Tip for Destiny's Launch

Destiny always connected? DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN BUNGIE.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/clogged-streets-simcity-launch-plagued-by-server-problems/

Who didn't see that coming? Plan ahead!

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Who didn't see that coming? Plan ahead!

It happened to Blizzard for Diablo III's launch, too. I'm actually beginning to suspect it's inevitable that there will be server issues when Destiny launches. It'll just be a case of how well they deal with them…

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Destiny always connected? DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN BUNGIE.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/clogged-streets-simcity-launch-plagued-by-server-problems/

Who didn't see that coming? Plan ahead!

What a fantastic tip, Cody! "Don't fuck up!" - I bet Bungie would NEVER have thought of that for themselves! (I bet Origin didn't think of it, even!)

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What a fantastic tip, Cody! "Don't fuck up!" - I bet Bungie would NEVER have thought of that for themselves! (I bet Origin didn't think of it, even!)

I'm sure if you asked Blizzard's network operations guys prior to Diablo III's launch if they'd thought it all through they'd have said yes, too…

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I'm sure if you asked Blizzard's network operations guys prior to Diablo III's launch if they'd thought it all through they'd have said yes, too…

I bet you're wrong about that. :)

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I bet you're wrong about that. :)

So, you think they knew they were about to screw up?

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I bet you're wrong about that. :)

So, you think they knew they were about to screw up?

No, but I'm pretty sure they thought SOMETHING would go wrong.

I remember standing in the network operations area of Bungie's studios as Halo 3 went live in 2007. It was a pretty smooth launch, all in all... but you wouldn't have been able to guess that by looking at the guys watching the monitors that evening. They were POSITIVE things were going to break, and break spectacularly - they just didn't know how.

(They were wrong. Which was cool. But I'm pretty sure they were representative - I doubt there's ANYONE involved with a huge (multi-hundred-thousand-plus) launch of ANYTHING that isn't sure, at some level, that it's all about to come crashing down on their heads.)

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so they don't have to debug it at launch.

So I think that they are taking this seriously. They may also have some form of public beta.

Nothing in life is guaranteed but I bet that they will do their level best to avoid having egg on their face at launch.

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Servers are expensive. It makes far more sense, financially, to have enough capacity for the usual server load that will persist long after launch, than to develop the capacity for a few days of high traffic.

I would think you could rent server space for the first few days, but then there might be issues with dependability of an outside company, not to mention the potential for loss of your server code, which would make pirating the game much easier.

I think this is also what's behind the Sim City issues. It really only affects early players, which might not be a significant contribution to overall revenue. Not to mention that refunds for this sort of thing are basically non-existent, which means there's no reason not to do business this way.

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Servers are expensive. It makes far more sense, financially, to have enough capacity for the usual server load that will persist long after launch, than to develop the capacity for a few days of high traffic.

I would think you could rent server space for the first few days, but then there might be issues with dependability of an outside company, not to mention the potential for loss of your server code, which would make pirating the game much easier.

When building a distributed system like this, you target ensuring performance is still acceptable at peak loads, not ‘suck it and see what it's like when the dust has settled 6 months down the line’. Server hardware isn't that expensive; especially when you're talking about a top-tier videogame release from a major games publisher. Operational expenses of this kind are usually amortised over the projected lifespan of the project, and you can guarantee that not every piece of kit rolled out on day one will still be in use towards the end of that lifespan. Plus there are virtualisation options to ensure you're using hardware efficiently and load-balancing etc. In short: initial outlay isn't a good enough excuse for not having enough infrastructure to cope with peak demand.

I think this is also what's behind the Sim City issues. It really only affects early players, which might not be a significant contribution to overall revenue. Not to mention that refunds for this sort of thing are basically non-existent, which means there's no reason not to do business this way.

Maybe in the US where the consumer laws come written on a damp piece of tissue, but elsewhere (particularly in the EU) this sort of wilfully consumer-hostile behaviour has consequences.

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Servers are expensive.

Servers are actually cheap. The expense is very small compared to support staff. In fact MMO games all spend waaaaay more on support staff than they do on servers.

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I would think you could rent server space for the first few days, but then there might be issues with dependability of an outside company, not to mention the potential for loss of your server code, which would make pirating the game much easier.

Like what Halo 4 did on Azure? As mentioned below, that was insufficient. Not to mention the Azure outage causing Halo hiccups two weeks ago...

(I think cloud-assisted gaming is the right way to go, but is has more fundamental problems than the ones you mentioned.)

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Honestly, there are a lot of ways that they can make services scalable, some of which aren't nearly as difficult. For example when Guild Wars 2 launched instead of letting you visit other servers they used the server space normally set aside for that function to create overflow servers. I feel like Bungie *cough* or EA *cough* could do this pretty easily, such as using some of the resources normally set aside for matchmaking to make sure players are able to at least play. That is of course just an example, I'm sure there are other methods and services they could use to do it.

