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You dont cut corners with servers for a MMO

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
I know in this current economic climate people and businesses are cutting back. But when your business depends so highly on one particular aspect you don't cut corners with it.
MMO live and die by their dependable servers. I know its not the only thing needed for a winning game, but its right up there in the top 3.

Just do it Cryptic. Trash this current set up and spend a few of the dollars you've made on state of the art servers..Servers that can handle peak times on week ends.

You're going to lose money if you don't spend it.

Basic business 101.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    That's some business plan you have there OP. Have you thought about implementing it in your own MMO company?

    Oh, and if you have some sort of background information on the actual hardware that serves as Cryptic's STO cluster, could you please share it with the rest of us. I for one really do enjoy reading up on the specifications of hardware and the possibilities of software that hardware can handle. :)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Are you kidding me? Come on, it doesn't take a certified to see how bad Cryptic's choice of server sollution is.
    But just for you I'll spell it out. Low performing servers running a heavy instanced MMO are doomed to failure on peak times of log ins.
    But honestly you must be a Cryptic employee to even think that their servers aren't the problem. And that in the 21st Century they can't buy better ones.

    Now shooo
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    You'd think by now that Google would have sensed the hole in the market and would have been offering MMO support for developers. Self-hosting server set-ups are very last millennium. Particularly since there's no point in a games company running a support staff for hardware - let the hardware companies support hardware and let the software company support software. Having your own hardware is the most expensive part of any web organization.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Arclight55 wrote: »
    Are you kidding me? Come on, it doesn't take a certified to see how bad Cryptic's choice of server sollution is.
    But just for you I'll spell it out. Low performing servers running a heavy instanced MMO are doomed to failure on peak times of log ins.
    But honestly you must be a Cryptic employee to even think that their servers aren't the problem. And that in the 21st Century they can't buy better ones.

    Now shooo


    All MMO companies do this, you dont over buy, that's just a bad idea financially as a company.


    You estimate what you think you need, but a little over that, then if you exceed that need, you recalculate your numbers buy a little over that new number and repeat.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    So, Cryptic should throw out the millions that have been spent on servers aready to make more servers that are just different from the original ones.

    How about we just be patient and let them do their work?

    edit: Servers showing as up. Beam me up!
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    In three weeks time the population will drop,
    Atari will only spend so much, they have smarter people than me to predict costs and common sence says you dont spend to cater for a million customers when next month you have only 500k
    If by some crazy miracle STO becomes a WoW killer and keeps getting bigger we can expect even more down time as they buy in more and more server stuff.

    edit, green light im out of here
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    "You dont cut corners with servers for a MMO"

    You do if your Cryptic and Atari.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    That reminds me... you know which MMO and company under-estimated their server need even more? Blizzard with their WoW. IIRC they launched with some 3 servers (1 for normal, RP and PvP). Those huge times in the queue sure hurt them in the long run, huh? ;)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    When we are in a deep recession (world-wide) you really aren't expecting a company to overbuy, are you?

    Because if you are -- you know nothing about that which you are preaching.

    Not only that, but the MMO market is a notoriously fickle market. Not someplace where you want to put all your chips into the pot.

    Simply put -- it's a balancing act. But hey, the OP is OBVIOUSLY more savvy about MMO operations than an entire dev company!

    We don't even know if Cryptic/Atari owns their own servers. They may be leasing from a co-lo and may have been undersold by a salesman or sales manager. But by all means Nostradamus, tell us how it REALLY IS!
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Actually, business 101 is this:

    Spend the least amount of resources for the greatest amount of return.

    I think they are doing very well.

    Everyone gets 4 college credits for reading this post.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Arclight55 wrote: »
    Are you kidding me? Come on, it doesn't take a certified to see how bad Cryptic's choice of server sollution is.
    But just for you I'll spell it out. Low performing servers running a heavy instanced MMO are doomed to failure on peak times of log ins.
    But honestly you must be a Cryptic employee to even think that their servers aren't the problem. And that in the 21st Century they can't buy better ones.

