4201

Then I hope they learned their lesson or will do so very quickly. I just hope it doesn’t turn into something lame like, “We expected about 1,000,000 sales in the first week, but we got 10,000,000. Our bad, we got the servers on order.”

4202

I’m sure that’s exactly the PR you’ll hear. No one wants to invest in additional hardware that most likely will only be needed for the first week or so, not even rental.

On the plus side, Blizzard has a lot of experience and infrastructure in place from WoW. This isn’t Ubisoft trying to pull it off or anything… although the open beta weekend went pretty poorly, from my point of view. I expected a lot better from them, given the pedigree.

4203

With the amount of money they are making, dropping 100k on extra servers that might not be needed shouldn’t be a big deal. I am sure they can find a use for those servers somewhere else eventually.

4204

We’ll see. Hopefully, I’m pleasantly surprised!

4205

I actually thought the same, but according to Blizzard it went incredibly well, since they experimentally ran the entire open beta on a single server (I presume to see what it could handle).

The fact they got several hundred simultaneous conections on that beta server is mind blowing. How they HELL do they pull something like that off? Seriously, our VDI environment has 60 people connecting at any given time and that’s on THREE linked crazy high end servers, and we are ofen at 60% CPU usage.

4206

Keep dreaming.

At this point it seems pretty clear that companies making games requiring heavy online elements realize their game will be unplayable for at least a few days, but don’t think placating people who have already given them their money is worth the cost of fixing it.

4207

Surely that’s why you design it so you can use cloud servers?

4208

That’s why I would design it to be so, yes, but I highly doubt Blizzard is hosting their battle.net servers via a cloud service.

4209

Oh I doubt it as well, but anything I’m involved with would have to have the capacity to expand into a cloud service for extra capacity at this point, and I’m completely unwilling to give companies slack on the issue these days.

4210

“Server” is a misleading term. Anyone bigger than the SMB definition uses clustered farms for servers. Obviously for something like this it would be a farm, probably a single farm, but farm none the less. Designed properly, you simply add more parallel units to the farm to increase capacity.

4211

Absolutely, I’m right there with you. That’s why there’s going to be much gnashing of teeth in my household if there are bad login / stability issues at release. A few hiccups are to be expected, but Blizzard has the experience and resources to avoid big launch day (week?) problems. If the servers are absolutely crushed for the first few days it’s because they were too cheap to prevent it from happening.

4212

I also thought the open beta weekend went very poorly. It was hardly playable during most of my attempts. Someone tossed out a number of 300k connections, which seems very low and makes me assume that the first week won’t really be playable.

4213

The optimist in me says that maybe they were only interested in seeing how much stress they could put on a single cluster/farm in order to test threshold limits and behavior under that kind of strain. While I’m sure that was part of the plan (as any stress test would be about that), the realist in me is a little more jaded and cynical, given that the stress test was also primed as a big marketing event. ;)

4214

Aside from the server downtimes, I had no problems at all with the open beta weekend. When I logged in, I was able to play the game without a hitch. The friend I played with also had no problems to speak of. And we played enough to get a good feel for all five classes. Blizzard has more experience with handling server loads than just about any other game developer out there. Plus, they’re not oblivious to the high expectations associated with this game. I for one don’t expect major issues at launch.

4215

They held the open weekend to stress test their environment. That’s the whole point, so those problems won’t pop up on release.

You didn’t think it was a demo to convince people to buy the game, did you? It’s frickin Diablo 3. You’re gonna buy it anyway.

4216

Yeah, that was a beta not a demo (it was even labelled as such). That was about stress testing and balancing, not sales. :)

4217

Oh come on, fellow Qt3’ers, you know marketing fully involved with and all over that stress test. :) Beta test and marketing aren’t mutually exclusive or anything, especially these days!

4218

VDI is a different kind of animal, though. Isn’t what is happening here much more akin to DB connections? In that case, tens of thousands of connections to “superdome” type clusters is the norm.

4219

Well, yeah. The point is that this isn’t a demo in the classic sense.

I mean, I didn’t play the demo but does it come up with a nag screen when you enter or exit to remind you to buy on May 15th or something?

4220

Oh, I’m sure there is a difference, but such a vast one is … hard to fathom.

And I know when they say “server” they are really talking about a huge cluster of equipment, but I’m curious as to WHAT kind of equipment and how it’s set up, from a technical point of view.

And even just connections to the datbase, at 200-300k that’s quite a lot, to me anyway.