World of Warcraft hits 2,000,000 subscribers

[Krakrok]

I'm not a master of database solutions (my line of work involves the hardware/OS end of things, and Windows/Linux on their own make me want to kill), but what else is there that can handle those kind of numbers?

The largest dating website on the planet runs MySQL.

[Abel]

Legend of Mir II, the most popular MMORPG in China, has over 20 million subscribers. The owner of the company that makes Legend2 is the richest man in China now.

He's known as the "Bill Gates of China". The name of his company is Shanda, a name you better all start to remember because Shanda is on it's way to become the biggest player in the MMO market.

The reason is that just like in Korea on-line gaming, mainly from netcafes, is mainstream entertainment for the younger Chinese. The total number of Chinese internet users is (afaik) still below 100 million, but a high number of those play one or more online games. And the most important: this figure increases rapidly by the day. China is a dozen times Korea and a few times Japan in terms of potential market.

Also you can have part in Shanda's succes: it's one of the best performing equities on the Nasdaq.

Lastly: WoW will likely be an enormous succes in China. Again few seem to know this, but Blizzard is BIG in China. It's by far the most popular of all game companies, probably even more popular then Shanda itself.

[Murgos]

I'm not a master of database solutions (my line of work involves the hardware/OS end of things, and Windows/Linux on their own make me want to kill), but what else is there that can handle those kind of numbers?

The largest dating website on the planet runs MySQL.

MySQL has been doing a lot of stuff over the last couple of years to bring themselves up to enterprise levels.  Last time I looked though PostgreSQL was still better for high-end reliable DB ops as far as 'free' DB solutions go.

[Yegolev]

I'm not a master of database solutions (my line of work involves the hardware/OS end of things, and Windows/Linux on their own make me want to kill), but what else is there that can handle those kind of numbers?

DB2?

It doesn't matter in practice.  You just need a team that knows the DBMS (or a nice support contract).  We have somewhat-large databases, two of them nearing a terabyte on Oracle 9, one at least a terabyte on Teradata.  Our problem is performing the backups in less than 24 hours, not response time.

[Azazel]

So, what you're really saying is Everquest fucked us from the start.

Goddamn, just when I thought we were ahead of China in that whole capitalism thing.

Here's some fuzzy math.

Drop the price to a point where even the most casual player who can only play once every two weeks can afford, and you'll make more money hats.

$5 = more profit/subscribers.

I know, that's a very complicated equation. But $15 a month means people have to be invested in their character or it's a waste of cash. I'm beginning to like this whole China place.

You do realise that if you lived in China the whole economy would be scaled at a different rate, and your job would pay you (probably) 1/3 of what it does now, but your costs (food, rent, etc) would be proportionate? It's the same reason many jobs get outsourced to India, yet the people there live comfortably. The same reason Indian people who live over where you are, or where I are working normal jobs can afford to send home money and essentially support their whole families on the side while having enough to live comfortably in the US/Uk/Aust/etc..

Or were you just deliberately being obtuse? 

Az

[Yegolev]

It's the same reason many jobs get outsourced to India, yet the people there live comfortably.

Everyone be sure to note that the word "comfortably" also scales down for India. =)

[Azazel]

True, but in relation to the people who don't have a relative in the first world sending them money, the people who do live really nicely for over there.

But you know, in a place where a day's pay is the same amount of money as I pay for a can of coke, they're probably not going to be spending 15 day's pay on their WoW subscription. And being sent $50 a week from a son/daughter/etc working in a first-world country pretty much means you're living large, as far as the local scale goes.

[Stephen Zepp]

I'm not a master of database solutions (my line of work involves the hardware/OS end of things, and Windows/Linux on their own make me want to kill), but what else is there that can handle those kind of numbers?

DB2?

It doesn't matter in practice.  You just need a team that knows the DBMS (or a nice support contract).  We have somewhat-large databases, two of them nearing a terabyte on Oracle 9, one at least a terabyte on Teradata.  Our problem is performing the backups in less than 24 hours, not response time.

From my limited technical knowledge, it's not the amount of data that is stored/indexed, but the number of simultaneous accesses of data. While I know that db tech has advanced beyond the 90's tech of "read-no lock, write-lock", there is still a huge bottleneck whenever a particular lock is established so the write can be performed--and if this isn't extremely carefully designed, a huge bottleneck could occur.

