Hello again all -



We're finished with invite waves for today. The servers are filling up, player populations are growing, and we're monitoring the influx of players carefully. More servers will be opened up as we need them.



We're expecting queues, and at peak times you should be too. That's normal for a large-scale MMO launch, as the initial rush of players hit the servers at the same time. If you don't want to queue to play, it's best to try and login at non-peak hours - or possibly play on a different server. We understand the frustration that queuing can cause, and we're working to minimize, but a certain amount of queuing is to be expected during Early Game Access and launch.



Looking forward to tomorrow, I wanted to try and explain the invite 'pattern' you've seen this week. It can be confusing, because we've been inviting a growing number of people on a daily basis, but the timing of people's code redemptions might not seem to match.



It goes back to our pre-order redemption numbers. Our graph of redeemed pre-order codes looks like two mountains with a flat plain in-between, basically. There's a massive peak from back in July (when we announced pre-orders) and a smaller, but growing peak at the end (recently). In the middle, there was a long period where the numbers of people redeeming pre-order codes were steady, but lower.



Now, we've been inviting large numbers of people every day, with more being invited day-on-day. What that has meant is, because of the pattern of pre-order codes being redeemed, on Day One of Early Game Access, we invited a lot of people who had redeemed over a short span of time (late July). Yesterday and today, we invited a lot of people but over a larger span of time (all the way to early December).



The question I know a lot of you have is, why haven't we yet invited those who redeemed very recently? The answer is because of the volume of recent pre-orders that have been redeemed, which is spiking up very high. So, a lot of people have redeemed in a short period of time. Essentially we're in the same place we were on the 13th, where we invited a lot of people, but most had redeemed in the same short period of time.



TL;DR - We've seen a LOT of pre-orders redeemed in the last couple of weeks, and that means that even though we're really close (in date terms) to getting everyone in, we couldn't quite do it today.



Tomorrow's invite waves start at 8AM CST, and I'll start another thread then to track progress.