Most of my thoughts are based on the weekend before last’s beta.  I was invited to last week’s beta, but only got to play a few hours.  It was my girlfriend’s birthday on the Friday. I only got the email on that day, and it is a lot harder to convince her that her birthday isn’t in December, but March and we have already celebrated it; when you are supposed to be at the supermarket buying the ingredients for a cake.

Our small group had decided come live to play republic, lured no doubt by all the sex drugs and rock and roll that the Jedi are well known to get up to, and so I decided in the preceding week that I would play the empire in the beta, so as to not ruin the story lines.  This also had the advantage that I could get out all the dark side in me before playing a consular.  I still however wanted to try out the consular style of play to see if it would be the best class for me.  As such Sith Inquisitor seemed the obvious choice.

I’m not going to talk much about the queues and bugs.  Were there some? Yes, obviously, it was a beta stress test after all.  I had a really unfortunate time on the Saturday night with my internet provider disconnecting, and then proceeding to disconnect again every time I would get near the front of the queue.   Frustrating as hell, true, but I can’t blame bioware for that no-one seems to want to supply stable internet to where I live (it’s as if they’ve seen what I do with it!).  I missed out mainly on the huge queues on the first day, due mainly to my better half logging me on when I was still rapidly trying to convince my boss that I was urgently needed at home for something that I couldn’t give any more details on.  This foresight from her is another reason that staring at the second invite on my phone, whilst in front of the baking stand in the shop I decided against running home, putting my computer in a bag and emigrating, leaving a note saying ‘I don’t exist, honest.  See you on Monday’.  My main impression was the servers held up well and for its stage in the testing cycle, the game seemed quite bug free.

So not long after getting home, I was in on the starting quests.  A friend of mine, not sure whether to play an consular or knight, was also playing a inquisitor so we went through the early levels together.  My other half had decided to become a bounty hunter and so we were planning to meet up with her after the starting worlds.

Immediately I got into the story so much so that  I’m actually now quite tempted to roll an inquisitor alt to see how it continues.  The fact that all the quests had voice over, and you had options in them allowed for a much more engaging questing experience compared to other MMOs I’ve played, but even so I found myself, often, wanting to rush through them to get back to the main story line.   As I said I wanted to get all the evil out, so I was taking the evil options at every possible opportunity.

This is a good chance for me to give my opinions on the light side/dark side idea.  There has been a lot of debate on the forums that were (The forums are dead, long live the forums!) about whether this is a good idea, and if so, what should be affected by your alignment.  Personally I think that this adds a very fun element to the game, especially group play.  To explain briefly for the uninitiated, you have choices, some of which give light side or dark side points.  If you have enough this can affect things like what colour crystals you use.  In a group, you all make the choice and whilst you get the relevant dark side/light side points for the call you made, a roll determines what actually happens.  Whilst this makes you feel like you are affecting the story line, in a group it also provides a lot of amusement and sometimes exasperation when the roll doesn’t go your way.  My other half seemed incapable of being evil.  As a bounty hunter she would consistently refuse to kill people.  I’m pretty sure that she must be the worst bounty hunter around for that reason, she however claims that it was because she wasn’t getting paid (or when she was, that she wasn’t getting paid enough!).  More than once when grouped with her we were going down a conversation line and all I can think is ‘If I had had my way we wouldn’t be having this conversation, mr NPC, as you would be dead by now!’.  As a bounty hunter it’s almost acceptable, but she then wanted to try out another character and was the nicest Sith inquisitor that had ever spawned.  How does that work?

I did get some chance to heal at early levels.  It’s difficult to say how it gets when you have more tools, I was severely limited in the healing abilities I had.  I found that generally the healing seemed fine to easy, but that force power could be limiting, especially if I had spent my time trying to use force lightning on a random add or two.  There are some things that I agree could be added to really help a healer.  Mouse over macro’s, a more customisable UI and a target of target frame being the top three contenders.  That said lacking all three wasn’t too debilitating, and I managed to survive my addonaholic withdrawal symptoms long enough to complete the flash points.

Over all the weekend left me with great excitement for release, and a large feeling of ‘What do I do in the meantime’; so I reinstalled KOTOR2, and found a droid to beat at Pazaak.

With early access beginning tomorrow (or today based on your timezone) the question on everyone’s mind is ‘When will I get to play’.  Given that we will only get emailed on the day we get in, I though I would provide some mathematical analysis and definitively decide when you are going to get to play.

Disclaimer: I am not speaking for either Bioware or Lucas Arts.  My results have not been peer checked and are not guaranteed to be accurate.  I can neither confirm nor deny rumours of my associates buying drinks for/chloroforming employees of above mentioned companies in attempts to get this information.  No Wookies were harmed in the production of this blog post.

Ok, that over with, let’s’ down to business.

