Warhammer Online Release: What Few Difficulties

So far, Warhammer Online’s pre-order collector’s edition head start is going relatively well, but there has been a few sticking points.

Traffic Jams

First off, people are running into massive login queues.  They think more servers are coming up, but that’s not neccessarily the case, but what they don’t realize is that they’re being blocked deliberately.  The evidence can be found here: http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/108599710/p1

Basically, the server caps are at 33%, and as several thousands collector’s edition customers attempt to log in they run smack into these arbitrarily low-set caps.  Over the next few days, these caps will be slowly bumped back until finally they’re at 100% by the time head start is over.

It wasn’t the smartest move in terms of customer satisfaction.  I’m guessing the reason for this move is to promote better health of the game in the long run by spreading out the players.  I can think of a few reasons why.  For example, people who don’t have the box may have agreed to meet on a specific server and if it were full of pre-order customers they’d be SOL.

As per their plan, they haev been steadily raising the caps throughout the day, and finally things are looking a bit better now:

“Folks,

Okay, as per schedule another cap was raised and almost all queues are gone now. Only 2 have any queue over 100. We’ll raise the cap again soon and that should take care of things unless a whole lot of new people flood in later.

Mark” (Source)

What’s the matter with Order, anyway?

Other concerns expressed during my prolonged stay at the MMORPG.COM forums today – not a really well moderated forum, but an active one – appear to revolve largely around matters of the Destruction side seeming to have more population.

Why is that?

It’s not the balance.  I know this because I participated in many scenario battles between Order and Destruction and when both sides were doing a good job it was actually an extremely even fight – battles would end with only a couple point spread out of potentially hundreds.  Player skill made the difference in the case of landslide victories.

It could be the look.  The Chaos side just looks a whole lot more radical, while the Order side looks normal.  It’s mostly a problem with the character creation screen, as if you actually enter the game you’ll be pleasantly surprised to discover hardcore dwarves or edgy humans awaiting you.  The High Elves are definately nausating goodie-two shoes, but not without good reason: In the game lore, they discover that negative emotions fuel chaos, and strive to conquer those emotions so they don’t get eaten in the long run.

It could also be a matter of incorrect assumptions.  A lot of people are joining Destruction because they, “The horde from World of Warcraft.”  Then they get into the game, and eventually get deep enough to realize that Destruction’s downright evil and actually a far cry from the cutesy horde races in WoW.

Overall, if you don’t mind hour-long waits to login on the Destruction in some servers, day 1 of release sounds like it has gone well.   I haven’t played it myself, I get to play it on Monday.