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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.
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.
Probably. WoW has supposedly reasonable hardware demands. I used to routinely play SWG on a 4 year old laptop with a Geforce2go 32 Meg chip. Have fun on the road.
Fileplanet also indicated that if you sign up for the final stress test, you are guaranteed an open beta slot. Blizzard's site says that Fileplanet only has so many slots...
I just cannot bring myself to support Fileplanet. Make me wait in line for an hour or pay money for a patch to fix a game that I already bought?
Skipping the rest of the tangent, if Blizzard needs Fileplanet to assist them with distribution, how ready are they for handling an MMRPG? I know some people that play Everquest and say that the servers are just emptying out, people are ebaying accounts like mad on the cheap. Are they heading to WoW?
Then I read that Blizzard does not have WoW balanced and is lacking character development content at the close of beta.
Blizzard has a great reputation, but are they going to ruin it on this game?
EQ2 goes live: 8 November, for $49.99
WoW open beta begins: 8 November, for free
Coincidence?