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
A DDoS attack isn’t usually stressing the whole game, just a specific, internet-exposed portion of it – usually the login services. Think of it like a crowd of people all banging on the front door of a building – they don’t even want *in* the building, they’ll just walk away if the door is opened for them, but while they’re around the real customers can’t get through the crowd to enter.
That will certainly test your login servers, but an online game has a whole mess of infrastructure and services *behind* that which aren’t seeing the DDoS and need to be tested. Actual players doing actual gameplay are the best way to test since you want to test the whole thing top-to-bottom.
Sure, you *could* create a whole fleet of programmed robot “players” which can stress your game, and there are advantages to that, but you run into problems:
* Building out a big enough set of bots is potentially expensive (in time or infrastructure costs), especially if you’re creating a game that’s supposed to support very high player counts.
* Bots will never act like real players act, so it’s not a very realistic test. If the bots all spread out in an MMO but the players all cluster together into a few areas, the bot test and the player test will get very different results.
* You miss out on free marketing. Players who participate in a stress test get a free sneak peek at the game, which makes them happy (if your game’s worth being excited about!) and generates buzz (so, free social media coverage and grassroots discussion/engagement).
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