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Looking at the various data and positive feedback we’ve received so far it has been an exceptional launch for both BioWare and Dragon Age: Origins. However, it was also clear that there were a few bumps and teething pains along the way that has had an impact to a small, but important portion of our community.
Despite our best planning for the launch of a single player game of this magnitude we have to admit we clearly underestimated the desire for players to want to play connected, their pleasure at sharing their stories on the BioWare Social Site, and the overall level of interest in the launch DLC (downloadable content).
Ultimately all these factors worked together to make for a rocky start for some of you – for those that did experience or are still experiencing any issues, our sincere apologies.
However, I wanted to share with you some of the things we are following, to reassure you that we are continuing to work on improving the launch of Dragon Age: Origins even further, and more importantly where we are at in terms of addressing these.
Social site and game connectivity
As most fans now know, BioWare has launched a new Social site for all of our fans to discuss their games on the forums, to share their in-game achievements, to upload screenshots and much more. If you are reading this outside the social site and have not visited yet, you can register on the Social site here: http://social.biowar...m/user_home.php
When Dragon Age: Origins launched, we expected things to get busy on the Social site as fans redeemed DLC content, used the faces they created in the Character Creator and more. We anticipated a big increase of traffic and having passed a slew of load testing we were confident that we were ready.
Unfortunately, no matter how well you prepare, sometimes things don’t work out. The process that updates the social website failed overnight on Monday 2nd and Thursday 5th due to volume of traffic. Social has a master server on which all content, posts, etc, are uploaded to. From there, for load balancing reasons, that content & the page updates are actually copied over to a number of ‘slave’ servers – these are what you and I actually connect to and view our social pages on.
With the process to update these display servers dying, it meant that over time each of these display servers began to fall further and further behind what was actually being uploaded to the master server – in terms of content, posts, etc. As such, when each of us was being directed to one of the display servers to view one of the web pages we were occasionally bouncing between older/newer content. And even something simple like refreshing the browser or make a forum post would place you on whichever next available slave server there was, which could again be anywhere from minutes to hours behind ‘reality’ - leading to it appearing that your post etc never happened. Ultimately each display server would end up receiving no updates, making it appear that the social site had zero updates for hours at a time - even users online would time out on the display servers, eventually looking like no one was on the site.
While no data was lost – everything still arrived at the master server – it created a very confusing site experience for everyone. It took a few hours working non-stop with the great folks at EA IT to resolve this issue, and once resolved it was a slow process to then get all of the missing data to each slave server in order to get caught up over time to ‘reality’. Before a more robust solution was put in place (on Friday 6th), we had a similar failure again on the 5th due to the start of European traffic / game launch.
As of noon on Friday November 6 this was fully resolved. Steps have already been put into place to not have this occur again and the Social site is now up and running smoothly.
A similar major contributor to general early game issues for some players was also due to sheer server load. Our initial estimates were created working with EA IT staff who have managed launches for numerous successful multi-player titles including FIFA, Madden, and the Battlefield series, as well as Spore –our expected closest relative in terms of online usage. We put together an initial estimate for server capacity that seemed appropriate based on those figures, in conjunction with a barrage of load capacity testing on DA:O itself in the months leading up to launch.
Much closer to launch, we revised our figures coming out of the data we saw from the stand alone character creator app launch – just about doubling capacity yet again from our initial figures. For good measure, we then set in place a contingency plan – our plan B – to allow for further rapid deployment of additional capacity to yet again nearly double that amount, should things really get going.
As it turns out, before the end of the first day (Nov. 3rd - US & Asia launch) we had not only exceeded our initial capacity, but our plan B as well! For a single player game with online features, this was unprecendented and the levels we were seeing was completely unexpected. Had this been an MMO, such as TOR, the initial setup and type of setup would have been very different indeed and we'd be laughing even with traffic in the orders of magnitude higher - but for a single player game no would predicted it would exceed this type of setup.
Since then the IT and online teams here at BioWare and EA worldwide have been steadily ramping up additional capacity – for peak usage on Wed Nov. 4th, for example, we did not have any significant server issues, and at the time of writing this we are now maintaining a steady buffer of capacity over usage. It appears we have managed to get ahead of the launch curve.
