players were streaming in & playing
PAX East 2011: Massively interviews RIFT's Scott Hartsman
With the launch of RIFT still fresh, members of the Trion team packed their bags & flew to Boston to attend PAX East. Although they didn't have a booth, their "We're not in Azeroth anymore" banner made their presence known. In addition, Community Manager Cindy "Abigale" Bowens hosted a party in Boston to celebrate the launch with players & fans. Massively had a chance to sit down & talk with Trion CCO & RIFT Executive Producer Scott Hartsman about launch day, security, designs for the future, & a whole lot more. Read on for the full interview!
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Scott Hartsman: It was a whole lot of activity followed by a whole lot of calm. The beta events & the head start were all hectic in terms of lots of new changes going out, sometimes major systems being shown to users for the first time, & plenty of stuff being proven out at scale. As things would get proven out, we'd be a small nervous seeing how they worked or didn't, but when the actual launch came around, they had been through several beta events, & every one of those was intentionally orchestrated as a launch. So by the time the actual launch came around, they had 200 people doing the job they had done three times before. Getting launch pre-rehearsals was the thing I think that got us the most stability towards the finish.
Massively: First off, launch day -- what are your overall impressions about how things went?
On the actual day of launch, the tenor around the office was unreal. The massive majority of the team got told, "Just play the game." There were a couple of dozen of us watching monitors & population stats & waiting for the other shoe to drop, & it never did. In the coursework of the first 24 hours, there were no server crashes, which blew our minds. The engineers & execs were ecstatic, players were streaming in & playing, & it worked.
Server queues appeared long the first night but then went down dramatically over most servers by the second night of Head Start. How were you able to accomplish that?
Opening up lots & plenty of new servers, for starters. In the event you think about how most open betas work, when you do an open beta, you are opening your game to the whole world. "It's free, come on in & play." That is usually when you get your largest numbers. After that, the tourists go away, & you finish up with a smaller set of individuals who are prepared to pay to play the game. They had the opposite; they had larger numbers of people than they had in open beta. That doesn't happen. They were definitely taken a small by surprise, because they were expecting our population trends to trend like most MMOs, & they didn't. Having more servers on standby, & standing more servers up as they needed, was helpful. Also, people's natural inclination, in the event that they had only invested 20 minutes in their character, to go somewhere else, helped a lot. As people spread out through the world a small more, that helped much more , because they could raise server caps. & then there is some of the normal play patterns. When a game is brand-new, people will play four to one time as much in a day as they normally would, but their hours-per-day of play settles over time. That is normal. When something's brand-new & shiny, you require to be there the whole day.
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