GOA: Age of Registering

Stealing a bad pun from Book of Grudges, this is the third day in the ongoing saga of registering for the European WAR open beta, run by GOA. The account registering page is currently down. The reason for that is that the temporary page put up yesterday allowed people to register, but the infrastructure behind it wasn't able to support the load, and didn't send out the confirmation e-mails. So even those who were able to register still aren't in the game. As the open beta ends, and the headstart period starts, in less than a week, this is starting to get serious. We aren't even sure yet we will able to register for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning in Europe on launch day. Right now any statement from GOA how confident they are that nothing could possibly go wrong with that would just be laughed at.

This is in stark contrast to the US WAR open beta, which is running just fine by all accounts, with no problems whatsoever reported on registering. And I'm not buying the excuses how hard it is for GOA to have a simultaneous release with the US, just because WoW had a European launch 3 months after the US launch. After all, that excuse is only valid for WAR itself, not for the account page. The GOA account software is completely separate from the EA one, so they can hardly claim they had to do last-minute localization on it. Plus the foolhardy decision to only start the account registering service a few hours before the open beta started was GOA's, as documented by their various declarations of how confident they were.

On the bright side communication has improved by leaps and bounds. The official WAR Europe site is now giving frequent updates on the situation. You don't have to search various game sites and blogs any more to get the latest official news, which was a silly way to do it in the first place.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link