The quasi-public beta for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has started. While I usually try to refrain from posting information about small, limited betas (this one is limited to 60,000 users, with distribution taking place over 5 days), there’s some statistical information on the developer’s blog which can be interesting.

To quote,

Going back to the beta launch, the stat that really sums up the level of anticipation is that of the key distribution on Saturday; 3,000 of the 15,000 keys available that day were snatched up in the first five minutes. That’s 10 keys every second! The data also shows that the ETQW beta executable was started 23 times per second immediately following the key drop. With demand being that high, the issue that almost everybody ran into was that all of our available servers were packed, making it difficult for people to find a free server to play on. Smart people in lab coats tell me that the rule of thumb for public betas is that about 5% of your players are active at any one time (the so-called concurrency rate). With that in mind, we had actually planned our server infrastructure for a capacity of 7.5% just to be on the safe side. Given that Sunday’s keys still hadn’t been released at that time, our concurrency rate on Saturday was actually over 10%! To put this in perspective, that’s thousands more players than expected, every second of the day.

This bit about the concurrency rate is pretty interesting and was new to me. Anyhow, the article is a bit longer, so head over there to get the full text.

And just as a side note, this beta hasn’t made a noticeable dent on the popularity of other popular online games, which is to be expected if the 3,000 figure (5% of 60,000) is right. GameSpy stats doesn’t usually cover the number of players on beta games either, so it’s hard to determine how the game popularity has been fluctuating since the beta started. There are websites dedicated to server statistics – like QuakeWars Tracker – but no chronological coverage is available.

This entry was posted Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 9:10 am and is filed under General. Both comments and pings are currently closed.