Can we please stop citing the Guinness Book for anything, ever? I know everyone is thinking of that lovely, thick, authoritative tome you had when you were younger. It no longer exists. The company was sold in 1995, and now the "book" is a glossy picture book with only a few hundred of the most photogenic records from the previous year. You can't use it to settle bar bets (the original purpose) because they can't be arsed to even put their historical records online, and every time some big cool new media darling arrives they make up half a dozen new records that apply to it so they can get free advertising. "Most viewed trailer for an action-adventure videogame," fucking really?
GTA 5 is technically impressive, but after playing State of Decay, I've come to realize how much I need to fill the negative space inside all those black-box buildings.
The world of GTA V feels hollow when 1% of the buildings can be entered. When I drive to what I recognize as the "Commerce Casino" in the real world, I want to go inside!
Agreed. But think how much additional work would have to be done to create unique interiors for every house. It already took a thousand man-years to create that huge virtual place without interiors...
i'd personally like to see what would come of putting all of the man hours they spread out over the massive world of GTA, into a single city block/apartment.
Does anyone have any thoughts/info as to why online play like this is always so hard to do right/scale? Many of these bugs and woes don't seem to be simply due to emergent gameplay and bugs that emerge from state issues.
It seems largely that they just need more servers. With the type of income (and expenses) that they've already incurred, setting up a few hundred more servers (a few clicks on EC2 if they have their Chef scripts done right) should do it largely right?
This will happen with any system that needs that kind of scale right out of the gate. It's just that games are one of the few systems like that. We really just don't have good ways of knowing what will happen.
Can you think of other online systems that need to scale to massive numbers of users on day one of it's release? If you can, how many of those systems survived?
With my own game project, I used around 50,000 bots on AWS and attempted to model them as closely as possible to real players (using real player data taken from our Closed Beta). Looking at resource utilisation on the servers, it looked like we should be able to scale even further than those tests. By that I mean, the most overloaded systems were still only using about 35% of the system resources.
Come open beta day, we got concurrency of around 75,000 at peak, higher than the optimistic estimate we had made of 50,000. New problems developed. In fact, new problems developed at around 45,000 that somehow the bots didn't manage to find. The worst problem was a deadlock condition that could take out one of the database servers randomly kicking off ten's of thousands of users at a time. It's hard to describe the feeling of knowing that you are frustrating so many people around the world.
More servers would have done nothing to prevent these problems.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that scaling all at once is really hard. Even if you take lots of precautions, random problems will still develop.
Curios, did your bots simulate connection issues as well?
This isn't my line of work but it would seem simulating 50,000 bots in an environment is not quite the same as 50,000 humans from all over the place with their various connections speeds and/or issues.
Plus, you'd have to teach your bots to try to do incredibly stupid things that humans tend to do, willingly or otherwise.
We basically attempted to get the bots to match each metric that we were measuring server side from a smaller sample of players during closed beta. The peak concurrency during closed beta was something like 2000 players, so we multiplied each metric out to get a target. Here are a few examples of metrics:
Chat messages per second
Party creations per second
Average party size
Number of zone transitions per second
Average number of open zones per player
Character saves per second
PVP Match list requests per second
And so on, and so on.
Certainly bots are not going to be the same due to the issues you mentioned, but we do the best we can! We didn't simulate all kinds of connection issues a real player might have, but we did match the non-graceful connection termination metric.
GMail is free. Facebook is free. GTA V definitely isn't free. I don't think limited invites really work in this case. Imagine how upset people would be to discover they'd paid their $60 for a game that advertised online play on the box, only to discover a three month waiting period whilst the system scaled up.
I believe it could have worked if they just gave early access to people who preorder, and even earlier access to those who preorder very early (and so on). Then people get more value for preordering and GTA doesn't get completely swamped on online release day.
That's a pretty good trick, but it might inspire some serious complaining.
The idea of a ticket that grants you entrance based on the order in which you preorder.
Sure it is. Right now they have online play, it's just buggy and unusable.
That is totally different from not having something due to some psychological reason (which I don't know). Just like people hate it when a price goes from $0 to $1, but don't care as much when $10 goes to $15.
I've got hand it to them for smashing six world records. Very impressive. I have to think that if you've accomplished that then you will have some problems on the technical side that would have been very difficult to anticipate.
Not really. These days the Guinness Book mostly just makes up new record categories to suit whatever the hot new media product is so they can get free advertising.
I'm not sure about the details but supposedly most were already held by Call of Duty. I'm not a gamer but highest revenue generated by an entertainment product in 24 hours and the fastest entertainment property to gross $1bn seems really big... for a game.
Revenue at point of sale does not directly translate into revenue at the studio. There are many other companies involved in the distribution to the end-user, all of which get their cut.
I was actually able to play last night for the first time, so I consider that progress. It was a bit laggy, but I presume this will be improved in time.
