On October 1, President Obama took the stage at a press conference and did something unusual for the leader of the free world: He explained why a website wasnât working. Specifically, Obamacareâs overloaded online service healthcare.gov, which hadnât had a particularly smooth launch. For a moment, the president sounded indistinguishable from a PR rep for a video game developer like Electronic Arts, Blizzard or Rockstar.
âLike every new product rollout, there are going to be some glitches in the signup process along the way that we will fix. Iâve been saying this from the start,â Obama explained, sounding for all the world like a Blizzard rep, explaining away Diablo IIIâs crippled online launch.
âWeâre going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected,â he continued. Somewhere across the country, former Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw likely nodded in solidarity, recalling when earlier this year she had had offereda very similar explanation in relation to her companyâs disastrous launch of SimCity
âIt is true that whatâs happened is the website got overwhelmed by the volume,â the President told the Associated Press five days later on Monday the 6th, âand folks are working around the clock and have been systematically reducing the wait times.â In an office outside Seattle, ArenaNet president Mike OâBrien may have felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, recalling the moment when he halted sales of Guild Wars 2 to keep the game running smoothly.
That same day, top White House technology advisor Todd Park elaborated on the ongoing problems millions of people were having signing in to healthcare.gov. âRight now, weâve got what we think we need. The contractors have sent in reinforcements. They are working 24-7. We just wish there was more time in the day.â Most gamers have heard that refrain, too.
On October 1, the same day that the Obamacare website went live, Rockstar Games launched GTA Online, the ambitious multiplayer counterpart to their already-ambitious game Grand Theft Auto V. Everyone whoâd bought GTA V got GTA Online for free, meaning that the moment Rockstarâs servers went live, millions of people attempted to access them and begin playing together at once. As predicted, it was a fiasco. The service was essentially broken; almost no one could log in.
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Is anyone going to get this stuff right?
There are a few constants in life: The sun will rise in the morning, and set in the evening. The traffic lane youâre in will be moving slower than the one next to you. Movie theater popcorn will always be way too expensive. And if a popular game or online service launches, it will always be broken for at least a week.
At this point, those of us who play video games have come to expect it. If millions of people are excited about an online game, we gird ourselves ahead of time. âIâll have fun playing this⊠in two weeks, when it actually works,â we joke, just a little bit bitterly. And so often, weâre proven right. Will that ever not be the case? Or is this simply something that we have to learn to live with? And even if that is the case, shouldnât there be some things we can take for granted? I think there are, and Iâve listed them here.
Thanks, Diablo III
Launch-day server overload is old hat for players of massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. But when Diablo III tripped out of the gate, meeting frustrated players with nothing but endless error messages, it raised our collective awareness of the stability problems that plague large-scale online games.
Thatâs probably because the Diablo series has long been thought of as a single-player game with an online component. Developer Blizzardâs decision to give the third game an online requirement was a controversial one. The gameâs launch was their chance to prove that an always-connected gaming experience was actually good for customers in some unforeseen way.
Suffice to say, it wasnât. Diablo III fell on its face and became the first, best example of why always-online just isnât good for people who play games.
Since then, weâve seen it happen plenty more times. Guild Wars 2 had incredibly jammed servers at launch, with ArenaNetâs president eventually being true to his word and putting a hold on new sales until they stabilized servers. Final Fantasy XIV couldnât get it right on the second time around, and was a disaster for a good chunk of time after launch. And of course, SimCity was such a colossal, flaming wreck that the SimCity Disaster-Watch tag on our site is still being updated months after the game came out. (In fairness, that tag is being updated mostly with ways the game itself doesnât work; the servers are, for the most part, fine.)
A week after launch, GTA Online appears to be mostly stable, though only yesterday did they manage to get out a patch to address the widespread bug that was deleting playersâ characters.
However, that does raise the question: Is this the new status quo? Can we expect, from here on out, that every major online launch will be plagued by functionality-killing server overload?
