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Star Wars Galaxies Technical Difficulties
Thanks to several readers for pointing to a SWGalaxies.net post summarizing the multiple technical difficulties on both registration and game servers for the PC MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, which launched within the last few hours. The registration servers were down or extremely slow through the afternoon of the 26th, and official word was "..a combination of hardware failures and some other unforeseen technical problems resulted in a severe load on the registration servers." These issues were resolved later on the 26th, and many were able to register their characters, but unfortunately all of the game servers are currently (11.30PM PST) down, as Sony "..found a serious problem with our database that is being worked on as we speak." We'd recommend watching the official site for more information as it happens..
At my university where I work at the computer help desk I got a call yesterday from a guy that lived on campus for the summer, bought SWG and couldn't connect to the servers.
SWG uses TCP/UDP 1023, which isn't blocked at all on the routes out of the university, but it also requires "bi-directional ICMP", which is blocked leaving the university so that DDoS attacks can be averted with simple ping on the whole campus.
The poor guy couldn't connect with his beand new game and seemed a little angry, but we're not unblocking ICMP just so that he can use his computer for 12 hours at a time killing wamprats.
My question is: why the hell would they need bi-directional ICMP?
The first evening went about as well as the first afternoon. It went nowhere. I picked up the game at about 10:15 am EST and proceeded home to wait for the servers to go live at 11. The sub servers were slammed and their little built in browser applet was a P.O.S. The forums were filled with posts to put the link in a regular browser so that you could go back and refresh but that didn't help other than to let you see two or three different screens rather than the same error screen over and over. Then everyone kept screaming Mozilla. Some folks had better luck with it but they were few and far between. Fast forward 9 hrs, 50 games of Counter-Strike, 2 hrs of Diablo II and 5 chapters in the new Harry Potter book and I finally was able to give them my credit card number, hooray :-(! I managed to get in two 20 minute sessions that basically consisted of me running around a huge city emoting "Where the hell do I go now?" Both of these sessions were on different servers and both were cut short due to disconnects. They say that they're going to give us yesterday free and not count it on our subscription. Should they even need to say this? I think not! The database problem that is causing the problems now might not have been forseen, but the subscription issue is just retarded. If I'm supposed to get a free month for buying the game, why can't I just use that? If I haven't forked over some loot for a subscription by the end of the 30 days, lock the damn acct! Either that or implement a presubscription page a month before the game comes out to eliminate the initial problem. Anyway, 24 hrs into the SWG experience and I have to say I'm having a lot more fun with C-S and D2.