Extension of Early Access

[Mrbloodworth]

Dear Early Access Customer,

As you may know, today was the deadline for registering a retail key to continue playing Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.

From reading our forums and support emails, we’ve discovered there have been some issues with regional distribution and retail shipments not making it out on time. While this is only the case for a minority of the players, we understand this would leave some of our players with no way to access the game until these shipping difficulties have been resolved. Even though we do not control the distribution and shipping process for Age of Conan, we have however decided to do what we can.

As a result we will extend the Early Access grace period a few more days, meaning that you can continue to play until Friday, 30 May 2008 at 22:00GMT. After that time, you will need to enter a retail key to continue playing.

We hope these additional days are sufficient so that everyone who has pre-ordered will get their Age of Conan retail box in time.


Sincerely

The Age of Conan development team

Linky

[Engels]

Yay! uhm, 3 more days of playing for me till my shipment gets in! A decent solution to a pretty fucked up situation. Who the heck would predict that an MMO would ever sell out. A Norwegian MMO no less.

[Signe]

It's weird because Amazon started stating that the CE was IN STOCK again days ago.  Also, that you could get overnight shipping and you're still waiting on your box.  They're all fucked up over there, I think!

[Engels]

Having worked at Amazon for 4 years, yes, it looks weird, but I've seen it happen before. Essentially, the distributor, in this case, Eidos, drops the ball in terms of honestly reporting how many boxes/books/tickle-me-elmos they can send to Amazon to meet an expected or even known demand. The people who coordinate this aren't legions of bone weary representatives in India, but more often than not, a single individual charged with coordinating dozens of products with a distributor.

For products where they see it coming, such as, for example, the latest Harry potter, they are on it like white on rice, and for the most part, the orders match the expected deliveries from the distributor. For these 'rogue' products, such as AoC, the individual in charge of coordinating the pre-orders probably talked to someone less than capable over at Eidos, and although Eidos was, in fact, producing enough CEs to satisfy the known demand, what was off was the ability to get them to the Amazon shipping facility in a timely manner.

So you end up with this situation, where batches of CE are floating about a warehouse waiting for a trucking company that's used to shipping 10k copies of something but now has to fulfill 100k.

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