59 réponses à ce sujet

[Sylvius the Mad]

Eh. The problem with the site wasn't that the resources weren't spent effectively. It's that the requirements of the exchanges were not communicated clearly until too late in the implementation process.

State exchanges that did really well did so by determining what true baseline functionality needed to exist and forego some of the more extraneous feature for later dates.

The federal site, in an attempt to set the bar, tried to meet all requirements and, in the process , succeeded in meeting few of them.

Ultimately, the failure is on the states, which purposefully dragged their heels in many cases because they knew they had the safety net of the federal site.



But this is why I didn't bring up the example initially - it is a messy can of worms and borderline politcal discussion.

What it really demonstrates is something I've heard from engineers on a number of occasions: when the client defines the features he wants, the schedule he needs, and the budget he has, the engineer's first job is to tell him that he can have, at most, two of those, and must choose which to sacrifice.

[Schreckstoff]

What it really demonstrates is something I've heard from engineers on a number of occasions: when the client defines the features he wants, the schedule he needs, and the budget he has, the engineer's first job is to tell him that he can have, at most, two of those, and must choose which to sacrifice.

[Elite Midget]

you won't be needing your old saves, the keep pretty much allows you to create new ones.

Eh? So it isn't an important than?

[Allan Schumacher]

Something only Duane Johnson could accomplish.

 

It was a genuine question.  What precisely do you mean?  Because I mean, several million (last I heard was 7) people are playing League of Legends at any given time.  Never mind the concurrent connections for huge sites like Google and Facebook.  Never mind where you get the numbers.  Why is 1 million people (where does this number come from) being placed as a huge task?  Is it?  Based on what?  Your past experience?  It isn't that difficult to think of examples that countermand this, including the launch of SWTOR (which would have much greater server demands).  Sure something like SimCity had issues, but again the demands on the server won't be the same.

 

Please drop the flippant answers in the future because they are not necessary and come across as deliberately evasive (i.e. you have no basis for your statement).  Given your previously established position of not liking the Keep solution in general, it undermines your concerns because NOW I think you're just rabble rousing because you want people to believe your statements so that they will reject the Keep.  Unless your goal was to simply aggravate me, which I suppose we can say "mission accomplished."

 

 

 

 

I would expect DA:I will be your best opening week for the DA series. Possibly for the company. I'd be, frankly, astonished if you didn't break 3.5 million over the first six weeks. Maybe more if the game is well received.

 

There's a mountain of difference between inciting concern because of 3-5 million people concurrently and you expressing your surprise that we don't break 3.5 million in six weeks.  I'd also be surprised if the game wasn't that successful over that period of time.  But unless your point is that people will stay on the Keep 24/7 for several weeks why they're playing, it doesn't seem particularly relevant to your point about overloading our servers.

[Allan Schumacher]

I believe you guys will easily break 5 million, might no be much but i know ppl who are not fans but are going to buy it just from the demo i showed them, they surprised me aswell they generally buy nothing more than COD/Fifa and a coupla crates of beer lol

 

I'm super excited for the game and I think it has a pretty darned good chance to do very well.  I'm certainly hoping for it to.

 

I just found it rather surprising that one of the conscientious objectors for the game that feels a great many of the decisions we make are poor ones still feels that the game will be more successful than DAO's lifetime in a single day.  I suppose the implication was lost, but I was more suggesting that it's rather convenient for him to manufacture such a high number with a hypothetical situation to reinforce his disapproval of the Keep.  Which is somewhat paradoxical because it implies a huge amount of day one Keep adoption from people that may not have even played the previous games.  Though I'll at least acknowledge that despite that, it's not impossible that they all might decide to check out the Keep for some duration.

[frylock23]

Here's one problem I see with not enough people knowing about The Keep. When people log in on day one, all eager to get into the game and play ... and they get to the part where they usually import their saves ... and the game redirects them to The Keep in big, flashing neon letters ... how many are going to get annoyed with the 300 question "inquisition" waiting for them at The Keep that keeps them from playing? This is why The Keep is being released early, isn't it? So if The Keep isn't marketed well enough to let people who want to play on day one with custom world states do that without slogging through a 300 question interrogation ... that's not going to make people happy. It's going to be a chore and not the cool thing it otherwise would be especially as a lot of people may be sitting on saves.

[dutch_gamer]

Once Bioware knows the release date of the Keep it is likely they will talk about this to the media. And even then some people can still miss all of it and still feel really annoyed about so many questions in the Keep. But at some point it is out of Bioware's hands and it is up to customers to properly research a game before even purchasing it as to not get surprised about a change.

 

I do think even currently a lot of people do know about the Keep. There are a couple of new threads about the Keep almost every week, specifically referring to the Keep with the wonder how it works, a lot of times new forum members too. I just don't understand why some fear Bioware is unaware they need to market the Keep and that they need to be told to think about this. I am certain they know but right now it is not the right time to market the Keep because not all questions can be answered. One can say, the same is true for the game, but with the Keep it is important that they can say beyond a doubt if importing save games will or will not work before telling the world about the Keep. And the final answer to this will likely come around the same time as the announcement for the release date or whenever the Keep actually gets released.

[Darth Krytie]

I should have grabbed an umbrella before coming into this thread, because the sky is falling for sure. I think there's a lot of needless worrying where there needn't be. The Keep will be released before the game (about a month, so says M&M)  is and that'll give people plenty of time to utilize it. There's really no need to get hyperbolic about the numbers of people who will likely access the site, especially at once.

