Official Updates

[Magnus_GOA]

Updates from GOA

This post is no longer updated and now stand as a testament to the Open Beta launch in Europe.

A new pre-patch update thread has been created here.

Recent changes
02:50 CET, September 14 - general update
02:10 CET, September 14 - Code validation online!
01:30 CET, September 14 - code validation postponed
23:15 CET, September 13 - Open Beta now finished. HS server list
22:00 CET, September 13 - Open Beta ends tonight
23:00 CET, September 11 - Launch servers revealed!
21:00 CET, September 11 - Summary of today
20:50 CET, September 10 - Open RvR servers! From our News
20:00 CET, September 10 - General update
18:00 CET, September 10 - General update: Upcoming news
14:40 CET, September 10 - General update
21:20 CET, September 9 - General update: Positive changes



Server Status

Open Beta Server status: Offline
Head Start servers: Inactive ETA: Sunday afternoon
Patcher: Online
Website: Online
Account registration: Online
CE Head Start key authentication: Online
SE Head Start key authentication: Offline ETA Monday 09:00 CET
E-mail server: Online

General Update
09/14 02:50 CET, September 14
The CE head start access code validation seem to be working out very well for most users, with confirmation e-mails being sent out within minutes. Some of you are getting the 1226 error code message. Clearing your cache may resolve this.

Upon receiving your confirmation e-mail, the following text is included.

Certain components could not be activated because they are incompatible with your account. We would like to advise you that those keys can be used to activate products on another account.

Don't be alarmed, your code validation is OK and your bonus item validation - have you entered one - will be processed in due time. We understand this message may be confusing and are looking into this.

* * *

02:10 CET, September 14 - Code validation online!
You are now able to enter your CE pre-order codes here. Both the Head Start access code and the Head Start bonus item codes can be entered at this moment. However, to enable a smoother code verification process we've given priority to the access codes. Bonus item codes will be validated as soon as possible. Basically, if your bonus item code isn't validated as you enter it, fear not and wait, it will be soon enough.

* * *

01:30 CET, September 14 - code validation postponed
The CE pre-order code validation process has been postponed to 02:00 CET.

* * *

23:15 CET, September 13 - Open Beta now finished. HS server list
The European Open Beta is now finished and we've closed our game servers.

The voice patches are now available. Only relevant for non-English players though.

European [En] Head Start servers scheduled to be opened at Sunday afternoon for our CE pre-order customers. We will open additional servers progresseively as the population on our servers increase.

[En] Head Start servers

Core
Axe Bite Pass
Karag Dron
Karag Orrud
Karak Eight Peaks
Karak Azgal
Karak Hirn

Core Roleplay
Burlok

Open RvR
Dragonback Mountains
Eltharion
Finuval Plain

Open RvR Roleplay
Alarielle

* * *

22:00 CET, September 13 - Open Beta ends

We've delayed the end of the Open Beta throughout the day, essentially due to the prolonged patch process and, naturally, the troubles from earlier this week. All things must come to an end however; Open Beta servers will be closed tonight. No exact time yet, but we expect them to be down before midnight, CET.


Head Start, estimated times

• CE Key validation available 1am CET, Sunday
• CE Head Start: Afternoon, Sunday
• SE Key validation available 9am CET Monday
• SE Head Start access granted when key is registered

Voice-over packs available tonight
We will soon make localised voice-over packs available. If your client is set on English, this does not effect you, as all voice recordings in-game are English by default and already included in the current buil. If you are running a German, Italian, French or Spanish client, the WAR patcher will download a 200mb file. This is only a set of core voce-overs. An extended package weighing in on roughly 700mb will be made available in the near future. *Edit* Now available

* * *

23:00 CET, September 11 - Launch servers revealed!
We are thrilled to share the list of European English Launch servers! Please note, these are the servers planned for full release. They will not all be included in Head Start. I will return with details on which servers will be opened for the Head Start as soon I can. Also, naturally, we have an additional battery of servers ready to be opened as these initial servers are filling up. As you can see, most English servers are based on Dwarfs and Elves.

English servers scheduled to be open at launch day,
September 18th

Core

• Axe Bite Pass
• Karag Dron
• Karag Orrud
• Karak Eight Peaks
• Karak Ungor
• Karak-Azgal
• Karak-Hirn
• Karak-Izor
• Karak-Norn
• Karak-Vlag
• Karaz-a-Karak

Open RvR

• Dragonback Mountains
• Eltharion
• Finuval Plain
• Mount Silverspear
• Sea of Dreams
• Shifting Isles
• Tiranoc

Role-Play

• Burlok
• Makaisson

Open RvR Role Play

• Alarielle
• Ellyrion

* * *

21:00 CET, September 11 - Summary of today
Due to the 25 000 character limit when posting here, I've removed the Newsfeed for now. This post has developed into being a general update thread only. I've not had the time to update it nearly as often as I wish, and with tomorrow a day off, this post will probably stay as-is until Saturday. That said, I'm very happy with the way things are developing right now; we're getting vital systems back online (although not free from bugs), game servers remain stable dispite strongly growing populations.


