Diablo III - It's official

[aaronspink]

My point about fucking up in the past is that you can't really prepare for the situation of a Blizzard-level game launch in advance. Nobody can.

This is false. This will continue to be false. With the right back end design, you can scale upwards of 100 MILLION users on launch day without issue. Quite simply, it appears blizzard hasn't designed a reasonable modern backend.

There were ~4.5 MILLION copies in the wild on launch night according to recent figures and statements, and it's a reasonable guess that the vast majority of those copies tried to log in on launch day. That's an enormous load on the infrastructure.

THAT IS A JOKE of a load. Both EC3 and Azure could handle that without breaking a sweat, to name but two of many third party infrastructure providers. There quite simply is no technical reason why that load should ever be an issue.

You can do dry test-runs all day, and the stress test Blizzard executed reached 300k concurrent users (which is already significant; it's more than the full population of EVE online for example), but nothing short of a full launch can simulate a full launch, so how do you prepare FULLY for something like that? Can't be done, I'd say.

I'm pretty sure that given 100k$ and couple months, I could stress test it up to 10 million concurrent users. All you need is a simple network stimulator and hardware to run it on. This stuff is pretty basic in all honesty. Blizzard is just really really really bad about anything network and backend related.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

You've been playing a piece of garbage since launch night? Hokay... Either you need a chill pill then, or define what you mean by "garbage" more precisely.

My point about fucking up in the past is that you can't really prepare for the situation of a Blizzard-level game launch in advance. Nobody can. There were ~4.5 MILLION copies in the wild on launch night according to recent figures and statements, and it's a reasonable guess that the vast majority of those copies tried to log in on launch day. That's an enormous load on the infrastructure.

You can do dry test-runs all day, and the stress test Blizzard executed reached 300k concurrent users (which is already significant; it's more than the full population of EVE online for example), but nothing short of a full launch can simulate a full launch, so how do you prepare FULLY for something like that? Can't be done, I'd say.

IMO, that's not even close to an excuse.
I'm not going into the technical discussions on either it would or wouldn't be possible to put every one of the 4.5M players online at the same time.

What I do know is that the publisher has total control over how many copies are sold both online and retail.
The same way an overbooked hotel won't take anymore customers to put then out there in the cold because there aren't enough rooms/beds, they should have limited the number of pre-orders and copies in order to assure a seamless experience to everyone who purchased the game on day one.

But no: bragging about how they sold X million copies over the first week is, for them, a whole better deal than providing the crappiest service ever during the first couple of days the game went online.

Blizzard: 1
Oblivious fanboys (who'll be happy with any bone thrown at them): 1
Gamers: 0

 

[pcchen]

Yes, as I said before, they know exactly how many copies were pre-ordered (plus the Annual Pass users). A simple rule-of-thumb is to double that amount for launch day preparation. Note that many pre-order was done way before the game was officially launched, so it shouldn't be difficult to estimate.

This, plus the Error 12 problem ("no license attached" for users pre-ordered long before, WTF?) and geo-based IP limitation problem on Asian servers, makes this a very sub-standard launch for Blizzard.

 

[czekon]

THAT IS A JOKE of a load. Both EC3 and Azure could handle that without breaking a sweat, to name but two of many third party infrastructure providers. There quite simply is no technical reason why that load should ever be an issue.

wow,d3 and sc2 uses battle net so its not only 4.5 mln (or whatever copies sold) that were overloading system . I experienced a lot of disconnect while playing wow at d3 launch day due to b.net being overloaded. But in general i agree with all being said, and keeping in mind that demand for d3 was v high they should prepare better for this.

 

[aaronspink]

wow,d3 and sc2 uses battle net so its not only 4.5 mln (or whatever copies sold) that were overloading system . I experienced a lot of disconnect while playing wow at d3 launch day due to b.net being overloaded. But in general i agree with all being said, and keeping in mind that demand for d3 was v high they should prepare better for this.

But that only goes to show how poorly their backend is doing and how little they spent modernizing it. Most of the technology required isn't new and has been around for quite a while as well. b.net certainly has enough load to make a virtualized scale out solution viable. The fact that they haven't moved to one is just a glaring example of how badly managed they are.

If they had properly moved to a vitualized scale out solution, then d3 wouldn't even of been a hiccup for their other properties. They would of had in place temporary capacity from the myriad of 3rd party service providers. ec3 and azure likely put online more capacity weekly than exists in the whole entire b.net infrastructure currently.

 

[czekon]

i remember rift launch when i succefully logged in after few hours of trying i stayed logged in for days to avoid same problems. My point is maybe you are right and you can somehow change your whole network soultions but at this point i dont think that saomeone else is doing that better even on much much smaller scale (rift for example).

 

[Kaotik]

My point about fucking up in the past is that you can't really prepare for the situation of a Blizzard-level game launch in advance. Nobody can. There were ~4.5 MILLION copies in the wild on launch night according to recent figures and statements, and it's a reasonable guess that the vast majority of those copies tried to log in on launch day. That's an enormous load on the infrastructure.

