US East had about 5 groups of 3 servers each during beta, and you could have one character on each group, up to a max of 4 characters total, if I remember right. Who knows what those numbers will be like at release, but restricting to one character on a group will be interesting if they do it.
Delayed again, this time for an additional month. Kind of bummed, because I was starting to really look forward to it.
Sad panda.
Things were pretty smooth for me aside from rare ‘lag detected’
Oh wow, that is super super surprising. Good on them, though. With the previous delay pushing release back a year or so and now this, it feels like they really want to get this one right.
Darn…I just bought my first new gaming PC in years and this was the game I was hoping to spend hours and hours in with my kid before her school starts…oh well.
They are in the ‘holy cow, a ton of people are playing our game!!!’ phase, which is pretty typical for any MMO that pops its head up, the problem as always, is retaining those people. It’s great that they are delaying the game to try and get it in a better state, but I’d be curious as to what their financial projections are for say the next year.
These kinds of games always draw a ton of attention at launch that seems to very quickly dissipate within the first 3 months. It will be interesting to see if this follows that path. I personally find this game to be extremely mundane, and my gut tells me it’s going to tank hard after the first couple months, but who knows?!?
Well, it’s not a subscription game so they don’t necessary need everyone to be logging in month after month after month. I doubt I’ll be playing it nonstop, I’ll probably play for a month or two and then pop back in for content updates or expansions or whatever.
Without a monthly sub I wonder what their business model is. I guess it’s similar to Guild Wars 2’s model? But them servers cost money (yeah, they are undoubtedly running on AWS but it’s still a cost to someone) so is the cash shop the main way they’re bringing in the dough? It’s all a mystery to me.
Edit to add: I looked a bit at Guild Wars 2 and people said the cost of maintaining servers is pretty low and can be offset by microtransactions. Nobody presented any numbers but that seems to be the prevailing opinion with respect to GW2.
There’s a cash shop for cosmetics and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some convenience/service items show up there. I wouldn’t be shocked if a battlepass system rolled out at some point, although that’s just my guess any isn’t based on anything I’ve heard the developers say.
Open Beta for public Sept 9-12
Man, I’m just ready for the damn game to be out.
Another one? What is the point?
If it’s open to all I would guess they want to do some network/server load testing.
They had a boatload of concurrent players before.
That they did. I’m not sure what else it could be. Maybe they are testing some changes they made based on feedback from the last beta, but it seems to be cutting it close to be testing something like that out. If release is a month away, they’re going to need code locked down.
From their own FAQ:
Open Beta is an important test for our server infrastructure
You really can’t over-test load. And open beta implies they are confident of what they are showing, which in-turn could drive more sales.
Yep, stress test. Will be a shit show most likely. I’ve already bought the game so I’m prolly gonna pass if I can resist.
Count me as someone who will buy the game if the open beta gives a good impression, but will pass otherwise. I imagine there’s alot of people with the same intentions.