Avian Gamers Network

Hello all,

There is no Beta Testing Weekend scheduled for this weekend. There may be further Beta Testing Weekends during September, but we're not going to guarantee it. The weekend that just finished was really our first dry run of Beta Testing Weekends as a whole, and we have plenty of data to crunch, and decisions to make before we start things up again.

Further to that, as Chris Collins explained in another thread, we are about to roll out a major new build for The Old Republic. That build won't be ready for this weekend. Just as we did not feel it was a good decision to ask potential EU testers to download our client only to have to download it again, the same applies for this weekend.

That does not mean, however, that as soon as our new build is available we'll be rolling out a Beta Testing Weekend immediately. As with any new build of the game, we need to get feedback from internal testing and our ongoing Game Testing program before rolling it out to a massive audience. That process takes a while, and that time varies depending on how testing goes.

We rolled out this previous weekend as a relatively small scale event; from now we will do bigger and bigger events, but that doesn't mean it happens every weekend. When we do resume, we'll be inviting many more people in.

While many of you are excited and anxious to know what's happening regarding Testing Weekends, I want to point out that a lot of posts on the subject with a lack of corresponding posts from us does not mean that we're not listening, or not aware of your interest. It shows your interest in the topic, which is understandably high, but we will not always be able to react instantaneously.

In the past couple of days we've been preparing a comprehensive FAQ regarding Game Testing Weekends as a whole, along with some details about the weekend that just happened. We'll post that tomorrow - in all languages, as we know the subject is of interest to everyone.

Hello everyone. Now that the first-ever Beta Testing Weekend is over we wanted to give you a bit of insight into how it went and what our next steps are. If you haven't read our FAQ about Beta Testing Weekends, you might want to take a look at that in conjunction with this.

For our first Beta Testing Weekend, we invited a large number of testers to play Star Wars: The Old Republic during Labor Day Weekend (a US holiday). While the number of testers invited was larger than any previous invite - many thousands - the number was still a fraction of what we're planning for later weekends.

What were the objectives of the weekend?

Primarily this was a small scale simulation of a launch scenario. That means, bringing on a large number of players, starting with the invite process, then proceeding through download, install, patching and logging on to a fresh new server.

We were looking to have large numbers of players on the game's Origin Worlds, like a launch day; we were looking to test our limits on PCU (peak concurrent users); and obviously we were testing to see how all this 'felt' to new players and whether they enjoyed the experience.

On top of that, as always, we were seeking feedback on the game itself - how it feels, how it plays, what people like and dislike.

How did it go?

On balance, extremely well. Every goal we had was met or exceeded, and we had no major downtime. This is good news for us, as now we can move forward in future Testing Weekends and increase the overall number of invites.

There were hitches, as you may know. We had an issue introduced into our invite process that caused a number of people to become 'stuck' in a specific database state. That was fixed by our web team as fast as possible, and while that delayed the initial download for some, we got as many as we could into the game. We are thoroughly testing that process to ensure it doesn't happen again - it was in fact the very first time we've had invite issues since Game Testing began.

Here are a few random quotes from four different testers within their Forums:

“I absolutely had fun. I found myself still finding enemies and attacking long after I had fulfilled the requirements of the mission simply because it was fun to just blast my enemies. You guys honestly put my jaw on the floor with the amazing world you built... and the look of everything. Video's had me skeptical but being in game washed away any doubts I had. I think you guys have nailed Star Wars for what it is..a galaxy far far away and a long time ago..enough said.”

"I really can't wait to see how the story unfolds. In most MMOs I play, I pick up the quest without even reading it but with these quests I am listening to the amazing voice acting and building my own story."

"Words alone can’t express how epic the voiceover is. Normally I end up making fun of the voiceovers in other games but this one caught me off guard. In addition, the in-game music and ambient sounds was also amazing. I didn’t feel overwhelmed with the background/ambient sound and the in-game music matched the current situation very well. Like I said before, overall this is and will be an amazing game. I just purchased the Collector’s Edition."

"Overall, I would say I had a lot of fun. In addition to the quests and PvP, I would sometimes stop and just look around at the planet or station I’m on. The amount of detail that was put into the environment was incredible. Well done."
What's next?

We're rolling out a major new build for The Old Republic very soon, and we're waiting until that build is fully tested and ready to go before we invite people to another Beta Testing Weekend. We're still hopeful that will happen in September, but we have no guarantees.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this gave you some insight into this weekend's events!

Yeah, I think it is still a way out... this reaffirms my thoughts of a November release.

Yeah, but then what do we do? MW3 and ToR around the same release = bye bye social life. Hehe.

bye bye social life.

Social life? What's that? Where do I get one?