I'm a software developer myself and I know what it's like to tell some people their services are safe so thay they could then tell millions of other people that their data is safe and so on and to forth. As a dev team lead, I know that as long as you have an incompetent developer in your team, you can't promise anything to anybody. Apparently (based on latests events), a company like Blizzard doesn't feel they have to be picky when it comes to accepting new people to their team AND organizing their development process well enough to prevent fuck-ups that we've seen today. This is why I'll NEVER EVER touch HC in D3, unless they'll make it totally offline. Their services are way too fragile to rely on.
I played a rather substantial amount of time on HC and have only had 1 confirmed DC death. Hundreds and hundreds of hours.
Being that you're privy to insider knowledge and the technological logistics of a development team, I assume you also understand the technical limitations, snafus and unavoidable "blips" which will occur when providing an online service to millions of people simultaneously on a massive international, worldwide scale?
HC online is perilous and it sucks dick to lose a char that stood up to everything sanctuary could throw at it, only to die because of the technology involved. DO NOT accept a HC account if you do not accept the x-factor of disconnection deaths.
I'm a software developer myself and I know what it's like to tell some people their services are safe so thay they could then tell millions of other people that their data is safe and so on and to forth. As a dev team lead, I know that as long as you have an incompetent developer in your team, you can't promise anything to anybody. Apparently (based on latests events), a company like Blizzard doesn't feel they have to be picky when it comes to accepting new people to their team AND organizing their development process well enough to prevent fuck-ups that we've seen today. This is why I'll NEVER EVER touch HC in D3, unless they'll make it totally offline. Their services are way too fragile to rely on.
I played a rather substantial amount of time on HC and have only had 1 confirmed DC death. Hundreds and hundreds of hours.
Being that you're privy to insider knowledge and the technological logistics of a development team, I assume you also understand the technical limitations, snafus and unavoidable "blips" which will occur when providing an online service to millions of people simultaneously on a massive international, worldwide scale?
HC online is perilous and it sucks dick to lose a char that stood up to everything sanctuary could throw at it, only to die because of the technology involved. DO NOT accept a HC account if you do not accept the x-factor of disconnection deaths.
You know what? I won't pretend that I've never ever fucked up a launch of a huge project, but it has NEVER resulted in a loss of a user info. That's the main mantra of the software development: is you fuck up the info of your users, you're useless and your product is shit. At the same time Blizzard do that and apparently they don't give a crap about it. The disclaimer they've put at the HC char creation doesn't make it any different: their services are still crap. I'm not even a HC player - I'm just a guy that knows that letting your client app to run for 3-4 minutes after being DC'd (considering there's no supported offline mode) is nonesence. You can't trust your HC char to people that create such software.
Kjalar, if the character was tossed out immediately upon connection loss (which is elementary programming, as you yourself say), players would simply unplug whenever they get in a hairy situation. You can already see the speed-of-light Alt-F4'ing people do in other ARPGs like Path of Exile. This is what BLizzard wants to avoid, because they feel it cheapens the entire premise of playing a "single-life" character (and I agree with this).
It's a game design decision, not a software oversight. They've been doing this for a couple decades, you know
Kjalar, if the character was tossed out immediately upon connection loss (which is elementary programming, as you yourself say), players would simply unplug whenever they get in a hairy situation. You can already see the speed-of-light Alt-F4'ing people do in other ARPGs like Path of Exile. This is what BLizzard wants to avoid, because they feel it cheapens the entire premise of playing a "single-life" character (and I agree with this).
It's a game design decision, not a software oversight. They've been doing this for a couple decades, you know
Which is why the "couple-decades-old design decision" is called TIMEout, not INSTANTout, you know
I'm a software developer myself and I know what it's like to tell some people their services are safe so thay they could then tell millions of other people that their data is safe and so on and to forth. As a dev team lead, I know that as long as you have an incompetent developer in your team, you can't promise anything to anybody. Apparently (based on latests events), a company like Blizzard doesn't feel they have to be picky when it comes to accepting new people to their team AND organizing their development process well enough to prevent fuck-ups that we've seen today. This is why I'll NEVER EVER touch HC in D3, unless they'll make it totally offline. Their services are way too fragile to rely on.
