Regarding your statement "The last patch put in a highly desirable feature" I was wondering what your were sepaking about.
It applies to any patch for any MMO, really. Do you pull the broken feature that players have been waiting for, or leave it in broken while you work feverishly to fix it. Either way, a great unhappiness ensues.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Regarding your statement "The last patch put in a highly desirable feature" I was wondering what your were sepaking about.
It applies to any patch for any MMO, really. Do you pull the broken feature that players have been waiting for, or leave it in broken while you work feverishly to fix it. Either way, a great unhappiness ensues.
Oh! thanks for the explanation.
There is only one answer, once it's done leave it there and even improve it. Customers and players alike don't care how difficult it's to maintain your environement. You'd had to think about it befrore implementing it.
There is only one answer, once it's done leave it there and even improve it. Customers and players alike don't care how difficult it's to maintain your environement. You'd had to think about it befrore implementing it."
you didn't really read this article at all did you? It's basically saying you need to realize that they TRY very hard to think of every possible scenario so something works as intended. But not everything is predictable.
There are too many posts for me to quote directly, so I will not. If you have been reading the comments I am sure you will recognise to whom I am referring.
Businesses that plan new software will always start with good intentions, so the planing and design phases are usually the best part. Unfortunately, everyone that wants the software, both the financiers and the users, keep pushing and pushing to get it earlier. This is where the problems start. Ever heard the feedback from code jockeys about what happens in the closing stages of MMO development? More and more people get hired to cut the code faster and faster. Pressure is applied to keep working longer and longer hours (for no extra compensation other than to state on your Resume that you were there). More pressure and less sleep means more minor mistakes that will haunt the venture later.
I recall when a major mainframe company planned a completely revamped version of their operating system (think DOS to Windows type upgrade but for mainframes). They spent millions of dollars and many years planning and designing it to prevent all the problems that were common place in their original software. Unfortunately, pressure was being constantly applied to get it out to the market so it be charged for and R&D costs recovered. As a result, someone decided that the fastest and cheapest way to cut the code was to hire the entire 1st year IT student body at the local university. After all, the design had been done properly and how difficult is it to just cut code?
Are MMOs more complex than software systems in the space shuttle? Yes and no. If you equate "Game Mechanics" to the interaction of multiple systems keeping people alive in space, then the shuttle wins by orders of magnitude. What does make MMOs more complex is everything that drives the graphics systems. Today's average PC is many 1000's of times more powerful than the first IBM PC, yet only a handful of people worldwide could type faster than that original 4.77MHz CPU could handle. What are we using all that extra processing power for? 90% of it is chewed up in graphics.
I freely admit that I love seeing how beautiful some of these new MMO worlds have been made. But if someone offered to upgrade my WoW graphics to "Real Life", full 3D, wear a body suit and goggles to immerse yourself in the game, at the cost of never getting past 4 fps, I would not take it. I would love to see it ... once ... but I would not game in that environment. I think part of the reason game companies plan on using the cutting edge technology is the belief that once the game goes live, what was cutting edge when the plan started will be common on most PCs. They need to take a step back from that belief.
What do I see for the future? The mistakes being made today by today's MMO companies are the same ones made many years and decades ago in industries all over the world. They are the same mistakes that the civil engineering industry made in the 1950's and 60's and the same that have resulted in the current world-wide financial system crisis. Boards of Directors taking their eyes off the actual product they make (or service they deliver) to push some artifical ranking number (eg share price) a little higher just so they can claim to be #1. When you forget about what you are doing, you stop doing it well and if that keeps up, you will not be doing it for long.
Sorry folks, but I do not see it ever getting better.
I have no doubt that the people whose job it is to keep the servers running almost invariably care very much about keeping the servers running smoothly. But that's not what people mean when they claim that a company doesn't care about server stability. If the problem is that the company doesn't have enough hardware, or good enough hardware, or won't hire enough people to run it properly, and that problem persists for a long period of time, then the company doesn't care about server stability. Or perhaps rather, the company cares about other things more than server stability, and when they have to make choices, are fine with letting the servers be a mess.
