Guild Wars 2

As excited as I am about HoT, I am anxious that like many MMOs, a launch day may just be a total clusterkitten, either from gameplay breaking bugs to actual game breaking bugs and server crashes. I’m just mentally preparing myself for that reality.

If Verdant Brink is just totally crammed with people, I could start grinding away at FOTM levels or PvP tracks, I guess!

Well, keep in mind that mega servers do exist so while there will be a lot of people, each server will have a limit.

every single MMO that launches something new has slow connectivity, i dunno why but ether they always underestimate the horde of players at launch day or never prepair their servers for the huge load.

MMO Rule #1: Never play on a patch day!

If you do, don’t complain.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

MMO Rule #1: Never play on a patch day!

If you do, don’t complain.

Extend this to Release Day.

I think Anet knows that the Release of HoT will stress the Servers to the Limit and beyond but they either can’t change it, due to Server infrastructure ( which has Weakpoints ) or things that will help are too impractical ( like having enough Servers to make sure that they don’t crash, what to do with them after Release? )

sorudo.9054:

every single MMO that launches something new has slow connectivity, i dunno why but ether they always underestimate the horde of players at launch day or never prepair their servers for the huge load.

I believe they do not underestimate. But they know the numbers will reduce overtime. So instead of prepare too many servers that will be unused over time, they simpy just wait for it to stabilize.

sorudo.9054:

every single MMO that launches something new has slow connectivity, i dunno why but ether they always underestimate the horde of players at launch day or never prepair their servers for the huge load.

Because being prepared cost money. Why waste money on extra stuff you won’t need in a week or two when the rush dies out. And you don’t have to worry about bad word of mouth since people are so use to bad launches and patch days, they will actually blame the other players for just trying to play.

After I make my rev and tomb him to 80, Halloween here I come!

Why worry ?

It is to be expected, if anyone truly believes that launch/release will be 100% perfect they are either dilusional or have never been around for an MMO launch/release. Things happen, people forget to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, players find exploits because we are creative like that. Then there is servers being jam packed by everyone trying to get in at once, malicious outside interference is also a very real possibility.

Just relax and expect the worst, then you can be pleasantly surprised when it goes fairly smooth, or you can be ready for the mass carnage that is also known as launch/release.

Play at your own risk and accept there will most likely be issues.

sorudo.9054:

every single MMO that launches something new has slow connectivity, i dunno why but ether they always underestimate the horde of players at launch day or never prepair their servers for the huge load.

It’s not that they don’t prepare, it’s that it is not cost effective. The excessive amount of players that play the new expansion within the first month is not the normal server load. Right now, the servers run the game with ease on normal load and become “stressed” on patch day. If you pay to upgrade and maintain servers that run the surge of expansion with ease, you end up having a lot of wasted resources during normal load when things go back to normal in just a few days even.

Would you pay the massive cost of buying a new AC and pay extra on your monthly electricity bills just because one day out of the year it is obscenely hot outside and your AC has a little trouble keeping up?

Its not smart nor efficient to do that. Of course, the person who isn’t paying won’t really care nor think about the costs.

Honestly, I would be surprised if the launch resulted in better than mild server instability. Being a veteran MMO player, I tend to hope for the best, but expect the worst on launch days.

Investing in more servers is not cost-effective. They aren’t going to invest in a resource that they are not going to need using after everything stabilizes. They know their player base, or just MMO players in general, and know that a good deal of those who jump in will get bored and go somewhere else.

Why waste the money?

Anyway, expect instability. I am.

I don’t know if you were around at GW2 launch day, but it was by far one of the smoothest and most problem free launches I’ve ever seen in an MMO.

Then they had to do some learning the hard way during secret of southsun and a lot of WvW culling woes. Then they eliminated culling, and worked out a stable baseline for full zones that we’ve been using ever since. This was where they fixed their “max players on map all on screen” problems for the most part.

Since that time they’ve worked in a lot of systems to handle large player loads on single maps, and field tested those systems multiple times in the map releases during LS2, and their entire server cluster backend is built around creating map instances on demand to account for increased load (as they intentionally created systems of increased load with megaserver)

Unless HoT is wildly more popular than GW2 was on launch day (highly unlikely) it’s a pretty good bet that the launch should go smoothly from a server performance standpoint. No telling from a content function/bugginess/explitability standpoint as Anet has always been extremely averse to spoiling content with public testing.

I’d say at worst it’ll connect and run fine but we might find stalled or broken events/content more than we’d like in the untested areas of verdant brink and beyond. At best it’ll all run just fine. In reality it’ll probably run just fine with a couple really nasty zero day event and vendor bugs that will get hotfixed before most people even get to the content.

it might be eased with the midnight launch. Half the world will be sound asleep when launch happens which should distribute the load over a longer period of time. There will be slow download speeds, and multiple patches on Friday for sure though. I’m really hoping they let us do the majority of the patch today, with only a smaller patch on Friday.

Will be Log-In Wars 2.

Why worry? Instability is expected on patch / release days. Give them 24-48 hours to work out the critical bugs, and then things should be peachy. If you want to play through/around those issues, more power to ya, but that’s on you.