

Blizzard internals from GDC Austin - siculars
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25307

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patio11
One interesting line out of many in this article:

 _[WoW runs on] over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5
terabytes of blade RAM, [...] 1.3 petabytes of storage._

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prakash
The RAM is the standout relative to everything else -- that's a lot of RAM.

~~~
harpastum
Not really. That's 1.5GB per core, and 8.5GB per slice. I'd say that's right
about average, especially for a gaming server.

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nihilocrat
_Brack singled out the tools team as a critical component of this group. They
make tools not only for the developers, but for customer service as well._

Hey, this is what I do! Well, for a different company, not Blizzard. It seems
to be an afterthought for most companies so it's nice to see him point that
out in particular.

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boredguy8
123 people on cinematics? I've played WoW since beta, and until recently have
seen all the content at all levels of the game raid-wise. This seems like a
lot of people for how few cut-scenes there are, and for the few pre-rendered
FMV scenes. Am I missing something, or wildly underestimating what it takes to
produce 3 minutes of FMV?

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jeffcoat
The groups responsibilities include "machinima sequences", which I take to
include most pre-scripted in-game sequences that have NPCs doing something;
triggered, say, by ending a quest. I suspect there are a lot of those.

(I wanted to compare that number to the people writing the quests themselves
-- it still does seem high -- but that group isn't explicitly mentioned. The
keynote is definitely glossing over a lot, even at this level of detail.)

~~~
pvg
I think when he said 'cut scenes' he meant the 'machinima sequences' as
opposed to the pre-rendered cinematics. And there really aren't very many of
those, either, far fewer than you seem to think - it's a very rare quest that
ends with or contains such a sequence.

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fh
Not that rare, I remember a dozen or two across Northrend. Almost every major
quest chain ends with such a sequence (and most of them involve the Lich King
taunting you). Admittedly the many many quests along the quest chain typically
don't have machinima sequences.

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zyb09
Sorry what are you talking about? There's exactly one ingame cinematic in WoW
(Wrath gate) and 3 prerendered once (intro video for each addon & maingame).
That's it. The 123 people of the cinematic team at Blizzard produce videos for
all Blizzard games and are currently heavily involved in Starcraft II, which
is supposed to have an hour of ingame cinematics as well as several minutes of
prerendered videos.

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pvg
The poster is talking about things like 'Lich King stands around talking shit'
and (the now defunct) 'Marshal Windsor takes an excruciatingly slow walk
through Stormwind' scripted bits. They're still quite few and can't possibly
require anything close to 123 people (Red vs Blue was done by two people,
after all and probably has more machinima in two episodes than the entirety of
WoW).

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pvg
Another number that struck me as interesting is that the programming, art and
design departments combined add up to fewer people (120) than the cinematics
department (123).

There's probably some explanation for this, perhaps that directing "the
creation of sword replicas, statues, and other physical objects" takes a lot
more manpower than I imagine.

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slyn
Even more surprising to me was this:

"Brack went on to talk about the customer support staff, a group with 2,056
game masters, 340 billing managers, and a host of other background staffers."

Programming, art and design, and cinematics adds up to maybe ~250 people.
Supporting and monetizing what they make requires about 10x the manpower. Is
that normal among all mega-corporations/projects, or is that something unique
to MMO staffings?

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henning
There are about 75-125 WoW servers (parallel instances of the game all hosted
by Blizzard), each having several thousand to the low tens of thousands of
users. 2056 GMs for that puts it at about 20-30 GMs a server. 20-30 people to
police ~15,000 players seems reasonable.

If a small percentage of people are having billing issues, that's tens of
thousands of people with issues, and billing requires detailed, one-on-one
interaction from a Blizzard employee, so 340 to handle all that seems
reasonable to me.

Based on the size of the player base the numbers seem right. The support staff
will have to grow with the userbase.

~~~
pvg
<http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/realmstatus/>

That's 242 realms, US only. Probably similar number of realms in the EU and
China regions.

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lowdown
Tom Chilton was a guildmate in UO. Great guy. It's cool to see him doing well.