Oh, and there are some Q&A regarding the European Head Start program available here, here and here (in that order).

It's been a very exciting day. We've been so busy writing news, there's been little time to share all that has happened with the community. Here's a summary of today's events.

New and old features brought online today

• Account registration - Unstable
• Password recovery* - Unstable
• Account log-in - online
• New: FAQ - online
• New: web-based help form - online
  

*Internet Explorer recommended for now

As indicated, we're seeing reports indicating that the account registration is currently not as stable as we had hoped. The same goes with password recovery. Our technicians are working hard to resolve these problems as soon as possible.

Billing department overloaded
The Billing department have seen a large increase of tickets through the web-based help-form recently and are currently unable to resolve them at the rate they are coming in. Customer Service Representatives have been dispatched to release the burden, but as of now, long waiting times is to be expected.

*Warning* Account and password recovery unavailable September 14th, 15th and 18th
To prepare for the launch of the Head Start on Sunday, we recommend everyone who hasn't yet got access to a valid war-europe account to make sure they're prepared and have an accessable account. As a cautionary action, we will take the password recovery and account management platforms offline on September 14th, 15th and 18th. This is, naturally, far from an ideal solution, but it is much preferred than to risk repeating the crash from last Sunday.

Patch 4.1.1 being implemented Friday morning
Patch 4.1.1 due Friday morning. Mythic is implementing the 4.1.1 patch at their servers this evening, European time. We had the choice of bringing down the servers and implement the patch simultaneously for an hour (and possibly longer) during prime time, or wait until the morning when the server populations are a tenth of that during prime-time. European servers will be taken offline Friday 09.00-10.00 CET to implement the 4.1.1 patch.

Chicken rule changed
An important change with the 4.1.1 patch is a looser set of rules for the Open RvR servers. Currently, a tier two character will become instantly chickened if entering a tier one area. With the new 4.1.1 rules, one will be able to enter a tier one tier below one's current tier. That is, a tier three character can wreak havoc in tier two, but not tier one.

Game servers performing well
We are seeing continuously good performance overall, a steady population increase and basically very smooth action. A couple of server crashes has been reported, but they were quickly resolved by the Monitoring team.

• All RvR servers went down 10:15 CET this morning. Resolved 10:22 CET
  
• Karak-Vlak went down 16:07 this afternoon. Restored 16:09 CET
  

* * *

20:40 CET, September 10 - Open RvR servers! From our News
By popular demand we are pleased to bring you a new server for the Open Beta. This server will use the Open RvR ruleset and is called Karak Azgal.

We previously said there wouldn't be any Open RvR servers during Open Beta. Well, plans change, and sometimes for the better! Got a class you haven't yet tried out? Now is the perfect opportunity to re-roll and enjoy the freedom of unbridled warfare. WAR IS everywhere!

* * *

19:50 CET, September 10
With the account system back online, it is our hope that a large group of players so far unable to gain Open Beta access will now be able to do so. We have very positive signs regarding the mail servers but not yet a clear confirmation that it is back to full efficiency. Throughout the day, we've seen ever-increasing player populations across all our servers which have performed well. Naturally, it is our hope that with the reopening of account registration and a hopefully more efficient mail server, we will see an acceleration of server population similar to what we saw yesterday evening. As said before - should the need arise, our monitoring team will bring additional servers online.

* * *

17:50 CET, September 10 - Upcoming news
Not much updates today, simply because there hasn't been much new information trickling in to us. That is, everyone is working really hard to resolve the many problems we are still facing. We've got positive indications on account registrations and we are currently trying to confirm this. We'll see updates on account creation and mail server status on war-europe within the hour.

Hotmail.com users have had problems receiving confirmation e-mails from us. Sending large numbers of e-mails is a delecate process in need of careful monitoring in order to stay below the radar of e-mail providers. In attempting to reach as many of our users as possible, it now appears that we've been too bold for Hotmail's taste and been flagged as spammers. We have engaged in conversation with them regarding this and hope the issue will be resolved soon. Update: ETA Thursday morning.
Again, I'd like to underline that we at GOA are by no means oblivious to the many failures accompanying the European Open Beta launch. The problems we have faced and the disappointment we have caused is something we take very, very seriously and will not just let go of, ignore or attempt to diminish. Very tangible actions will be taken as a direct result of the past few days, mark my words.

