
What EA could have done to help Sim City - chrislloyd
http://blog.minefold.com/post/44819603128
======
kevingadd
I love armchairing as much as the next guy, but this is lazy spam, plain and
simple:

nslookup api.simcity.com

nslookup socket.simcity.com

nslookup update.prod.simcity.com

Right now these are returning CNAMEs to amazon web services and akamai for me,
and I'm told they were days ago as well.

If you're going to talk about how EA should have set up SimCity, maybe you
should at least look and see how they ACTUALLY set up SimCity and make sure
they didn't do the things that you claim would have fixed their problems?

EDIT: Also, getting a launch right for a tremendously mass-market product is
hard work. Until you've actually done it, it's kind of shitty to stand back
and shout simple advice like 'use the cloud' or 'use modern devops practices'.
I think that's what really bugs me about this post: The minefold guys probably
do have useful bits of scaling advice to share here, but they're burying it
under lazy swipes at a big competitor that really aren't justified.

~~~
mindstab
Ok so then they appear to be "misusing" AWS. It's built for exactly the kind
of problem they are having. Kudos for getting on it but they appear to have
mis-designed their architecture then or something else.

I'm not sure what's worse, as the author intimated, making a massive online
game not using cloud tech, or using cloud tech and still suffering massive
server resource shortage and being unable to scale anyways due to poor
architecture?

~~~
kevingadd
Many problems are not magically solved by throwing more machines at them. The
problem Minefold's blog post lazily describes as 'single point of failure'
actually encapsulates certain classes of problems that are intrinsically
singular; as it happens, friends lists are one of them.

No matter how much horizontal and vertical scaling you do, it will eventually
be possible for a player to create a friends list that has so many friends on
it that operations on it end up becoming prohibitively expensive. Friends list
operations end up effectively being JOINs.

~~~
mindstab
So your theory is that problems with friends list are keeping people in 30+
minute queues to play the game? Because otherwise you are straw manning me.

I agree, just throwing AWS at the problem doesn't solve it, as demonstrated by
this catastrophe. On the other hand, many people, including OP have managed to
build scalable gaming systems on top of AWS where EA/Maxis for the moment
appear to have failed quite dramatically.

Yes it's a hard problem, but it doesn't seem off base distilling the OP's
argument down to "they have done the cloud wrong".

~~~
kevingadd
It's not a straw man, 'Better friends lists' is one of the sections in the
original article.

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malloreon
How about: 1\. Not require always-on DRM for an almost completely single
player game.

~~~
whatupdave
Minecraft seems to strike the right balance here. Authenticate players on
public servers to avoid spoofing other accounts, but also allow people to run
their own private servers and disable online mode. Granted this enables piracy
but I'm sure it hasn't put a dent in their sales.

~~~
rhizome
Even if it _has_ put a dent in their sales, Notch doesn't seem to mind.

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hayksaakian
"If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective,
we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How
To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is
meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

Via <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

~~~
chrislloyd
Thanks, fixed.

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jeffehobbs
Yeah! Why didn't they elastically scale with the cloud? #fail

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ihsw
They don't need help, they already got your money.