Actually their services have been impeccable between WoW, SC2 and D3 in the past few years compared to other companies. Furthermore, there's a lot more to their services than the software and hardware that run them compared to a typical database or website for instance, especially when literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are accessing those services at a single time.
You have no insight as to what the issues they're having actually are yet you criticize them and claim it on incompetence with little to no evidence to support it. No offense, but just because you're a software developer doesn't mean you understand the inner workings of a multi-million dollar system that has thousands users accessing it routinely and you shouldn't spout it as though you know what's going on. As I tell people I work for all the time, no amount of money or man hours can predict issues, especially when millions of people access your services daily.
In case you're not familiar with the theory, there are lots of different reasons to have timeouts instead of just failing when any server request fails. The main one is the fact that Internet connection is not 100% reliable. And I wasn't talking about that anyway. I was talking about how poorly their "connection lost" checks are coded to show one of the reasons why there's no point in playing HC: the life and death of your character doesn't 100% depend on your skill or gear.
I'm a software developer myself and I know what it's like to tell some people their services are safe so thay they could then tell millions of other people that their data is safe and so on and to forth. As a dev team lead, I know that as long as you have an incompetent developer in your team, you can't promise anything to anybody. Apparently (based on latests events), a company like Blizzard doesn't feel they have to be picky when it comes to accepting new people to their team AND organizing their development process well enough to prevent fuck-ups that we've seen today. This is why I'll NEVER EVER touch HC in D3, unless they'll make it totally offline. Their services are way too fragile to rely on.
Actually their services have been impeccable between WoW, SC2 and D3 in the past few years compared to other companies. Furthermore, there's a lot more to their services than the software and hardware that run them compared to a typical database or website for instance, especially when literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are accessing those services at a single time.
You have no insight as to what the issues they're having actually are yet you criticize them and claim it on incompetence with little to no evidence to support it. No offense, but just because you're a software developer doesn't mean you understand the inner workings of a multi-million dollar system that has thousands users accessing it routinely and you shouldn't spout it as though you know what's going on. As I tell people I work for all the time, no amount of money or man hours can predict issues, especially when millions of people access your services daily.
Please, show my post where I say I know "the inner workings of a multi-million dollar system" that Blizzard has created. Please.
Now, if you refer to my words about the 3-4 minutes long delay that was caused by god knows what failure on the Blizzard's side that caused tons of disconnects and deaths - you have to be blind to not acknowledge it. And, just so you know, by saying that, I still don't say that I know everything about "the inner workings of a multi-million dollar system". But you know what? I don't need to. Because I see the result and I know that it shouldn't happen in a well-designed SOA. I mean, no system is perfect, but there are mistakes that you should never allow to slip through your fingers if you espect your system to be used by millions of people.
What makes me angry about all this is this: if you're a dedicated HC player, you kinda expect that there's a 0.001% possibility that you'll lose control of your character - and you prepare for it. You stack Toughness and regen to be able to soak hits for 10-20 seconds or even longer. At least one of my friends did that, which is how I know that there are people that treat their HC chars THAT seriously. They test the ability to survive DC's by unplugging the Internet cable and it works just fine. Now, when Blizzard's servers fail, it turns out that it's a whole different story. It turns out that because of how their services work (incorrectly), the char can stay "online" for several minutes (or longer), while being pummeled by all kinds of stuff. No one can be prepared for that and Blizzard's disclaimer won't make you feel less screwed over when this happens to you, so you should think twice before creating a HC character. That's my point.
And to be perfectly clear, I've over-simplified the whole "timeout" thing, since, you know, you don't expect a lot of people that are actually familiar with the software development (even though there are tons of people that think they really are) in a Diablo 3 forum. What I think was happened is a classic "I'm alive" mistake: there's a service that's supposed to monitor the state of other services and notify the client if the server has faulted or inaccessible. Problem is that if monitoring is poorly implemented, there can be a situation that a service that tells "I'm alive" to your client app is the only service that is actually alive in your whole infrastructure. This would explain why client apps "retained" the connection for so long after actually being disconnected.