Oracale is most definitely not optimized from the technical perspective for handling hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections--and no db really is. Some dev's are actually reverting back to flat file implementations for highly accessed data because the db tech just isn't currently evolved to handle this type of scenario.

[Yegolev]

From my limited technical knowledge, it's not the amount of data that is stored/indexed, but the number of simultaneous accesses of data. While I know that db tech has advanced beyond the 90's tech of "read-no lock, write-lock", there is still a huge bottleneck whenever a particular lock is established so the write can be performed--and if this isn't extremely carefully designed, a huge bottleneck could occur.

Yes, it can and it does.  We don't just keep enormous amounts of data gathering dust of course, we have thousands of concurrent users hitting these things 24x7.  We don't run this junk on Windows because of scalability.  Small, inconsequential DBs start with 4GB of RAM.  Our bigger ones have around 20GB of RAM, with a max of 1000 asynchronous I/O connections to hundreds of EMC disks.  Caching is the way to go, in the Oracle SGA, the AIX filesystem, and on the EMC frame itself.  I/O is the killer.  There is no fix for this other than to throw money at it, both for hardware and/or for smart people to run it.  Sometimes you just can't fix it, either.

That said, the fact that I have to relog in WoW after gathering from the wrong node is unacceptable.

[Stephen Zepp]

From my limited technical knowledge, it's not the amount of data that is stored/indexed, but the number of simultaneous accesses of data. While I know that db tech has advanced beyond the 90's tech of "read-no lock, write-lock", there is still a huge bottleneck whenever a particular lock is established so the write can be performed--and if this isn't extremely carefully designed, a huge bottleneck could occur.

Yes, it can and it does.  We don't just keep enormous amounts of data gathering dust of course, we have thousands of concurrent users hitting these things 24x7.  We don't run this junk on Windows because of scalability.  Small, inconsequential DBs start with 4GB of RAM.  Our bigger ones have around 20GB of RAM, with a max of 1000 asynchronous I/O connections to hundreds of EMC disks.  Caching is the way to go, in the Oracle SGA, the AIX filesystem, and on the EMC frame itself.  I/O is the killer.  There is no fix for this other than to throw money at it, both for hardware and/or for smart people to run it.  Sometimes you just can't fix it, either.

That said, the fact that I have to relog in WoW after gathering from the wrong node is unacceptable.

I firmly agree wth the concept of proper multi-level caching of data, but this is a hugely complex design.

[HaemishM]

Keep in mind the article says that the average urban salary in China is around $1000 a month while the average rural salary is around $100 a month. So 66 hours of game play for $4 is pretty decent. If the average Chinese player played for 4 hours a night, that's over 16 nights of gameplay, which would make 30 days of gameplay around $8 a month. And with such a large and obviously accepting market for online games, somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 million or more, why wouldn't companies want to sell their game in China?

[Soln]

truly I am glad I am not teh Smed after this release.

those #'s for China+ are completely mindblowing.  However, getting an online service in China ain't easy. AOL tried-it/trying-it.  Not sure of connectivity and scaling issues (seems to be known issues), but CS support and Billing would be crippling if not solid on day0.

[HaemishM]

That's why you get a Chinese company like 9city or Shanda to do that shit work for you, so you can sit back in Irvine and count your money hats.

[Pococurante]

I hit the lootbug today when grabbing some bruiseweed, and my guildmate got it when mining some mithril. Could be it's just on the Euro servers theese days, but I doubt it.

I'm on a US server.  Hit it again just last night.  Have ever since the patch.  It's not a database/netcode thing since a bugged node will always bug the player again regardless of when they re-attempt.

[El Gallo]

Lastly: WoW will likely be an enormous succes in China. Again few seem to know this, but Blizzard is BIG in China. It's by far the most popular of all game companies, probably even more popular then Shanda itself.

Blizzard is big in Korea too (Diablo and the 'craft games seem to be huge), but WoW is a relative flop there (300k or so, utterly dwarfed by Lineage I/II).  The conventional wisdom is that this is because WoW is not enough like the Lineage games (though I've heard people talk about some sort of distribution hitch or fight with cafe owners or somesuch as well).  Is Mir more like Lineage or more like WoW (I know nothing at all about Mir)? 

