Eurogamer: Did you have a metric for success for this weekend, something in particular that you were looking at? And if you did have one, did you meet it?
Rod Fergusson: Yeah. Part of it is the number of players. "Beta" has been a twisted word that has become "marketing beta", which means demo, and for us this was a true beta because we wanted to be able to test that load and what does it mean to get a lot of players in? And Friday was a little bumpy because of that, but the way that we looked at it is the issues we find now are issues that will be a lot smoother at launch. And so this weekend was to prepare for next weekend, and next weekend prepares for launch.
We ended up doing six really big hotfixes that fixed dozens of issues, so we saw server stability come back up and the queues went down, and so we're feeling really good about that particular aspect.
Eurogamer: I tried to play on Friday and couldn't because of the long queues (that were a couple of hours' long), but on Saturday morning, and even into Saturday evening, the queues had disappeared, they were less than a minute, which is impressive because I'm sure just as many people were playing then as on Friday.
It makes me wonder what people's expectations should be about queueing when the game comes out. Is there an expectation that queues will be a thing we have to deal with, to some degree?
Rod Fergusson: Of course the ideal is that there are no queues - that is where we want to be. Basically, what we're having today in the beta is what we'd like to have for launch - you go in, there's no queue, you go.
Sometimes, queues are part of how many servers are available and those sorts of things, but the other side of queues, honestly, is around protecting the services. Sometimes you'll put a queue in place just so that if there's one particular service - like writing to the database - that you're trying to not overwhelm, you'll add to the queue to say, "Hey let's just slow down a little bit while we fix this or look at it." So it's not always just availability of space. Sometimes something's being investigated, or you're trying to manage pressure on one particular thing until you can reinforce it.
And that's actually what happened: we actually turned up the queues a little bit to protect this while we were working, and then, once we did the work, we were able to start dialling it up and dialling it up and the queue was going back down again.
Because it's an inexact science: you don't know how slow it has to go to not fall over and so you go conservative immediately. And that's what people were seeing through the bigger queues when we were being very conservative, to say, "We fell over once, we don't want to fall over again." And then, as we started to work and gain confidence, we started to go, "Hey let's halve the time. OK, let's halve it again." So eventually it goes away to nothing.
Eurogamer: Is there anything you're worried about in this regard with the open beta coming up, when presumably many more people will play?
Rod Fergusson: We've made a lot of forward progress. The reason we're doing these tests - I mean part of it is we want people to get hands-on and see if it's a great experience or not, and fortunately, once we got into Saturday, the last two days have been phenomenal in terms of feedback positivity. But beyond getting it into players' hands to try it themselves, and to get balance-feedback and other feedback that Joe's received, it really is about making sure we can run it at load.
