On Tuesday, February 14th users who were in the BETA program will be able to PRE-LOAD the game via Stardock Central.
On Wednesday, February 15th, all users who pre-ordered directly will be able to PRE-LOAD the game as well.
It requires an updated version of Stardock Central that has been designed to make use of our updated server farm infrastructure. So in theory, your download speeds should be very fast.
Stardock Central 2.29a or later is needed. Go HERE to get it.
However, some % of people are going to have problems. This thread is to make it easier for them (and us) to figure out what went wrong.
Important points:
1) Don't assume the problem you run into is universal. So if you run into a problem, please report it.
2) Give as much information as you can. The log info will be important.
3) There are 3 types of failure:
a) Server Time-Out -- this is where you lost connection to the server. We want to know about this as the new server farm should be able to handle 10X what we are expecting. Don't worry though, Stardock Central supports download resume.
User-Validation failure. This is where the system can't find your information in the database. Is the email address you used to order the same as the email address you used here? Once your order has been processed (i.e. beta users have already been processed, pre-orders will be processed the end of the day tomorrow) you will receive an email with info. If you lose this info, go here and put in the email address you think you used to buy the game.
c) Extraction error. This is where it has downloaded but it fails to properly extract. This should be pretty rare.
We are anticipating a 2% problem level. That is, 2% of users will run into some problem. That's approximately 100 people from the beta and initial direct pre-order group (we aren't assuming all users will try this out).
So this thread could get pretty busy. Stay tuned.
We will begin at around 2:30pm EST.