The Warhammer Online open beta test has begun

by Samuel Axon Sep 7th 2008 at 9:00AM

Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, New titles, Warhammer Online, News items

Mythic Entertainment just opened the virtual gates for the Warhammer Online open beta test. After fans spent half the morning expressing their impatience and Rickrolling one another on the game's various forums, the log in program/patcher suddenly stopped telling everyone they didn't belong and said, "Come on in and play!" Well, for most people anyway. It turns out that some folks still can't log in, but be patient; your time will surely come.

We're sure you can expect massive lag and overcrowding if you try to play today (or probably at any point in the open beta, really) but if you're willing to weather such tribulations, then by all means, grab your own Warhamma' and log the hell in!

If the lag proves too much for you today, or if the servers just explode, feel free to continue reading our extensive coverage. Otherwise, we'll slay you, err, see you there!

Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out all of our previous Warhammer Online features, and don't miss any of our ongoing coverage as Massively goes to WAR!

Tags: beta, breaking, bugs, crowded, crowds, ea, ea-mythic, fileplanet, forums, general-unrest, lag, mythic, mythic-entertainment, open-beta, overpopulation, test, war, warhammer-online

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

recursive said on 8:56AM 9-07-2008

And thus GOA's reign of despair commences. Maybe when they said account pages would be up at 9:30, they meant on like, I don't know, Tarturus (which is apparently 4 hours behind CET), but it doesn't fill me with faith that we will play this beta this afternoon as promised either..

SgtBaker said on 10:11AM 9-07-2008

The .eu Open Beta has been very... well, betaish, so far.

I doubt many europeans are playing yet, after 10 hours, most don't seem to have gotten past the account registration...

I don't know what they were smoking when they decided they should make the whole account registration site based on flash. Horrible experience (and probably root of their launch failure).

I have a feeling I should have ordered a US copy...

ermansup said on 10:34AM 9-07-2008

Well on the US beta servers we are all pretty much stuck in patching. Instead of kilobytes per second we are talking about seconds per kilobyte.

juhani said on 10:40AM 9-07-2008

yeah some cant register.. all of Europe cant register. Nice first impressions Mythic, I really thought this game would be the bomb.. :(

smoke2000 said on 11:27AM 9-07-2008

GOA really messed this up , more then 90% of the european people get a variety of errors on the different registration steps. Personally i've been trying to login for about 5 hours now , while timing out every single time.

Squig said on 11:46AM 9-07-2008

Trying to activate my CE open beta key for 7 hours now, and having various issues with the website. I sure hope the launch goes smoother in Europe than the open beta...

crsh said on 1:01PM 9-07-2008

I managed to register my beta key (I'm in Canada though), but the download queues are, well, a bit insane at the moment - that's to be expected, hopefully I can get the client and patches soon.

Brian! said on 2:04PM 9-07-2008

I want to point out that Destruction is outnumbering Order by a large amount. Every server is that way.

I only say that because I am afraid I will owe Michael winnings on a bet (granted, he never officially accepted!)

Will the trend continue to launch?

Pirate Penguin said on 10:54AM 9-08-2008

Although I am not Michael, I did make a similiar bet in several population threads on this site and I stand by it!

Still though, I'm pretty sure that when I made the bet I added '6 months or so after release' to see what effect the more casual fans would have (the ones who have not really followed the game but will join because friends or positive reviews say it is fun).

Every racial side I joined yesterday (order or destro) had people running around all over the place so it was hard to get a sense of the population.

papawapa said on 2:21PM 9-07-2008

So far I've experienced a wait of 3 hours patching 118 MB only to have the patch die at 94%. Now it seems to be stalled for the last 30 minutes at 30%.

Dave said on 3:37PM 9-07-2008

Just so everyone knows, you still need a key for open beta if you didn't preorpder or get one somewhere. Some places like MMORPG.com are out but I got one from Ten Ton Hammer and they say they still ahve them:

http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=34201

Used to be just for subscribers but now looks like all you have to do is register.

pksh said on 3:37PM 9-07-2008

Please Massively, do a coverage of the disaster at the Europen beta today...

Quentin said on 4:09PM 9-07-2008

Yup... so at the end of the day GOA only accepted 10% of the entire OB population, this includes or exclude shall I say the people who have paid for CE / SE editions who are meant to have garunteed access.

There is so far no sign that they will allow the other paying playerbase access in any time soon other than ETA unkown. And that status hasnt changed in the last 5 hours.

Have fun america, but europe have been left in the dust.

Kyoji said on 6:13PM 9-07-2008

Man that sucks, the American Beta has been very smooth so far, I'm getting no lag and very few game-breaking bugs, even on full servers where you have to wait for ~20m to get in. I hope GOA sorts the situation out fast, you guys deserve to be in with the rest of them.

my2cents said on 8:08PM 9-07-2008

I'm on a US server. The download was slow, but I just went out for 2 hours and it was almost done when I got back. The game is incredibly fun!

However, I'm having HORRIBLE, horrible framerate issues. Granted, I don't have a great computer/graphics card. However, I play both WoW and LotRO on medium settings and have no problems (except in Shatt in WoW, but even then it's manageable.)

With WAR, I set all the graphics settings to the lowest possible settings and turned off all optional effects and I'm getting on average 5 to 8 fps. =( I'm hoping that it's only because of the beta launch.

One positive sign is that in a T1 scenario (the only kind I've experienced yet) my fps goes up to a not-so-great but somewhat manageable 12-15 fps, even in the thick of combat, so perhaps there are simply too many players in the starting zones right now for my comp to handle.

my2cents said on 8:12PM 9-07-2008

Oh and I should mention that actual lag (not slowdown due to graphics processing, but server lag) is not bad. It's mostly not a problem, only occassionally. And the server I'm playing on has been stable.