Still, in expectation of the European and rest of world launch, and our first weekend where we anticipate our greatest traffic load yet the IT teams are literally building additional servers at our request to keep capacity ahead of load.
Having gotten over the initial wave, we’ve been monitoring our forums and working in collaboration with EA’s customer support group, to track and resolve the most common remaining issues that players have been reporting to us.
DLC (Downloadable content):
Some players have reported that they have been unable to see their DLC (on PC). DLC is delivered through our custom content updater service, so this needs to be up and running. The normal game installer should correctly set this up on any version of windows.
However, it appears that some digital download service installations were not correctly setting up the service – as such, those games were effectively ‘blind’ to the DLC on the servers. In addition, despite extensive testing on all supported version of Windows, even with the non-digital version of the game there is a small sub-set of configurations where it appears that the service is still not installing correctly.
There are some manual work-arounds in the BioWare and Stardock & D2D forums. In addition, we are working on an update to address the remaining configurations.
If you still are not seeing any DLC, we apologize – please bear with us as we get our updates out for these unforeseen cases. In the meantime, you should confirm that you have the DLC attached to your account (through code redemption or purchase), by looking at the registered game promotions page on the social site (http://social.biowar...ntitlements.php). As long as the content is there you are good, you will not lose that content. We ask for your patience while we find a way to deliver that content dependently to your specific configuration as soon as possible.
Digital Download versions:
A segment of players, predominantly with digital game versions from a variety of e-stores, had encountered an issue where they had first registered their game key on the social site, and subsequently were unable to authenticate their game with their respective digital game service.
There was an issue resolved here on social which should now prevent this problem moving forward. If you are still experiencing this problem please contact EA support as they have a fix for this already.
With a segment of digital consumers there have been some cases where the online authentication system used was also impacted by server load, or experienced a different issue due to a specific system setup not seen before – this could manifest itself as a ‘could not connect to EA Core’ or ‘WC.dll’ error. We are following this issue closely with the team that handles this technology and hope to have a solution shortly.
This system also uses Adobe Air was its web interface. As such, there have been some individual cases where the player uninstalled Adobe Air and was subsequently unable to authenticate the digital version of the game. At this time, the best solution is to keep Adobe Air installed (or to re-install).
A small segment of players also reported download issues with EADM (when purchasing through EA Store). This is being investigated as well. For now, the best solution appears to retry the download.
On reflection:
Releasing any PC title these days is always a challenge. Releasing a PC title on a brand new game engine with this many online moving parts, and as a new OS is launched, makes it that much more interesting. Still, when we look at the actual total number of players who are happily playing DA:O without any issues, it is a real testament to the level of quality assurance for a title of this scale and across the three platforms shipped on.
Despite the amount of testing conducted at BioWare, EA worldwide, and compatibility testing at various labs including the major hardware manufacturers, nothing ever quite prepares you for a piece of technology hitting the wider gaming audience and the mind boggling permutations of hardware, software, drivers, firewalls and custom configurations out there.
We really appreciate everyone’s patience as we work to iron out these last wrinkles that are impacting some of you.
Know that we are continuing to monitor your feedback here on the forums, as well as throughout EA’s support network, including FAQ usage, email and phone calls – there is actually a significant number of BioWare and EA staff lurking through the various forums on social site, our previous forums and EA support sites with the sole purpose of capturing this feedback. Those issues are collated and prioritized on an on-going basis and already being planned against a roll out game feature updates and fixes, which we'll continue to do as needed.
The relative number of staff posts doesn’t do justice to the effort that actually exists behind the scenes - please understand that our priority remains in working on any issues. We have a dedicated post launch team, which includes not only the DLC creation team but also individuals devoted to supporting the DA toolset, and releasing new features and updates to social site and the game – and this team will be supporting Dragon Age: Origins exclusively for quite a while.
As I wrap this up, I can see more and more of our European players (and beyond) going online for the first time and enjoying the game and DLC – we’re looking forward to hearing more from you, and to deliver even more content in the future to expand your DA:O experience, in addition to continuing to address these issues as they come up. We hope you will continue enjoying DA:O as much as we loved making it.
(edited for spacing)
Modifié par Fernando Melo, 07 novembre 2009 - 03:14 .
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