On the 7th September 2008, GOA partner of EA and Mythic for Europe, failed to even deliver an operational registration system for Warhammer Open Beta Europe. This is the second time this company ruins a launch, and has problem with their services. First time was when they were taking care of the DAOC servers, and offering poor services and customer support.

Strangely enough the http://www.war-europe.com site is made fully of flash combined with ajax and also broken into 5 iframes, those who know webdesign may laugh at this moment, but yes they chosen this system for a site that will be visited by millions of people. At the same time they launched (they tried) the registration system in the last day and even if their community managers posted on several forums, sometimes they blamed the customers browsers, and sometimes they said is gona be online right away, but it didn’t happened. Of course they didn’t managed to even post a news item that they have problems, they just wasted the time of 50.000 or more people that stood in front of the pc for more then 8 hours to try to make an account on their site, i am not talking to even log on the server, that was beyond...their imagination.

Now if we analyze this, the fault is not entirely to GOA. It seems Mythic and EA even if they are big companies, and they knew that GOA cant handle after the DAOC EU problems, I don’t think they cared much, even tho they lost a lot of money, and potential customers today.
The latest official response was:

"Folks, I just got off the phone with senior management at GOA and I know you’ll be getting lots of information shortly. I know it doesn’t make today better but I can assure you that leadership is very aware of the situation and they are doing/going to do something about it. They are not at all happy about the situation either.
I won’t say trust me on this because right now, our European fans have no reason to have any trust. I will say though to see what transpires before launch, during Open Beta and then, if we launch well, I hope we will regain your trust.

Mark Jacobs, EA“

So after like 12 hours they observed that something is not working. When US servers and site were working fine, of course the US site is way better, like a normal mmorpg website. The account system was ready weeks back, so they had time to prepare.

I sincerely hope that companies like GOA never get contracts like this, and also EA and Mythic wont dare to treat us like this in the future, I am sick of getting treated like a second class customer as an Europe citizen, just because companies make more money in US. Of course they do, because they never treated us as it should, with respect.

On the other side until we finish our first impression, preview article for WAR, so far I can tell you that it looks very promising, even from the first levels I was impressed with the new approach but at the same time with many features that WOW made them standards and WAR toke them further, which is not bad (we played on US…).

Later Edit:

In the end, after 3 Days, players are now able to log in play, lets hope the release will be smooth.