Episode 0: Begun, Beta testing the Old Republic, I have

A long time ago… I signed up to beta test Star Wars: the Old Republic. I’ve been pretty much on the sidelines about this game. Don’t get me wrong. I love all things Star Wars, and this is one of those games that I would truly like to play in, but the iffiness as to whether or not I could play the game since I live in the Philippines dawned on me. Now that the Non-Disclosure Agreement has been lifted, I can now talk about Star Wars.

I was thrilled! I was madly grinning from ear to ear that would have put the Joker to shame when I received the email that I could beta test the Old Republic. The Force was strong, I tweeted.

So I hurried over to the TOR site, and downloaded the client. It drove me nuts that the network wouldn’t allow me in. “Not allowed to be played from where I’m from” type of message It also annoyed me to no end the error message would disappear from the launcher in a blink of an eye.

I knew that TOR could be played anywhere— Bioware said they wouldn’t be IP blocking, and I did receive the invite. So anyway, I decided to search for a proxy server. A Canadian or American one so i could go and download it. So it was good. I was able to login.

Then boom.

Right around 10GB, I restarted the PC. Suddenly, not even the proxies would accept my login. After an hour of shifting through proxies, and after I tried reinstalling the game launcher. I finally gave up and went to the forums. Turns out, even folks living in the US were having the same problem.

So the Force wasn’t against me, after all!

A day later, I went back to the Game Tester Page and downloaded another copy of the game launcher installer.

Then BOOM.

It worked. I didn’t even need to have a proxy.

Hey, this is a beta. I can understand it could be frustrating.

Needless to say the download is a 20GB one. So for people living with a slow Internet connection, I would suggest getting the physical disc or upgrade to a faster one. If you’ve played other MMOs, you’d know that downloading huge files is pretty much the norm anyway, so investing on faster internet is going to be a plus for you.

DC Universe Online for example is a 13GB download, and even if you did install from a disk, there has been so much update since game launch that you’d be downloading half that anyway.

So going back to TOR, at the time of this writing i have like 3.5GB of download left. I’m cleared to go and test out The Old Republic at 10 AM Central. My download should be done before then (unless the DSL breaks down), and so long as WiMax can handle the load.