Dawn of War 2 Beta Is Over

According to sources at the Dawn of War 2 community website, "On February 18th, 12:01am GMT, the Beta will officially come to an end."

This is a sad day for free, awesome RTS gaming - but it means that the game is going live and I can go out to the store and buy me a copy of Dawn of War 2! I don't think I will be able to go out and buy it today, but I hope that stores in my area will have a copy of it for me to pick up tomorrow after I get home from work. I have $150 worth of gift cards at Game Stop that I think will be perfect for buying DOW 2.

More Beta News
In addition to announcing the beta ending, the DOW 2 community site also released some very interesting tidbits about statistics from the beta.

The first was a graphic about game lengths. According to this source, ranked games lasted an average of 9.73 minutes for 1v1 games and 12.16 minutes for 3v3 games. Custom games were considerably longer, taking an average of 18.57 minutes for 1v1 and 18.03 minutes for 3v3. What is most interesting about this statistic is the incredible discrepancy between custom and ranked games at the 1v1 level.

This could be a result of a bug that has been fixed in the first retail patch for Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War 2 where the TrueSkill ranking wasn't being properly implemented to match players with each other.

I also found it really interesting that the 3v3 ranked games were the most popular of all multiplayer game types. Personally, the ranked 3v3 was my favorite - but the dropping was so prolific that it often skewed match results dramatically. There were plenty of matches that should have been way more competitive than they were because somebody had their settings too high and crashed the game.

Playing a 2v3 is not easy, especially for people just starting out (which I assumed many beta players were).

Finally, the thing that surprised me the most was the total suckfest that the Space Marines appear to be in this game. I love playing them and will continue to do so, but they ranked lowest on almost every single metric that compared the four races from the Warhammer universe. While having the most played commanders, they also had the some of the lowest win/loss ratios for these commanders. The Space Marines also had the lowest win/loss ration in high level 3v3 games.

To me, this means that the Space Marines are in general the worst of the factions or they suffer from a disproportionate number of noobs playing with them. I hope that this doesn't continue because having a noob multiplayer partner is extremely bad for the stats. I hope TrueSkill works as planned.

I'm sad to see the Dawn of War 2 beta end, but I am excited to buy the game and check out how awesome the single player campaign is going to be.