Duh.
It will all be downloaded and installed eventually, and this will all be forgotten and forgiven.