So here is what we know:

•  Bioware are starting early access from the 13th December, this was originally the 15th
• Everyone who pre-ordered the game will get access on the 19th or earlier
• Pre-orders were available on the 21st July
• Early access is based on chronological order of registering the pre-order codes
• Bioware have stated that they expect less people to hit the servers on the 13th than in the recent stress test beta (which some people suggest had about 750k people)
• Bioware have suggested that to have access on the 13th you would have had to register your pre-order code soon after the 21st July

I’ve taken these and with some calculations and a little help from excel come up with the date you will get to play!  My better half, looking over my shoulder wanted me to post a screen shot of my spreadsheet so here it is (please note some of the titles are wrong, see my tables below for the definite answer to when you will get access!):

And so the dates:

Unfortunately we don’t quite know enough, we need to make some assumptions.   All of these assumptions are based on pre-orders everywhere else being similar to those in the USA.  So if Bioware were to let in the same amount of people each day on each of the seven possible early access days then you would get early access thus:

7 Day linear

Now I apologise for how dull this table is. Black on white is very boring, but I’ve been fighting tooth and nail with this table to display in any readable way.  Originally it decided that the best colour for every other row was white.  Now this would have been fine, except that it insisted on taking the font colour from the rest of the post.  White on white is not known f0r its readability.  Many attempts to change these values in this ‘nice little easy to use’ table plugin I had resulted in no effect whatsoever.  Cue a dive into the inner workings of the site, and many threats of destruction with a hammer, and we finally have something that at least displays everything.  I’ve come to the conclusion; however, that my computer only expects Bioware to let people in every other day.  Who knows, it may even be right.

Right, now it’s reasonable to actually think that Bioware are expecting to give people access over 5 days, and have left themself 2 days in case anything goes wrong, and so access would look like:

5 Day linear

Who says they have to add in the same amount each day.  A good way of doing it would be to let half the pre-orders in the first day, then half of the remainder the next and so on (for those of you sad interested, this ‘decay function’ is seen in radioactivity) hence:

7 Day 1/2 Decay

Unfortunately this would probably have more people hitting the servers on the first day than in the beta test.  They however wouldn’t have to use a decay factor of 1/2, but could let in 1/3 of those waiting each time, like so:

7 Day 1/3 Decay

With the above tables, if you think they would want to keep 2 days as ‘oh shit days’ just cut off the tables at the 17-dec point, with decay functions the previous values wouldn’t be affected.

Another reasonable way would be to start with not many and ramp up the numbers, so say add in 0.1 of total pre-orders the first day, then 0.15 the second, then 0.2 the third.  This gives us 5 days of additions with 2 days left as just in case:

5 Day Ramp Up

I decided not to look at 7 day ramp ups as the initial numbers were stupidly small, or to change many of the parameters as having pre-ordered late, any ramp up strategy is quite depressing for me!

So lets give an example or two.  If you pre-ordered on the 30th September, you will get in on the 13th, 14th, 15th or 16th.  If you pre-ordered on the 25th Oct you would get in on the 15th, 16th, 17th, or 18th.  My assumptions might be slightly off so lets say give or take a couple of days.  Err hang on, that’s pretty much every day isn’t it?

I need a better method.  Anyone got a dart board?

It’s been a while since my first blog post; I, like thousands of others, was lucky enough to participate in the weekend beta stress test.

This wasn’t, as I’ve said, a particularly exclusive invitation.  Bioware wanted to load test their servers and so everyone who had signed up to be a possible tester before the 11th of November was invited to participate in a weekend beta test, and for the slow, lazy or generally disorganised people who hadn’t yet got around to this, there were still possibilities to get an invite from multiple large websites.  The first I had heard of this was when my girlfriend turned to me and said, ‘You’ll never guess what I got, a beta invite for the old republic’.  I will admit that my first thought was why HER, not me? She calls Yoda Kermit!!!  Grabbing my phone I found that the universe was not quite that cruel and I also had one.  This information was passed onto our friend who’s even more of a star wars fan than I, and the process repeated itself.  The first text: “**** you both” was obviously sent before he checked his email and found his invite.

On the Monday preceding this details began to be confirmed, and we were able to accept this invitation.  On doing so, we got access to the mythical Beta Forums.  Now I have a confession to make, I secretly (well not so secretly now) enjoy a good forum argument, especially if I’m not involved and don’t have to get involved.  Given the way that Bioware had decided to run this beta, I had high hopes that I would find some threads on the official forum to amuse me, and I was not mistaken.  Now the sketchy information we had before this weekend was that there would be a 4 day testing weekend from the 25th to the 28th, but no other information was forthcoming till the official announcements were made that Monday.  When the announcement was made, not only was the beta ending on Sunday night for those in the US , but also that the invitations would be staggered, with those who accepted the beta invitation first getting access on Friday, others on Saturday and the real slow coaches on Sunday.  Everyone’s beta, however, would end at the same time, on Sunday night/Monday morning.

