kalo said:
xInspireRuin said:
If I can be a voice of reason here.
sure, go ahead...
Understandably a lot of people are upset at the latest issue with the servers. I, myself, spent a fair amount of silver to attain one of my last champions for the Maulie fusion. While it was a surprise that the event was cancelled, I knew that there were issues when my enhancements started to take longer to proc the "Success" or "Fail" result.
so far so good...
Working at a tech company (website servers), I can say this much. No piece of hardware is 100% reliable.
It's 2019, nobody's talking about hardware anymore, check AWS or any other cloud provider's uptime SLA - 99.9999%. Simply following best practices you can achieve comparable results on-prem. It's not their first game, so supposedly they have some supposedly smart people working on server setups, databases and game back-ends.
Especially under cases of extreme traffic.
Extreme traffic is Black Friday in Walmart. This game has 0 real-time features. It's traffic load is nothing compared to any real-time MMORPG, where you actually have to coordinate millions of connected players in near real time. Talking about ping below 100ms? What real time feature do we have here? A chat?
Given the circumstances, I wholeheartedly believe that Plarium did everything in their power to prepare for this event.
Like what? Checked the average of daily active players, checked 95th and 99th (three sigma anyone?) in server loads over the last month, ran a comprehensive stress test on staging environment, then used them results as a projection of expected load in production? Eliminated all the memory leaks in the code? Deployed an auto-scaling cluster with fail-safe load balancers?
It doesnt hurt to mention that Raid is one of the most popular mobile games available; not only in the US but in other countries as well.
It's around #70 in "top free iPhone games", according to SensorTower. Compared to many games it's player base is small.
(The sheer amount of server space and resources needed to handle all of our accounts must be pretty insane)
Insane is setup for Blizzards WoW realms. Here? Seriously, google "server setup for 1m concurrent connections" or "1m rps on single server" - you will find some good reads from 2014 (5 years ago).
What mustve been unexpected, was the sheer volume of players that woke up in anticipation of gaining this character.
Again, they have full statistics. Not anticipating something like that is incompetence.
If I had to bet, I would say that large majority of players were waiting for this event, as Ragemonger is a character that has recently been released and was not acquired by a lot of players. This leads me to assume this was one of the last pieces of the puzzle for a lot of players to unlock the sought after legendary. With the legendary being one small step away, I'll assume again that every active player who was close to finishing Maulie began upgrading away.
But for some reason, whoever planned this event didn't think that way and didn't see how this one champion will become a bottleneck. They probably didn't check it with PR department as well and they never heard of a very similar fiasco with previous limited legendary fusion.
Theres close to 0 chance that Plarium has their 'upgrade artifacts' data/scripts running on one server. So what this may mean, is that we ran a very real threat of overloading multiple servers. So, who knows what other aspects of the game could have been made unavailable..
Plarium made the right choice for our experience, as unexpected as it was.
They turned off a feature to avoid complete server crash, as simple as that. It doesn't matter what's their server(s) setup in the context of damage mitigation.
Plus, they are a company who I've seen first hand compensate their player base for even the smallest of downtime. (Ever gotten a spare boss key or some energy after a prolonged update?)
Now you do sound like a new player OR Plarium employee.
All things aside, Plarium has mentioned that an announcement will be made tomorrow about what will happen with the event moving forward.
Hopefully you can see that theres not too much cause for alarm, and while it is frustrating, I'm certain Plairum has a plan.
P.s. I'm not quite sure how the upvote system works here, but if it helps with visability give this comment a rating so more people can see it. (This is essentially just a different perspective on this issue.) Thanks!
No offense, but it's a very long version of "it's not their fault, they are the good guys" BS, sugar coated in some distantly technical mumbo jumbo to make it sound more plausible.
No, it is their fault, and it's twice as painful to see something like this after Foli.
I'd ask "Who hurt you..?"
But I already know the answer to that question.
For all intensive purposes, I agree with both sides of the arguement.
I wrote a much less friendly post directed at Plarium for the Foli contest. One of my arguments was aimed towards the large amount of money that would ultimately be required to even contemplate finishing that tournament. I did not agree with the way the tournament preyed upon those who wanted to better their teams; given the hundreds of dollars required to make that fusion even remotely possible (shard openings, energy packs, silver for artifact upgrades).
I made my comment on this thread because I noticed a trend that the posts initially were riddled with insults instead of arguments. While feedback is critical to any player based system, it felt like the criticism towards the company was blurring over the actual argument. It just so happens that I thought the argument deserved a new perspective.
Now, looking into your highly critical hyperanalysis of every minuscule detail that I added (with good intentions, mind you), to my initial post, I can strongly assume that you care more about stirring the pot and letting others know that you've been made upset than resolving an issue. Look man, it's going to be okay.
Look, your takeaway should be this.
Plarium may not have calculated properly the amount of resources needed.
Plarium made a choice to cancel the event.
Plarium did not want to cancel the event.
Plarium had no other choice.
Plarium decided what to do in terms of compensation for the players.
Plarium went about their business.
Then this thread started.
I got the general notion that while some of us were upset, rightfully so, others were much more prone to frustration worthy of bursting a blood vessel. My initial post was a reminder to not stress so much, mistakes happen, and that theres probably an answer to the question that will be made clear, soon.
If you somehow found an argument out of that, well, to each their own.
