Early access – bring it on!

In the week when Play.com sell out of their Collector’s Editions and start to send out beta keys, I found myself considering why Early Access to the live game is such a valued thing – even if it just means 3 days playtime before the masses converge on the game. So far, this is my list of why it was worth the extra money* to me (and um, yeah.. I still owe someone a bit of money for my CE!)

• You have a better chance of getting your fave character name
• You have a better chance of getting your guild up and running and getting the name you want
• You get to vacate the starting areas before the deluge
• Less server stress, less chance of un-smooth launch

These should all be pretty obvious. On another tack, we have less servers to choose from. I believe it’s been stated a number of times that there will only be limited servers for the Early Access Brigade (my fabricated name there), maybe one or two of each server type, whatever they think they need. Now, this sounds bad initially, because:

• You don’t get to choose from the entire server list from the start
• If guilds are split between early access and non-early access players, then there’s a chance the server will be pretty full before the entire guild can join it, which may lead to problems, depending on how they deal with overcrowding

But on the other hand, let’s assume that the Early Access Brigade are all fairly into the game, enough to blow £60 on a game that they could otherwise have got quite a bit cheaper by not getting the Collector’s Edition (and this assumes there are no pre-order bonuses about to be made available on non-CE purchases). They’re the kind of people who hang out on internet forums and blogs discussing Warhammer Online and what they look forward to or fear about the game. They embrace RvR as a concept – and they’re all going to be choosing from the same limited list of servers!

So.. surely those servers will have a higher chance of being populated by experienced MMO players? Which again, is a big advantage to both the experienced and non-experienced alike. It’s not like the later servers won’t have experienced players on them, some guilds might want to wait for the non-early access servers so everyone can join at the same time, or because they want to pick an emptier server to start on from the entire list of potentials. But for those of us who’ll probably stay on their early access server, I believe it means we’ll have a fairly knowledgeable population on both sides of Order/Chaos split.

This, for me, is a huge benefit and one that I hadn’t really thought about until all the analysis of the WHA figures and speculation that new players were more likely to pick Order. Does this mean early access servers will be weighted towards Destruction? Or that it won’t matter as much, because at least the Order players might have more chance to be organized from the off? I have no idea, that’s all in the realms of ‘who knows’ but I do think the poll results might affect the early access servers more than the ones that come later.

*obviously it’s not the only reason the pre-order Collector’s Edition was worth the money to me – who wouldn’t want the choice of extra heads, some extra quests and funky items?