The emails informing us of this began to go out on Monday evening,  I was one of the lucky (or tragic) ones who decided to check the Tester page early on Monday morning, and so preempted my mail by a good 18 hours.  Even so, having responded within about 4 hours of the options to do so appearing,  I was greeted on the forums with not one, but two threads about how unfair this staggering was, and how some people would be really annoyed if they ‘only’ got to play for 14 hours.  These are people who, no doubt, two weeks before would have given a limb (preferably a leg, two hands being useful in playing the game) or sold their only sibling to Bioware, for the ability to beta test the game for a single hour, and now 14 hours weren’t good enough.  Some even went as far to say that they wouldn’t even bother to play if they were on the Sunday intake; 14 hours obviously not, in this case, being better than none.  None of those complaining seemed to realise that having managed to find this information and accept this invite, get to the beta forums and complain before I’ve even managed to head into work on Monday, means that there were very likely to be on the Friday intake, and almost certainly not on Sunday.

It’s obvious that I’m not that sympathetic.  Ignoring the obvious point that most of us feel privileged to get any Beta Testing time,  Bioware had good reason for planning the beta as they did: they have a similar plan for the early access.  I know that personally I would prefer the launch to be smooth, and not have much time in beta, than for them to not have rigorously tested the planned launch.   In the end though, Bioware compromised slightly and only staggered the invites between Friday and Saturday.  We also found out on Sunday, during the beta, that they had extended the beta till Monday at midnight (or for us in theUK6am on Tuesday).  This wasn’t any good for me, as give the notice I already had plans on Monday evening I couldn’t change.  Perhaps I should go and complain on the forums!

To avoid spending too much time excited about upcoming events, I do my best to ignore the fact that they are coming. As a child, coming up to december, I used to do as little as possible that was christmassy. To this day I still halfheartedly tell my girlfriend off for trying to discuss presents with me in November, or even worse October. About the time that the “Holidays are coming” advert would appear on the TV, I would give up and start my preparations, and of course start getting excited.

This strategy was working with The Old Republic. Obviously I was going to get it, but the later I could delay this ‘point of no return’ , the less time that I would be waiting impatiently, devouring every snippet of information the internet had to offer. Then, a month or two back, a visiting friend played some of the trailers. The whole visit turned into a weekend of TOR videos, forums, planning and from that point there was no returning to my previous state of forgetfulness. So started the excitement, and of course the preparations, so how to prepare:

1. Star wars marathon!

All 6 films back to back. This was especially important as my girlfriend hadn’t actually seen any of them (I didn’t think this was possible for someone in this day and age!). This was an omission in her education that needed to be rectified; not to mention the fact that if she plays the game, I get more game time! Those films that were not already in the collection, or had been lent to friends (can you call someone who doesn’t return a star wars dvd a friend?) were bought, pop corn was purchased, alcohol refrigerated and then we waited. Unfortunately a friend of ours, never one to miss out on anything star wars related, had got delayed on the underground.

He did arrive though, eventually, replica light saber in hand (if the delay was due to him being arrested for carrying weaponry on the underground he never mentioned it). After setup time, and other minor mishaps we got started, four hours after our planned time of 1pm. Now we (my friend and I) made two mistakes, if making a new star wars enthusiast was our goal. The first one had already been made, we should have aimed to start at 9am, and might have started by 1, because for someone new to the series, after already 12 hours of films, and approaching 5am you are really not going to appreciate the final film as much as you otherwise would. Our second mistake ties into this, we decided to play the films in chronological order according to the story line, rather than when they are made. As such not only did she get quite a shock at the decrease in special effects and graphics when we went from 3 to 4, but also when the masterpiece that is Return of the Jedi came on, all she really wanted to do was go to bed and sleep for 12 hours.

I fear my girlfriend will never now be a full blown convert. The other day, naming the characters on a poster, she came out with ‘Kermit, Darth and Hot Guy’, or as we would know them Yoda, Anakin and Obi Wan. Soon after when asked what actually happened in Return of the Jedi, she replied ‘They came back’. She is, however, willing to try the game. I’ll take that as a win.

2. Choose a class

When i started playing galaxies my class choice was quite random. As a Teri Kasi Master I was ok, but i must have been one of the only sitting mayors in the game to actually loose an election I contested. I gave up soon afterwards. In Wow I tried four different classes before settling on druid. In fact, as I had a friend who kept switching servers (he violently disliked one of the instances, and re-rolled multiple times at around that level) who I followed, i had 3 or 4 different low level priests before finding the class I liked most. This time, to not repeat past mistakes, I decided to research heavily to give myself the optimum chance of getting it right first time, but then I remembered one of the healers got to wield a light saber. Jedi Consular it is.

3. Start a blog

And so here we are…