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World of Warcraft Stress Test Beta Signups Open
erax0r writes "FilePlanet has been given 100,000 World of Warcraft stress test beta accounts. Sign up for a FilePlanet paid account to be given a beta CD key which will be activated a later date. Blizzard has also composed a FAQ for the stress test." If you're not a FilePlanet subscriber, and with the exception of this I don't know why anyone would be, you have a chance of getting in the stress test, but forking over the cash guarantees your spot.
For anyone who was planning on forking over 15.00 use this link to save you some money! (7.90)
small flowers crack concrete
Why US only? Yes I read the FAQ; same time-zone, language barrier yadda yadda. Wouldn`t it be better if they had different time-zones, that way Blizzard could monitor the game play during working hours and not leisure time. Or maybe Americans play games when at work ;) .
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
" If you're not a FilePlanet subscriber, and with the exception of this I don't know why anyone would be"
Let's see: nice quick downloads, early betas of Tribes, Worlds of Warcraft, Warhammer, etc. Instead of waiting 2-3 days for a reliable bittorrent of a game file, I can get it in a shorter period of time.
Considering FilePlanet's average performance this is more of a stress test on FilePlanet rather than WoW.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I don't know exactly how this one will go; maybe they've upgraded their hardware since I last played in beta, but even the stress tests with the standard beta crowd made the game utterly unplayable. The server would die every few minutes. You'd get 5 minutes of play for every 10-15 minutes of downtime. Often times, you'd get disconencted in the middle of a fight, and log back in as a ghost, then spend the up-time trying to get your body back, jsut to die again.
I think a lot of people are just getting their hopes up over what's essentially going to be one, bug, on-going crash.
And in case anyone's interested, here's my 2-sentence review:
World of Warcraft absolutely perfects the EverQuest-styled game, and pulls it off with a lot of flair and refreshingly understandable design decisions. Unfortunately, I've come to expect more from a game than EverQuest-styled monotony in a no-skill-required environment, and WoW, for all its polish, comes away feeling like half the game it should be.
Blizzard used Fileplanet because they have a shitload of servers to host this giant file. The stress-testers will only be able to play for seven days.
100,000 * 1.5 gigs each is just too much over such a short time for anybody except an established file-serving company.
Why not judge them on how they got the actual closed beta copies to the the players, with BitTorrent.
And if you don't want to play WoW because of this, I feel bad for you. It's an amazing game.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Please, gawd, someone post a .torrent.
WineX is supposed to run WoW perfectly,thankfully.
My religion forbids the use of sigs.
I agree. Nobody should be having to spend money to play Betas. I remember the Diablo 2 Stress Test. THAT WAS FREE!! Blizzard's going the way of the greedy old men now. Why don't they just limit the amount of users who want to download it? And they are using BitTorrent for some of the movies they give off...Why not use it for the stress test, since we'd all get it from each other? Makes sense to me...
Flat Screen TV for F
That is why online games are so popular with publishers. Instant anti-piracy protection. As long as you make sure only known accounts can play you have instantly killed of piracy. Just check the number of people begging for half-life keys.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Maybe because it's a stress test; which by its very nature has to have a shitload of people.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
theres also a boatload of private servers for ragnorock online.
100,000 * 1.5 gigs each is just too much over such a short time for anybody except an established file-serving company.
Or BitTorrent.
In fact, since there'll only be a 2-3 day window for making the downloads, its the PERFECT use-case for bittorrent. (And obviously, both you and Blizzard are aware of the BT protocol)
A shitload of people playing it, yes. But i'm talking about downloading it, and limiting the amount of people who get to download it at one time, releasing it on BitTorrent to only so many people, then those so many people share it out, etc. etc.
Flat Screen TV for F
Not sure anyone read the FAQ, but you don't have to pay to get in on this Stress Test. The people that pay get the first crack at the signing up, but they are/have opened it up and anyone who wants to (subscriber or not) can download the stress test and play for 7 days when they open it up. As there are ~100,000 openings (I have no idea how many subscribers Fileplanet has that are interested), I imagine everyone that wants to will get a crack.
This isn't a beta test; Blizzard is just seeing what it looks like to have 100,000 people playing WoW instead of 6,000.
As for stability, the Beta servers are pretty solid right now and always seem to be ~3 days after a patch. Also, keep in mind that it has been officially stated that these patches are only lightly QA'd during beta as they just want to get the content in. When in production, all patches will be given the typical Blizzard polish.
