It got better though!

Warhammer Online fanboys went into a tizzy yesterday as open beta went live and the hordes rushed in. While the US Open beta test seems to have gone swimmingly so far, the European side of things was not so lucky.

GOA, the European publisher and operator of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, has issued a public apology for the false start to its open beta test yesterday.

Although servers have opened, and closed beta testers have been able to enter the new phase without any problems, account registration and authentication for new players is not working.

"I rarely address players directly, but I wanted to write you as too few of you have been able to access the open beta today," said GOA's chief executive, Ghislaine Le Rhun, on the European WAR site.

"We have not yet solved the issue of saturated Open Beta key activations that we're currently experiencing," Le Rhun said. "I am sincerely sorry for this, and I understand all the frustration the situation has spawned.

All is not lost though. The folks at GOA have come up with a work-around, and a temporary validation system is now available.

This morning we explained to you that a new system would be coming for open beta key validation. We are pleased to announce that this is now online. For the moment this system is open to people who either already have a beta centre account on war-europe or those who created an account yesterday and have received a confirmation email. Those of you who have not yet had the chance to create an account must wait a little longer and to you we apologise for the delay - we will of course update you when you are once again able to create new accounts.

For more updates on how the validation issue is progressing, please check out the European Warhammer Online official site.