At noon Eastern time, or 9am Pacific time, today, Warhammer Online went live with the beginning of the head start for those who pre-ordered the Collectors Edition of the game.
Of the two servers that Casualties of War chose for guild play, Averheim for Order and Volkmar for Destruction, Averheim was not up right away. So I rolled up a Destruction character first.
After making my Black Orc, Wuhl, I got a bit of a shock trying to get in to play.
I was greeted with this message:
18 hours to get past a queue of three people?
Well, it seems that 18 hours is the default time, as I saw that same number pop up a couple more times. In reality it was about a minute to get on to the server.
Still, there were queues all of five minutes into the CE head start. And within an hour the queue to get into the Volkmar was getting pretty deep.
I wonder how long before we see an expansion of servers. I mean, we’re only seeing CE pre-order people at the moment. What will it be like when day one for everybody shows up?
This mattered because the client locked up on me. This seems to be the new crash to desktop on my scenario, only it is worse as it requires me to do a hard reboot.
After I got back to the game and saw the queue to get back on to Volkmar, I headed over to the Order server to reserve some names and find the guild.
There I actually found the guild, including Jobildo, Syncaine, and Tobold. There we many more, but I haven’t mentally associated character names with blogging identities yet.
I did get to play for about an hour, spending most of my time doing the RvR scenario Nordenwatch. They seem to have tweaked the experience rate between preview weekend one and preview weekend II/open beta. At preview one, doing PvE quests seemed to allow you to gain ranks a lot faster, while I heard some complaints about how slowly RvR let you progress.
Now, however, it takes a lot more PvE quests to get a rank, while RvR seems to let you cruise up through ranks a lot more easily. This was all compounded by the fact that everybody was level one, so the competition for goals in PvE quests was pretty fierce. You should have seen all the greenskins trolling the beach looking for barrels, for example.
Anyway, as I predicted earlier, my “main for the moment” is a witch hunter. I used one of my standard names and called him Tistann.
I decided to go for a bit of the Nick Fury look with the eyepatch.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I have the same problem. Consistently crashing during Open RVR and a few minutes into any Scenario. A client crashing to the desktop is not fun but crashing the OS and requiring a HARD BOOT is horrible!
I think I’m done for the evening. I had a good time questing but enjoy PVP and I need the RVR and Scenarios to break things up a bit. *Sigh*
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I played for 12 hours yesterday, no issues.
One of the best online times I have had in 3 years with an MMO
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I’m pretty sure that the main reason Volkmar was full was because it was selected as the CoW Destruction side server.
Curiously enough 18h 12m 16s is exactly 65,536 seconds which is the largest integer which can be stored in two bytes.
Looking forward to being able to play on Tuesday after you guys have ironed all the bugs out.
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Good times indeed, at least until Comcast turned the internet off at about 2am EST.
Had one crash during a scenario, after that nothing for hours. Also nothing today as well.
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@Mornazh – “I’m pretty sure that the main reason Volkmar was full was because it was selected as the CoW Destruction side server.”
I would find that to be a pretty scary indication of server capacity for WAR, as my impression is that Destruction is the lesser part of our guild when it comes to raw numbers. Maybe it was all those Genda groupies.
“Curiously enough 18h 12m 16s is exactly 65,536 seconds which is the largest integer which can be stored in two bytes.”
Blasphemy! What self respecting coder starts numbering from 1? It is always 0-65,535 in my mind! Still, good catch. I had not thought to break it down to the seconds.
@Hudson “I played for 12 hours yesterday, no issues”
When I came back later in the day, I had no further issues. And the hard crash, while annoying, was still better than the previous weekend where I was dumping to desktop so often that I just put the game away and did something else.
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I had a few spots at which I would character jump and then a few in which my character died and reverted back to the PREVIOUS rez position (not the one i died in, but the one I last logged out at) which was kinda weird.
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