the following comment is somewhat related
if you bought HL2 via store, yet STILL downloaded the entire game, something's wrong with you

He's referring to this..

Correct :)

I remember being very pissed - I bought it in a store on launch day... Got it home only to find they hadn't stuck the cdkey inside the case, so had to go back and get another one... then finally got home, only to find Valves servers were offline, so I couldn't activate it anyway.

Pretty much the same thing happened to me. It took an eternity to get it authed to the steam system and I just sat there thinking "this is a single player game, it doesnt even have mp in it and yet I have to have an internet connection and it takes 45 minutes to be able to play it, this is ridiculous".

wasn't aware of that
didn't get HL2 until 2005

isnt that when it was released anyway? or late 2004 ?

late 2004

All well and good, but sorry I`m British and I don’t do queue’s. It was hugely annoying that a game I had helped beta test to get this far was now denying me entry

Er, you're British, you are supposed to do queues, and you're certainly not supposed to queue jump!

Seriously though, the queues were a good thing since id thought about capacity and made sure the whole site didn't come down. Did you take part in the "crash tests" during closed beta? If not, you have no position to bitch IMO. The number of players who took part wasn't anywhere near what it should have been given the number of testers, and those were the only ways that id had any hope of finding issues associated with these sorts of large numbers.

Adding further salt to the wound, I had to re-register and my nickname, which I’ve used for almost a year during the closed testing

... except clearly not at all during the last month, otherwise you wouldn't have been culled. Thats your own fault - it was even publicised that this was going to happen.

The number of players who took part wasn't anywhere near what it should have been given the number of testers, and those were the only ways that id had any hope of finding issues associated with these sorts of large numbers.

"Early on, we were tossing around two different orders of magnitudes - anywhere from 50,000 to 5 million people playing. We have no idea where it is going to be in there. The fact that 70,000 people have signed up in a week means that we’re going to be looking at hundreds of thousands of players, if not millions." -John Carmack

And yes, thank you, that was the quote I referred to in the column.

There is a big difference between knowing we're going to get lots of players, and knowing which parts of the system will fail when there are lots of players.

The whole point of the crashtests was to try and identify the bottlenecks - ie, to find that the way the stats backend reporting was not working fast enough and wouldn't hold up under the current load, or to identify things in the serverbrowser infrastructure that needed optimisation to cope with the load.

These are the sorts of things that id have had to do in a rush this week to get the queues down, and to get the stats back online.

Probably they would have had issues anyway, but low numbers of beta testers turning up when there are scheduled stress tests certainly didn't help this.

As a moot point, the people playing it now ARE beta testers. Before it was a closed beta, now it's an open beta, it's still technically a test release.

People whining about queues and problems in a beta test is absolutely silly, this is the kind of stuff you need to do an open beta to test our properly... so guess what id did...

There is a big difference between knowing we're going to get lots of players, and knowing which parts of the system will fail when there are lots of players.

There's no harm in going from A to B to C instead of straight from A to C.

well, there still is a difference between planning ahead for a certain capacity of people and the actual field testing of it.

what would "B" be?

I'd say its a queueing system which prevents you reaching C until you know that you can handle it.

sounds like a functional plan.

There's no harm in going from A to B to C instead of stay at A

If A=B and B=C then A=C BUT ONLY IF THEY ARE TRANSITIVE

Kinda agree with you and yes some of this is my own fault :)

I didnt see a thing about the nick name thing so it either wasnt very well publicised or I was stupidly busy over the last month, either way I dont blame iD so much, it was just as the column said, frustrating to lose my nick. No biggie :)

shouldnt skim read press releases :P

Should read ESR more then ;)

I admit, its been a while ;)

what an asslicker, the game's not 'very good'

Better than Gay Strike, Gay Forteresse, Left 4 Gay ect...

Except not.

you mean gay 4 dead?

Is that your A material?

I love how polarising the sites users are :) One person claims im an asslicker to iD and another on the same page complaining that I have given them a hard time. Cant be both surely? ;)

Not if you're a rough lover :)

lol

"Deck the halls with gibs from rail guns"

There's no more gibs :'(

About the queue.

Even if they did anticipate the vast amount of players that wanted to try the beta(!) right away. I don't think there was that much they could have done. As AnthonyJ pointed out there were bound to be some flaws in their system when handling big numbers which means a queue as such probably prevented some bis breakdons.
Also, the number of people who just want to give it a shotldn't have given the game out of curiousity and many of them wouldn't have given the game another show no matter what.
They should id have rented a ton of servers just for a couple of days for lost of money just because there "might" be a lot of people joining?
Sure in retrospect in would have been better, but if there had been less people sign up it would have been an enourmous waste of money for a free game.

So, I hope as soon as they get actual ads in and the game goes final they will have the infrastructure.




Of and to those thinking I'm kissing id's ass. I just find it boring to swim with the whining masses and prefer to think about why they did what.

Also: I got lucky, forgot to log in in the last month, but "becks" wasn't taken when I registered again :D

John Carmack himself has been telling us via the press that he expects “millions” of Quake Live players, so why was the launch of the open beta so badly handled?

about that, don't you maybe think that in the actual release of the game now, something like queues won't happen now, seeing as they've tested it in the beta?
complaining about the queue is like complaining that the site goes offline because they're changing something.

Not really, when the site goes offline its to update it and it doesnt last multiple days. As I said above, this is a ranty column that I do every week, I dont hate iD (actually the opposite as many of the people who work there will tell you) and im not pissed at them but it was frustrating not being able to play a game I really wanted to play for nearly 10 days due to huge queue sizes. You could argue I could have waited in line like everyone else, but I did for over an hour at a time, but I dont have limitless time on my hands to do that all day long as I have to work too ;p

It was frustrating and I hope iD learns from this when it goes live, god help us if the queues come back when this goes live because then I fear it wont take off the way I want and hope it will.

edit : oh and im sure if no one was complaining about the queue then iD would have done nothing about it yet I am convinced they have done EVERYTHING they can do to get rid of the queue (I heard some of the guys had pulled many all-nighters to get things working smoothly), so yes, there is every need to complain as it makes the product better and I am sure iD feel the same. The best BETA testers are those who complain a lot :p

you know what really grinds my gear?

i LOL'd :(

Did I miss something? :/

ye obviously lol ... my mind was twisting what he said :( am bad

a Chinese?

"id" btw.

yeah cmon red, you can do it better than "iD" ;)

kinda sounds like ice Divers, doesn't it?

No :<

really doesn't? :´(

No :<

OK, why not :>

thank you <3

mr caseSENSITIVE

:D

You respect the nick? You write it properly. You respect the *? you write it properly. Wanna play devils advocate? gl with that ^^

clarify your previous statement

Cant remember what i was trying to say, sry! :D

But u hopefully still realize that this is a beta, a version where things like that can and must happen to avoid such failures in the full-release!

tl;dr much?

.

See if you feel the same when piss heads start pissing against the toilet door because they're too tight to pay to use the toilet.

.

See if you feel the same when the plane is landing and all the piss runs to the front all over your duty free.

That's without stepping in it then brining it back through the plane!

troo story?

Great editorial. Loved the article, though I differ in opinion about the game as it stands right now.