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
The one thing that’s extremely difficult do is accurately simulate being ignorant. Simple example, it’s very hard for you to imagine getting lost in your own house. You could try to imagine what it would be like to be lost in there and think about where you would put up signs to not get lost, but until a person actually comes into your house for the first time and gets lost looking for something, you don’t know where they’ll get lost. It’s a lot faster to watch 3 people get lost and put a sign there vs evaluating every corner of every room to see where it could happen.
Users get lost, click wrong buttons, click stupid buttons, try to break things in ways you would never consider, and do countless other things that a developer who knows the game inside and out wouldn’t think of.
It’s rarely just the login that causes issues. It’s usually something far more complicated. In cases where user turn out did vastly exceed expectations, there’s nothing you can do about that. It’s far better for a company to have to buy more servers after the fact vs having massively under utilized servers that they paid for up front. Especially for a small company who may not have the money to afford that until the game starts selling well.
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