I can understand that there will be problems. If a server crashes now and then, or even has to be offline for several hours during prime time because something unforeseeable went wrong, I can understand that. If a game runs fine under normal circumstances, but chokes when you try to get 50 people in an area at once, I can understand that, too--unless the game creates incentives to cram as many people into an area as possible. What I'm not so understanding of is when servers are unstable day after day for months at a time without the company fixing it.
That may sound rather harsh; most companies I've seen do a respectable job of keeping their servers up and running. I've only seen two exceptions to this. One was the obscure 2am Games, which went out of business because, well, they really needed to go out of business. It would have been a severe flaw of capitalism if it couldn't put 2am Games out of business. The other exception is Blizzard, whose server problems, while inexcusably bad, were far shy of what 2am did, and Blizzard also did a lot of other things well.
A number of things in the article seem to be saying, "the servers are down, but it's not our fault, and there's nothing we can do about it". That may be true in the sense that it's not the fault of the people whose job is to run the servers. But that doesn't mean it's not the company's fault. If a company comes out and says, we're never going to have another patch to fix bugs, that wouldn't be the fault of the people who run the servers, either, but it would very much be the fault of the company--and it would be fair to say that a company that did so didn't care about fixing bugs.
The article talks at length about the order of servers leading to some having far more players than others. The overcrowded servers thus have lag problems. Where did the order of servers on the list come from? Was it forced upon you by the nature of the universe? Or did someone at the company have to code it as such? If a bad way of listing the servers available funnels too many players into some and not enough into others, that's the fault of the company.
I can understand that some bugs are very, very hard to track down and fix. If all a player can tell you is that the game is crashing, there are many, many things that could potentially cause that. It could be subtle interactions of disparate code pieces written by different people. I get that. But you can't find the code that sorts the servers on a list? Really? Carelessness there may not be the fault of those whose job is to run the servers, but it is very much the fault of the company. A company that takes no measures to address that can fairly be said not to care about the problem.
Perhaps more fundamental is the assumption that there need to be separate servers with players prohibited from moving from one to another in the first place. Wizard101 has no such problems, for example. Players can freely switch from one server to another almost whenever they feel like it (60 second delay, not available when in an instance). Guild Wars likewise has no problems with one server being too crowded and another too empty. A company that chose to go the rigidly separate servers route chose all the problems that arise from that model. Whatever problems arise from that choice are the fault of the company.
There's this magical thing we IT people call "virtualization" that fixes almost all those issues... Get with the new technology and consolidate resources.
Nice artickle but I do understand why most WAR players pick up the servers that already have most players (and the LOTRO players for that matter).
The game is far more fun when there are more people around, there are a lot of discussions here about which server that have most population so people can choose them.
And as I see it, the dev must cap the server so it cant get too many players. In this case the problem came out of nowhere but there are more discussions about lagg here so I think Mythic have taken water over their heads and let in too many players on the servers, either they will have to put some kind of tech wizzard to make it all possible or lower the number of players (they dont have to kick anyone, just dont let any new players up until enough quited).
A PvP game with lagg is the worst possibly game to play. I can uderstand that crap just happens but Mythic must fix this ASAP or lose a lot of subs. No need to point fingers whos fault things are.
you didn't really read this article at all did you? It's basically saying you need to realize that they TRY very hard to think of every possible scenario so something works as intended. But not everything is predictable.
you didn't really read this article at all did you? It's basically saying you need to realize that they TRY very hard to think of every possible scenario so something works as intended. But not everything is predictable.
I did. I was adding some emplasis on her post.
Originally posted by fatchickenj
There's this magical thing we IT people call "virtualization" that fixes almost all those issues... Get with the new technology and consolidate resources.
Yes and no. Virtualization can only go as far as your architecture let you consolidate things.
So if it wasn't planned beforehand it won't help you at all. Not every architecture is scalable and no matter what you do you'll have things like I/O bottlenecks, latency issues. Lately we virtualized a farm of 300+ Unix/Linux/Windows severs and well Virtualization can be your worst ennemy.
/trollon Wow, Kyleran, for an elite member of this site I would have expected better of you than: '...unless it was some F2P or something.' I hereby Knight thee Troll of the Realm. Your post is hereby summarily dismissed! /trolloff At least the rest of the responses, so far, have been enlightening, especially the ex server-maintenance chap.
