Gamigo has delayed character and name reservations (which was to take place today after being originally delayed from earlier in the week), to October 12th (exact times noted in the announcement). The launch date still remains as October 15th.
The delay is due to the issues affecting the PTS build (server busy as well the as the disconnections) which Khrolan covered during Friday’s live stream (which he sort of confirmed what I had written about it being related to their login servers). The client build for the character creation seems to also be affected by this (and addressing it with a newer build, prevented them from meeting their time lines of offering a pre-download).
IMHO, they are going to end up running into QA constraints with validating all of the issues they need to address (the ones raised in Friday’s stream embedded below).
There is just a little over a week to get all of this done (that includes re-implementing the reconnect capability for both login queues and on the game server side). The logistics are complicated by the fact that the development is done in South Korea, the community management and PR facing stuff is handled out of Germany (Berlin), and some of the technical operations are based out of Trion’s old customer service location in Austin, Texas.
It’s not going to be surprising to me that opening up the Unchained PTS to the general public on the 7th, will end up being an absolute shit show if the game client doesn’t have better network fault tolerance and if they cannot better load balance the login servers (two possible points of failure that can easily escalate). All of these will be reflective of the production launch environment challenges that Gamigo will face, IMHO, (given how the character creation and name reservation has been pushed off for one week) it would be better if they actually pushed back the launch date to the end of October since crunching to QA all of this in the next week is going to mean some stuff will fall through the cracks heading into the actual launch.
