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Engineering Everquest
The IEEE Spectrum site has an article up discussing the engineering required to keep Norrath running. From the article: "The Death Star is a huge, warm, windowless room containing the rows and rows of servers that run Sony's online games. The whooshing of a massive air-conditioning system is so loud that conversation is almost impossible. A large steel cage surrounds more than 500 servers stacked 32 high in towering racks--and this is just one battalion, albeit the largest, in Sony's 1500-machine army of servers."
Everquest is merely the highlight of the report, but theres also EQ2, Planetside and SWG all running off these servers. With that in mind, 150,000 users 'at any given time' isn't too impressive when spread out over 1,500 servers. Assuming the number of users is equally divided (37,500 users and 375 servers per game 'at any given time') then theres not much workload really being put on the servers. That comes out to roughly 1 server per 100 players.
That's not a redundant comment , its a space station!
I'd rather have an article describing, you know, the awesome engineering obstacles (failures and successes, thanks) a similar but larger project a few people may've heard of. I seriously felt like this was a copy of an article from Time magazine, what with the information that was just @#$@ old and common knowledge (that is, to the audience of people who would be interested in the first place), and really just an advertisement in disguise.
... why do I care? I didn't learn anything. They were small, got bigger. They make revenue from customers. Now, if this was a wonderful introduction to When Projects Go Off Expectations, with a "case study", then that would have been something.
I admit I'm new to reading this periodical, and skipped straight to this article, but... I sortof held IEEE to higher standards. Maybe I should go to journalism school, or something, but
"We budgeted the game to hit 200,000 subscribers, 20% churn, eleventy billion in cash, and so we set up servers (because YUO LIKES TEH OVERFLOWZ) to support 300,000. When 500,000 people showed up on opening day, Leeroy Jenkins shat his pants. He dropped a drumstick and suggested we throttle connectivity, so that players who do get on have the experience we designed, and players that don't have a tangible explanation as to our undercapacity. Thus was born the much hated queue system, and you can bet Leeroy a chicken that we burnt the midnight oil adding capacity. A unique issue games like EverWowSide face is that we can't just take the servers down for teh upgradez. So we had to do a cost benefits analysis and for the first two weeks we did rolling reboots [SEE SIDEPANEL]... our original upgrade-lifecycle plan [SEE SIDEPANEL] expected us to have this sort of user growth over the course of a year, but we had to have had it doned yesterdays liek JeffKs. So [INTERESTINGLY INFORMATIVE ARTICLE ABOUT A MASSIVE ROLLOUT IN A MONTH THAT WAS PLANNED FOR A YEAR, HOPEFULLY AVOIDING TOO MUCH BACK PATTING AND MAY POSSIBLY BE RELATED TO ENGINEERING, AS OPPOSED TO COME PLAY EVERSIDEGALAXIES2]"
No, wait. I'm wrong. An article about all those empty servers is much more interesting.
From the article:
"Three people per shift work in the NOC, and there are three shifts per day. During each shift, NOC staff monitor game activity, responding to players in remote locations and working with a custom suite of software tools to fix problems along the way."
Maybe this is why the GM didn't answer your call. There were only 3 of them.
I seriously hope and imagine that there are more (maybe 10) but the article totally implies that 3 people handle problems with players in remote locations.
Which would totally explain SOE's tech support.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
EQ doesn't have players anymore, what are the servers for?
To keep the NPCs alive?
I don't need a signature.
This is geek porn! How can you talk of a room full of computers running a popular MMORPG and NOT HAVE PICTURES? /. ppl get excited about pictures of cruddy wiring in LAN closets! This article might as well be a harlequin romance novel.
--Mike
> Which would totally explain SOE's tech support.
You mean lack of it.
*ducks*
That really goes a loooong way in explaining a lot of things that go on over at SOE. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they eat it too.