* * *

13:30 CET, September 10
It's the fourth day of Open Beta. With days of arduous struggling behind us, things took a turn for the better yesterday. With account registration down and e-mail servers still struggling, yesterday wasn't the turn-around we had hoped for but it was a turn for the better. Game servers now have good populations, continuously low latency and apart from some issues with the Spanish servers, we've seen few crashes overall.

Right now, our main technical priority is to get the e-mail platform back to full capacity and start chunking out confirmations to everyone who's waiting. When we get this done, we'll focus on account registration and password recovery. Again, we'd like to remind anyone who's waiting for a key validation e-mail confirmation to try use the patcher.

* * *

00:30 CET, September 10 - Open Beta status
First, apologies for the misguiding statements earlier today, saying that the bulk of players had now had their confirmation e-mails sent out. Whereas many e-mail verifications had indeed been sent out last night, I had misunderstood the situation and a far larger portion of players than I thought were still waiting for their key validation e-mail.

So, where are we right now? Recap of today's changes.

• The mail server sending out confirmations, but at a much too slow rate.
• Although no confirmation e-mail has been sent, everyone who has entered a valid code should have access to the patcher. Clearly, there are, as always, exceptions.
• Contrary to our announcement earlier today, we never did get our account registration back online. Sorry about that. New ETA is Wednesday morning, although there are no guarantees for this, naturally.
• A new English server has been brought online: Karak-Vlag!
• Server population caps has been raised across the board.

With three very rough days behind us, there is an air of hope in the offices. We are still working very hard and doing crazy hours to resolve the many issues at hand. We are hoping to have all our vital systems in full operation tomorrow but there are naturally no guarantees for this.

* * *

21:00 CET, September 9 - Positive changes
With many of you waiting for the confirmation of your key validation, many are now able to start the patcher and gain access to the game servers without having received this confirmation e-mail. It's not the most fancy of solutions, but it does allow more players to join the beta servers. We are now seeing the populations on all our servers increasing at an accelerated rate. Our server monitoring teams are surveying the populations closely and will continue doing so throughout the night.

The patcher is performing very well and we are seeing very high download speeds overall. Encouraging!

After endless wait and problems since Sunday, things are really starting to shape up. Not perfect, not ideal, but we're seeing very positive changes. We're really hoping this trend will last throughout the night.

* * *

15:50 CET, September 9 - Where we are right now
During the night between Monday and Tuesday, the bulk of the backlogged key validation confirmation e-mails were processed and sent out to players. Many of the players who then received the confirmation of their key validation could still not gain access to the client patcher. This was caused by a delay between the confirmation of keys and the activation of beta access. This morning, our technicians were able to bridge this problem and players should now be able to patch and log in immediately after they receive their key validation.

With all the various problems and technical bottle-necks we have faced the last couple of days, we are now happy to announce that more than 70 000 Europeans have full access to the Open Beta servers. We have seen a strong development of server population and our game servers are continuing to perform very well overall. The few game server issues we have had has been quickly identified by our monitoring team and our internal server status notification systems has proven successful.

Although we are seeing a positive development on many of our platforms, this is much too late. Our systems have not performed satisfactory and we have much, much work to do. Let there be no mistake about one thing though: GOA are 100% committed to WAR in Europe, and we have Mythic by our side, supporting us. There has been increasing drama in the community and speculations are flying left and right. Variations of "we told you so" and "GOA has failed, Mythic should take over and provide WAR to Europe" etc has been uttered countless times over the forums. As much as we humbly accept much of the critique directed toward us for the way we have managed the Open Beta launch, let a couple of things be clear:

• GOA and Mythic are in this together, as we have for years. We've been through purgatory together and we've gotten back on the horse. The European Open Beta launch has not lived up to our, Mythics nor our customers expectations and we are sorry for this.
  
  Setting up a business and infrastructure capable of delivering WAR to hundreds of thousands of Europeans in five different languages is not a trivial task. We have had a couple of days of setbacks, but we will get back there and deliver, with the help and support of Mythic.
• This is beta. This cannot be underlined sufficiently. When Heathrow launched a new terminal earlier this year, they were supremely confident that they would be able to handle the hordes of passengers going through their system. And they had good reason to be confident; the new terminal was truly state-of-the-art in every way, they had a significant over-capacity, they had executed very successful simulations and rehearsals. Yet at launch day, everything just crumbled. Whether it is an airport or an Open Beta of an MMO, large operations have one thing in common: it is impossible to simulate and prepare for them. No amount of preparations can prepare you for the real thing. This is precisely why we have an Open Beta, as opposed to just launching the game as-is.

