I was stuck in the very long queue for an upcoming online game (like a few thousands in front of me) and the reasoning for that is they need to stress the server so they can optimise it and the queue and then have servers ready for the release date. It’s always like that during betas, stress events and release dates. Before the release day, any queue is justified by ‘we need players to test the server for us’ and after the release day the justification is that ‘we didn’t expect so many players’.
Buy why do you need real people to connect to your server? If DDoS can overwhelm the server then why can’t you use it to test it and treat it as fake players that stress your server?
In: Technology
Others have noted the main issues with this, but i think it wort looking at WHY the servers are unprepared after a stress test.
Before the test, we make some assumptions about the number of players that will connect. We can figure that out from our marketing and engagement, but its still a lose prediction. We also dont want to DDOS our own servers by letting everyone in at once. Were trying to see what happens when we stress the game systems, not what happens when our login servers get nuked.
Based on the stress test were able to identify where we might have problems. Maybe the players item storage was creating too many requests and we need to fix that. We also get a sense of the real player numbers. We guess 50k players, and we get 100k during the stress test. in the ball park but still pretty off. But people enjoyed what they saw in the stress test, so we can also assume we’ll get more players than that. We need to make another prediction on the actual player count at launch. Make it too small, and we’ll have unhappy players sitting in the queue. Too big, and we might end up spending a ton of money on server space we dont need. We’d rather some players need to wait then burning potentially millions of dollars on servers we dont need. So, we make a conservative estimate. Often its too low.
A good example is Helldivers 2. Helldivers 1 had an all time peak player count on steam of about 7000 players. When making the sequal, they know they are going to get MORE players but how many is up in the air. So they hope for 5x as many players. And the game explodes. Stress tests are utterly overwhelmed. They make an even bigger server for launch. That gets overwhelmed. It took nearly 2 weeks for things to stabilize.
Predictions are hard, and sometimes your player base is insane
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