It seems that, at least for now, the answer is a resounding âyes.â Rockstar shouldâve been the best candidate to have a smooth launchâthey have a huge reservoir of money, and should have theoretically been able to buy enough servers and pay enough technicians to get everything working. Furthermore, since GTA Online launched two weeks after GTA V, they had a pretty good idea of just how many millions of players would attempt to log in on day one. But while they did fix the majority of GTA Onlineâs problems relatively quickly, the fact remains that the game didnât work very well for the better part of a week. If these guys canât get it right, who can?
Well, actuallyâŠ
Some People ARE Getting It Right
There is reason for hope: Some online games have managed to pull off relatively failure-free launches. Star Wars: The Old Republicâs launch went, as Fahey puts it, âso smoothly that people forget about it.â Funcomâs two recent games Age of Conan and The Secret World both launched with some minor hitches, but players were able to get in and play from the first day. (Thatâs likely because Funcom learned more than a few hard lessons from the prolonged failure of the Anarchy Online launch.)
The Secret World worked somewhat differently than some other online games, using what Funcom calls a âsingle serverâ approach, which puts all players together but separates them out into âdimensionsâ that they can travel between. While I canât say for sure that that approach would work for every online gameâitâs entirely possible that other factors contributed to TSWâs relatively smooth launch, including the fact that it never really attracted players on the scale of a WoW or a Guild Wars 2âit does appear at least possible to take a different approach to online games that makes it less likely to encounter the sorts of traffic jams that we so often see.
(Side note: Iâm not a server expert. For a good breakdown of the gist of how some MMOs function, check out this article from Carbine Studiosâ lead network engineer David Ray about how the servers work for their still-in-beta MMO Wildstar)
Those games arenât the only ones to get it right. Activisionâs massively popular Call of Duty games normally launch to a huge influx of players, and while their launches havenât always gone entirely smoothlyâthere are usually intermittent crashes and bugs for the first few days of play, though some versions of the game run better than othersâtheir servers donât seem to get hellaciously outmatched as some of the other games in this article. Itâs a bit apples and orangesâCall of Duty functions very differently online than, say, Guild Wars 2, but still good to see that these games can launch without complete failure.
Activision has launched an annual Call of Duty every year since 2006, so theyâve probably got this down to something of a science. If other companies had that much practice, would they do a better job, too? And by that reasoning, is there any really excuse for a company to get this wrong more than once?
Valveâs Steam service has also come a long wayâit wasnât that long ago that it was a complete wreck, marring the 2004 launch of Half-Life 2 with the very sorts of delays and registration woes that todayâs gamers have become so accustomed to. And yet with practice, Valve too has worked out most of the kinks in their system. Granted, the occasional launch will still encounter some hiccupsâI have memories of Portal 2 being harder to play on launch night than it shouldâve beenâbut theyâve come a long way since the early days. Practice, it would seem, does make perfect.
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Whatâs Causing The Failure? Lots Of Things.
The causes behind these failures are as varied as the services and games themselves. Unfortunately but understandably, the moment things go wrong, most video game companies hold technical details close and donât release specifics beyond âWeâre working hard to increase network stability.â When SimCity fell short, its makers got specific enough to say they were increasing both the number and stability of servers.
The nature of most failures, however, is usually evident to anyone who suffers through them. In SimCityâs case, the servers were constantly full, and even when they werenât, they were too overworked to provide a stable experience. Thatâs in part because games like SimCity and World of Warcraft all use multiple separate servers, each of which has a population cap. As a result, the individual servers become slammed, and players wind up locked out of various servers, despite having had access to them earlier. As you can imagine, sinking a few hours into a game on a given server, only to return the next day and find that server full, can be pretty annoying.
Back to Obamacare for a second. Given that the Affordable Care Act is a national initiative with, letâs be real, a lot more riding on it than some inconvenienced video game fans, thereâs been more transparency surrounding what went wrong. Tech advisor Park blamed a software problem, not a server or hardware issueâthe bulk of the healthcare.gov functions, he said, are ready to handle a huge influx of users, but the software that handles login creation crumbled under the weight of all the new usernames.