Words cannot explain how committed and keen GOA are to bring WAR to Europe. This is why we will let actions speak for us. Very interesting announcements will be available at war-europe today.

* * *

18:40 CET, September 8 - The new beta key validation system
Iain has compiled a few short Q&As about the key validation pages.

Q: I can't log into the site, I get the 'Authentication servers are offline message'
A: Yes, you do not need to login to the site to use this page. Simply go to here and fill in your details.

Q: Who can use that page?
A: Anyone who already has a beta centre account - this means anyone who created an account to apply for the closed beta or to recieve the newsletter even if they didn't get a closed beta invite. In addition, anyone who created an account on our site yesterday and has received a confirmation email.

Q: I don't have an account yet, when will I be able to use my key?
A: We are bringing a new account centre online, at the moment we have no ETA for this but we will keep you informed via the news.

Q: I put my details in, now what?
A: All you need to do now is to wait for an email from us. This email will either confirm that your validation is complete (in which case you can log in and play) or that there was a problem with your details (in which case you need to go back and resubmit your information).

Q: Why are you doing it this way?
A: To reduce the load on the database server we have an asynchronous system. What this means is that when you put your details in, the system will store it, another system will then check it and confirm the details to you. This means the whole system is much smoother.

* * *

15:20 CET, September 8
Several teams are now working together diligently to bring you an improved key validation procedure. Once our internal tests turn out positive we will launch this service as soon as possible. This has been the nr. 1 bottleneck in allowing players to join the Open Beta servers so we have high hopes for these changes. More updates to come!

* * *

12:10 CET, September 8
Sunday's soft launch ended up not being very soft. We experienced technical difficulties on primarily our account registration and key authentication platforms. A slim stream of players continued to wade their way through these problems, with the help of some rather unorthodox methods. This trend continued throughout the night.

As announced on our news, we took our registration and authentication platforms down for maintenance this morning. We hope to be able to bring them back online by early afternoon.

Game servers have been down for much of this morning, but after a successful and universal EU server reset, they seem to be stable. All in all, our servers performed well yesterday. This was, however, completely overshadowed by other problems. We are now back in full force and we hope to be able to resolve the most pressing issues during the day. Our number one priority is to allow our many Open Beta testers to try out the game, and by doing so provide us and Mythic with much valued data and feedback.

* * *

Blessings,
-Magnus

[Robertus]

Will the people who have paid for this get to play TODAY?

*bites lip*

[Vladdax]

Thanks MagnusK, looking forward to when the account servers come back up.

Although this sort of post is exactly what we needed 10 hours ago, would have saved a huge amount of stress!

[Sarcasm]

id say thanks but id be lying .... this is what almost 9-10 hours too late now

Mythic please sack GOA

you have wasited my day and countless 100000s of players!

Misinformation and lies

[Snap]

Sounds really good Magnus, first thing today that is good, really.

[Fisk]

Thank you for this information , the only thing i was really angry about was the bad info updates from GOA, but better late then never i suppose

[Rik Riorik]

Bra Mange!

Better late than never. Good job on cramming in the most interesting issues in this one thread.

[Clankz]

1000 per server with 1500 in queue?

Is it only me that sees this as a completely retarded amount of people?

[Gasteropod]

So I can log in with the account I made a year ago ? (when the authentication servers are up of course)

This is not a rant just a funny thing :

My dream came true. I saw that only like 10 % of the beta key owners are getting in the servers today and it came true. Funny

[Paaaulo]

bet they dont come online till about 12-1am when kids and people who need to work are in bed, as to ease stress on the servers

[Commsiar]

HEy Magnus, thanks for the update.

One question. Would it be your guess that that the key authentication servers will be up again today (as in this side of midnight)? And on a related note is there a cut off time when all your engineers go home to bed tonight?

[Dorkhan]

Any info are the rest of us able to play in the OB today and shall we get any compensation becouse of the late start of OB?

Again, good to know that you are doing something instead of that you would have gone home and called it a day.

[Euphie]

would be nice to be able to play today jesus y didnt u do this a few days ago....

[dayloon]

Magnus, looking at how today has gone do you admit that you probably should have opened up the account pages days earlier, like we all said you should do ? Today has been a bit of a disaster hasn't it to be honest.

[Tinhat]

So what about those who have bought the CE? It now seems like a complete waste of money.