The Day BioWare Won
There was one fear that every BioWare and Star Wars: The Old Republic fan had about the upcoming MMO. We knew that the game would have story. We knew that it would have quality. From all the footage we’ve seen, we knew that the game would have everything a modern MMORPG had to have. We knew BioWare made good games and we were optimistic that they would deliver with SWTOR. What we didn’t know is whether BioWare’s inexperience in making Massively Multiplayer Online games would show when millions of users started playing the game. Will their server technology fail?
The short answer is – BioWare Won!
They handed out hundreds of thousands of beta keys. They invited everyone that applied within the last three years to test their game. My best guesstimate is that they had around one million beta testers hitting their servers at some point. Things were not 100 percent smooth, but they were 90 percent good. I tested how the whole beta went myself by going to a European server right from the start. These were hit very hard because there weren’t enough of them early on. I logged on the very minute the servers went live. It took about 10 minutes to get through the whole login procedure, but I got in and started playing. Things in game might not have been as smooth as they were when the regular game testing happened, but they were very playable. There were a lot of issues the first few hours and BioWare addressed as many as possible right away, trying to get every single player into the game. That is what beta testing is all about — discovering problems you weren’t aware of before. We had a patch of the launcher on Saturday and several more fixes in the meantime. In the end, BioWare passed the test of technology with flying colors. Now they have a good game and have the technology that will support all of its players.
Before closing this article I wanted to address one more issue. There must have been thousands, if not tens of thousands, of players that had problems during this weekend’s beta test. Based on my experience during all three days, nothing happened that was out of the ordinary. There were server disconnects and queues and login problems. All of this falls within the scope of a beta stress test. The beta was not staged so that people could fully enjoy SWTOR as a finished product. This was meant to uncover bugs that may pop up so that people may enjoy SW:TOR in December. As such, this test was a great success. Also, if they had 50,000 “unsatisfied” customers, that may seem like a huge number. In fact, that is only 5 percent out of the guesstimated 1 million testers. This is an OK number to me.
All I have to say in the end is Congratulations, BioWare. Our faith in you through all these years turned out to be justified. We are sorry we doubted you… at times ;).
10 Responses to “The Day BioWare Won”
I wholeheartedly agree, Bioware’s stress test weekend was a huge success!
I think the longest queue I had was like 35 minutes, I never got booted once I was on and honestly I don’t think I have ever once crashed to desktop since I have been in the general testing program, had no lagg to speak of.
From my perspective of 15 years of MMO gaming i think they are going to do awesome!
From what I am seeing Bioware is sitting very pretty with this launch and if they can just get a handle on other issues that are major in my opinion like the User Interface, Itemization and AH and crafting work that still needs to be done, tweaking of the mod system, etc, I think they are going to have a very smooth launch for a MMO with this level of possible player population.
It is looking very good from what I am seeing!
Yeah the game will be amazing, just waiting to see how well it looks at launch with graphics setting and antilaising lol
What I loved, it was clearly a stress test as was attested by the few spam the customer service demand. But at no point the fun was absent.
It was a pleasure to play despite being a test on a gigantic scale for the first time. The world version instances works well, you can change version as long as there is room to get to a group . There were some bugs when changing directly from the map and not the pop up when joining a group.
And the death system is well thought out enough that a death due to a big lag has little cost.
When you see how this week-end went you can only say : “And it will be better at launch!”.
yeah it was a success, I was not gonna buy the game put after playing it like all weekend i threw in my preorder today it is a really good game
Whoot!
i preordered the collectors editon back in august, my birthday to be the day exactly, after playing last weekends beta , i am now convinced that the $150 plus i am spending on the game is worth it. after spending so much time in blizzards gaming universe with wow and diablo i cant wait to see how a science fiction mmo plays for me. i wish , EA, Bioware and Lucas Arts a hell of a launch in 20 days, and i cant wait for early access to begin
I wanted to play this game since day one and the beta just made it all the more urgent of a want for me, lol. The graphics are stunning, voice acting is great, and the multiple choice dialog and the fact that it controls things down the line will make even playing alts fun, instead of the static I have done this quest 10000 times. As for the beta, i was only booted to desktop once when I queued for PVP other then that the game ran flawlessly save for a few graphics glitches.
I am very greateful to have beta tested/played the last 2 beta 11.11.11 and 25.11.11
I have a decent computer, video card and double internet bandwidth – all graphics/resolution were on max, fps above 50 and the game ran like a charm. I easily alt-tab to windows and pasted numerous pictures.
In the second beta, I could no load my previous char – not sure if that again was part of the beta but I created a new one and off I went to SWTOR land 🙂
It was more playing than testing as I only encountered minor things – at least things already reported. I would like all UI items to be moveable+sizeable – but’s it’s not critical.
I can say compared to other MMOs I played, this one sure kept me interested and going – look forward to Dec 15-20th to meet you all there :)!!!!
This was by far the smoothest BETA experience I’ve participated in. (a nice counter to my SC2 experience which fried my Mac’s graphics card.) I actually did not experience any queues at all during the 4 days I played, including logging in/out during peak times. I think we’ll be in for a good launch experience if the BETA ease is any indication.
A very good beta by all standards. This the the second Old republic beta that I’d been invited to, just seeing the improvements made in only two weeks was staggering. I pre-ordered after the first beta and sincerely hope to get early access as soon as it is available. SW: ToR is going to be very cathartic for me after the whole Galaxies debacle.