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Amazon's New World Launch Woes Were Bound To Happen, But This Time Felt Different | MMORPG.com
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Amazon's New World Launch Woes Were Bound To Happen, But This Time Felt Different | MMORPG.com
Amazon powers much of the internet thanks to its Amazon Web Services offering, which is why it seemed like a surprise its MMO, New World, launched with such widespread server issues. Brradford explores why he felt that this launch felt different than other day one MMO woes.
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From my perspective, less than twelve hours after launch, it was flawless for us. Over a dozen servers with no que and medium pop. Dozens of no que high pop servers. Probably less than a dozen high pop servers with over 1000 in que.
If you want to be on a "popular" server I guess you have to wait.
As launch days go, this seems minuscule compared to most. That is of course unless you expect Amazon should make room for everyone on the server world they chose. Seems like you should be willing to look for other servers if you want to play that bad.
Mind you this is only from US East server point of view.
Sunday night all should be worked out so I can login and enjoy.
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The "not opening enough servers" problem is a problem of having dedicated, physical servers to host a game. If you buy 100 servers up front, and then in a month, half of your playerbase is gone, then you're stuck with 50 physical servers that you've paid for but don't have any use for. Publishers could reasonably conclude that having some queues for the first day or week is cheaper than spending two or three times as much on hardware as you actually need longer term.
That only provides an excuse for Amazon if New World is hosted on dedicated physical servers that can't ever be repurposed to any other use besides hosting New World. I'd be very surprised if they're actually doing that rather than just using commodity hardware from AWS. And if it's the latter, then New World traffic is a drop in the bucket for them, so they could easily have spun up twice as many servers as they needed for launch day and then scaled back once it became clear exactly how much they actually needed.
They didn't do that because they chose not to do it. One possibility is that the people working on New World are too incompetent to figure out how to scale things to more servers, as that expertise only lies somewhere else within the company. (Don't assume that everyone who works for a big company is competent at everything that the company does.) The other possibility is that they intentionally chose to have too few servers for launch day and wanted to have massive queues. There really isn't a third possibility, unless you count both of those possibilities being simultaneously true.
There is some degree to which problems are exacerbated by putting a bunch of people into queues and then people in queues doing things that you didn't expect to make the problem worse. Or alternatively, people in the game refusing to log out when they're done playing because they know that it will take hours to get back in. Those problems don't show up unless the game doesn't have nearly enough servers to begin with. If no one is waiting in a queue, then it doesn't matter what the people waiting in queues do.
Yeah I am going with it was done on purpose to create hype. But I agree, incompetence runs a very close 2nd option.
Other problem I have is people saying these servers are only holding 2k people? Yet they are getting 800k concurrent, which would require at least 400 servers. Math doesn't seem to work, even if you the people in queue as concurrent, that would still require 300 servers, which I don't see them using. Maybe I am missing something like the world name has multiple servers attached to it.
Yeah this is BS, me and friends purposely picked the lowest pop server available to us. It wasn't until later they added more servers. Now our server has 2k+ queue during primetime.
Its too hard to get all our friends to start a new char on a totally new server and waste time some have put in. Some are already level 30.
This is just is not the customers fault.
thank you! had one disconnect today, but I've played for 25 hours already on the most populated server on NA West so wont complain. Game is awesome.
This is really baffling, as it almost means they either don't give a darn about EU players again (US company yada yada here we are again) or they literally have no more available capacity in their AWS Frankfurt data center?!
They had no trouble however, doubling the server capacity within 12 hours in NA East. /shrug
So there is a lot of incompetence at play here.
It is that team which gave a pass to global names, staggered world server launches and transfers as a supposed panacea to launch woes. Every bone in their body should have been saying "Don't do it this way!".
Many posters have spoken of the smooth in game experience, I think that the 2000 players maximum was a deliberate move on AGS's part and a clever one. Would you as the team want to have players on social media complaining about log in queues or the in game experience? But having made that decision, global names and staggered server launches should have seemed barking.
Instead of keeping server names secret as long as possible they should have released them well in advance. It’s Amazon. They know how to use data better than anyone else. It’s why I get soap suggested shortly before it runs out...
They should have incentivized people to signup on a server in advance and published running population totals.
You signed up for that server pre-launch, you get queue priority. Others can still join at launch, but folks that pre-selected that server get in at a 4-1 rate.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
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Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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The concurrent numbers are taken from the Steam statistic AFAIK, and Steam doesn't make a difference between players who are ingame and already playing and players who are in the queue.
And what many forget: If servers have a preferred language, for example Spanish, then those players who speak the language will gather there and not spread out to other servers.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
EQ1 is my favorite style of MMO, so I really didn't think I would enjoy this new combat style MMO. Surprisingly, I'm having a lot of fun! (4 hours in)
FYI, this is not a bad launch when the ONLY complaint by everyone has nothing to do with the actual game, but that they can't stand waiting in line. Like everything, it has a limited capacity.
Every other MMORPG I've played at launch has had significant downtime the first week and glaring in-game bugs. Other MMO's wouldn't even have had adequate server caps in place, resulting in a poor in-game experience.
To me, New World is an example of a great launch. In-game, my 5 year old desktop runs it very smoothly and I haven't encountered any noticeable bugs. No crashes either. I couldn't play last night because of server queues, but no biggie. I've lost track of how many years I've been waiting for a new MMO to play, what's a few more days waiting for them to increase server capacity.
Looking at https://newworldstatus.com/ the lowest queue on EU servers is one and half hour for like 1 or 2 servers. Rest already have 3+ hour queues and rising.
And it's not even prime time yet in Europe.
Seems Amazon really doesn't give a damn about EU as usual, haven't added a single extra server since launch.
225k EU players on servers, from which 199k are sitting in a queue LOL!
According to https://newworldstatus.com/?sort=queue there's over 500 servers, if one world is one server
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