New World – Rich Lawrence Interview

Amazon Game Studios’ new MMORPG New World was released a few days back, and predictably, the initial launch wasn’t exactly what you’d call smooth. As a result, we can now check out this PC Gamer interview with Amazon’s Rich Lawrence that focuses specifically on what makes MMO releases such a tough thing to pull off, and why it’s not just a matter of plugging in more servers.

Here’s a sample question to get you started:

PCG: There is a perception that this is simply a number-crunching problem: “oh why don’t they just turn more servers on.” Is that mistaken?

RL: I wouldn’t call it mistaken, but there is a lot of detail that can get lost there. Each server that a player sees is actually multiple machines configured to talk to each other—if we do our jobs right, that is not visible to the players, but it’s still a complication.

The machines have different roles, and thus different configurations and data to work with, that needs to be copied in place. They have network rules to talk to each other and the players in order to be secure. They need to be plugged in to larger systems, like log-in, or customer service. And once all that is done you need to test them, because there’s always the small chance of bad hardware somewhere, and even automated systems sometimes break on copying a file, that kind of thing. And though we automate many steps, it always requires some humans—a server needs a name, decisions on whether it should be a specific language, where it goes, how to notify customers it’s available; including translating to local languages.

I completely understand the player perspective of “I need a server to play on, now!” We heard that loud and clear. In the first day of operation we doubled the number of servers. That’s well over a thousand machines, hundreds of thousands of configurations and changes. I describe this to illustrate that it has a time component. It’s time we are happy to spend of course, but not trivial and absolutely not something that we were taking casually. If we had been sitting around and just not turning on servers, I’d be furious with us as a team. That wasn’t the case; we worked frantically non-stop through the first 40 hours of operation and we’re keeping up that pace, with more servers pouring in. We will keep them coming until it’s not a problem.