Woke up with a lovely surprise. The Warhammer Online CE Head Start servers came online an hour early. That was a smooth transition from Beta to Launch!
Public Beta servers shut down sometime late last night. The CE Head Start servers were up and running by 9am Pacific Time. I rolled a Witch Elf on the Standard Ruleset realm with the lowest Destruction population. At that time it was Ulthuan with a Medium population. By noon, everyone in North America was hitting the servers hard and if you look back at the forum posts, this is when most of the complaints were logged. Some pretty nasy queues formed. But Mythic was quick to respond, bringing up a couple of new servers and raising the population cap on the existing ones.
I logged in 4 times today and only had a queue for 15minutes at noon. As of this evening all 20+ servers are running smooth with medium populations and no queues. I’d say that was a pretty successful launch. They’ve purposely kept the population caps low to encourage smeering across all of the servers. This is smart. Come Tuesday they can raise the cap more knowing that the first wave will be well into Tier 2 content. And by Thursday, the third wave can hit the starting zones as well. This should create a nice spread across the servers and avoid the starting zone clusterfuck that can happen with virgin servers.
My experience leveling to rank 7 today was excellent. A good population for public quests, relatively short scenerio queues, and no camping of key quest targets.
The real test will be how WAR holds up next weekend after the official product launch.
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