Yep. As I say, get your pre-orders in.
[Edited - Don't take this as fact. Depending on shop you may NOT be able to cancel once you have received your pre-order code. See my post on the next page]
They are purposely limiting both the availability of game copies (even digital as seen) for launch and territories in which people can pre-order the game. More supplies & regions will open up after launch. It's a sort of.. staggered release in a way. Helps to make sure that the games launch is as smooth as possible and then start to let more people in from there. I know a couple of you here have become less interested recently but TOR is likely to be the biggest MMO launch since WoW. They'll be trying to counter severs going down from having more players than they may have originally anticipated and the lag and queues because of that I would imagine. Good idea imo.
Makes sense to pre-order now rather than leaving it until later
especially if any of you are considering a boxed CE. Digital Deluxe copies are already gone as you've all seen. I don't know about other US shops but here in the UK if you pre-order with GAME or Amazon online you won't pay a penny until release, you should be able to cancel anytime before they start preparing your copy for dispatch and if the price goes down at any point between the time you order and the time it is released (even if it drops in price for just a few hours or a day) you'll get charged that new lower price come launch.
Just a warning for those of you thinking about ordering nearer to release like Anny here. There's really no reason NOT to pre-order now when you can cancel anytime and not pay anything, just to make sure you secure yourself a copy for release. Don't think that the standard editions won't sell out too because they will. (Amazon US have now sold out of the collectors editions).
[Edit]
http://www.gamefront.com/star-wars-the-old-republic-to-have-limited-launch/ wrote:When pre-orders went up this morning for Star Wars: The Old Republic, something odd happened. Origin was saying something about 111limited quantities111 and whatever, leading us to be angry and whatever because we thought EA was just being needlessly stingy.
But it turns out that
quantities are limited for a reason, as we learned at SWTOR111s Comic-Con panel today, and that reason is that
BioWare is going to launch SWTOR with a limited number of players rather than have millions of folks dive in all at once when they go online this winter. One can see the wisdom of such a tactic.
So if you don111t manage to land a pre-order today, be sad but don111t worry, because you will eventually get to play the game. Eventually.
Don't risk leaving it. You were warned
Also for anyone who has or will be ordering with GAME, they'll be sending the pre-order codes (which give us early access) out next thursday apparently. I'm a little worried as the wording on the site does state that the order in which they'll give early access is the order of people entering their codes but this info seems a bit conflicting as I've also read that the standard & digital deluxe editions will give a 3 day head start and the collector's edition 7. So not sure which is true. Or maybe the first come first serve of the early access will just mean they'll be sending emails out in waves on those particular days in the order of people registering their codes.. As long as it's the same day it's no biggie. I'll be angry if I don't get the same amount of days to the early access after buying a CE just because GAME are sending the codes later than Origin's which are instant. Hopefully they will make this clearer.
4 of us (Ash, Mech, Ava and myself) have pre-ordered now so once we've all received and entered our codes our Sith guild has already met the pre-order requirement and before Phase3 too!. Piece of cake