Why do you need real people to ‘stress’ the server in online games?

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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

11 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

A stress test isn’t about overwhelming the server’s network connection. That’s all a DDOS attack does. It’s about testing all the resources.

You need real people because headless clients simply can’t give you the whole picture. Real people will have different behaviours that can’t be predicted accurately. You need people to do what they will do, so you can catch any vulnerabilities. If a headless client doesn’t do something players do, you don’t know if that behaviour will be a problem.

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