4.7, 3.5 + 1.2 to WoW year subscriptionists, not to mention SC2 and WoW users using battle.net at the same time.

This is false. This will continue to be false. With the right back end design, you can scale upwards of 100 MILLION users on launch day without issue. Quite simply, it appears blizzard hasn't designed a reasonable modern backend.

Show some examples of this, Diablo 3 traffic was enough to push all internet bandwidth use up by 14%, concentrating solely on Blizz server sites. No-one can really "prepare for that".
100 million users on launch day is just bullcrap until proven.

THAT IS A JOKE of a load. Both EC3 and Azure could handle that without breaking a sweat, to name but two of many third party infrastructure providers. There quite simply is no technical reason why that load should ever be an issue.

Again, show some proof of ~4.7 million or even close to simultaneous sign in tries, that's without counting SC2 & WoW users using Battle.net at the same time

 

[Sigfried1977]

Doesn't matter either way when there's a tried and true solution which worked pretty well in the past. It's called offline mode.

 

[czekon]

Noone really cares for offline mode these days .

 

[Sigfried1977]

Says who?

 

[Kaotik]

Doesn't matter either way when there's a tried and true solution which worked pretty well in the past. It's called offline mode.

You call item duping & other cheats "working well"?

 

[czekon]

Says who?

gamers

 

[czekon]

You call item duping & other cheats "working well"?

gives also protection against piracy , all social features coop play , you can track friends chars online , achivments , cross game (wow sc2 d3) chat and so on i rahter live with some connection issues then without all this features.

 

[Gubbi]

Again, show some proof of ~4.7 million or even close to simultaneous sign in tries, that's without counting SC2 & WoW users using Battle.net at the same time

Facebook, iCloud, Dropbox, Skydrive, Gmail, Hotmail, all kinds of online services handle much higher user counts.

As Aaron says, there is no excuse.

Cheers

 

[Sigfried1977]

gives also protection against piracy , all social features coop play , you can track friends chars online , achivments , cross game (wow sc2 d3) chat and so on i rahter live with some connection issues then without all this features.

And an offline mode would change all of that how? This is not an either/or situation. And when did it become fashionable to list anti piracy measures as a positive aspect? Piracy is Blizzard's problem. It should never be the consumer's problem.

 

[cjo]

Facebook, iCloud, Dropbox, Skydrive, Gmail, Hotmail, all kinds of online services handle much higher user counts.

As Aaron says, there is no excuse.

Cheers

But how many of those services can cope with several multiples of the expected number of average users? All of those services will expect a relatively constant number of users throughout the day, and in most cases these have been ramped up from a small number of users over a very long period of time With the Diablo III launch, Blizzard would have had pretty much every person that bought a copy of the game trying to log in at exactly the same time, including all of the people that will play the game twice and never log in again etc.

How many users over the expected average load should they be expected to cater for? How much extra server capacity / bandwidth should they be paying for? The odds are that they will never see loads like that again; I don't think that any gamer should be surprised that their servers were a little busy for a day or two after such a major launch.

Now, the unreliability after the initial rush is less forgiveable.

 

[pcchen]

Doesn't matter either way when there's a tried and true solution which worked pretty well in the past. It's called offline mode.

No. Offline mode works only for those who wants to play offline. At least Blizzard think the majority of Diablo 3's players don't really want to do that.

Due to item dup, cheat, etc. it's impossible for Blizzard to allow offline characters to transfer to battle.net (it's already the case in Diablo 2). So, if Diablo 3 has an offline mode, it will only benefit those who actually wants to play offline. If you want to play with your friends on battle.net, why would you spend your time on an offline mode character which you can't use in battle.net? Heck, I don't even play my characters on Asian server anymore because of the server congestion issue. My friends and I plan to play only on US server, at least for now.

So as you can see, if Blizzard actually implemented an offline mode for Diablo 3, it won't help us. We are not going to play offline characters when the server is down. Maybe some players will, but I reckon that most won't. Of course, at the initial rush, more people may be willing to play offline mode because they want to see the game no matter what, but, to me it's hardly a good reason to spend resources on something that's mostly just for a limited time frame.

 

[czekon]

And an offline mode would change all of that how? This is not an either/or situation. And when did it become fashionable to list anti piracy measures as a positive aspect? Piracy is Blizzard's problem. It should never be the consumer's problem.

isnt that obvious?.

And when did it become fashionable to list anti piracy measures as a positive aspect?

whats wrong with that.

 

[Sigfried1977]

isnt that obvious?.

In which way would having a separate offline character affect online play? SCII had an offline mode as well.

whats wrong with that.

The same thing that was wrong when Ubisoft did it. I guess since this is Blizzard it's now perfectly fine that I can't enjoy my game because something's messed up on their end, or that I get killed in single player because of a lag spike.

 

[Kaotik]

The same thing that was wrong when Ubisoft did it. I guess since this is Blizzard it's now perfectly fine that I can't enjoy my game because something's messed up on their end, or that I get killed in single player because of a lag spike.

In what game Ubisoft had similar online single/multiplayer game, which requires internet connection but no other antipiracy means?