    Now shooo

    So, can you tell me the specs, brand, and quantity of the current server hardware Cryptic is using?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Arclight55 wrote: »
    Are you kidding me? Come on, it doesn't take a certified to see how bad Cryptic's choice of server sollution is. But just for you I'll spell it out.

    This is hysterical. Your spellling is impekable. I am hapy yu spellled it ot.



    Arclight55 wrote: »
    Low performing servers running a heavy instanced MMO are doomed to failure on peak times of log ins.

    As an engineer, give me some details on these low performing servers. Obviously in the server
    store there is a shelf of low performing servers ( I bet they are the ones in the green boxes, right?) and there is a shelf of high performing servers. Cite Cryptic's current server schema, and then present an alternative schema based on your own engineering experience.
    Arclight55 wrote: »
    But honestly you must be a Cryptic employee to even think that their servers aren't the problem. And that in the 21st Century they can't buy better ones.

    Now shooo

    I am serious about this. If you want to learn how this works, send me a tell off line, and let me know when you graduate. I will call a friend at one of the stronger IT programs in a college in your state, and see if s/he will make an effort to let you take a class in server engineering. Assuming you have the SATs and the GPA in your current school, they will start you off on the learning curve that will result, in 5 years, in your having the barest of qualifications to make the statements you have made without sounding like a doofus.

    My office hours are over, consider yourself schooled. :)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Arclight55 wrote: »
    I know in this current economic climate people and businesses are cutting back. But when your business depends so highly on one particular aspect you don't cut corners with it.
    MMO live and die by their dependable servers. I know its not the only thing needed for a winning game, but its right up there in the top 3.

    Just do it Cryptic. Trash this current set up and spend a few of the dollars you've made on state of the art servers..Servers that can handle peak times on week ends.

    You're going to lose money if you don't spend it.

    Basic business 101.

    Basic MMO 101

    Say you have a milliion users on launch day. Your first launch weekend, your peak users could be as high as a third of that number: 333,333.

    Half of them won't go past the first month. 500,000 subscribers. After the first month, your peak users will be 10-15% of your subscribers. 75,000 max.

    Detail a business plan where you build a system that will comfortably house 333,333 users at peak on a budget based on 75,000 users at peak.

    Show your work.

    (Sigh, so many freaking 'experts' on the internet.)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    ZenBrillig wrote:
    Basic MMO 101

    Say you have a milliion users on launch day. Your first launch weekend, your peak users could be as high as a third of that number: 333,333.

    Half of them won't go past the first month. 500,000 subscribers. After the first month, your peak users will be 10-15% of your subscribers. 75,000 max.

    Detail a business plan where you build a system that will comfortably house 333,333 users at peak on a budget based on 75,000 users at peak.

    Show your work.

    (Sigh, so many freaking 'experts' on the internet.)

    Now here is the amazing thing. You make fun of experts on the Internet, and then you yourself prove a bit of expertise by pulling numbers nearly directly from the literature on MMOs and massive gaming. So obviously there is one expert, you.

    And before you think I am making fun of you, I am not. You really did just make a cogent argument in a manner as well as a professor who studies this subject could. The problem you outline is discussed often, and engineering students ponder the issues of total cost of operations in depth in their projects.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Arclight55 wrote: »
    I know in this current economic climate people and businesses are cutting back. But when your business depends so highly on one particular aspect you don't cut corners with it.
    MMO live and die by their dependable servers. I know its not the only thing needed for a winning game, but its right up there in the top 3.

    Just do it Cryptic. Trash this current set up and spend a few of the dollars you've made on state of the art servers..Servers that can handle peak times on week ends.

    You're going to lose money if you don't spend it.

    Basic business 101.