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Like what Halo 4 did on Azure?

Gotta love how Microsoft dogfoods it up with their premier videogame IP just to promote their going-nowhere-fast cloud service...

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What a fantastic tip, Cody!

Always glad to help.

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Admittedly, Cody does have a point. Half of this could be avoided if not for the connection required bit screwing the servers, especially for people who just want to play campaign alone. Blizzard also came to find out that a lot of people really enjoy playing Diable III by themselves, and the always on things has led and can still lead to problems for them. While it's not a deal breaker for me, the thought of Destiny requiring my connection to always be on is a really nasty thought that I definitely can't say I support, and not just because of server issues.

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Admittedly, Cody does have a point. Half of this could be avoided if not for the connection required bit screwing the servers, especially for people who just want to play campaign alone. Blizzard also came to find out that a lot of people really enjoy playing Diable III by themselves, and the always on things has led and can still lead to problems for them. While it's not a deal breaker for me, the thought of Destiny requiring my connection to always be on is a really nasty thought that I definitely can't say I support, and not just because of server issues.

My best guess: Destiny is not an FPS; it's not a Halo-style game with a linear, pre-packaged single player campaign.

Destiny is a shared-world shooter.

They wouldn't announce the "always online" requirement this early if it was just DRM. Usually if that's the case such details aren't mentioned until fairly late in the marketing cycle, as a footnote they hope people will gloss over. The fact that they've gone out of their way to point out something this potentially controversial (to the uninformed) tells me that the always-on requirement is vital to the way they want you to play the game.

World of Warcraft requires an internet connection at all times. It has a story and you can play through solo, but that's not the experience Blizzard had in mind when making it. An offline version of an MMO is an oxymoron, perhaps Bungie feels the same way about their new shared world shooter genre.

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My best guess: Destiny is not an FPS; it's not a Halo-style game with a linear, pre-packaged single player campaign.

I've been worried about this for a while and I was just starting to think that worry wasn't valid, and now you say this. ): Even if I'm going to spend a lot more time in multiplayer, I don't know if I'd want to buy a game, even marked down, that doesn't have single-player.

World of Warcraft requires an internet connection at all times. It has a story and you can play through solo,

well that was making me feel a little bit better...

but that's not the experience Blizzard had in mind when making it.

and then you went and said that D:

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Admittedly, Cody does have a point. Half of this could be avoided if not for the connection required bit screwing the servers, especially for people who just want to play campaign alone.

Yeah that's more of where I was going with this. The Sim City problem could have been totally eliminated if players could play offline. Once you wed yourself to the always online model, server problems like that are now entirely your fault and unforgivable. Can't connect to the servers on launch? "Well, okay I'll just play with my friends on the LAN" vs "Shit, I can't play at all".

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Destiny always connected? DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN BUNGIE.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/clogged-streets-simcity-launch-plagued-by-server-problems/

Who didn't see that coming? Plan ahead!

What a fantastic tip, Cody! "Don't fuck up!" - I bet Bungie would NEVER have thought of that for themselves! (I bet Origin didn't think of it, even!)

Claude's point is well taken, although I can imagine EA might respond much like Homer Simpson:

"Just because I don't CARE, doesn't mean I don't UNDERSTAND."

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In an age where a connection requirement is the norm, I think developers will need to put a more effort into ensuring adequate server performance on release. Since most games see their greatest percentage of sales during the first weeks of release, having server issues can severely impact their sales. Consumers aren't going to buy a game if they can't play it.

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Yeah personally experiencing the Sim City launch I can say that if this had been a game like Destiny I would've been much more annoyed. I still think Bungie can manage to pull it off with a lot less issues than Maxis had, but we'll just have to see.

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Halo 4 doesn't even require an always on connection, and all of its many, many server issues experienced during the first week or two of launch didn't help multiplayer's case for me. It just added to the things I was disliking about the game, and added onto the list of things that weren't working or were broken (some of which took months for them to fix in this most recent TU). I'm already sort of dreading the thought of having to avoid trying to play Destiny for maybe 48 hours after launch to bypass all the potential server issues.

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Honestly it's possible to have a good launch. When Guild Wars 2 launches it only had server problems for about 30 minutes to an hour right after it opened at midnight. With the size we're expecting Destiny to be I would imagine they will be preparing on the scale of an MMO not a scale like SimCity or even Halo multiplayer.

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I hope so. Bungie has plans to rule the world, after all. At the very least they should go take over a city and fill it with nothing but servers. Anyone who attempts to bring down the servers shall be flung into the sun.

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I hope so. Bungie has plans to rule the world, after all. At the very least they should go take over a city and fill it with nothing but servers. Anyone who attempts to bring down the servers shall be flung into the sun.

I think we figured out what the Traveler is: a giant server cluster.

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Tip for Destiny's Launch