A bit of outrage is stirring among Warhammer Online players who pre-ordered the game, expecting to be able to play through September 22th before having to enter the registration key from a retail box copy. A post at the official Warhammer Online website yesterday revealed otherwise. Now the deadline is *checks watch* several hours ago, so folks who opted for slightly slower shipping now find themselves waiting a weekend to return to their characters, or in extreme cases scrambling for a retail version of the game just to keep themselves from going through withdraw.

We'll be talking to the folks at Mythic shortly regarding the apparent change of plans. Until then, feel free to speculate in the comments section. Perhaps start a betting pool It's Friday, go crazy.

Update: Mythic folks were too busy to talk, but they have posted an update on the site announcing that Amazon, GoGamer, EA Store and The Source (CE online) pre-orders have had their time extended until the 22nd. Full text after the jump.

Folks,

Good, bad or ugly, Mythic has always had the integrity to stand up for what we think is the right thing to do in any situation. I don?t expect everyone to agree but I?ve never intentionally made a decision to hurt the community and/or our players and I don?t intend to start now. For the last couple of days we?ve been dealing with a very difficult and complicated situation. Sadly, there are lots of moving parts and sometimes it takes both a bit of elbow grease to get things working properly.

Here?s where we stand right now. As of this morning, we deactivated a large number of accounts and ended the Head Start for our game. At the same time, we?ve been in touch with the retailers, both online and brick-and-mortar, and while we are getting great data on the number of people who will get their game today; there is still a relatively small number of people who won?t be able to get them due to shipping issues (no matter what the issues are, whose fault, etc.).

So, after a lot of conversations I?m happy to announce that over the next few hours we are going to extend the grace period for all customers of Amazon, GoGamer and the EA Store till the 22nd of September. Based on the data we have gathered, these companies account for just about all the customers that were concerned about their chance to get into the game today. Thus, if you currently have an account with us, you?ll be able to get back into the game while you wait for your game to be delivered. Of course, all characters are still intact and no billing of any credit card has taken place (it couldn?t, the account still has free time on it) since the accounts were simply deactivated not wiped.

We have been assured by all the brick-and-mortar retailers that they got their shipments in the stores already so if you needed to go to a store to pick up your game, the units are in stock everywhere. We will be monitoring the situation closely over the next twenty-four hours of course.

As I?ve said countless times, we will do the best we can in any situation to make it right and I hope you agree with have done so again. I thank the community for its support, especially for this rather thorny problem.

Mark

Update: 2:33 PM EDT - This offer has been extended to individuals who pre-ordered the Collector's Edition through The Source.