
GTA 5 breaks entertainment records but Online woes continue - perfect_son
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2013/oct/09/gta-5-breaks-records-online
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PhasmaFelis
Can we _please_ stop citing the Guinness Book for anything, ever? I know
everyone is thinking of that lovely, thick, authoritative tome you had when
you were younger. It no longer exists. The company was sold in 1995, and now
the "book" is a glossy picture book with only a few hundred of the most
photogenic records from the previous year. You can't use it to settle bar bets
(the original purpose) because they can't be arsed to even put their
historical records online, and every time some big cool new media darling
arrives they make up half a dozen new records that apply to it so they can get
free advertising. "Most viewed trailer for an action-adventure videogame,"
fucking really?

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ipsin
GTA 5 is technically impressive, but after playing State of Decay, I've come
to realize how much I need to fill the negative space inside all those black-
box buildings.

The world of GTA V feels hollow when 1% of the buildings can be entered. When
I drive to what I recognize as the "Commerce Casino" in the real world, I want
to go inside!

~~~
Zoepfli
Agreed. But think how much additional work would have to be done to create
unique interiors for every house. It already took a thousand man-years to
create that huge virtual place without interiors...

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meddlepal
Maybe they could use procedural generation. Introversion software had been
working on the tech to do that awhile back for one of their games

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tibbon
Does anyone have any thoughts/info as to why online play like this is always
so hard to do right/scale? Many of these bugs and woes don't seem to be simply
due to emergent gameplay and bugs that emerge from state issues.

It seems largely that they just need more servers. With the type of income
(and expenses) that they've already incurred, setting up a few hundred more
servers (a few clicks on EC2 if they have their Chef scripts done right)
should do it largely right?

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Negitivefrags
This will happen with any system that needs that kind of scale right out of
the gate. It's just that games are one of the few systems like that. We really
just don't have good ways of knowing what will happen.

Can you think of other online systems that need to scale to massive numbers of
users on day one of it's release? If you can, how many of those systems
survived?

With my own game project, I used around 50,000 bots on AWS and attempted to
model them as closely as possible to real players (using real player data
taken from our Closed Beta). Looking at resource utilisation on the servers,
it looked like we should be able to scale even further than those tests. By
that I mean, the most overloaded systems were still only using about 35% of
the system resources.

Come open beta day, we got concurrency of around 75,000 at peak, higher than
the optimistic estimate we had made of 50,000. New problems developed. In
fact, new problems developed at around 45,000 that somehow the bots didn't
manage to find. The worst problem was a deadlock condition that could take out
one of the database servers randomly kicking off ten's of thousands of users
at a time. It's hard to describe the feeling of knowing that you are
frustrating so many people around the world.

More servers would have done nothing to prevent these problems.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that scaling all at once is really hard.
Even if you take lots of precautions, random problems will still develop.

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talmand
Curios, did your bots simulate connection issues as well?

This isn't my line of work but it would seem simulating 50,000 bots in an
environment is not quite the same as 50,000 humans from all over the place
with their various connections speeds and/or issues.

Plus, you'd have to teach your bots to try to do incredibly stupid things that
humans tend to do, willingly or otherwise.

~~~
Negitivefrags
We basically attempted to get the bots to match each metric that we were
measuring server side from a smaller sample of players during closed beta. The
peak concurrency during closed beta was something like 2000 players, so we
multiplied each metric out to get a target. Here are a few examples of
metrics:

Chat messages per second

Party creations per second

Average party size

Number of zone transitions per second

Average number of open zones per player

Character saves per second

PVP Match list requests per second

And so on, and so on.

Certainly bots are not going to be the same due to the issues you mentioned,
but we do the best we can! We didn't simulate all kinds of connection issues a
real player might have, but we did match the non-graceful connection
termination metric.

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acron0
Any Rockstar North devs on here? Give us a wave! You deserve a pat on the
back.

~~~
deelowe
Probably too busy lighting their cuban cigars with 100 dollar bills. :-)

~~~
ido
I doubt the "lowly" developers have gotten rich off of it...

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confluence
I don't understand why gaming companies don't do progressive releases based
around some kind of invitation like system to cap growth rates.

If it worked for gmail, and if it was good enough for facebook, then it is
good enough for GTA 5, and any other online game that hasn't yet scaled.

Don't fall prey to the thundering herd problem.

Build invitation fences.

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objclxt
GMail is free. Facebook is free. GTA V definitely isn't free. I don't think
limited invites really work in this case. Imagine how upset people would be to
discover they'd paid their $60 for a game that advertised online play on the
box, only to discover a three month waiting period whilst the system scaled
up.

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randartie
I believe it could have worked if they just gave early access to people who
preorder, and even earlier access to those who preorder very early (and so
on). Then people get more value for preordering and GTA doesn't get completely
swamped on online release day.

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hobs
That's a pretty good trick, but it might inspire some serious complaining. The
idea of a ticket that grants you entrance based on the order in which you
preorder.

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yogo
I've got hand it to them for _smashing six world records_. Very impressive. I
have to think that if you've accomplished that then you will have some
problems on the technical side that would have been very difficult to
anticipate.

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PhasmaFelis
Not really. These days the Guinness Book mostly just makes up new record
categories to suit whatever the hot new media product is so they can get free
advertising.

~~~
yogo
I'm not sure about the details but supposedly most were already held by Call
of Duty. I'm not a gamer but highest revenue generated by an entertainment
product in 24 hours and the fastest entertainment property to gross $1bn seems
really big... for a game.

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sixQuarks
How much have they made total so far? Does anyone know? If they did $1 billion
in 3 days, it's been almost a month now, perhaps $1.5 billion?

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MrFoof
Revenue at point of sale does not directly translate into revenue at the
studio. There are many other companies involved in the distribution to the
end-user, all of which get their cut.

~~~
sixQuarks
yeah, I know that. But I'd still like to know the total revenue figures

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d23
I was actually able to play last night for the first time, so I consider that
progress. It was a bit laggy, but I presume this will be improved in time.

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YourCupOTea
They need an editor.

