during late 2008 and early 2009, "quake live" was in an invitation-only closed beta. a handful of players were selected to begin the testing of the beta and were later allowed to invite a limited number of friends, whom, in turn, were permitted to send out invitations of their own. on february 24, 2009, the game progressed from closed beta to open beta, which caused an increased amount of traffic on the web server. queues were organized to limit the stress and prevent the overloading of the servers. within the first six hours after launch over 113,000 user accounts were created. the queues were removed after several days, and the servers were then upgraded to handle the larger volume of traffic.