There’s around an interview with Paul Sams not so different from another released some months ago.
we have in excess of a million and a half paying subscribers – it’s been going really, really well.
Each of the other markets have been going really well for us. We’re number one in North America, we’re number one in Europe, and in Korea we kind of move back and forth between number two and three. We expect for that to continue to go up – that’s probably the most competitive market in the world for these types of games. In China, from a concurrency perspective in open beta, we’ve broken all records in Chinese history for these types of games, so we’re quite excited.
We were able to respond and provide additional hardware very quickly, because we had another full datacentre ready to light, so we were able to do that and to get the capacity up.
[…]
In doing the whole planning process, we had to look at historical data from other companies. We looked at what their typical concurrency was as a percentage of their overall subscribership, we used all those things – we kind of padded those a bit, and we also looked at historical sales trends… We did all the different things that intelligent businesspeople would do to effectively plan for such a launch. The challenge is that the demand was so much greater than any other company had experienced, not to mention beyond the padding that we put on top of that.
We said, okay, let’s for the sake of planning just assume that from a numbers perspective, it’s equal to the biggest thing out there. Then let’s add to it, and say let’s be ready for more. Well, when you do that, and you still have demand that outpaces that… [laughs] That’s challenging! And so we’ve had to work very hard to deal with that.
As I wrote on QT3 I don’t believe those excuses about the problems at launch. This because those problems are still alive and well right now, just showing in a different form (same as when I write about “symptoms” and “causes”). The game, as many other in the genre, has problems of population and accessibility. The Battlegrounds launched recently and brought a long list of problems both on the design and the implementation. Some of the most serious are rooted in a structure that wasn’t properly planned and that brought to the initial problems with the queues after the release and now with the queues on the Battleground.
These Battlegrounds are a novelty now and many players are checking them. Still, on most servers there aren’t enough players to keep the instances up without long to infinite queues that become even worst thanks to the faction unbalance. What will happen six months down the road when the players will be bored to tears by repetitive gameplay that doesn’t go anywhere and that is available without a monthly fee in other games? How this form of PvP will be accessible in a low populated server or during the off-peak?
These problems cannot be ignored or justified in any way. That’s “design” and it should have been solved YEARS ago, when the project started. Not seven month after release. Not as a “surprise”. There is no fucking surprise if we deal with something that everyone else with some experience in the genre already saw coming.
Give a look to this thread. We were already anticipating and discussing these problems. We also suggested possible solutions:
Mark Asher:
One of the things they might be able to do with instanced battlegrounds is draw upon all the servers to fill them. Instead of requiring enough level 25-30 Alliance players on one server, that instanced battleground will be filled with Alliance players from all the servers.If they do something like that they shouldn’t have any problems with low population instances.
But what was going to happen is what I anticipated. It’s my skepticism:
Well, really, it’s a great idea that opens even more possibilities. I don’t think Blizzard will experiment and innovate this much.
Now what I say is that I do not tolerate justifications. The management of a game doesn’t belong here. This is a duty of the designer. This is a crucial aspect of how the game is built and it’s not tolerable that it gets systematically ignored. As I wrote this is a deliberate choice. They chose to ignore an important fundament of the game and they are going to suffer that choice as everyone else doing the same mistake. Not for two months after release because the servers have queues or are crashing, but for the whole course of the game because the gameplay and the accessibility is hindered by a plan that doesn’t work and that noone cared to focus on.
There is NOTHING more important than this. There isn’t a single aspect of the game design in general (in this genre) that is more important. I do not tolerate that this argument is easily dismissed.
At least now I have Guild Wars. That’s a game that isn’t run by idiots and that planned correctly the structure of the game before everything else.