Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Blizzard Offers Look Inside WoW At GDC

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the belly-of-the-beast dept.

Yesterday morning at GDC Austin, Blizzard's J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce took to the stage to finally give a peek inside the inner workings of World of Warcraft. Tipping the scales at around 4,600 people utilizing 20,000 computer systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage, Blizzard has created a raging behemoth. The Online Network services group alone has "data centers from Texas to Seoul, and monitor over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. [Pearce] points out the picture of the GNOC (Global Network Operations Center) in their slideshow, a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations. They use those to ensure that conditions of the data center are up to their standards; with only a staff of 68 people they ensure connectivity across the globe for the numerous WoW servers."

32 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Story at 11... by CRiMSON · · Score: 5, Funny

    Massive online game requires massive ammount of servers, bandwidth and people to maintain.....

    --
    oogly boogly!
    1. Re:Story at 11... by CRiMSON · · Score: 4, Funny

      With wild abandonment?

      --
      oogly boogly!
    2. Re:Story at 11... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      +5 He-Man And The Masters Of The Obvious!!1

    3. Re:Story at 11... by Rycross · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You'd be surprised at the number of people that think you can run something like a WoW server on a spare box underneath someone's desk.

    4. Re:Story at 11... by NYMeatball · · Score: 2, Funny

      You wouldn't be surprised at the number of people who DO try to run application servers underneath their own desk in the corporate world.

    5. Re:Story at 11... by sopssa · · Score: 2, Funny

      You do not need such massive infrastructure to run a MMO, its just being wasteful about resources. Sure, the uptime could suffer a little bit and its possible you would sometimes run over the allowed bandwidth with Comcast, but you CAN run these things just fine on your living room behind the TV. If you want redundancy, you could have another server at your friends place.

      Just because its "cool" and you have some money, it doesn't mean you have to waste it. Hell, even Slashdot runs just fine on CmdrTaco's mom's basement..

    6. Re:Story at 11... by sopssa · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The interesting question with the amount of people working at blizzard is that will indie mmo's stand any change?

      World of Warcraft utilizes 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and more than 4600 people.

      That's quite hard to compete with, and it only seems to be growing. Even other big MMO's have trouble competing with WoW, with Eve Online pretty much the only true competitor (and its more targeted for hardcore players)

    7. Re:Story at 11... by amplt1337 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ...yes. The hard part of a Massively Multiplayer Online Game does in fact come from the Massively part.

      --
      Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
    8. Re:Story at 11... by OakDragon · · Score: 5, Funny

      You wouldn't be surprised at the number of people who DO try to run application servers underneath their own desk in the corporate world.

      All you need is a post-it note saying "do not turn off!! SERVER!!!!"

      --
      Dark Reflection
    9. Re:Story at 11... by Jared555 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Then you find the one person who thinks unplugging the power strip to plug it into another outlet will not shut off the computer

    10. Re:Story at 11... by KermitJunior · · Score: 2, Funny

      For instance, I live on the 7th floor, hence that is where my desk is. I know for a fact four people below me have their desk (and computers) directly under mine, and I'm not evening asking to maximize the machines that will fit there.

      --
      There is a Universal Life Value Check it
    11. Re:Story at 11... by bigstrat2003 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Whoosh!

      --
      "16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
  2. Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue by eldavojohn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Let's say they have 10 million active subscribers world wide and that each of them pays $12 a month. Wouldn't you expect that sort of protection and insane support on something generating $120 million in revenue for you a month? I would. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a whole lot more to it that we don't know about and never will.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue by gblackwo · · Score: 4, Informative

      I think he may mean that in countries like Russia and China the subscription rate is tremendously lower due to the local currency.

    2. Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue by Tekfactory · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Except ASIA is a large portion of the subscriber base (the 10 million number they like to quote a lot)and doesn't pay much per month at all. Blizzard licenses the game to ISPs and other partners that resell the game service as part of their offerings.

      So that part of it IS known, and you should factor that into your equations. Monthly income off WoW is nowhere near $120 million.

    3. Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue by The+Clockwork+Troll · · Score: 5, Funny

      With currency exchange rates fluctuating so frequently, Blizzard has to allow for the possibility that in Russia, World of Warcraft subscribes to you.

      --

      There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
    4. Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue by damien_kane · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Congratulations, sir.
      That's the first time in a long time that a Yakov Smirnov joke has made me do something other than want to slap people.

      You get my vote...