 

Truth is, and history has proven it out, most people will play with the default state. There were more people who played both DA: Origins and DA: Kirkwall  that used a default world state instead of an import. This also bears out in Mass Effect 3 given the number of people who don't meet Wrex as over 80% and I think the numbers of people who saved him in ME1 were way higher than 15%.

 

Most people who will play won't care. Really. They won't. I think the forums become a bit of an echo chamber. All these diehards in one place makes it seem like everyone who picks up DA:I will be on the same page. They won't. Sure, some of them people who care won't be on the forum, but they are on twitter or facebook and those sites have talked about the Keep. And will ramp up talking about it the closer the Keep gets to launch. The Keep will also head into open beta soonish, to test servers and such, and there will be a greater number of people seeing it. It'll get around to the people who would care in the first place.

 

 

Think of the number of people who are going to play this game cross-platform from their previous games. That number alone would indicate that those who do wouldn't assume they could save import from their previous games just due to the common sense mechanics problem.

 

I honestly think that judgement of the Keep and whether it's a good tool or not should be reserved to people who have actually seen it and have used it. Forming a hard and fast opinion on something you've neither seen nor tried makes an entire argument suspect.

 

So, tl;dr. Don't worry. The Keep is awesome and fewer people care about using the default world state than anyone in here has postulated.

[Fast Jimmy]

Allan Schumacher, on 10 Jul 2014 - 7:06 PM, said:

 

It was a genuine question.  What precisely do you mean?  Because I mean, several million (last I heard was 7) people are playing League of Legends at any given time.  Never mind the concurrent connections for huge sites like Google and Facebook.  Never mind where you get the numbers.  Why is 1 million people (where does this number come from) being placed as a huge task?  Is it?  Based on what?  Your past experience?  It isn't that difficult to think of examples that countermand this, including the launch of SWTOR (which would have much greater server demands).  Sure something like SimCity had issues, but again the demands on the server won't be the same.

 

Yet every single one of the examples you've given as successes are products that are online-centric in their focus. Yes, League of Legends and SWTOR didn't crash their opening weeks... because I'd be willing to bet every dollar in my pocket that stress tests and regression testing for each possible permutation of the game was a major section and focus of the project cycle. DOUBLY true for sites like Facebook or Google. Their entire existence is based upon being able to function well under large server loads. 

 

The one example in your list that was a product that merely had an online component, not had it as its focal point, is SimCity. Which was not the best example of predicting and testing bandwidth.

 

One million users is an arbitrary, but totally realistic number of people who will be playing the game the first day/days of release. And the reason I say Herculean is because it is. 

 

If one million people access a site in a day, that is over 11 people access it PER second. That's on an average, and not taking into account peak usage times. If we assume everyone accesses The Keep and obtains their world state file and it is relatively small - say 1MB - that is a number that is pretty manageable: probably under a terrabyte a day, or 100 mb/sec. 

 

However, if many players actually visit the site to set up their world states, where you would have multiple pages with multiple input fields and some type of flash presentation for every major choice available, then we are talking an entirely different order of necessary bandwidth needed. Whether or not traffic to the site is correlated through the same bandwidth servers as the source of the Keep files themselves (a logical assumption, but one that may not necessarily be true), this could help circumvent some issues, but it still would be problems for people who waited/didn't know to set up their world states before Release Day.

 

 

 

Please drop the flippant answers in the future because they are not necessary and come across as deliberately evasive (i.e. you have no basis for your statement).  Given your previously established position of not liking the Keep solution in general, it undermines your concerns because NOW I think you're just rabble rousing because you want people to believe your statements so that they will reject the Keep.  Unless your goal was to simply aggravate me, which I suppose we can say "mission accomplished."

 

 

Lighten. Up.

 

 

 

There's a mountain of difference between inciting concern because of 3-5 million people concurrently and you expressing your surprise that we don't break 3.5 million in six weeks.  I'd also be surprised if the game wasn't that successful over that period of time.  But unless your point is that people will stay on the Keep 24/7 for several weeks why they're playing, it doesn't seem particularly relevant to your point about overloading our servers.

 

Nowhere did I say there would three million people on day one logging into The Keep. 

 

I had made the comparison to the healthcare.gov website, which during the first four months of operation, only sold a little over three million policies. Yet, from its very inception, it encountered numerous crashes and bandwidth issues. I then stated it wouldn't be impossible for DA:I to sell three million copies. 

 

Given that my original example, the healthcare.gov site, took six months to get over three million, then six weeks to get to three million for DA:I would be a blink of an eye. But that is also a false correlation - not everyone who went on the healthcare.gov site bought a policy, nor will everyone who buys a copy of DA:I access The Keep. 

 

 

But all I was doing is answering the original question posed to me:

 

 

Isn't the assumption that the same amount or anywhere near the same amount of people that went to the HEALTHCARE website are going to log onto the Keep at once just as ridiculous of an assumption?

 

 

...to which I say no, it is not a ridiculous assumption. Its not an EQUIVALENT assumption or comparison... but it is not entirely outside the scope of comparing the two. To which I replied:

 

 

<shrug> As I stated, the entire exchange program enrolled seven million people. Many of those on state-run exchanges, not the federal site.

If DA:I has three million to five million units sold, would that be DRASTICALLY a different scale?

 

 

...again, noting that the SCALE of comparison was not outlandish.