03-30-2005, 02:30 PM
Quark,Mar 30 2005, 10:09 AM Wrote:Back in late January/early February they mentioned hardware updates to a few servers, Stormrage being one of them. Right after that was when Stormrage was stable as a rock. Then they put the game back on shelves, and everything went to the hounds again. On Feb 24, they promised hardware updates again for the "terrible 20" or so. Them adding hardware to these servers is only living up to what they said they would do a month ago ...
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They don't need "hardware updates." Throwing hardware at the problem is almost never the right solution unless the only problem is scaling, and it's clear by the nature of the problems and the times at which they occur that's not the case. (Let's face it, when the server starts throwing up at 6am on Friday morning, you know it's not load. Some of my most nightmarish lag issues have happened at the bottom of their usage curve.)
I'm thinking they need to seriously re-architect the server/database layout, and I'd bet good money that the server code's got severe memory leaks as well (which would explain the off-hours problems).
Of course... they can't even keep their website in operation, so I'm starting to have doubts about their ability to fix the game itself. From what I've been able to gather, they refused to even accept applications for operations folks outside of Orange County, when pretty much everyone who has experience operating mass-usage 24/7 systems is in Virginia and San Jose. I mean, when's the last time you heard of AOL having problems like this? They solved this issue almost 10 years ago, but in that time not one MMO (and keep in mind we're talking about services with 1/10 as many users as AOL is handling) has managed to properly architect their systems so they're appropriately scalable? Madness.
/endrant
Darian Redwin - just some dude now