I understand they have no problem implementing this. But implement new features take times. And they would rather be fixing the sever issues now rather than doing something which will be obsolete. Launch day are always the toughest time of any game. The queue is simply there because they have already prepared it. The overwhelming amount of people playing are what they did not expect, which is a very good news indeed. I was getting worried before launch that the game is coming close to release without any fanfare or hype.
Yup totally understand about it taking time to implementing new features. I think they are doing the right thing here also. It's tough to predict reception, but I think folks underestimate the clout that comes along with getting endorsed by Penny Arcade. I see this quite often where devs get surprised when their game gets mentioned on the site. Almost like a Slashdot effect is what happens sometimes.
I apologize for the queues and for the lag. We got surprised by both the demand and our ability to handle numbers. We did test in Beta with bots standing in for players, but it turns out that real players act a bit differently. No surprise there - it's just hard to predict what will happen in the real world. But that doesn't really concern you, the player, I'm sure. It's our job to provide a quality play experience and we're working to try to do that. Earlier today we experimented with turning on some profiling features in our database to try to get an insight into what was going on. That made things MUCH worse so we turned that off again. Things seem reasonably stable now and we're working on a bunch of optimisations that we've already identified. I'll keep you all informed as we make more progress.
Nice work all 'round, as far as I'm concerned. I'm pretty impressed with how quickly the Blue Manchu dev / ops team was able to iterate over different tweaks and fixes. I've had fewer issues playing this game on launch day than I've had with certain titles during regular operations. Cheers, and thanks for the great efforts you've put in today, and congrats on a successful launch - I'm gonna go mess up some goblins to celebrate.
I really want to be impressed by how popular this game has gotten but things like WoW have ruined my perspective
Yea, ouch. Are you saying that you don't know if YOU like the game until you have proof that 10 million other people do, too? I mean, everyone is certainly welcome to their opinion, but even if I was the only one playing, I would still like this game. (I would be a little fearful that there wouldn't be many updates, if I was the only one buying pizzas, but I would still play.) There are still some Kongregate flash games that I play regularly, and those certainly don't have millions of people who play them.
Selective profiling ? For new accounts under lvl 7 only... could be anything...server desyncs, incompatible plugins, AVs etc... shrugs.
I wonder what made you think that a game with 40,000 closed beta testers would have enough capacity with a server that only has room for 2,500. As far as I know the industry rule of thumb is that number of active players divided by 5 gives you a good estimate of peak concurrent users. And that is in the long run, usually a higher percentage of players is only in the first weeks after release.
I expected this when I got up yesterday morning and saw a ten minute wait. Even as a basic supporter I'd rather them put up enough servers to hold all the players then give me specific access, though I'm not opposed to it.
Hey Jon & company, You folks are doing great. For a small and independent firm, and a first Friday eve post launch, lag is pretty understandable. Thanks for being so responsive about what's going on... Yes the delays are not as much fun as, say, hunting cards, but I figure things will improvise. (Right?
Tobold, I agree - but the test only ever had 1 k simultaneous users, even with 40 k accounts. So I can understand why they were surprised, but yes - they probably should have prepared for maybe 5 k at least. 2500 is a very low number considering. Easy to be wise after the fact however!
Whoever it was who posted earlier about people who have actually paid money having priority status in the queue is on point. To think I paid money and am waiting for peeps who did not is ridiculous. I've got limited time for this nonsense.
40,000 beta testers is not 40,000 active players. I went through the leaderboard near the end of Beta, and there were less than 9,000 who won more than 1 multiplayer game (I got tired of scrolling through at that point). Also, people should remember to close out the game when they're done playing or stopping for a while. No reason to keep other from enjoying it while you're not actually there.
Noone said it wasn't a good idea, I even suggested it myself in another thread. It's just a matter of being able to code it within a reasonable time frame - which would take precious resources (they are like 5 people!) from Blue Manchu working on setting up new servers and code to stabilize things. There's no switch they can turn on that just suddenly checks for paying customers on login. Knowing the kind of people the devs are I could totally see them giving people with existing subs an extra day or two to alleviate some of the growing pains. But that's just me guessing.
That being said a lot of people play sp - and are not even interested in mp. So while interesting numbers don't really tell the whole truth. If people followed the tutorial, they're likely not playing more than 1 mp game if they're not interested. Also, as to put things into perspective from earlier post. Anyone remember the D3 launch? Anyone? And that was the numero uno developer in terms of financial backing and launch know-how.
Right, I wasn't using that as a full number, but to compliment the argument I was making. Less than 14,000 people were even on the MP ranking board. Beta lasted for quite a while, and it's kind of silly to assume they were all active.
Speaking as a fellow who's got an active three-month membership, I'm thinking that would be a terrible move. Sure, it'd save you your fifteen minutes, but even if the pay / free player ratio is 50/50 that means that your fifteen minutes gets added on to their wait. Or worse, if paid players spend more time in the game during an average session (which I think is a reasonable assumption.) The server queues are getting handled, but on the occasion that we wind up with a small wait, I'd rather share that evenly with all the players; I don't want the club membership thing to turn into this VIP versus peasantry shenanigans that so often happens in other free-to-play games.
I paid for a membership and I'm fine with a queue. I realize that many people don't have a lot of free time, but you can Q, do some housework, take a shower, whatever, and when you finish you are in. Not the end of the world, and the lag seems improved from yesterday. Given that we are conversing on the interwebs, I do feel a need to criticize though: discards each seem to be a separate client/server interaction, you might consider ticking them all off in the client then handing everything in one go. A hearty congrats on the success of the game and thanks for all the hard work.
I'm reasonably sure that the pay/free ratio is not anywhere close to 50/50. If it's like a lot of ftp games, they'll have 5-10% generating over 50% of their revenue. In my opinion, like in many other businesses, those 5-10% absolutely deserve VIP treatment.
