Slashdot Mirror
GTA Online Runs Into an Online Roadblock
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "CNET reports that Grand Theft Auto Online, the biggest entertainment release of the year with more than $1 billion in annual sales, is having some trouble getting the gamers online. The title, which launched on game consoles Tuesday morning, is experiencing server issues that have locked out some gamers and made it difficult for those who have gotten in to play the game. Fifteen million people purchased the game when it was released last week — and any number of them could play online when that 'perk' becomes available on October 1. 'At a conservative estimate I would expect about two million players to log on to GTA Online within the first 24 hours,' says Keza MacDonald, UK games editor for IGN.com, the video game and entertainment site. 'Rockstar has never done an online game of this scale before, so they are totally unproven in terms of their network infrastructure.' Rockstar, the game's creator, said that it was doing all it could to buy and access servers to accommodate what was expected to be massive demand for its online title. Meanwhile Twitter is abuzz with complaints from gamers who say they can't get into the service."
All would be forgiven if the Rockstar equivalent of a 404 for multiplayer was a gang of hookers appearing suddenly and beating you down until you died.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Day one server issues for a AAA release??? STOP THE PRESSES!
Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
I don't want it. I need me some Steam DRM before I can enjoy a game. Why would I want the ability to buy it used or sell it?
GTA V wasn't released this Tuesday *or* last week. It was released more than two weeks ago. The online component went live (well, theoretically) Tuesday (yesterday).
Agreed. When you only pull in a billion dollars in the first three days after launch, you can't afford to go all-out in preparation of your online component just to make sure you maintain good-will and enthusiasm for your company's product and reputation going into the future.
50$ million dollars (or whatever the figure would be) to buy hardware that is only going to be useful for a week is 50$ million dollars, no matter HOW much you start out with.
After all, if nobody wants it, the servers wouldn't be slammed and hard to get to.
How much are those servers costing the consumer? That's what I thought.
Didn't Guild Wars 2 limit the ability to purchase the game initially to give them time to scale the hardware? Of course that isn't as easy in this situation since the game has a single player component.
From Wikipedia article on Grand Theft Auto 5:
"The game includes a multiplayer mode, Grand Theft Auto Online, which allows up to 16 players to freely roam a recreation of the single-player setting. Players can cooperatively engage in various activities, such as races and bank heists. "
From Rockstar Games (http://www.rockstargames.com/V/GTAOnline):
"Access to Grand Theft Auto Online is free with every retail copy of Grand Theft Auto V and launches on October 1st"
The CNET article is horrible by trying to slant an angle that Grand Theft Auto Online is a separate game from GTA5. Its not. Its a multiplayer aspect to GTA5 which is running into issues. Not a separate game, a feature of an existing game not working as expected. End of story. On the Slashdot editing front, Grand Theft Auto online did not make $1 billion in annual sales, GTA5 did. FTFA: "GTA Online's launch comes a couple of weeks after Rockstar started selling Grand Theft Auto V. That title has become the biggest entertainment release of the year, generating more than $1 billion in annual sales".
On the plus side, thanks for the heads up GTA Online is now available.
In hindsight, Rockstar probably shouldn't have decided to split the costs of a datacenter with healthcare.gov.
I hear they're having some weird server issues, too. GTA players are signing up for the bronze healthcare plan, hoping that if they do well enough on it the game will bump them up to silver or gold. And uninsured people are signing up for catastrophic care plans that teleport them to the nearest hospital and take away their guns when they get hurt.
Whats wrong with spinning up a few hundred EC2 instances? Cheap, easy and no initial outlay.
actually I don't think there's much tier-1 commentary about being a DB or not. As a first cut you can be good about the big stuff but be an annoying douche about it. better than playing GTA V all day in ur undies.
I'm not sure why we should praise a New Zealand pop singer. I'm also not so sure that the "thou shalt not kill" thing applies to pixels. I'm pretty sure that God would have said something like "thou shalt not use algorithms to effect the deletion of pixels through the interaction of a user interface".
wat? anyone hardware devoted to online will pay for itself within the first week with these kinds of numbers. don't be that standard IT douche... plus micro transactions...
Its not THAT bad. I have been playing since yesterday. Was just playing with 3 friends of mine. Have been in huge 8vs8 battles. Never a spot of lag while playing. Got disconnected a couple of times AFTER my missions or deathmatches were done yesterday. I think the problem most people are having is actually getting past tutorial mission. Two million people, all trying to do the exact same mission. Once you get past that its basically smooth sailing tho.
I think it could actually be easier to control the number of users accessing a multi-player feature in a single-player game. They could have blocked everyone from logging in until November 1st as a default. Then they could have let people earn the ability to push that date forward by accomplishing certain objectives in the single player game. For example, a user could earn a minute off for every hundredth of a second they beat certain thresholds in each of several of the many minigames. A graph of the number of users with access versus time might look like the tail of a statistical distribution, giving the company a chance to have a more manageable launch.
actually I don't think there's much tier-1 commentary about being a DB or not. As a first cut you can be good about the big stuff but be an annoying douche about it. better than playing GTA V all day in ur undies.
Don't worry. I play naked! Wanna see my schlong?
.. then again, maybe not.
Then again, how about merging the two - one player builds and manages the city, the other takes advantage of the populace...
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Whats wrong with spinning up a few hundred EC2 instances? Cheap, easy and no initial outlay.
Not Invented Here.
Or corporations don't trust a cloud service run by other corporations when it really really matters.
If Rockstar can't do it smoothly, what did you expect from the other major rollout?
Protip: The Internet is a Decentralized Network, built to withstand thermonuclear war, with packets routed around cities mere moments after disappearing from the grid... And you fucking morons built a centralized service atop it? Even though specific end user machines could have downloaded world state and served the bandwi-- Wait, you built the whole gods damned web as centralized?
