World's 2nd most popular cloud infrastructure company is unable to deploy their own software on their own cloud infrastructure.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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The world’s 1st most popular cloud infrastructure company was also unable to deploy their own software on their own cloud infrastructure. I remember just being in total disbelief when New World, the Amazon-developed MMORPG struggled for WEEKS (Months?) with server capacity issues. Like… you guys own ALL the servers, the main selling point of which are their ability to dynamically scale to demand.
I totally get the irony of how Amazon's own MMO struggled with server capacity issues, but that probably has way more to do with how the game was actually written/implemented, and less to do with Amazon's scalability features.
That’s my point. If any MMO is going to be tightly designed to utilize the abilities of a platform like AWS, you’d think it’d be the one owned by the company that owns AWS. At the very least because it’s an opportunity to flex the capabilities of AWS as an MMO back end. AGS is not AWS, but you’d assume there would be a team from AWS assigned to work with them specifically, as well as the fact that AGS doesn’t have to consider cost as a limiting factor when utilizing AWS as a back end, like any other MMO developer would. It’s a huge leg up they had over every other MMORPG developer, and still somehow managed to screw it up.
Yeah that would be the logical thing to do, lol. In my time experiencing and working in the software development world though, rarely are high-level decisions like that made based on how logical they are. Usually they're made based on how much short-term cash flow they may generate.
Usually they are made based on how much they will improve the career chances of the person making them.
I work there and I'm not surprised.
The inability to download from their servers means that players are eating up refund time sitting around waiting. So now there are players that haven’t even gotten to play yet and can’t get a refund through Steam.
I swear companies are just fucking trolling us at this point.
Didn't this happen with the last MSFS? I seem to remember Steam extending the refund period for that game. But I could've dreamed that
There should be a general exception for games that update in the game, or a Steam API setting that differentiates between play time and update time, and penalties for games that don't abide by it.
A general distinction between play time, menu time, update time, pause time,... might be nice for counting hours in game too.
I had this exact same problem with the last MSFS. I bought it 4 months ago and never could download the content. The game crashed something like 5 times before I was able to actually get the loading screen to open. Then it was off to the races downloading 150gb of content from M$ servers at a blazing 320kbps.
Figured I’d cut my losses and refunded before my 2 hour window so I could use that money to purchase an actual flight simulator (XPlane 12)
Thankfully the new one doesn’t require further downloading. The trade off is that even more of the game is server-side.
If the servers can only handle a certain number of players, then they should only sell a certain number of licenses for the game.
Then, when concurrent player numbers drop over time, they can release more.
But no, they'll happily take the money from everyone on launch even though their servers can't handle the load.
Could you imagine the possibly equally as bad reception if a digital game was limited? Then add in that you’d get scalpers trying to sell steam keys for stupid money.
This is just another example of why you should wait a while before buying a new game, even sequels.
I vividly remember a downloaded game telling me they had run out of available licences, once. Can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty certain it was on Steam. How you run out of numbers still rascals me, all these years later. And I say this as a software dev.
Want to sell: Microsoft flight simulator license DM me to discuss price.
Maybe there's a middle ground, where instead of just letting a flood of people all download your game on day one, the publisher like pre-downloads it onto some sort of physical media, and then sell copies of that physical media. That way people could get into the game immediately when they receive their copy without having to wait on the same 6 hour download that a million other people are also waiting on, that download activity doesn't interfere with the bandwidth of people trying to play the game, and the physical availability puts a sort of temporary artificial limit on how many people can play at once.
People can already get into the game immediately when they receive their copy, just with a vastly simplified distribution mechanism called "download". You might not remember all the issues physical distribution mechanisms had back in the day.
They probably didn't know how many players their servers could support. This was one way to find out.
Any company worth any money does stress tests of their servers to simulate different scenarios with different loads.
Either they were overconfident, or simply didn’t think QA testing was necessary or worth the cost.
So as somebody who tried the game 24 hours after release, it worked for me just fine and it’s actually pretty good. Loving the career mode.
This is why I don’t buy or play games on release day. It’s never worth the aggravation.
Just wait a week ffs. Why do you all NEED it on release day? Yall are part of the problem.
If I buy a product, it should work properly regardless of what day I bought it.
True in theory but in the absence of regulation to that effect if you don't vote with your wallet either companies have literally no incentive to ensure that.
Patient gamers unite! I wait until that game I want hits AT LEAST -75% off.
The only exception I've had for that rule for myself in recent memory is for Monsterhunter games.
You look hard enough (or maybe not very hard at all) and you can see which developers and companies can't do launch days very well, or release too early. Blizzard/Activision, CDProject Red, Ubisoft, and Microsoft come to mind.
It's the smaller to mid-size companies that have something to prove that release something more polished. Not always the case, but you've gotta stand out somehow.
Is the content from the previous flight simulator compatible with 2024 or do people have to remake and rebuy everything again?
No it should carry over.
Remake and rebuy everything of course. Did you expect backwards compatibility? Where’s the money in that?
Edit: have a look at people in the game forums unable to have their community content (especially planes) not working in 2024, or only partially working (mismatched textures, missing liveries, flight model glitches). As of right now, there are lots of compatibility issues.
Except that's not the case according to the Flight Simulator 2024 FAQ
For any content you purchased outside of the simulator, the Community Folder will continue to work as it did in MSFS 2020. Any content in your MSFS 2020 Community Folder can simply be copied over to the new MSFS 2024 Community Folder, and the vast majority of that content should work in MSFS 2024. For any content you purchased in the Marketplace in MSFS 2020, that content will show up as owned in the Content Manager (in MSFS 2024 called “My Library”) at launch for you to use in MSFS 2024, and the vast majority of that content should work in MSFS 2024. This availability does not require developers to sign off on their content.
Really shooting from the hip on this one, huh?
Nope, just been keeping up with the MFS2024 forums, where tons of community content has issues rendering and systems not working. Technically being able to load content but not have it work the same way or in a usable manner doesn’t seem like real “backwards compatibility” but go ahead and take Microsoft’s word. We both know they’re good for it! 🤣