According to the universal code of PC game launches game developers must ensure:
All games, products, and or services that are distributed or rely on a digital/on-line component (e.g. the "Internet") must have a disastrous first few days of availability to ensure that the entire release is tainted.
The level of disaster and general failure of said service must be inversely proportional to the amount of time, effort, and testing that went in to trying to avoid the mandatory fate.
However, the rules do not specify WHEN this disaster must occur. So there's some wiggle room. So rather than having the "disaster" and "nightmare" be on Galactic Civilizations II's release date we would like to move it back to be a week BEFORE the release.
So here is what we have in mind:
Tomorrow, February 14th we will open the doors to allow all the existing beta users to begin pre-loading the game. You won't be able to play it as it's just grabbing all the big data files. But it will make sure that on release date your download is only a couple of megs.
For your convenience we will go ahead and create the appropriate posts which will be entitled:
- "Download woes"
- "Stardock sucks"
- "Yet ANOTHER problem! HELLO?!"
On Wednesday, February 15th, ALL users who pre-ordered will then have their orders processed and be able to begin preloading the game as well. New forum threads will be created:
- "Where's my email?!"
- "Stardock drops the ball...AGAIN!"
- "Class-action lawsuit may be needed"
- Yep, it's a cluster you-know-what!
- Didn't they test this?!?!!?111
- Game is d0med!!!!1
The major issues on Tuesday will be making sure that the updated Stardock Central works, that it handles existing customers well, and that our new server farm is doing what we expect it to (i.e. not timing out on downloads, extracting the files properly, etc.).
The major issues on Wednesday will vary between people who don't get the email with the serial #s and links, can't get their serial #s to work, and of course the people who didn't read any of this, download the thing and are mad because when they click on the icon it thanks them for preloading the game and that the actual final EXE will be available on February 21.
As far as we can tell, everything should go smoothly. We've gone over it over and over again. But with thousands of users suddenly jumping on at the same time and with all the different levels of network connection and of course all the people who have 3 different email addresses (i.e. we have two accounts - the Stardock.net account which lets you get on the forums and your order account, we keep them seperate because your order account has order info and that is not allowed by our internal policy to be used outside our store -- we keep that info under lock and key). So just bear that in mind, if you ordered using one email address and have a different email address here, you may need to do a lookup (Which we'll have available here for you to do).
But the guidelines are clear: No electronic launch can be smooth. So we figure it best to get it out of the way so that the actual release day is nice.
Strictly voluntary of course. On Thursday, the floggings begin but there will be a sign-up sheet for that. My skin is very tender... 