    5. Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue by pwfffff · · Score: 2, Informative

      Also add in name changes ($10?), character re-customization ($20?), and server transfers ($25). Oh, and faction changes ($25?).

    6. Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue by xororand · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "In Soviet Russia, the government controls the corporations."
      is also pretty good, imho.

    7. Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue by Trolan · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, the 11.5 million number is accurate as at least up to 23Dec2008:

      From: http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/081121.html

      World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition

      World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licenseesâ(TM) territories are defined along the same rules.

  3. Should I Be Concerned... by Logical+Zebra · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...that WoW servers are guarded and maintained better than DoD networks?

    --
    I have a bad feeling about this...
    1. Re:Should I Be Concerned... by drexlor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I was alarmed when I was searching for a new bank that the major banks do not offer authenticators or usb dongles to use for online banking for normal consumers. Why can I protect my WoW account better than my bank account?

    2. Re:Should I Be Concerned... by Cassini2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Why can I protect my WoW account better than my bank account?

      Check out the terms of service on your bank account. You might be shocked to learn the bank isn't responsible for your financial losses. Often, they specifically exempt themselves from all responsibility relating to fraud, mistakes, and/or computer errors. If they cash a bad cheque, you are on the hook.

      There is a reason why people that survived the Great Depression hide money under their mattresses.

  4. All I read... by lazorz · · Score: 5, Funny

    Additional instances cannot be launched.

    1. Re:All I read... by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 4, Informative

      I was told by someone at blizzard that they essentially implemented a fix across all battlegroups (which for those who don't know is a collection of realms at one data center) so you shouldn't see the error anymore. The problem was that each realm had a set amount of blades (something like 14?) for instances. Lower population realms didn't use hardly any of that capacity - whereas high population realms there wasn't enough. Well any good server admin knows you never can tell if a low population realm becomes a high population realm or visa versa so clearly you can't build these realms based off that alone - the app needs to scale accordingly.

      The fix was that now all instances belong to a pool of servers now - which will eventually allow instance sharing across realms (that is - a party of players on different realms) once its switched on.

  5. "Only" 68 people? by FuegoFuerte · · Score: 2, Insightful

    with only a staff of 68 people

    How does it take 68 people to monitor that few servers, and most of them BLADES?!? The writers have apparently never worked in a large network environment (not that I'd expect that they would have, being writers and all). But seriously... that's not really that many servers for a large online service, it really shouldn't take that much work to keep it all running unless it's horribly designed.

    Eh well, if they have the cash flow to retain that many warm bags of mostly water, more power to them.

  6. Small programming dept by obi1one · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The programming department currently consists of 32 people, and envelopes systems, tools, gameplay, server technologies, and UI.

    I know adding more developers can slow down production in the short term, but 5 years on I would think they would have been able to scale their programming staff up a bit more by now. New ui elements (gear manager, quest helper, even voice chat) have tended to be late and light on features, so thats one area I would think could benifit from more bodies in the future.

  7. Bosses by Idiomatick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Apparently the programmer's boss is also a programmer, the artists boss an artist and they are expected to work together. So so SOOOO much better than the bureaucrats most of us get stuck with.

    1. Re:Bosses by julesh · · Score: 2, Funny

      Apparently the programmer's boss is also a programmer, the artists boss an artist and they are expected to work together. So so SOOOO much better than the bureaucrats most of us get stuck with.

      Yeah. You say that now. Then you'll get a job where your boss is a programmer, and it'll be like "Why haven't you finished that task yet? I could have done that in 2 hours, and you've been 6...", and no matter how much you argue about how long such a task takes, you'll never win, because he'll _know_ exactly where your time is going.

  8. Imagine what these guys are like... by dan_sdot · · Score: 3, Funny

    The creative development team is the hub for the company's history. They have two full-time lore historians, keepers of blizzard's past. They are the liaisons with the novelists, work to create shared art resources, act as an archive for every piece of art that's been created for Blizzard Entertainment, and currently maintain 100,000 art assets.

    I wonder what those two guys are like. I'm pretty sure they must be nerds of EPIC proportions. And I don't mean that in a mean way, I'm just sayin....

  9. Ob. ctrl-alt-del by DarthVain · · Score: 3, Funny

    How it REALLY happens behind closed doors:

    http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20090916

  10. Weather Stations by danielk82 · · Score: 2, Funny

    a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations.

    That the night shift promptly changes to Family Guy at 8 PM when everyone else goes home.