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
For JESUS said to his followers, thou shalt not kill, and said not he that thou shat not not kill whilst in a video game, for that is evil in thought.
PRAISE the LORDE!
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?
Of COURSE there are issues. Rockstar is not retarded. They are not about to spend money unnecessarily so the first day wankers can play their fucking game. They'll scale their purchases and outlays so the game runs smoothly after the "gotta have it NOW" faggots have calmed down. They'll scale their purchases for the long-haul.
It's the same thing every time. Bunch clueless, emotionally retarded basement dwellers crying about how they can't get on in the first couple of days, having no idea how large gaming companies work. Grow the fuck up.
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).
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.
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.
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.
.. 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.
this is a great game and it takes many years to make it in action so that s the only reason for the price http://gamesdriving.fr/
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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?