ROFL, I'm only an elite member for all the BS I spew here, nothing more. Dismissing my entire post for one off hand remark is being a bit sensitive don't you think? (and many F2P's are not well run, IMO at least)
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Ok so basically whats shes saying in a underlying tone that Turbine is over subscribing servers, and dont have anyone working on real server optimizations from within the code anymore because its obvious that part of the code is "good enough" so no real need to keep up on that part anymore, which in turn means more money in the pocket of the executives whom were former AIG employees that decied that profits is more important than keeping on at least 2 people to keep server code up to date and more improved after each new addition of content which is supposed to be their 1st priority with the game, and should be with all the millions of dollars theyre making off the game during a economnic crunch which I might add isnt hurting the gaming industry so much as its more or less a excuse to rocket sales even further than before by laying thousands of people who were working for less than meager wages to start with, bringing around the question does Turbine really do "care" about their game, and their customer base....(Takes a huge breath...wipes brow!)........right?
To me in a "128 bit Sanya encrypted nutshell" she is pretty much saying the exact same thing that the gamer she was ridiculing about the company not "caring" all because the gamer didnt break it down in a pie and relabeled it BS? Wow Sanya I sorta thought that when someone saves someone from having to hear someone talking BS and trying to make it look prettier than a pig with a silk purse on, was doing me, and a few billion intelligent people on the planet a favor....(take another huge breath)....right?
Now I see why Mythic picked you up, but you cant BS a BSer Sanya, but +1 to you for trying! Have a awesome "non-BS" day!
What do I see for the future? The mistakes being made today by today's MMO companies are the same ones made many years and decades ago in industries all over the world. They are the same mistakes that the civil engineering industry made in the 1950's and 60's and the same that have resulted in the current world-wide financial system crisis. Boards of Directors taking their eyes off the actual product they make (or service they deliver) to push some artifical ranking number (eg share price) a little higher just so they can claim to be #1. When you forget about what you are doing, you stop doing it well and if that keeps up, you will not be doing it for long. Sorry folks, but I do not see it ever getting better.
Me either.
And that makes me very sad.
From my observation, "the industry" is so protective of itself that it doesn't let new people with new ideas in unless they have suchandsuch a degree beneath years and years already in the industry. Then those people have to have a game that is somewhat made, and not just a design document. THEN, those people have to hope their game isn't "too risky" so that someone with money will invest in it.
All the while, we have to hope that the industry hasn't warped such a potentially bright mind into not exploring the boundaries of video game design and instead looking for the next cash cow based on doing what other games have done previously. Which, essentially... is fail.
The industry will, essentially, choke itself.
All while thinking they're wonderful... and ignoring the fact that they fail to deliver time and time and time and time again.
I'd like to punch a few CEOs in the face to be honest.
Excellent read, and as a Sys-Admin myself, well-appreciated. I understand, fully, having to wake up in the middle of the night to resolve server issues. Not for an MMO, mind you, but server issues are server issues.
The biggest problem with MMOs is the whole "dude, what server are you on, I'll join that one". Most MMOs require you to limit yourself to one server, or shard, so that you can join up with others you know. The fall-back from this, of course, is the more popular a server is, the heavier the load. The heavier the load, the more issues the end-user will see.
MMOs and the sharded world most rely on have always experienced this problem. Players want to be part of the most action-packed server. The most action-packed servers, however, will eventually not be much fun to play on once they reach max-capacity.
I think one thing MMO vendors could do is make server transfers free. Not free forever, mind you, but free maybe once every 6 months. This would make it more attractive for players who dislike server lag to pickup and move to a lighter server, or even pick up and move an entire guild to a lighter server for that matter. This would be advantageous to both players and the vendor.
Ok so basically whats shes saying in a underlying tone that Turbine is over subscribing servers, and dont have anyone working on real server optimizations from within the code anymore because its obvious that part of the code is "good enough" so no real need to keep up on that part anymore,
That's silly. There is no single more important aspect to a MMO than its servers; if they don't work, there's no game any more, and unavailability is a good way to get people to try and get hooked on your competition.
Now you have a half-point in that like many services MMOs do 'oversell' in that they are not providing capacity for every single subscriber to be online at one time, but then you throw out your half-point by venturing into hyperbole.
