By Crom, it's sold out!
Age of Conan fever is peaking, and it seems that the interest has caught Funcom off guard. according to the official forums, the May 17th "Early Access" program for those with special pre-order keys is now sold out. That means anyone who has a pre-order key, but hasn't actually registered it to create his account on Funcom servers is out of luck and has to wait until the real launch - May 20th for the US, May 23rd for the Europe.
Quoting the official "Statement regarding sold out Early Access Program":
We measured how much capacity we thought we would need for this program and registrations have been on pace for this capacity – until two days ago. On Monday the registrations spiked and on Tuesday they increased even more. Early on Wednesday the capacity limit was reached and automatically shut off. The entire program is now mostly sold out globally, with some local variation. We had no way of anticipating the spike we saw at the end.
Our goal for Early Access was always to provide the best possible gaming experience for the ones who would get into the program. We scoped servers and download capacity for the 15gb client for a set number, based on our best projections. Those have been soundly surpassed. We are of course extremely humbled by the fact that so many players can’t wait to play the game.
We understand that there’s been some unfortunate confusion about the pre-order keys in some markets. Early Access has been a special limited offer that was exclusively available through the Age of Conan billing pages once you registered your pre-order key. Just to clarify there are no ‘Early Access keys’, and all pre-order keys do of course give the exclusive mounts and item benefits to your account as intended.
The players, understandably, are not amused... Forums are brewing with thousands of complaints about the whole scheme. I can't help it - I have to jump in here and rant a bit about the whole thing, so from here on out, this news item turns into bit of a blog post.
Age of Trouble ahead...?
I can't help but wonder what ever happened to this old fashioned "I give you money, you give me a game, and this transaction happens on a set date of release"? Now we have all these preorder hoops to jump through with small print and all kinds of extra junk just so one can play the game on the first day of release.
There are also other tidbits about the launch that makes those of us who were there at Anarchy Online launch cringe in terror. Leaks from the closed beta indicate that Funcom is still fixing fundamental engine bugs, and the client is apparently far from being stable - all just a few days before the masses flood in. Granted, it appears that the game has improved with leaps and bounds during the late phases of beta - latest word is that it's a lot better than it was just a month or two ago, but still - isn't it bit late to be fixing the graphics engine two days before the masses trample all over the shiny new servers?
In my personal opinion, the launch already feels like a disaster. The whole concept of "early access" for a MMO launch is somewhat silly - for a whole lot of people the whole point of getting to the game on the first day is to race. Most of the people trying to participate in the launch race are, of course, misguided - they will never match the leveling speed of the top no-lifers but that doesn't mean they don't want to try - it's the buzz of the launch of a new MMO. I've personally participated in a couple of these as impulse buys, with no real intention to play the game long-term - just to enjoy the mad rush of the early days and weeks - until the real, fundamentally broken bits of the game become apparent.
The "early access" scheme also causes problems with character naming and pre-existing guilds. Many players have names for their characters they have used in numerous other MMOs for so long that the names are part of their identity. If you are not there when the server first opens to the public, you risk that someone else picks the name you have always used. Should this happen on a server that your guild picked as their own, you are pretty much stuffed. Either you lose your identity (the name), or you lose your friends and guildmates that you have played with in that previous game. Both can sour the deal before your first character has even taken the first step in the new game. Even if additional servers go up on the "real" launch day, if half of your guild has already started up on one of the "early access" servers, you have no choice but to join them. Should you get lucky and still get to name the character as you like, you still constantly lag behind with your guild mates in progress due to the head start.
How not to launch a MMO
In a way, the "early access" of Age of Conan seems like a textbook example of how not to launch a MMO. The problem with these sneak-in-early programs is that if it's in any way limited, you annoy players that, even at launch, end up being divided to haves and have nots. It's one thing to be unable to participate in the beta - those characters get wiped anyway, and all you really gain is information and practice. But to separate the crowd at launch based on arbitary cutoff number - partially based on how early you could get your "preorder key" (another silly concept) is just hilarious. It tears up guilds, and it creates bad blood among the playerbase.
Sure, the likely business reasons that led Funcom and Eidos to do what they are now doing seem sound enough - the early access cutoff was set at what they can support with their server hardware, so things don't go instantly boom on the first day. Yet if they are already sold out, three days prior to the actual "early access" launch, it's clear that they are not prepared, so to speak. Either there is going to be a shortage of retail boxes at launch and your shiny "preorder" won't actually mean you get the game for the launch, or the servers will be overloaded and it will go boom anyway. It's far too late to change anything - either you have the server capacity ready to go, or you don't.
"Would you like to reserve your Preorder?"
I wonder if the main driving force behind the scheme is the lucrative promotion deal with "preorder goodies" that seems to be "hip" these days - nothing sells a preorder box like a beta or "early start" key, dangling right there in front of a fanboy. These schemes seem to be driven by the preorder-happy brick and mortar retail empire of GameStop. They like it when they can get you to come in twice - once to preorder & reserve your copy, and once to actually pick it up (twice the opportunities for some impulse buys). With "preorder boxes", it can actually be three visits - first you reserve your preorder box, then you come and pick it up, only so you can return for the third time to pick up the actual retail box. Three opportunities for the sales guy to push impulse buys to you!
GameStop and others like them seem to like it so much that they entice developers and publishers to offer you shiny things if you do so. They of course pocket all the money you paid to reserve your copy in case forget the reservation or can't be bothered to return for a refund. They also enjoy the invaluable data on how many boxes they should order to the store for the release, and the publisher gets shiny preorder boxes to the store shelves prior to the actual launch day, to promote the game. It also ties people to purchasing the game before the release - before any reviews are out there.
Bah. Give me old-fashioned proper, simultaneous and worldwide launches without any of this early-preorder junk, and with NDA of any beta test lifted well in advance of the actual release so you don't have to fork out money "blind" - with purchase decision based on Internet rumors. I'm not too thrilled how the whole system is mutating towards maximizing the early hype, leading to even earlier "reviews" based on marketing drivel, all working in concert to get people to part with their cash before they actually know if the game is any good.
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