    Oh shut the hell up OP, the severs go down for 1 hour of unscheduled maintenance and everyone has to post their own thread crying about being denied the pleasure of hitting space bar repeatedly for a few minutes. The servers are working more or less fine now, you should have seen them in beta. I haven't seen a queue in ages and instances are loading much faster. I almost never experience lag anymore either.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    CDR_Mat wrote:
    Actually, business 101 is this:

    Spend the least amount of resources for the greatest amount of return.

    I think they are doing very well.

    Everyone gets 4 college credits for reading this post.

    The truth hurts.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    CDR_Mat wrote:
    Actually, business 101 is this:

    Spend the least amount of resources for the greatest amount of return.

    I think they are doing very well.

    Everyone gets 4 college credits for reading this post.

    There are plenty of other more complicated business models also. Things like burn and turn, or smash and grab.

    Because after all, business is about profit, and profit has no morality, nor integrity.

    Funniest quote about buisness. People often say, 'it is just buisness' but only say that when they are doing something they know is wrong. Which means they know buisness is wrong. I find that funny.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Battleunit wrote: »
    Now here is the amazing thing. You make fun of experts on the Internet, and then you yourself prove a bit of expertise by pulling numbers nearly directly from the literature on MMOs and massive gaming. So obviously there is one expert, you.

    And before you think I am making fun of you, I am not. You really did just make a cogent argument in a manner as well as a professor who studies this subject could. The problem you outline is discussed often, and engineering students ponder the issues of total cost of operations in depth in their projects.

    But basic buisness misses the being bold part. The truely greats had bold plans that expected success, and did not just secure a safest situation.

    Many formulas can skim some margin of profit, safely with no real big success. They are a bit bland, but it is just accounting.

    But when you go big and bold, sometimes things work out even better. But each has there own look at what reward is. And even if you do go up in flames, it is a great ride if you go bold, and many times it works out.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    ZenBrillig wrote:
    Basic MMO 101

    Say you have a milliion users on launch day. Your first launch weekend, your peak users could be as high as a third of that number: 333,333.

    Half of them won't go past the first month. 500,000 subscribers. After the first month, your peak users will be 10-15% of your subscribers. 75,000 max.

    Detail a business plan where you build a system that will comfortably house 333,333 users at peak on a budget based on 75,000 users at peak.

    Show your work.

    (Sigh, so many freaking 'experts' on the internet.)

    Actually that is really easy to do, You have your mega super dupper server, that can run a full capacity start up. You use that during start up, then move to smaller server you buy in the future, and move your high capacity one to next game release, although for that model to work, you would have to be putting out high quality games, expanding staff and running multi overlapping scheduled development.

    However failures of reputation could make it easy to get in downward spiral, since although profit margin is based on highest turn out to resource comparison, reputation is based on highest satisfaction compared to customer invested cost, and not just customer dollars but many other things customers have invested in something.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Pyryck wrote:
    That's some business plan you have there OP. Have you thought about implementing it in your own MMO company?

    Oh, and if you have some sort of background information on the actual hardware that serves as Cryptic's STO cluster, could you please share it with the rest of us. I for one really do enjoy reading up on the specifications of hardware and the possibilities of software that hardware can handle. :)

    :eek:
    Not know the hardware? then how could these "problem solvers" make "it's so obvious" statements or come up single paragraph "simple solutions" with out knowing exactingly what cryptic is running? I mean really! it's all right there in the system spec's. If it wasn't then they'd making thing up as they go, and that would make them look like idiots.... oh, wait a sec...:p
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    ZenBrillig wrote:
    Basic MMO 101

    Say you have a milliion users on launch day. Your first launch weekend, your peak users could be as high as a third of that number: 333,333.

    Half of them won't go past the first month. 500,000 subscribers. After the first month, your peak users will be 10-15% of your subscribers. 75,000 max.

    Detail a business plan where you build a system that will comfortably house 333,333 users at peak on a budget based on 75,000 users at peak.

    Show your work.

    (Sigh, so many freaking 'experts' on the internet.)