Besides, if you had been looking, you would have noticed that lately Turbine was in fact advertising for a server programmer. I know this because I was recently in the job hunt and almost applied, but MA is a bit more uprooting than I wanted to do at the moment.
Originally posted by Sanya
Next week, I’ve got some discussion with an actual server professional to share with you. Tune in then!
Oh, I can't wait to see who that might be... could it be her long-time friend and one-time Mythic server professional Lum? What are the odds?
There are many important aspects for any project, MMO included.
But the original article does hit the nail, if the server flops, all designa and vision are gone. People can stare at your website, the artwork of your boxset, and listen to the musical score (when the screen says, "server down") for just so long.
The server has to sustain the game. Game design has to be implemented and that is where the server comes in. As a designer at times, I know how many times my design is compromised b/c the engineer need to implement it in a budge limit. Can't blame him either, he need to meet the budget or he is fired.
During the development stage, everything is a compromise, the lore wants this, the designer has to design a gameplay that is playable, not just loyal to lore. The engineer has to implement it, not just loyal to design, but limited to budget. The programmer must implement the engineer's (read system design) wishes according to the limits of the platform and engine.
Everything is a compromise, from lore to design to implementation to coding. Budget, time constraint and "vision" about the future platform on which the game (or whatever system being developed) is to be delivered on. Blame no one in particular. Its a team work, in which everyone want his own but ends up compromising.
Hey Sanya Weathers!!! I'm a 24 year old cpa in the process of getting his actuarial degree. I'm also a male model with a great body and above average face. Let me know if you want to go out sometime. Nice article too....8474146382
Ok so basically whats shes saying in a underlying tone that Turbine is over subscribing servers, and dont have anyone working on real server optimizations from within the code anymore because its obvious that part of the code is "good enough" so no real need to keep up on that part anymore,
That's silly. There is no single more important aspect to a MMO than its servers; if they don't work, there's no game any more, and unavailability is a good way to get people to try and get hooked on your competition.
Now you have a half-point in that like many services MMOs do 'oversell' in that they are not providing capacity for every single subscriber to be online at one time, but then you throw out your half-point by venturing into hyperbole.
Besides, if you had been looking, you would have noticed that lately Turbine was in fact advertising for a server programmer. I know this because I was recently in the job hunt and almost applied, but MA is a bit more uprooting than I wanted to do at the moment.
Originally posted by Sanya
Next week, I’ve got some discussion with an actual server professional to share with you. Tune in then!
Oh, I can't wait to see who that might be... could it be her long-time friend and one-time Mythic server professional Lum? What are the odds?
Wow, did someone hit you over the head with a hammer? Try to take my WHOLE post into context instead of a small section that can be interpreted into anything ya want. F`ing liberal tree huggers, give them books, and give them books, and all they do is eat the pages!
Comments
It applies to any patch for any MMO, really. Do you pull the broken feature that players have been waiting for, or leave it in broken while you work feverishly to fix it. Either way, a great unhappiness ensues.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
It applies to any patch for any MMO, really. Do you pull the broken feature that players have been waiting for, or leave it in broken while you work feverishly to fix it. Either way, a great unhappiness ensues.
Oh! thanks for the explanation.
There is only one answer, once it's done leave it there and even improve it. Customers and players alike don't care how difficult it's to maintain your environement. You'd had to think about it befrore implementing it.
"Oh! thanks for the explanation.
There is only one answer, once it's done leave it there and even improve it. Customers and players alike don't care how difficult it's to maintain your environement. You'd had to think about it befrore implementing it."
you didn't really read this article at all did you? It's basically saying you need to realize that they TRY very hard to think of every possible scenario so something works as intended. But not everything is predictable.
There are too many posts for me to quote directly, so I will not. If you have been reading the comments I am sure you will recognise to whom I am referring.
Businesses that plan new software will always start with good intentions, so the planing and design phases are usually the best part. Unfortunately, everyone that wants the software, both the financiers and the users, keep pushing and pushing to get it earlier. This is where the problems start. Ever heard the feedback from code jockeys about what happens in the closing stages of MMO development? More and more people get hired to cut the code faster and faster. Pressure is applied to keep working longer and longer hours (for no extra compensation other than to state on your Resume that you were there). More pressure and less sleep means more minor mistakes that will haunt the venture later.
