Letter from IainC on Open Beta Situation
Alrighty let's have a little post mortem on the situation.
Firstly let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. Yesterday was in no way, shape or form a success. A lot of things went very wrong. Funnily enough however they didn't go wrong in the way most people thought they would or for the reasons that were being thrown around.
The website and our entire platform got hammered yesterday - which we expected. We knew how many open beta keys we'd given away and what sort of traffic to expect as a result. We got a lot more than we were expecting and yet the platform held up, the site slowed down (which was inevitable with the sheer volume of traffic, even a basic HTML page would have been slow under that onslaught) but everything stayed up. This is pretty much the big ray of sunshine that we took away, our datacentre took the onslaught and survived unscathed.
The account system broke. This wasn't down to the traffic (although that was a factor), nor the fact that the page was in Flash. There was a problem with our database server which didn't surface during testing. As you can read in the news, we have been working on this all night and we expect this to be resolved soon. Ultimately the system didn't work but we're glad we found the issue now in beta rather than before the headstart or live begins. Many of you criticised the decision to bring the account pages online the same day as the beta began but this was not the cause of the problems. While yesterday was a very painful day for us, there is a silver lining because it means that our headstart and live launch will be significantly more robust.
There was some miscommunication as well which falls entirely on us. The confusion over people with war-europe accounts not needing to create a new beta account was the main issue, other than that the team who were in the office yesterday worked very hard to keep you updated. Magnus and the other CMs who were working yesterday were in the office from 7:30am through to 3am this morning. During that time our teams were working on several different situations at once and the situation was often in a state of considerable flux. We had technical teams working on various solutions, management teams dealing with our partners and, for the most part, these people were busy fixing things rather than writing status reports that were likely to be out of date by the time they hit the CM team. Despite that, Magnus and the others posted what they had, when they had it both on the official news site and around the various fan forums.
Overall then, some things went right - not many to be sure and the important things certainly didn't. We made some mistakes, we expected many problems and we found some entirely different ones. We disappointed many of you by not letting you get into the open beta when we said you would and for that I am sorry. All of us are disappointed that we couldn't bring you the service you expected. I wasn't at work yesterday, Magnus was the man on the scene covering the situation, but I did keep a close eye on forums and was in contact with the guys in the office. A lot of what was said yesterday here and on other forums was entirely out of line. Of course you were disappointed and criticism is certainly warranted but frankly many of the posts made about the situation were borderline sociopathic. If having delayed access to a beta test really drives you to such depths of anger and fury that you felt compelled to make the death threats, racial slurs and other deeply unpleasant posts then - and there is no polite way to put this -
there is something wrong with you.
Today we have a lot of people at the office who are preparing to put in a long week after a long weekend to make things right. This isn't magically going to make yesterday alright but we are very much committed to making sure that you aren't disappointed again.
Edited for clarity.
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Iain 'Requiel' Compton - English Community Manager
European Warhammer: Age of Reckoning team
War-Europe