Just--gahhh. What Lamers. I'm out.
actually I don't think there's much tier-1 commentary about being a DB or not. As a first cut you can be good about the big stuff but be an annoying douche about it. better than playing GTA V all day in ur undies.
Don't worry. I play naked! Wanna see my schlong?
You mean your schlort?
No wonder I am having a hard time logging into healthcare.gov to look at my (probably) new insurance. All the bandwidth is being sucked up by GTA5, because they both launched the same day.
15 milion bought the game... so the worst case scenario....2 million will be online..
Thats a nice one... they dont know World of Warcraft study case?
This is exactly why I just tried to connect once, and then went back to offline... I knew it wouldn't work the first week.
But I don't understand why they don't rent scalable cloud services, from amazon or whatever? Are they actually buying all the servers themselves?
Or would even amazon or MS azure datacenters not be sufficient?
You would have succeeded better if you had written something like "While you are waiting for the GTA online problems to be resolved, why not check out our racing game, here's the shameless plug: http://gamesdriving.fr/ " You should not have mentioned the steep price either as it will turn down customers. Make the game work perfectly under Linux and you would get more customers in Slashdot.
Or he should just put it in his sig. And not have 200 games that are essentially all the same game.
which is totally what she said
You can sell extra servers to next company preparing for big launch, few months down the road. Or rent them to Amazon/whoever to run their cloud on them, until you need them for a next event year or two later.
You won't recover all the money this way, but can probably cut the cost considerably.
You have a typo there: should be "shopping" not "shoping". Also "Air jordan" should be written as "Air Jordan".
There was 3 day head start for pre-order, which had lot of overflow instance and crashed often. After the release they did stop selling the game online. You could still go to a dirt store and buy a boxed copy. BTW, there is no single player component. Some content can be played solo, but everything is networked.
Until the first few week there was a lot of connectivity issue. After a year it is still far from bug free, but this software is so complex and always changing I doubt it will ever be considerate stable. Overall experience is pleasant.
This unsolicited opining was brought to you by the Anonymous Coward and the Interwebs foundation for well connected tubes.
1. It's all about the PROFIT... not gaming experience.
Games manufactuers let users do the final testing. I bet they save a lot of $ by getting users to beta test. This was the same with COD2... billions made and network issues meant your PS3 locked up and completely froze! I must have logged over 20 support tickets awith Activision and as yet, have no solution that works. Their shitty response eventually replied to me saying I need to delete the update patch and download again... which didn't fix anything. So I will be selling COD2 ASAP.
I understand that Rockstar have done many online games, so the report was not worth reading as it states...
"'Rockstar has never done an online game of this scale before, so they are totally unproven in terms of their network infrastructure.'"
This doesn't make any sense given we are on the 5th version of GTA and many of the previous versions had good online experiences.
BTW I completed GTA5 the other day and was VERY dissapointed with the ending (killing Trevor)... it seems gameplay suffers for good graphics and movie cut scenes (which I always skip anyway).
ROCKSTAR - remember you make cool GAMES (and minigames) with adult humour... please stop trying to make interactive movies.
Killing Trevor is the easy way out. I intend to try the deathwish and see if its better.
The bottleneck is at the point of where you make your first connection to the online service. Everyone is required to do a set of tutorial missions before joining the real servers.
They have it setup like an mmo where the missions are instances. Once you FINALLY get past the tutorial there are almost no problems. In fact, the lobbies I played in where not even full.
That first tutorial instance is the problem.
I'm willing to bet GTA is seeing twice as much traffic as healthcare.gov.
Honestly, how hard can it be?
We can farm out a thousand servers to run a website. Don't. Have them be connection brokers.
Design an image for a server that boots, automatically announces itself to the connection brokers, and gets a unique name back.
Now every time you go over the capacity of your own datacentre, spin up that image on a few hundred Amazon/Azure/Whatever servers. In fact, for every two instances outside that you spin up, take off one of the internal ones so you have spares, have enough bandwidth for the connection brokers, etc.
People have been doing this en-masse for decades now in the larger datacentres / websites / infrastructure. Honestly how hard can it be? The only problem is exhausting your upstream bandwidth to TALK to all the servers that you're spinning up elsewhere. That's not something you can get quickly or cheaply if you've underestimated. But you can always just move the connection brokers to the cloud too, and solve that problem.
Sure it'll cost, but then it'll die down and you go back to internal servers if that's what you want. Meanwhile, you can say you had 10m people playing online at once rather than "we crapped out around one million because we designed it badly".
And what the hell is wrong with proper testing, including letting pre-orders go online early, so you can predict demand and fix problems before the proper launch? Oh, no, apparently we just let stuff break nowadays, because people have already paid for it so stuff them.
GTA has an online mode? I guess that is why there was an update the other day. Ho hum. Well, you guys have fun on your online racing. I've no interest whatsoever in GTA online.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I thought that was Wil Wheaton?
Why would they though?
In 5 years when they release GTA 6 they will pull in 1.5 billion regardless of how they fuck up online play.
As long as the single player campaign works, no one will care.
Sure they'll bitch and moan a bit. But it won't be anything like the drama EA had with sim city.
The game has a stock exchange whose price movements are affected not only by your actions locally but by other players' actions globally. Needless to say, trading and obtaining price quotes requires a connection to the GTA servers. Interesting idea but you that money is locked up if you can't connect to the servers. I stupidly had invested everything in this market and couldn't pull out the money I needed to complete a mission. It did come back online after an hour but it'll be a while before I do that again.
why not check out our racing game
Err, I don't have anything to do with racing games???
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the government had stayed open. Nearly a million federal workers suddenly found themselves on furlough, so what better to do than hop on GTA Online?