I recall when a major mainframe company planned a completely revamped version of their operating system (think DOS to Windows type upgrade but for mainframes). They spent millions of dollars and many years planning and designing it to prevent all the problems that were common place in their original software. Unfortunately, pressure was being constantly applied to get it out to the market so it be charged for and R&D costs recovered. As a result, someone decided that the fastest and cheapest way to cut the code was to hire the entire 1st year IT student body at the local university. After all, the design had been done properly and how difficult is it to just cut code?
Are MMOs more complex than software systems in the space shuttle? Yes and no. If you equate "Game Mechanics" to the interaction of multiple systems keeping people alive in space, then the shuttle wins by orders of magnitude. What does make MMOs more complex is everything that drives the graphics systems. Today's average PC is many 1000's of times more powerful than the first IBM PC, yet only a handful of people worldwide could type faster than that original 4.77MHz CPU could handle. What are we using all that extra processing power for? 90% of it is chewed up in graphics.
I freely admit that I love seeing how beautiful some of these new MMO worlds have been made. But if someone offered to upgrade my WoW graphics to "Real Life", full 3D, wear a body suit and goggles to immerse yourself in the game, at the cost of never getting past 4 fps, I would not take it. I would love to see it ... once ... but I would not game in that environment. I think part of the reason game companies plan on using the cutting edge technology is the belief that once the game goes live, what was cutting edge when the plan started will be common on most PCs. They need to take a step back from that belief.
What do I see for the future? The mistakes being made today by today's MMO companies are the same ones made many years and decades ago in industries all over the world. They are the same mistakes that the civil engineering industry made in the 1950's and 60's and the same that have resulted in the current world-wide financial system crisis. Boards of Directors taking their eyes off the actual product they make (or service they deliver) to push some artifical ranking number (eg share price) a little higher just so they can claim to be #1. When you forget about what you are doing, you stop doing it well and if that keeps up, you will not be doing it for long.
Sorry folks, but I do not see it ever getting better.
I have no doubt that the people whose job it is to keep the servers running almost invariably care very much about keeping the servers running smoothly. But that's not what people mean when they claim that a company doesn't care about server stability. If the problem is that the company doesn't have enough hardware, or good enough hardware, or won't hire enough people to run it properly, and that problem persists for a long period of time, then the company doesn't care about server stability. Or perhaps rather, the company cares about other things more than server stability, and when they have to make choices, are fine with letting the servers be a mess.
I can understand that there will be problems. If a server crashes now and then, or even has to be offline for several hours during prime time because something unforeseeable went wrong, I can understand that. If a game runs fine under normal circumstances, but chokes when you try to get 50 people in an area at once, I can understand that, too--unless the game creates incentives to cram as many people into an area as possible. What I'm not so understanding of is when servers are unstable day after day for months at a time without the company fixing it.
That may sound rather harsh; most companies I've seen do a respectable job of keeping their servers up and running. I've only seen two exceptions to this. One was the obscure 2am Games, which went out of business because, well, they really needed to go out of business. It would have been a severe flaw of capitalism if it couldn't put 2am Games out of business. The other exception is Blizzard, whose server problems, while inexcusably bad, were far shy of what 2am did, and Blizzard also did a lot of other things well.
A number of things in the article seem to be saying, "the servers are down, but it's not our fault, and there's nothing we can do about it". That may be true in the sense that it's not the fault of the people whose job is to run the servers. But that doesn't mean it's not the company's fault. If a company comes out and says, we're never going to have another patch to fix bugs, that wouldn't be the fault of the people who run the servers, either, but it would very much be the fault of the company--and it would be fair to say that a company that did so didn't care about fixing bugs.
The article talks at length about the order of servers leading to some having far more players than others. The overcrowded servers thus have lag problems. Where did the order of servers on the list come from? Was it forced upon you by the nature of the universe? Or did someone at the company have to code it as such? If a bad way of listing the servers available funnels too many players into some and not enough into others, that's the fault of the company.