[Astorax]

It's not a database problem in the sense of, it being a performance of the database issue.  If it were, then you'd see it on random nodes depending on how hard the database was getting hit at any given moment.  That's not how it occurs however.  It's consistently the same nodes.  If you loot the peacbloom node that's next to the zepplin tower in Trisfal, you get loot bugged by that peacebloom node.

It happens consistently, but only on some servers...other servers don't see this problem. So clearly that node has been cleaned up on certain servers, but not others.  The fact that they aren't all fixed boggles my brain, and i'm sure that there has to be SOME other thing going on, but still...

[Yegolev]

I don't know why it happens but it sucks cock.  It is the same node all the time, so no, not network.  Some update process gets hung somewhere... I don't get it.  Stop playbalancing and start fixing bugs, fuckers.

[Paelos]

I don't know why it happens but it sucks cock.  It is the same node all the time, so no, not network.  Some update process gets hung somewhere... I don't get it.  Stop playbalancing and start fixing bugs, fuckers.

Or you could just avoid that node instead of letting it ruin your day. I'm just saying.

[Pococurante]

Which of course is what people do... now if the Gatherer plug-in just had a ring color to indicated bugged nodes.  Wouldn't surprise me if the spawn object is its own bit of code and so some are just obsolete scripts.

Nodes seem much more random to me these days.  I suspect Blizz dropped a bunch more spawn objects.  But they still spawn once until harvested and in the exact same spot.

What Blizz should do is attach a timer to spawned nodes and expire them, as well as change the spawn object to pop the new node instance within an area rather than on top of the object itself.  Something UO has done since 1997.  Over seven years ago I was writing code version checks in UO emu scripts to bootstrap to new script versions.  I imagine Blizz will do something similar one day.

[Paelos]

If Blizz fixed the boats so i didn't fall in the deep sea and die, and also fixed the evade bug on mobs that happens a ton, I think I'd be cool with most of the things in game.

[Astorax]

If Blizz fixed the boats so i didn't fall in the deep sea and die, and also fixed the evade bug on mobs that happens a ton, I think I'd be cool with most of the things in game.

The evade bug is similar to the loot bug in that it has to do with specific parts of the map.  What it is (I suspect) is tears in their detection mesh that the creature 'falls' into.  When that happens, there is no pathing and LOS information getting passed appropriately, so even though technically you should be able to hit it, the information in the hit check is passing a null value at some point due to an error in the geometry, and the default result is an evasion (probably because in the code, the enum for hit possibilities has evade listed as 0).  For each of these cases, every time you come across one, you should log a ticket and/or post your coordinates in the bug fix forum. I've had a couple of the loot bugs fixed this way, although they seem to be a bit slow on the uptake these days.

[Yegolev]

Or you could just avoid that node instead of letting it ruin your day. I'm just saying.

True.  That requires remembering, and I suck at that.  It also really limits my node choices in some cases.

[Astorax]

Or you could just avoid that node instead of letting it ruin your day. I'm just saying.

True.  That requires remembering, and I suck at that.  It also really limits my node choices in some cases.

I used to run Cosmos, and then it was happy because I could mappin all the bugged nodes and have them show up as minimap icons...so I'd know right away if I shouldn't loot that one...but no more...

[pants]

Yes, it can and it does.  We don't just keep enormous amounts of data gathering dust of course, we have thousands of concurrent users hitting these things 24x7.  We don't run this junk on Windows because of scalability.  Small, inconsequential DBs start with 4GB of RAM.  Our bigger ones have around 20GB of RAM, with a max of 1000 asynchronous I/O connections to hundreds of EMC disks.  Caching is the way to go, in the Oracle SGA, the AIX filesystem, and on the EMC frame itself.  I/O is the killer.  There is no fix for this other than to throw money at it, both for hardware and/or for smart people to run it.  Sometimes you just can't fix it, either.

That said, the fact that I have to relog in WoW after gathering from the wrong node is unacceptable.

