Originally
posted by
Magellan:
So with the whole Diablo III thing going on right now I thought I would ask this question because we are for the most part a civil gaming forum (I giggle when I typed that).
Is it acceptable to fluff when a game you pay for does not work or perform to what you think it should...
OR
Do we expect to much from the gaming companies and the technology just isn't there for what we want?
I'm just curious because there are a lot of people who are defending Blizzard's on Diablo 3 not working right now and it surprised me because at first I thought it was just people trolling....but it seems there are quite a few people who are not upset that they can't play and don't blame Blizzard at all for the problems.
Do people really pay that much money for things and not care when they don't work right or is there some gaming code that I don't know about yet?
I believe the second. That is, I'm in the "Do we expect to much from the gaming companies and the technology just isn't there for what we want?" group.
Diablo 3 is a game that has sold to millions on the first day and broke all sales records. I'm a programmer, and I can tell you that technology, bandwidth, and money doesn't scale linearly.
People are complaining about Error 37 (authentication server too busy) and stuff, but if you have a authentication server that can only handle 10000 logins per second, because that is how fast the fastest CPU runs, then that is the limit. You can't throw money at it to make a faster CPU that doesn't exist yet.
You can however have more authentication servers but if you go down this route, then what really happens is that you need to add additional code and hardware to perform load balancing between the multiple servers, and add additional overheads and security checks and communicate with each other to make sure the 2 (or more) authentication servers do not read/write to the same user at the same time in the database. These extra communication and overheads does not necessary mean faster and more simultaneous logins.
People do seem to think money can solve everything, but it really doesn't, hardware and stuff doesn't scale linearly due to overheads, and in economics, it is called diminishing returns, or sometimes diseconomies of scale (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseconomy_of_scale - yes this happens with hardware and coding as well).
Now, personally, I don't agree with the business decision of "always online" to require playing D3, this obviously is not related to technology or programming. However, players have always been able to vote with their wallets whether to buy a game or not. Blizzard does what they are doing because there is enough demand for it.
Anonymous, you're forgetting that a lot more people play Diablo than WoW. A whole lot more.