I can understand that some bugs are very, very hard to track down and fix. If all a player can tell you is that the game is crashing, there are many, many things that could potentially cause that. It could be subtle interactions of disparate code pieces written by different people. I get that. But you can't find the code that sorts the servers on a list? Really? Carelessness there may not be the fault of those whose job is to run the servers, but it is very much the fault of the company. A company that takes no measures to address that can fairly be said not to care about the problem.
Perhaps more fundamental is the assumption that there need to be separate servers with players prohibited from moving from one to another in the first place. Wizard101 has no such problems, for example. Players can freely switch from one server to another almost whenever they feel like it (60 second delay, not available when in an instance). Guild Wars likewise has no problems with one server being too crowded and another too empty. A company that chose to go the rigidly separate servers route chose all the problems that arise from that model. Whatever problems arise from that choice are the fault of the company.
There's this magical thing we IT people call "virtualization" that fixes almost all those issues... Get with the new technology and consolidate resources.
Nice artickle but I do understand why most WAR players pick up the servers that already have most players (and the LOTRO players for that matter).
The game is far more fun when there are more people around, there are a lot of discussions here about which server that have most population so people can choose them.
And as I see it, the dev must cap the server so it cant get too many players. In this case the problem came out of nowhere but there are more discussions about lagg here so I think Mythic have taken water over their heads and let in too many players on the servers, either they will have to put some kind of tech wizzard to make it all possible or lower the number of players (they dont have to kick anyone, just dont let any new players up until enough quited).
A PvP game with lagg is the worst possibly game to play. I can uderstand that crap just happens but Mythic must fix this ASAP or lose a lot of subs. No need to point fingers whos fault things are.
"Freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose" - Janis Joplin
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I did. I was adding some emplasis on her post.
I did. I was adding some emplasis on her post.
Originally posted by fatchickenj
There's this magical thing we IT people call "virtualization" that fixes almost all those issues... Get with the new technology and consolidate resources.
Yes and no. Virtualization can only go as far as your architecture let you consolidate things.
So if it wasn't planned beforehand it won't help you at all. Not every architecture is scalable and no matter what you do you'll have things like I/O bottlenecks, latency issues. Lately we virtualized a farm of 300+ Unix/Linux/Windows severs and well Virtualization can be your worst ennemy.
ROFL, I'm only an elite member for all the BS I spew here, nothing more. Dismissing my entire post for one off hand remark is being a bit sensitive don't you think? (and many F2P's are not well run, IMO at least)
As for being a troll, its a title I proudly wear.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Ok so basically whats shes saying in a underlying tone that Turbine is over subscribing servers, and dont have anyone working on real server optimizations from within the code anymore because its obvious that part of the code is "good enough" so no real need to keep up on that part anymore, which in turn means more money in the pocket of the executives whom were former AIG employees that decied that profits is more important than keeping on at least 2 people to keep server code up to date and more improved after each new addition of content which is supposed to be their 1st priority with the game, and should be with all the millions of dollars theyre making off the game during a economnic crunch which I might add isnt hurting the gaming industry so much as its more or less a excuse to rocket sales even further than before by laying thousands of people who were working for less than meager wages to start with, bringing around the question does Turbine really do "care" about their game, and their customer base....(Takes a huge breath...wipes brow!)........right?
To me in a "128 bit Sanya encrypted nutshell" she is pretty much saying the exact same thing that the gamer she was ridiculing about the company not "caring" all because the gamer didnt break it down in a pie and relabeled it BS? Wow Sanya I sorta thought that when someone saves someone from having to hear someone talking BS and trying to make it look prettier than a pig with a silk purse on, was doing me, and a few billion intelligent people on the planet a favor....(take another huge breath)....right?
Now I see why Mythic picked you up, but you cant BS a BSer Sanya, but +1 to you for trying! Have a awesome "non-BS" day!
Me either.
And that makes me very sad.
From my observation, "the industry" is so protective of itself that it doesn't let new people with new ideas in unless they have suchandsuch a degree beneath years and years already in the industry. Then those people have to have a game that is somewhat made, and not just a design document. THEN, those people have to hope their game isn't "too risky" so that someone with money will invest in it.
All the while, we have to hope that the industry hasn't warped such a potentially bright mind into not exploring the boundaries of video game design and instead looking for the next cash cow based on doing what other games have done previously. Which, essentially... is fail.