My serious DB-foo is a bit out of date these days, but when I was working on a ATM system for a bank in the late 90s (ie hole in the wall machine you get money out of) its database was heirarchical - IMS I think it was - on a IBM MVS machine.  I asked the guys why it wasn't running DB2 or something relational - and they told me that relational databases were too slow for hundreds/thousands of transactions per second - the niceness of using DB2 was offset by speed.  Is it still a similar problem with Oracle et al?  I vaguely remember someone saying years ago that Everquest didn't use no fancy shmancy relational database, it had a really simple system, that seemed to scale quite nicely with increased numbers.

[Alkiera]

As Zepp mentioned above, EQ1 used(and may still use) flatfile "databases" to store stuff on their servers.  WHich is part of why it requires the server to go down(or at least a few zones) for them to change relatively minor things, that WoW can change with little effort.

Alkiera

[sidereal]

It also means Blizzard can run arbitrary reports on their data or hunt for exploits directly in the DB.

SELECT Player_id 'Farmer'
   FROM PlayerEquipment
   WHERE Rarity = 'Epic'
   GROUP BY Player_id
   HAVING COUNT(*) > 5

FTW.

[Rodent]

Sheesh, I really sparked a debate here.. Look people, they key point here is that with 2 million users they should be able to garner enough cash to hire a programmer to fix the problem. IE I don't give a shit if your MySQL/Oracle is running fine, Blizzard needs to fix the bug.

Hats off for a very technical derail though.

[Driakos]

As Zepp mentioned above, EQ1 used(and may still use) flatfile "databases" to store stuff on their servers.  WHich is part of why it requires the server to go down(or at least a few zones) for them to change relatively minor things, that WoW can change with little effort.

Alkiera

Ultima Online uses the flat-file method as well.  Backups and game info are essentially one huge notepad file.

[magicback]

Hello everyone,

Been lurking for a while, but want to comment on WoW in China.  That article was reasonably accurate, but here are some phat figures:

Blizzard got a $3m license fee up front and will get at least $50m for the next four years.

Based on some stock analysis I read this means The9 (the comapny is US-listed) is expecting to rake in at least $50m in revenue from WoW a year just from China alone.

If you talk about relative amounts in the US, that's like expecting $200m box office receipts for the next four years for your $50m movie. Sh*t, movie studio exec. are scratching their head over this!

No wonder SOE and WBI is getting together.

Lastly, anyone heard anything about 404gaming?  They got a system to rapidly develop mutlipe games on the same infrastructure.  Their first game is some hip-hop game that's probably going get a lot of press on MTV.  They got lots of hip-hop artists assigned to the game.

What to hear your views on this.

Edit: fixed link

[HaemishM]

Hello everyone,

Been lurking for a while, but want to comment on WoW in China.  That article was reasonably accurate, but here are some phat figures:

Blizzard got a $3m license fee up front and will get at least $50m for the next four years.

Money hats, indeed. Whoever owns Blizzard just bought themselves a Porshce, and are even now furiously masturbating in it.

Lastly, anyone heard anything about 404gaming?  They got a system to rapidly develop mutlipe games on the same infrastructure.  Their first game is some hip-hop game that's probably going get a lot of press on MTV.  They got lots of hip-hop artists assigned to the game.

What to hear your views on this.

404gaming... vaporware, gangsta-style.

[Signe]

Someone emailed me a while back about 404gaming.  I looked at the site and read the teeny bit of info they had available and found nothing to inspire me.   They had stated on their website that they would be at E3 but no one I know actually found them and someone mentioned to me that they weren't on the list of booths.  I looked at the site just a bit ago and there is still no real information.  I'm not even entirely sure they actually exist. 

[Velorath]

Money hats, indeed. Whoever owns Blizzard just bought themselves a Porshce, and are even now furiously masturbating in it.

And then cleaning themselves off afterwards using thousand dollar bills to wipe up no less.

[Krakrok]

Money hats, indeed. Whoever owns Blizzard

A sewer company in France owns Blizzard.

[magicback]

404gaming... vaporware, gangsta-style.

Yeah, that's what I thought.  I'm gonna see how may suckers than can get to preorder.

Think lots of young wannabe gangsta are going to be scammed.

As for WoW and China: no EQ2 in China.

[HaemishM]

Even communists know EQ2 sucks.