Originally posted by StephenReid (Source)

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Hey everyone,

I’m happy to announce that we have now invited everyone who has pre-ordered and redeemed their pre-order code for Star Wars: The Old Republic to Early Game Access. If you haven’t yet received an email, start the SWTOR Launcher and you should be able to get into the game.

If you still have issues, please reply in this thread and we’ll try to help you as soon as we can. We know there have been isolated issues with code redemption, and we want to help you get into the game. Please be patient as we deal with your issues as fast as possible.

Remember, you will not have been granted Early Game Access unless you have pre-ordered the game, received your pre-order code, and redeemed that code on your account.

If you have picked up a copy of the game already and did not pre-order (for example, from most European retailers), you will not be able to access the game until December 20th, but you will be able to redeem your product registration code now. This should have been explained by your retailer, and was noted on European packaging.

We’re not done with invites yet, however. There’s still time to pre-order, and if you do redeem a code before Early Game Access ends, you’ll still have time to play. After you redeem a pre-order code, we will invite you as soon as possible. We’ll be sending invites continuously from now until the end of Early Game Access, and we will no longer .

We look forward to welcoming all of you to Star Wars: The Old Republic!

Originally posted by StephenReid (Source)

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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.

Some greats news and some confusing news here this morning. The good news is that more beta invites are going out! More people than ever will get the chance to test Star Wars: The Old Republic! And even better than that is that our European friends will finally get into the game as promised earlier in the month. Here’s the message from Chris Collins:

Originally posted by Chris Collins (Source)

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Today, we’re excited to announce that we are sending out a batch of invites! In particular, this initial batch marks the start of a series of invites to our larger European player base, who get the chance to join the Star Wars: The Old Republic Game Testing program and provide feedback during the months up until launch.

In other exciting news, we’ll be making further announcements in the coming days and weeks, as we update you on Game Testing on the European service. On top of that, we’ll also be announcing details around the upcoming Beta Testing Weekends!

With the launch drawing ever-closer, we’re more excited than ever to receive your feedback on the game to help make the launch as smooth as possible.

And now for the confusing news.