So I'm bored sitting at work listening to all the whiners about how slow this is and how BioWare is horrible, blah blah, so I decided to do some rough math just to see approximately how many people there will be playing now.

So I'm taking some liberal approximations, but based on what I know about MMO's and also servers themselves, I'm assuming that each server that is coming up as "full" in the server list is hosting 2,000 people (lets say 1000 light side 1000 dark side). From my count, there are 73 "full" servers which would roughly mean that there are at least 146,000 playing on those servers alone. This is not counting the "medium", "high" servers.

Lets say you balloon the amount of people per full server to 5,000. That makes 365,000 users on all at once, first day. I work as a System Administrator for a living and you guys need to understand that controlling and maintaining a multitude of clusters for that many users is astronomical. Please realize that computers are not just magic and pixie dust and they are very temperamental if everything is not perfect. You may think that just because a company has done it before means there won't be problems, but trust me, you could do the same thing 100 times and still have weird issues pop up from time to time.

They're doing this right.

Cut them some slack.

my response is... what about the difference in output of the server status from the website and the server status showed in the client. Where most servers are full or high on the web, on the client they're mostly listed as light with a few medium sprinkled in thar

I'm assuming the website is expressing how many invites it has given out, not necessarily the amount of people that are currently on. Currently it's only 5:20 EST. Which means most of America is still at work/school. Most MMO's generally see an influx in players logging in from 730 EST on. Most people in America work for a living so I would expect those numbers to rise dramatically in a few hours.

Even if they don't, it doesn't matter because in the end you'll still be able to play before the 20th, exactly what BioWare promised.

146,000 on the first day you say?

1,460,000 (estimate number of preorders)

== 10 days. See you after launch is what you are saying?

So I'm bored sitting at work listening to all the whiners about how slow this is and how BioWare is horrible, blah blah, so I decided to do some rough math just to see approximately how many people there will be playing now.

 

So I'm taking some liberal approximations, but based on what I know about MMO's and also servers themselves, I'm assuming that each server that is coming up as "full" in the server list is hosting 2,000 people (lets say 1000 light side 1000 dark side). From my count, there are 73 "full" servers which would roughly mean that there are at least 146,000 playing on those servers alone. This is not counting the "medium", "high" servers.

 

Lets say you balloon the amount of people per full server to 5,000. That makes 365,000 users on all at once, first day. I work as a System Administrator for a living and you guys need to understand that controlling and maintaining a multitude of clusters for that many users is astronomical. Please realize that computers are not just magic and pixie dust and they are very temperamental if everything is not perfect. You may think that just because a company has done it before means there won't be problems, but trust me, you could do the same thing 100 times and still have weird issues pop up from time to time.

 

 

They're doing this right.

 

Cut them some slack.

Don't ruin the computer magic, you're just like those people that swear movies aren't magic.

I would be very surprised if BW didn't have another 10 servers or so which they're getting ready to deploy. I doubt they've played all their cards this early on.

Didn't they add a couple of servers during one of the beta weekends?

146,000 on the first day you say?

 

1,460,000 (estimate number of preorders)

 

== 10 days. See you after launch is what you are saying?

The numbers that I was using are very conservative, most newer clusters can handle a lot more users than that, but my scope of knowledge as it pertains to BioWare's infrastructure is limited, so I chose to err on that side.

BioWare has also announced that this is the smaller of the waves.

"We're actually planning to invite more tomorrow than today, and invite the same number again on Thursday - at which point we'll be into the original 'five days of Early Game Access'."

Source: http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=66561&postcount=6438

Please realize that computers are not just magic and pixie dust

Bioware hasn't broken out the pixie dust yet?!?!?!?!

If they don't use their pixie dust by [arbitrary date] I'm cancelling my pre-order! Nothing but a unicorn will mollify me!

so how many people can an actual server hold then? maximum? i always thought each server could hold tens of thousands or more.

This I unfortunately do not know. It's all based on how their clusters are set up and that's out of my understanding. The amount of characters you can store is usually tremendous (I think wow has server pops of 30-35k), it's the amount that are on at the same time that's the issue, then you have to take bandwidth and other factors into account.

Bioware hasn't broken out the pixie dust yet?!?!?!?!

 

If they don't use their pixie dust by [arbitrary date] I'm cancelling my pre-order! Nothing but a unicorn will mollify me!

Hahaha I love this

I work as a System Administrator for a living and you guys need to understand that controlling and maintaining a multitude of clusters for that many users is astronomical.

Being Cisco certified by self i call BS, "Controlling and Maintaining" a system that is allready wired and put online is not a diffacult task. Booting the system or running backups is the only time consuming part (unless of course your netcoding is horrific or a rack slot suffers a critical hardware failure.)

Being Cisco certified by self i call BS, "Controlling and Maintaining" a system that is allready wired and put online is not a diffacult task. Booting the system or running backups is the only time consuming part (unless of course your netcoding is horrific or a rack slot suffers a critical hardware failure.)

This. It's nearly 2012. People run systems with 550 million users and I'm supposed to be impressed by them running one with less then three tenths of a percent of that user base? In fact computers are so not magical that I disagree with the OP.

So I'm bored sitting at work listening to all the whiners about how slow this is and how BioWare is horrible, blah blah, so I decided to do some rough math just to see approximately how many people there will be playing now.

 

So I'm taking some liberal approximations, but based on what I know about MMO's and also servers themselves, I'm assuming that each server that is coming up as "full" in the server list is hosting 2,000 people (lets say 1000 light side 1000 dark side). From my count, there are 73 "full" servers which would roughly mean that there are at least 146,000 playing on those servers alone. This is not counting the "medium", "high" servers.

 

Lets say you balloon the amount of people per full server to 5,000. That makes 365,000 users on all at once, first day. I work as a System Administrator for a living and you guys need to understand that controlling and maintaining a multitude of clusters for that many users is astronomical. Please realize that computers are not just magic and pixie dust and they are very temperamental if everything is not perfect. You may think that just because a company has done it before means there won't be problems, but trust me, you could do the same thing 100 times and still have weird issues pop up from time to time.

 

 

They're doing this right.

 

Cut them some slack.

Doubt your as smart as you think you are...

Considering they can dynamically set the server limits to distribute people selecting servers. There is no way to accurately determine the amount of people playing per server making your post total nonsense.

I have been watching a live stream all day and the server zones are DEAD! very few people wondering around.

Being Cisco certified by self i call BS, "Controlling and Maintaining" a system that is allready wired and put online is not a diffacult task. Booting the system or running backups is the only time consuming part (unless of course your netcoding is horrific or a rack slot suffers a critical hardware failure.)

So then what happens when a single node of a cluster drops due to high demand, overheating, hardware malfunction? Preventing access to a certain zone but the rest of the server is operational, you can't just bring the unit down just because one phase isn't working.

Now say that happens to 5 servers, or 10, if things go wrong, they usually happen in batches.

This isn't even mentioning authentication servers, which have to access a giant database of user information, making sure that players can even log in.

I don't know about you, but I don't have to support 300,000+ people all at once.

Doubt your as smart as you think you are...

 

Considering they can dynamically set the server limits to distribute people selecting servers. There is no way to accurately determine the amount of people playing per server making your post total nonsense.

 

I have been watching a live stream all day and the server zones are DEAD! very few people wondering around.

I never said I was smart, I'm actually quite dumb. I was just merely passing the time at work.