Anyone else sceptical about guaranteed access to beta weekends when you pre-purchase?

[Hellspawnxxx]

Beta has been a pretty horrible experience for me since I'm not in it lol. Even after pre-purchase beta I will still feel a tiny bit of resentment towards Anet for taking randoms over GW1 vets and people with more experience. Meh. whatever.

you shouldnt view it as such. its a good thing they didnt only invite GW1 players. because you have to realize even though may have a had a pleasent experience in GW1 doesnt mean everyone had aswell. No Jumping / No Auction House/ None persistent world and many other things left a nasty taste in alot of MMO Players mouths and they used that soured mouth to speak ill will of Guildwars 1 for many years which inturn even to this day there are some MMO players I come across who are dead set on not getting guildwars 2 because of thier exp in GW1 themselves or from friends they heard about. GW1 felt very incomplete but where they lacked a complete game in GW1 they finally built a fully functional true MMO with Guildwars 2. and this open to anyone beta is a great way to get some of the people who had a bad experience or heard of such from GW1, get them into GW2 try it love it and spread the word.

[Merendel]

you shouldnt view it as such. its a good thing they didnt only invite GW1 players. because you have to realize even though may have a had a pleasent experience in GW1 doesnt mean everyone had aswell. No Jumping / No Auction House/ None persistent world and many other things left a nasty taste in alot of MMO Players mouths and they used that soured mouth to speak ill will of Guildwars 1 for many years which inturn even to this day there are some MMO players I come across who are dead set on not getting guildwars 2 because of thier exp in GW1 themselves or from friends they heard about. GW1 felt very incomplete but where they lacked a complete game in GW1 they finally built a fully functional true MMO with Guildwars 2. and this open to anyone beta is a great way to get some of the people who had a bad experience or heard of such from GW1, get them into GW2 try it love it and spread the word.

GW1 was not an incomplete game, it just did not follow the same mold that wow copies and improved apon and other MMO's have since copied. It was different enough that it was more of an aquired taste that did not nessicaraly appeal to the masses. And reguardless of opinions on the merits of GW1 and its compleatness your last statement makes no sense whatsoever. While the press has leave to release info all the randoms are still under an NDA, they cant spread the word without violating that NDA so clearly word of mouth was not the intent. Personaly I'm fine with the random lotery to get in from signups but still, dont go makeing up reasons that are easily disproven with even 5 seconds of thought.

[Arkenaw]

you shouldnt view it as such. its a good thing they didnt only invite GW1 players. because you have to realize even though may have a had a pleasent experience in GW1 doesnt mean everyone had aswell. No Jumping / No Auction House/ None persistent world and many other things left a nasty taste in alot of MMO Players mouths and they used that soured mouth to speak ill will of Guildwars 1 for many years which inturn even to this day there are some MMO players I come across who are dead set on not getting guildwars 2 because of thier exp in GW1 themselves or from friends they heard about. GW1 felt very incomplete but where they lacked a complete game in GW1 they finally built a fully functional true MMO with Guildwars 2. and this open to anyone beta is a great way to get some of the people who had a bad experience or heard of such from GW1, get them into GW2 try it love it and spread the word.

Sorry, but this is exactly why I think GW1 players should have gotten in. It's not a free demo for people who didn't enjoy GW1 to see if they like the game or not. It hardly matters though since there was only 1 "opt-in only" weekend event. So I'm not as angry as I normally would be.

[DrakeWurrum]

While the press has leave to release info all the randoms are still under an NDA

And even then, there's some things the press aren't even allowed to talk about yet.

[Shadzta]

Nope, they will let EVERYONE in, unlike Blizzard they don't have something in fine print that says *Subject to change.

---------- Post added 2012-03-29 at 02:32 PM ----------



You're fooling yourselves if you think server upkeep costs anything now days.

In 2010 when blizzard had 11.5 mil subs, it cost $136,986 per day for ALL servers in EU, US, Asia combined.
That's when they were making $172,500,000 a month from subs. chump change to them.

IDK how much it is now, but you can find it here http://investor.activision.com/results.cfm

your right i did calculations on another thread few months ago using their acitivision stock holder results thingy expenditure etc etc etc...anywhooo long story short they spend under 3% of the SUBSCRIPTIONS ALONE on server maintainance and upkeep etc...thats not including the xfers faction changes etc etc. They can easily do it.

[Cuchulainn]

I talked to the manager of my local Game Stop (USA) today. He said quote for quote...

"You seem to be ahead of us on the news. We don't even have any digital access copies on our shipping records yet. And trust me, there are quite a few GW2 pre-purchases here. This happens quite a bit, though, for beta access games. We usually get beta access copies shipped in a few days before the actual beta starts. Just keep in touch and we'll make sure you get your beta access. BTW, I can't wait for the game to come out either. A lot of people are getting tired of sub based models like WoW".

I'm not bullshitting you. That's exactly what the manager said, verbatim.
It seems the GW2 community is bigger than even I thought it was. God help us.

[Spl4sh3r]

They will easily use overflow/retail servers when they do this. Their server system means that no character is saved on a server and as such it doesn't matter if they were to use all of their servers for Beta.

Also those one million that signed for beta, we know alot of them are actually people signing up multiple times aswell as those that signed up only once. We can't be sure that all signed will actually pre-purchase either.

[nalle]

They will easily use overflow/retail servers when they do this. Their server system means that no character is saved on a server and as such it doesn't matter if they were to use all of their servers for Beta.

Also those one million that signed for beta, we know alot of them are actually people signing up multiple times aswell as those that signed up only once. We can't be sure that all signed will actually pre-purchase either.

And we can't be sure that all who are interested in the game and who wanted to sign-up to the beta were able to in the 48 hour window given, so it goes both ways really.

[Spl4sh3r]

And we can't be sure that all who are interested in the game and who wanted to sign-up to the beta were able to in the 48 hour window given, so it goes both ways really.

They increased the time on the signup window just so they could hit a million aswell.

[Midnight Man]

If say 1,000,000 people pre order the game. they will not have servers to accomadate all 1,000,000 players.

Assuming that when you say "pre order" you mean "pre purchase" (they do not have to give BWE for pre order, and as such a pre order is not viewable by ArenaNet financially as a "go ahead" to provision a slot for that person to play on - at least as far as BWE is concerned), you have to be kidding me, right?

If you honestly believe this, then you're also saying that they won't provision enough servers to handle the number of clients they sell the game to. Or, to put it another way, they will bury 5+ years of work on the game by shooting themselves in the foot and underprovisioning the back end infrastructure that people are paying (in part) to use.

[terrahero]

Sorry, but this is exactly why I think GW1 players should have gotten in. It's not a free demo for people who didn't enjoy GW1 to see if they like the game or not. It hardly matters though since there was only 1 "opt-in only" weekend event. So I'm not as angry as I normally would be.

It takes place in the same universe. And thats where most similarities end. GW2 is going to be a very different game from GW1 and very different from anything on the market right now.
The one beta weekend with random people in it and those people arent even allowed to speak about their experiences, only the press is. If anything it was just a "lets see how GW2 performs on various machines". No reason to focus solely on the people who played, or are still playing, GW1.

You are right, its not a free demo for people to see if they like the game. But neither is it a "thanks for playing GW1"-event.