That underlines one of the reasons these sorts of failure-at-launch problems can feel so intractable: Massive online programs require a lot of moving parts, and if any one of them fails, the entire system can go down. To hear Park tell it, itâs as though healthcare.gov is a well-constructed house with a broken front door. From what Maxis said about SimCity, their front door worked fine, but the house itself didnât have enough rooms. Each house, then, has its own unique structural problems.
We Should Be Able To Take Some Things For Granted
In a perfect world, companies would have the online infrastructure to make any online service work as advertised on day one. Clearly, we do not yet live in that perfect world. All the same, there are a few things we should be able to take for granted. Four things, specifically. Theyâre the least we should expect.
1. Let us play offline, at least a little bit.
Sure, GTA Online didnât work all that well. But Rockstar hasnât taken all that much heat for itâcertainly not to the extent that Blizzard and EA/Maxis did for Diablo III and SimCity. The reason for that is pretty simple: Grand Theft Auto V is a massive, fun game that players can enjoy offline while waiting for GTA Online to get up and running.
The crucial failing of both Diablo III and SimCity was that they took series that were previously known as offline experiences, made them online-only, and then promptly failed to work when the games launched.
If Diablo III had offered a single-player mode and the optionalâthough doubtless cool!âmultiplayer features hadnât worked for a while after launch, people would have been far less upset. If SimCity had launched with its nifty-sounding online economy and trading functionality broken but a playable offline version working, fewer players would have been demanding refunds, and EA/Maxis wouldâve had to eat far less crow to try to get back into playersâ good graces. Itâs a lesson they seem to have finally learned: The latest word is that theyâre looking into an offline option for SimCity, and theyâve gone out of their way to confirm that The Sims 4 will be a single-player, offline game
Massively multiplayer games like Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV have a somewhat different row to hoe, given that the entire point of an MMOs is to play online with friends. This next bit may be pie-in-the-sky, but dammit, Iâm a dreamer. So: Even those games should theoretically launch with some sort of stripped-down offline option. It could be small: A little area, a character creator, the opportunity to earn some XP and make sure you like your character while waiting to get in and play. It might not be compatible with the way those games currently workâand it could be wide open to exploits and cheatersâbut future games could take that kind of thing into account and give players something to do offline.
However they accomplish it, some sort of offline component doesnât seem like too much to ask. It neednât be as grand and complete as the standalone version of GTA V, but players who bought a product deserve to use it, even if just a limited version.
Itâs heartening to see companies backing off and giving people offline options: To see Diablo IIIâs console version be playable offline, to see SimCityâs makers talking about a possible offline version, and an offline Sims 4. And itâs particularly nice to see Microsoft do the right thing and relax its stance on the Xbox Oneâs previously announced internet requirement. To this day, I imagine what wouldâve happened if the Xbox One had launched with an internet requirement and hit the same sorts of problems as recent online games. And oh, how I shudder.
Developers, I beseech you: Do not lose our progress. Do not delete our characters. Do not make us use the character creator more than once. Do not allow this to happen. Do not.
Once SimCity got up and running fairly stably, I sank a good five or six hours into it. I built a lovely little city, and was really happy with what Iâd accomplished. And then, thanks to some combination of tech and server issues, I was permanently locked out of that city. All those hours, gone.
It should really go without saying, but losing progress due to server failure is unacceptable. Not only does it inconvenience players in an obvious way, it can cause them to lose faith in a game altogether. After losing that first city, Iâd begin a new SimCity town only to imagine what would happen if, in a couple of days, I lost it again. My faith in SimCity was fractured beyond repair, and Iâve never really gotten it back.