The industry will, essentially, choke itself.
All while thinking they're wonderful... and ignoring the fact that they fail to deliver time and time and time and time again.
I'd like to punch a few CEOs in the face to be honest.
Well said and I hope it eleviates some of the typical flamers I see when lotro has to bring servers down for hot fixes. Of course I know better too.
Excellent read, and as a Sys-Admin myself, well-appreciated. I understand, fully, having to wake up in the middle of the night to resolve server issues. Not for an MMO, mind you, but server issues are server issues.
The biggest problem with MMOs is the whole "dude, what server are you on, I'll join that one". Most MMOs require you to limit yourself to one server, or shard, so that you can join up with others you know. The fall-back from this, of course, is the more popular a server is, the heavier the load. The heavier the load, the more issues the end-user will see.
MMOs and the sharded world most rely on have always experienced this problem. Players want to be part of the most action-packed server. The most action-packed servers, however, will eventually not be much fun to play on once they reach max-capacity.
I think one thing MMO vendors could do is make server transfers free. Not free forever, mind you, but free maybe once every 6 months. This would make it more attractive for players who dislike server lag to pickup and move to a lighter server, or even pick up and move an entire guild to a lighter server for that matter. This would be advantageous to both players and the vendor.
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Danag
That's silly. There is no single more important aspect to a MMO than its servers; if they don't work, there's no game any more, and unavailability is a good way to get people to try and get hooked on your competition.
Now you have a half-point in that like many services MMOs do 'oversell' in that they are not providing capacity for every single subscriber to be online at one time, but then you throw out your half-point by venturing into hyperbole.
Besides, if you had been looking, you would have noticed that lately Turbine was in fact advertising for a server programmer. I know this because I was recently in the job hunt and almost applied, but MA is a bit more uprooting than I wanted to do at the moment.
Originally posted by Sanya
Next week, I’ve got some discussion with an actual server professional to share with you. Tune in then!
Oh, I can't wait to see who that might be... could it be her long-time friend and one-time Mythic server professional Lum? What are the odds?
Be seeing you.
There are many important aspects for any project, MMO included.
But the original article does hit the nail, if the server flops, all designa and vision are gone. People can stare at your website, the artwork of your boxset, and listen to the musical score (when the screen says, "server down") for just so long.
The server has to sustain the game. Game design has to be implemented and that is where the server comes in. As a designer at times, I know how many times my design is compromised b/c the engineer need to implement it in a budge limit. Can't blame him either, he need to meet the budget or he is fired.
During the development stage, everything is a compromise, the lore wants this, the designer has to design a gameplay that is playable, not just loyal to lore. The engineer has to implement it, not just loyal to design, but limited to budget. The programmer must implement the engineer's (read system design) wishes according to the limits of the platform and engine.
Everything is a compromise, from lore to design to implementation to coding. Budget, time constraint and "vision" about the future platform on which the game (or whatever system being developed) is to be delivered on. Blame no one in particular. Its a team work, in which everyone want his own but ends up compromising.
Hey Sanya Weathers!!! I'm a 24 year old cpa in the process of getting his actuarial degree. I'm also a male model with a great body and above average face. Let me know if you want to go out sometime. Nice article too....8474146382
That's silly. There is no single more important aspect to a MMO than its servers; if they don't work, there's no game any more, and unavailability is a good way to get people to try and get hooked on your competition.
Now you have a half-point in that like many services MMOs do 'oversell' in that they are not providing capacity for every single subscriber to be online at one time, but then you throw out your half-point by venturing into hyperbole.
Besides, if you had been looking, you would have noticed that lately Turbine was in fact advertising for a server programmer. I know this because I was recently in the job hunt and almost applied, but MA is a bit more uprooting than I wanted to do at the moment.
Originally posted by Sanya
Next week, I’ve got some discussion with an actual server professional to share with you. Tune in then!
Oh, I can't wait to see who that might be... could it be her long-time friend and one-time Mythic server professional Lum? What are the odds?
Wow, did someone hit you over the head with a hammer? Try to take my WHOLE post into context instead of a small section that can be interpreted into anything ya want. F`ing liberal tree huggers, give them books, and give them books, and all they do is eat the pages!