I’m really hoping the keys aren’t just for this one day of sessions. That would be a PR blunder for ANet and really frustrating for many of us. I assumed there would be multiple days including weekends when I changed my play style so I could get a key.
Putting the first beta day on a work day actually makes sense to me, technologically (I do load and stress testing as part of my job) precisely because you get fewer people. You want to uncover kinks in the system that maybe are hard to trigger with automation with a smaller group of people first so you don’t end up with so much noise that you can’t diagnose all the different issues. If you have a larger group, you are more likely to uncover so many problems that you can’t tell what is going on. So, the first session has hardly anyone, misses the working US entirely. At the end, they take two hours to make quick tweaks and configuration changes, hopefully tuning the system a bit and alleviating the worst issues. The second session gets the folks coming home from work on the east coast of the US, so it has a bit more traffic. Now they hit a new set of issues – a bit more config tuning, but now there are more interesting issues coming out as well. The last test is the real stress-test though, and it’s set before midnight on the east coast of the US, but after folks on the west coast get home from work.
That’s all well and good, technically. But the players don’t really care about technology motivations. We care about the fact that we won a prize that many of us invested extra effort to acquire – and now many of us aren’t going to get to use that prize.
If there are other sessions coming up on weekends that these keys are good for, no harm no foul. Otherwise, ArenaNet just lost some credibility. I think ArenaNet has done well by their players so far, so I think that they either already have a weekend test planned for Key holders – or, if they don’t, they will see how frustrating this is to us and schedule one.
As for employees of AN working weekends – I don’t think switching a Monday of work for a Saturday occasionally should be a big deal. Entertainment industries attract a user base that is active primarily on the weekends; this is just part of their industry. Many industries are more active during the work week and occasionally require employees to come in on the weekends when they need to do maintenance or testing in production that should NOT impact the users. I’ve done that myself many times, and who hasn’t heard about 3AM maintenance being done by network admins? Usually (at healthy companies) the employees then get some down time during normal working hours so they are working a normal schedule. This kind of schedule is part of why tech engineers are paid salaries, generally. While such irregular hours are not a frequent part of the job for most developers, they generally are still part of the job.