24

[marty]

It's been 24 hours since opening QUAKE LIVE and we wanted to provide a quick update on the hot topics. First, we really appreciate the positive feedback from everyone that's making it through, but also understand the frustration of waiting in line.

QUEUE
Obviously, the biggest factor we've had to deal with is the overwhelming number of people that have visited the site, and in nearly all cases encountered a large list of people ahead of them in the queue. Couple points on this:

1. We obviously didn't intend for tens of thousands of people to have to wait in the queue, but it was put in place for a reason, and that was so once you made it to the site, it still performed fairly well and didn't crash under heavy loads, which for the most part has worked well. We apologize for the frustration a line causes, but it will be in place until we can scale and optimize our back-end to accommodate "everyone." This is our top priority right now and when we get to that point, there will be no queue. You can certainly trust us on this - for a game funded by advertising revenue, we don't want a queue keeping you out anymore than you want it.

2. As mentioned in the developer notes post, it's was very difficult to estimate how many people to expect when opening this. There are so many things that can affect traffic to a site, and like many online games or services during launch, we got slammed. We also had a number of hardware and software issues that we're still working through. It's important to at least note that we're trying to walk a fine line with this project, in that we're running a backend system more like an MMO than a FPS; but we're not charging you $60 up front to help offset our costs or charging a monthly fee to play. Hopefully, it then makes sense to everyone that we need to be responsible with the costs of our infrastructure and grow or optimize as demand warrants. We're in this process now.

3. We had a few bugs in the queue that caused a number of issues. Most of these have been addressed and the queue should be running more efficiently and reliably, including not kicking you back to the queue after downloading the plug in.

Training
Because of the heavy load on our backend systems and software, we were having a number of players who would have to repeatedly play the match against Crash before it would allow access to the site. One aspect of this problem is specific to launch in that EVERYONE needs to play that - moving forward, there will be far more people that already have an account and go straight into the website.

**IMPORTANT** For the short term - in an effort to minimize people needing to play the training match over, we've disabled the "reporting" of all games other than training games into the database. This will effectively make all games that you play online "un-ranked" and stats will not be collected, but will ensure that the training game reports get through. We will return to normal stats reporting as soon as possible.

Email Delivery
Another issue with having a huge influx of players registering is sending the confirmation emails. We've seen reports of players waiting several hours for your confirmation email. What happens here is that when we send massive amounts of email, the mail providers like gmail and yahoo (two of the most popular for our players) throttle the amount of mail that they will let us send through their system. So, our system has sent your emails, but they are basically sitting in their own queue and released to you as your mail provider sees fit. These problems will improve after the initial rush of unregistered players, and we will continue to improve that system.

Password recovery
We are aware that the password recovery system is not functioning and we are working to fix it as soon as possible.

Everyone here appreciates your patience during these early days of opening the site. We've seen a lot of terrific "reviews" of the site and game from those that have made it through the queue and hope that everyone remembers that we want you in the game as bad as you want to be there - so we're working hard on all of the above and will continue to keep you updated.

The QUAKE LIVE Team

[NateBorland]

Marty, thank you for all that you do. I haven't been able to get my computer to run QL yet, but I'm looking forward to it! Thank you!!!

[donbueno]

whatever everything is awesome! you guys rock! I cant believe this crappy lappy is playing this! Great idea guys and once again thanks and wow it feels good to be fraggin like its 1999

[Flayra]

It was pretty flawless for me and I love the Twitter updates to keep us in the loop.

Keep up the awesome work!

[arkadius]

great !

[spasticat]

Now the game runs just as fast in a browser. Simply amazing. Great technical work here transferring a game to a completely online experience.

And to think, all of us assumed up until now the best gaming experience you could have in a browser had to be in flash.

This pretty much blows away that assumption.

[Yakumo]

Thanks loads for the update. Considering the number of people trying to get on I think it's gone amazingly well. Other services would have gone down all day, or longer, after such an unexpected hit.

I'm a rather ticked off about one thing though, I'm off sick today, and you turned off the stats 30 minutes before I would have gotten the 'sick day' award no idea when I'd play that long again. (though on 'matches' stats it says 6hrs for Wednesday that seems to be rounding up the time reported elsewhere.)

[zxyzxy]

Hopefully this will shut some of these players up.

[Carrierz]

Thanks for the update. Good to see that you actually do know and care about the issues going on right now. I haven't played quake for a long time feels great to play it again. =)

[wn]

Originally Posted by marty

...until we can scale and optimize our back-end to accommodate “everyone.”

Is there an ETA on this?