The problem with bittorrent and 3 or 4 seeds is that when 100,000 people connect to the tracker at the same time, the speed is shitty and bad.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I dunno, it's pretty simple to slip copies out to 4 or 5 large, free sites and let them deal with it as well and handling some of the load themselves -- it'd spread rather quickly then. If your company or host can't serve that sort of volume, that notes a problem in how your company is handling things.
I won't judge them on how they distributed the closed copy because that's rather irrlevant to the asinine fact that they're asking people to PAY MONEY FOR A BETA. Think about that for a second...
Is this the next big thing? Paying money for betas and demos?
And for the record, I won't play WoW simply because the world doesn't need another MMORPG to add to the literally-thousands already out there.
-- Primis.
What's wrong with paying to get into a beta? Is it any worse than paying to test drive a pre-production Ferrari? What's wrong with paying to play a game? Do you buy a television and then get every channel for free afterward?
You're not paying for a product here so much as you're paying for a service. Besides, there's nothing wrong with paying to get into the beta - considering the amount of time you're allotted, and the popularity of online games, you may even be getting more of your money's worth out of it than if you went to a movie.
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
How are you sure that Blizzard's getting paid for this? I suspect that Fileplanet's hosting it for free, or somewhere close to that non-number in order to hype their own service and boost subscriptions. Blizzard gets to distribute the software without straining their own lines. Of course, that's just a suspicion.
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
Apparently I've got to disable my firewall so that their security server can post a picture. Why does it need it's own port? I hate gamespy
Phear the proxy muahahahaha :).
;P. As for timestamped url's for downloads, so much for technological progress like download managers, 1.4Gb file single stream without restart capability, snigger...
As for fileplanet, what an incoherent pice of dribble, the thing doesn't even work properly half the time
Please ohh please someone post a torrent!
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
"literally-thousands"
Thousands? Maybe tens or almost hundreds. But not thousands.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
By all trustworthy accounts, your 2-sentence review hits the nail on the head with a giant paladin's maul. While I appreciate that they made it the best EverQuest style experience possibly, I really wish they would have managed to transcend it with an even more fun and organic experience.
I guess now they're owned by Vivendi Universal, and the MMORPG market being expensive and risky as it is, Vivendi decided to take the safest road, stick with the known, and do Everquest +1.
What about $10.25 for 90 minutes of entertainment in a movie theatre? I think $1 a day is a pretty fair deal personally...
Realizing this is responding to a troll (or at least a troll tone), there's a reason I'd be willing to pay $7.50 for a week of a late-beta.
I'm really on the fence about buying this game. I like MMORPGs, but I'm really happy with City of Heroes right now, so I'm not sure if it's worth my time.
Only way to really know is to play.
So, if I don't like it, I save the $45 it takes to buy the game and play for the first month. Sounds like good math to me, IF you're likely to buy the game but not sure if you'll stick with it.
-- Kate
I have one of the keys for getting in the game for free but wont be using it. Anyone who wants it can have it. Email me at hckymanr@yahoo.com and I will send it to you :)
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
For those morons who are screaming "OMG BLIZZAARD IS A MONIEZ MACHINE",
Fileplant has been offering subscribers first crack at stuff FOREVER. Since they started subscribing, they had subscriber only offers. Blizzard gets not part of this, they PAY to have their stuff hosted there and panned out to the masses. If you don't like the fileplant downloads, subscribe, if you don't want to subscribe, don't bitch about it.
That's how the closed beta is being distributed.
a) You don't HAVE to pay money for the beta, it's just that fileplanet members get priority. It's still open to the public. This is because it's a stress-test beta, they want hundreds of thousands of people to make sure the servers can handle the load.
b) Honestly I love WoW, and I'm more of a single player person myself. I don't really care that the world has thousands of MMORPGs because if I don't want to play them, I don't have to. Nobody is holding a gun to my head. So go ahead and don't play WoW, it's your right, but just know that you are missing out on a fun game.
No need to pay for the subscription to get it. Just sign up for the free membership, login, then click on the link. I got the cd key emailed to me a day later with a link to download it..
If you can't spot the sucker in the first 5 minutes of playing,then you are the sucker.
A good site for information about the game and to meet other people playing it is http://wow.warcry.com/ I do some work for WarCry, though not on the WoW site, but I do think the site is good. I downloaded the beta. Kind of burned out on the "EQ style" games but I've enjoyed Blizzard games previously so willing to give it a try... for free, that is.