So this was on the login screen for Eve this morning:
For those who are unaware, Diablo III recently released, and those numbers are Diablo 3 error codes that are preventing people – most people, apparently – from playing.
I have to admit, I laughed hard when I saw it. It’s damn funny.
With that said, it’s kind of the cool thing to laugh at the 800 pound gorilla when he trips and falls. Blizzard is that gorilla, and this is certainly a trip and a fall, so I guess I’m sitting on the bandwagon.
CB made a counterpoint to this; Eve is, as much as he enjoys it, a game with a much smaller player base than Diablo’s (thus far hypothetical) throng of adherents, so to see the devs mock the gorilla when your single-shard server “only” has to deal with roughly 45 thousand simultaneous worldwide logins at a given moment looks a little bit disingenuous.
And maybe it is. CCP has said its current server hardware could theoretically handle upwards of 1 to 1.5 million concurrent players, but who’s to say if that’s true?
Fact is, it doesn’t matter: they are not required to.
Diablo III’s servers, on the other hand, are required to and, more importantly, the fact that they were going to be hit with this kind of load is in no way, shape, or form a surprise. To anyone.
In the words of a certain Burning Crusade trailer, Blizzard was not prepared.
When the 800 pound gorilla falls out of his own tree, I do believe it’s fair to point it out, even if you can’t climb the tree yourself.
Disingenuous? Hardly… Forget 45,000 logins, Blizzard was unable to manage people who wanted to use a single login to play by themselves…
It was quite frustrating trying to play when the servers kept going down every 5 minutes, but I did laugh very hard when I saw that at the log on screen to Eve.