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World Of Warcraft Open Beta to Start Next Week
Drac8 writes "Blizzard and Fileplanet have announced that the World of Warcraft open beta will start at the beginning of next week. Fileplanet subscribers and current Beta testers are invited to start now. Fileplanet subscribers may find it slow going, as servers are overloaded and requests for signups/keys are going very slow."
Maybe a server crashing during a load test ist not 'failure' after all?
Sometimes a load test is not asking "Does our server crash when it's slashdotted?" (as this is a rather boring question, with the answer beeing yes or no), but "What part of our server is mostly stressed by a serious slashdotting and which part(s) do we need to enhance/replace to make it more stable?".
The latter question has quite a lot of possible interesting answers ranging from hardware (the new IBM DeathStar failed!) via software (our ftp-servers have a fixed maximum of 5 connections) to wet-ware (our sysadmin was shocked by the amount of traffic, had a heart-attack and stumbled over the power cable).
When someone is serious about this question than a test that looks like a failure to someone else can be a huge success.
If you're wondering: paying $16 to fileplanet to play a beta a week before everyone else and 2 weeks before release.
I wonder if WoW will play on a 1.6ghz laptop with a mobile Radeon 7000...
In regards to the software testing, I think it has more to do with the game than the network connection. Specifically, what actions are taking too much CPU time/bandwidth/memory. Hopefully they'll get the kinks out in time for the open beta.
1. Save up a month of Vacation from work. Check
2. Full-size fridge stocked with Redbull. Check
3. Emergency store of Cheese-wiz and crakers. Check
4. Plenty of empty bottles for call of nature. Check
I am now prepared to cease being a productive member of society and devote my life to World of Warcraft.... May God have mercy on my soul.
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
I didn't pay for Starcraft, and me and my friends used BNetD to play it for years. I'm not saying Blizzard was right to kill the project, but maybe they had their reasons.
I just paid the money to FilePlanet and registered for the beta only to recieve a message that they are out of CD Keys and I will recieve one when the next group is released. Basically, don't waste your time paying because you won't get shit.
EQ2 goes live: 8 November, for $49.99
WoW open beta begins: 8 November, for free
Coincidence?
the only reason i payed this stupid $7.90 toa a company i despise is for an extra week of WoW. a dollar a day, ok, i guess i can swing that. i feel dirty, but i broke down and did it.
now, i'm unhappily waiting for my CD key. if i don't get it by early this evening, i'm going to start trying to get my money back from FP.
i could live a little longer in this prison
After joining, I had to fill out the subscription form for the beta 3 times. Now when I do it, I see my beta key and a link to download the massive 2.5 gb file. So if you haven't gotten it yet, just resubmit and you should get through.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin
You know what sucks, that whole localized server crap they are pulling off. I mean anyone in the world can sign up for this test by subscribing to file planet but once retail hits only people with a USA billing address can play, wtf is up with that.
I live in mexico so I sent an email to the billing department asking if I would be able to play or should my friends and I cancel our preorders. They replied saying they don't have that information ummm ok. I can get someone in the US to pay for me , but Blizzard sucks for making me have to go through that extra step to fucking play.
Consider yourself lucky if you can download the 2.5 GB file from Fileplanet. Earlier beta testers were forced to use a proprietary BitTorrent client which totally maxed out your connection, both up and down. My disappointment with the game itself aside, this delivery method was totally unacceptable. There are many ISP's who impose 5GB combined transfer limits per month, and after uploading at 45KB\s for 3 hours these people were lucky to get the whole game at all, never mind play.
The quality of this game and of the installer are not up to par with Blizzard's usually high standards. If you've played other MMORPG's in the past, don't go nuts trying to jump on this beta-wagon. It's very ho hum. I deleted it in less time than it took to download the beast.
If you want to get a head start downloading the 2.5GB client for the upcoming open beta, I put a copy of the Mac downloader and of the raw torrent (PC and Mac) on my server:
http://krasher.serveftp.net/
- Vincit qui patitur.
World Of Warcraft Open Beta to Start Next Week -Millions slated to lose G/Fs
I am the Lizard king
Sign up for the free Exigo beta and fill in the credit card info for $0.00, hit Next until it says "Merchant Error. Please try again."
Now back on FilePlanet, it seems to work for getting the WoW beta key signups too.
Crazy as it might seem, maybe you could stop bitching about how you can't get immediate access to the betas because you signed up too late and just keep a regular subscription going there.
I'm not saying that you HAVE to pay $7 a month to get into betas but goddamn, don't get all noobish and whine EVERY SINGLE TIME you see something on fileplanet and sign up too late. Good god, learn from your mistakes and just get an account with early email notification or stop trying to say the world is against you, but pick one please.
I didn't pay for Starcraft, and me and my friends used BNetD to play it for years. I'm not saying Blizzard was right to kill the project, but maybe they had their reasons.
Yes, and you just demonstrated them exactly. One of the reasons Blizzard's games sell so well is that when people buy them, they're not paying for the (easliy copied) software, but the unique registration key that let's them get on Blizzard's online services. With BNetD, however, people can play the games online without a key, which defeats the whole system.