From Jimmy Blake’s blog;

I have wasted most of my Sunday dealing with the idiocy of GOA, the French company licensed by Mythic to deal with the European Management of the highly awaited Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Warhammer Online.

Warhammer Online has been a long time coming, with the original project canned after two years of development and a cost of $30 million in 2004.  Based on the 25 year-old Warhammer franchise from UK company Games Workshop, Warhammer Online could have garnered the marketshare now enjoyed by Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, but alas WoW came out first and stole the thunder.

Instead developer Mythic were appointed to write the version that is finally to be released on 15 September.  Unfortunately Mythic appointed GOA to handle Europe.  The appointment was surprising as GOA seriously screwed up on several occassions with a previous Mythic franchise, Dark Age of Camelot.

Now the UK is Games Workshop home turf, with the highest per capita spend on Games Workshop’s table top games and the highest number of retail outlets.  This should have represented Games Workshop’s, Electronic Art’s, Mythic’s and GOA’s core market.  Many UK players would drop World of Warcraft to play Warhammer Online as long as the game and the experience held up.

Now here lies the problem – the experience.  I, among several thousand others, spent hard earnt money to buy the limited Collector’s Edition of Warhammer Online which guaranteed a place in the Open Beta.  Warhammer Online, incidentally, is one of the only MMORPG that I didn’t get a place in the Closed Beta, so I was even more keen to get my hands on the game as quick as possible.  GOA then gave away tens-of-thousands of guaranteed Open Beta accounts through affiliate websites, OK well I paid for it like a mug but hey, I don’t care as long as I get my place.

So I brought the Collector’s Edition and got home.  Hmmm, nowhere to pre-order or pre-down the beta client.  Months and months go by with no information on the Open Beta in Europe what-so-ever.  In the States, Mythic has been keeping everyone up to speed with what is going on.  Weirdly the launch date for the game is announced, only several weeks away and still no announcement of the Open Beta.  Wow, they must be pretty damn sure they have ironed out the bugs in the game and have scaled their server infrastructure.

Weeks then past, the game is announced FFS – where is the Open Beta?  Finally we find out it is to start on 7 September – a Sunday???  OK, a French company organising a major product launch on a Sunday.  GOA, a company that had to relocate a call centre to Ireland to get around the strict French employment laws has organised this at a weekend.  Dear bloody God, they are clueless.

As the launch date approached, there were no details on how to download the 10 gigabyte beta client – this could take weeks if users have strict bandwidth caps (it was finally announced a couple of days before the beta launch, along with a very buggy download client that forced many people to download it from the paid commercial Website Fileplanet or off of BitTorrent).

After the Dark Age of Camelot debacle, many users were seriously questioning how prepared GOA were to handle the Open Beta.  GOA made an announcement that they were more than ready to handle it and how successful they had been in the past with bigger events.  Users pleaded on forums frequented by GOA and Mythic staff to stagger the registration of the Open Beta codes or simplify the heavily Adobe Flash-orientated GOA Website prior to the go live date.

On the evening of Saturday 6 September GOA announced that the servers would be available from 8:30 CET for Open Beta registration – Oh dear God, they are pushing all of the tens-of-thousands of Open Beta customers to the same server at the same time.  Memories of the O2 iPhone 3G activation I spent a day dealing with only a couple of months earlier sprung into my mind.

By 11 CET nothing was working, you couldn’t register a new account, you couldn’t change a password, you couldn’t activate the Open Beta keys – nada.  This carried on all day, I have only just stopped trying now.  A couple of senior Mythic staff tried to put a positive spin on things on some of the forums but tens-of-thousands of potential beta testers were baying for blood.

On the GOA Warhammer Website it has stated that the authentication servers are still down effectively stopping registration of the paid-for guaranteed Open Beta accounts, as well as the freeloaders accounts handed out by GOA.  From reading the forums it is evident that only a few dozen of the thousands of beta testers managed to get in after over 16 hours of trying.

Having to take down your key servers on a Open Beta launch day is absolutely, I try not to swear on my blog but, fooking farcical.

There has been no official update since about close-of-business, surprise surprise.
Warhammer Online had a high bar to reach if it was to tempt World of Warcraft players to switch their £8 a month from Blizzard to Mythic/GOA.  This just leaves a sour taste in the mouths of the most loyal of players.

Mythic have licensed GOA to run Europe and there is not much chance of that contract being undone, but the complete arrogance and incompetence of that company beggers belief.   They knew exactly how many Open Beta keys that have given out, it is not hard in that case to do capacity planning.  It also turned out in a different posting that GOA have also seriously underestimated the number of realm servers they’ll need – I can’t understand how as most of the Open Beta players can’t even get onto the sodding game.

A lot of the Closed Beta players who are already in have been accusing frustrated players of whining or nerdrage and posting messages supporting GOA “it is difficult to do”, “they are trying their best”.  I’m sorry but NO, NO, NO.  This could have all been avoided if GOA had heeded the suggestions about staggering the registration and optimising the Website instead of using Flash.  Building a scalable authentication service is also not difficult – I have worked on authentication servers that can do tens-of-thousands of authentication requests a second for mobile carriers.

Pissing off early on the day of an Open Beta launch because ‘it is a Sunday’ and leaving two of your most critical servers up the swanny is just shameless.