Last week, upon getting into GTA Online, I made my first character. Despite the fact that the GTA Online character-creator is almost comically lousyâI canât even tell what my grandparents look like, let alone figure out how many options I have!âI was pretty happy with what I came up with. I named her âFelina.â She was a sorta badass biker chick who liked committing crime more than she liked hanging out with friends. I got into the game, watched Felina arrive at Los Santos International Airport, and then the servers failed and I got booted. Upon restarting, I found that Felina hadnât been saved, and I had to start over again.
Other players reported worse failuresâlosing characters after sinking in dozens of hours and having to start over. (Again, worth noting that yesterday Rockstar said itâs finally fixed the problem, though lost characters will stay lost.) If itâs too much to demand that all online games work perfectly on day-oneâand even if itâs too much to ask that they all have some offline componentâsurely itâs not too much to ask that they save our progress locally in some way. As annoying as it is to lose progress online, the worst thing about it (for me, anyway) is how it undermines my faith in the game in general. Why should I invest time in this thing that may just erase all my progress?
3. Level with us. Early.
Even if everything has gone wrongâeven if the server farm is on fire, if a family of poltergeists has moved into the engineering offices and a zombie redneck torture family is currently filleting the IT team, a developer or publisher can still come out ahead by following one simple guideline: Tell us whatâs going on. Level with us. And do it early.
Rockstarâs GTA Online launch might have left a lot to be desired in the execution department, but they succeeded in one crucial area: communication. Prior to launch, Rockstar was remarkably forthright about the likelihood of server problems. âThere will be the typical growing pains for an online game,â they wrote, âincluding but not limited to crashes, glitches, crazy bugs, gameplay modes and mechanics that need re-balancing and other surprises!â So it was written, and so it came to pass.
That kind of clear communication shouldnât be the exception. Compare that to EA/Maxisâ weirdly robotic communiquĂ©s in the midst of the SimCity fiasco. They referred to SimCity as a success, mentioning fans around the world who were loving the game, and acknowledging the gameâs catastrophic failures in a smiling âoh, itâs not such a big dealâ manner that smacked of corporate double-speak. They admitted error in a tone and manner that didnât match up with their customersâ feelings of anger and frustration.
âThe good news is that SimCity is a solid hit in all major markets,â Maxisâ Lucy Bradshaw wrote mere sentences after apologizing for the disastrous launch, as if the fact that EA was making money on the game would somehow make us all feel better. âThe consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a great game,â she continued. Why not just own it? Cut the smiling corporate happy-talk and say, âHey, we screwed up. We know youâre mad, but weâre going to make it right. Sorry!â As Rockstar has demonstrated, you donât have to be all gloom and doom about it. You can keep it light. After all, we want the game to work, too. So just be clear and honest with us. Weâll thank you for it.
4. Donât make us pay for your services while theyâre busted.
Players shouldnât be paying for an online service as long as itâs not working. If a service is rocky for a week or two, those two weeks should be free, or the game-makers should extend the free trial period to make up for it. If a game is free but allows players to buy in-game items, suspend microtransactions until thereâs a level playing field (as Rockstar did with GTA Online). In short: If the game is broken, players shouldnât be paying for it.
When it comes to online games and services, consumers are becoming conditioned to expect launch failure. Yet our future will be increasingly connected and online. As our ambitions continue to outpace our technical bandwidth, itâs tough not to just throw our hands up in the air and ask, is this stuff ever just going to work?
Thereâs certainly an argument to be made that people only pay attention when things go wrong. Some online games have had relatively smooth launches, and there have been successful technical approaches that indicate that, in fact, some methods work better than others. But given the fact that just last week, Rockstar Games and the Obama White Houseâtwo massive organizations with seemingly endless financial and technical resourcesâboth debuted services that were broken at launch, it would appear we still have a ways to go.
Just because things donât always go according to plan doesnât mean it all has to be such a series of fiascoes. If game developers can give us some things we can rely onâsomething to do offline while we wait for servers to start working, an assurance that we wonât lose any progress once we start playing, and clear communication about whatâs really going onâitâll only help ease our transition to this apparently inevitable brave new online world.
To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter @kirkhamilton