    Unfortunately,

    A) those numbers are a lot more fluid than that. Your MMO could grow (see WoW), or it could drop like a rock (see AO at launch), so really there is no way to know how many users you'll have after a month. Anyone trying to wave numbers around, yes, is one of those freaking 'experts' on the internet. Or I guess the kind of consultant who advises about your MMO like the pope advises about condoms and sex: he doesn't really have any experience with doing it right (or at all), but he can quote a book written by someone else who didn't either.

    B) In fact, looking at the typical subscribers-vs-time curves on MMOGCHART.COM, the typical shape is more like a bell curve. Well, rather more like a teardrop for most games. The number of subscribers tends to keep rising for at least a year. E.g.,

    http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
    http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

    Spot at least one of those successful ones where the active subscriptions halved after the first month. I don't see any.

    The only ones where that kind of a subscription drop actually happens is in the screwups category, and a sign that the game plain old didn't deliver:

    http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html

    You'll notice the massive TRIBBLE-up of the Anarchy Online buggy launch, along with the likes of Vanguard and DDO, as the only ones actually showing the kind of a subscriber dynamic that you wave around as some general fact. It's not. It's what happens when you TRIBBLE up.

    B) how you treat your users during that first month, may well determine how many you have in the second month. If you give them an experience like you don't have to bother because most will leave, well, it may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    C) And you rarely get a second chance to make a first impression. Most games never do. You'll notice in charts 1 and 2 there that the growth rate for most games starts high, and slows down over time, as the hype dies out, people move to other games, etc, until it finally starts going down. Making the experience crappy in the first month isn't the smartest plan ever.

    D) Server capacity is hardly that inelastic. Hardware can even be leased these days, or moved to another of the games of a larger publisher, if you're really convinced that you'll TRIBBLE up and lose half your subscribers in a month. Even if you might one day be capped at 75,000 concurrent users, it's not like your data centre needs to be capped at that from day zero.

    E) That percentage for peak users after the first month is basically just as bogus. Yes, the average peaks during the weekdays will be around 10%, but the first day after some expansion pack, or new content patch, or just if you ever decide to run some event that proves popular, or on some aniversary "double xp weekend", or whatever, the actual peaks can be a lot higher. Heck, even school vacations can throw a fluke in the curve. Your game still has to deal with those. You'll need some extra capacity anyway.

    Basically it's the same idea as why your local mall is calculated more for the peaks during the friday before christmas, than for the expected number of customers on a thursday morning. That's why there are all those non-manned checkout lines most of the time: to deal with the flukes, not with the lull in between them.

    Applying the same idea to an MMO and servers isn't exactly rocket science.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Maybe they just wontto optimise there servers they have now have them run as good as possible rather then to just chuck more hardware at it and have all the problems still there!
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    CDR_Mat wrote:
    Actually, business 101 is this:

    Spend the least amount of resources for the greatest amount of return.

    I think they are doing very well.

    Everyone gets 4 college credits for reading this post.

    I LOLed. :)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    nixboox wrote: »
    You'd think by now that Google would have sensed the hole in the market and would have been offering MMO support for developers. Self-hosting server set-ups are very last millennium. Particularly since there's no point in a games company running a support staff for hardware - let the hardware companies support hardware and let the software company support software. Having your own hardware is the most expensive part of any web organization.

    true, but it would probably make security issues even worse

    mmos always have security problems with devs and pseudo-devs and helpers giving out gear, levels, favors, and all sorts of stuff like that to people they like (friends, family, girls they are trying to impress/boink, guys they are trying to impress/boink).

    could you outsource hardware and not increase the security black-hole?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    greploco wrote:
    true, but it would probably make security issues even worse

    mmos always have security problems with devs and pseudo-devs and helpers giving out gear, levels, favors, and all sorts of stuff like that to people they like (friends, family, girls they are trying to impress/boink, guys they are trying to impress/boink).

    could you outsource hardware and not increase the security black-hole?

    Security isn't the big problem with trying to handle launch capacity issues in the cloud - latency is the real pain.
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