From SWTOR.com.
Hey everyone, good morning and welcome to the first day of Early Game Access for Star Wars: The Old Republic!
We're granting access based solely on when people's pre-orders were redeemed, and we're going to be granting it in 'waves' - large batches of emails and game entitlements that will go out over the course of today (and tomorrow, and the next day, and so on).
I'll be updating this thread (and this post) as we send out more 'waves' of invites.
So far today, we have sent out two 'waves' of invites; we will be sending more later on, but I cannot be specific on timing. (Why? Because as we invite each wave, we monitor to see how servers are performing and so on. If everything is good, we'll send a 'wave' earlier; we in fact sent 'wave 2' ahead of schedule. So cross your fingers.)
Now, to the question you all have: when will you be invited? Well, I cannot be specific to individuals or even to dates, because again, we have to remain flexible. That said, I can talk a little about the pattern of pre-orders.
At the very beginning of pre-orders, which started on July 21st, we had a massive influx of pre-orders. A huge spike. After that, things settled down. As a result, today especially, you're going to see a fairly narrow band of dates from those admitted to Early Game Access. From tomorrow, it'll spread out to a wider date range.
That's about as specific as we're going to get right now. However, as we send more waves I'll update this thread/post with more information. Thanks for your patience - we know it's been a long road, but you'll be playing before too long.
Stephen Reid | Senior Online Community Manager
Update: Wave 3 was just sent.
Update: Wave 4 was sent approximately noon CST. (Apologies for delay.)
Update: Wave 5 - the final wave for today - was sent at approx 1:30PM CST.
Wednesday 12/14 Waves
Today, we're inviting many more people to play The Old Republic - more than yesterday, and over a much greater time span.
As explained yesterday, our initial pre-order rush was over a very short span (about a week). Today we'll be inviting well beyond July, but again, we're remaining cautious as we send each email wave.
We're currently planning on sending four waves of email invites today of equal size. We're going to get them out as fast as we can, while monitoring player counts and server population. I'll update this thread when each wave is sent. You can also follow our official Twitter account for notification.
Wave One was sent at 8AM CST (6AM PST / 9AM EST / 2PM GMT / 3PM CET).