I'm a software developer myself and I know what it's like to tell some people their services are safe so thay they could then tell millions of other people that their data is safe and so on and to forth. As a dev team lead, I know that as long as you have an incompetent developer in your team, you can't promise anything to anybody. Apparently (based on latests events), a company like Blizzard doesn't feel they have to be picky when it comes to accepting new people to their team AND organizing their development process well enough to prevent fuck-ups that we've seen today. This is why I'll NEVER EVER touch HC in D3, unless they'll make it totally offline. Their services are way too fragile to rely on.
Actually their services have been impeccable between WoW, SC2 and D3 in the past few years compared to other companies. Furthermore, there's a lot more to their services than the software and hardware that run them compared to a typical database or website for instance, especially when literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are accessing those services at a single time.
You have no insight as to what the issues they're having actually are yet you criticize them and claim it on incompetence with little to no evidence to support it. No offense, but just because you're a software developer doesn't mean you understand the inner workings of a multi-million dollar system that has thousands users accessing it routinely and you shouldn't spout it as though you know what's going on. As I tell people I work for all the time, no amount of money or man hours can predict issues, especially when millions of people access your services daily.
Please, show my post where I say I know "the inner workings of a multi-million dollar system" that Blizzard has created. Please.
Now, if you refer to my words about the 3-4 minutes long delay that was caused by god knows what failure on the Blizzard's side that caused tons of disconnects and deaths - you have to be blind to not acknowledge it. And, just so you know, by saying that, I still don't say that I know everything about"the inner workings of a multi-million dollar system". But you know what? I don't need to. Because I see the result and I know that it shouldn't happen in a well-designed SOA. I mean, no system is perfect, but there are mistakes that you should never allow to slip through your fingers if you espect your system to be used by millions of people.
What makes me angry about all this is this: if you're a dedicated HC player, you kinda expect that there's a 0.001% possibility that you'll lose control of your character - and you prepare for it. You stack Toughness and regen to be able to soak hits for 10-20 seconds or even longer. At least one of my friends did that, which is how I know that there are people that treat their HC chars THAT seriously. They test the ability to survive DC's by unplugging the Internet cable and it works just fine. Now, when Blizzard's servers fail, it turns out that it's a whole different story. It turns out that because of how their services work (incorrectly), the char can stay "online" for several minutes (or longer), while being pummeled by all kinds of stuff. No one can be prepared for that and Blizzard's disclaimer won't make you feel less screwed over when this happens to you, so you should think twice before creating a HC character. That's my point.
You speculate their issues are primarily due to incompetence, which would require you to know their inner workings in order to actually be a valid speculation. Did hardware failure not cross your mind? What about a cyber attack? We don't know the cause, and because of that we can do nothing but speculate. With that, incompetence is a stretch because you have nothing supporting why they're incompetent, other than the fact that they had issues. Anyone who has any clue of mass network environments isn't going to immediately blame issues on incompetence, especially when it's on a gaming network that millions of people rely upon to play their games and are able to do so daily without issue 99% of the time. Blaming down time on incompetence says to me that you think you know how their system is setup yet don't have the sense of scope to realize how massive an undertaking it is to manage. I'm not trying to be rude, that's just how you come off when the first thing you do is blame it on incompetence.
Networks aren't flawless, regardless of how much money is spent on them or who works on them. Issues will always arise and speculating the way you are, as though it's fact, is beyond me because we don't know the actual issues. No network, no matter how well designed will never have issues especially when miliions of people are accessing that network simultaneously. This is a fact and nothing there's actually nothing they can realistically do about it. You're judging them on one morning of network issues when in the past 3 years of D3 existing post launch they've had practically zero issues. But this is how people are, they don't complain when nothing's wrong but the second an issue arises they scream bloody murder.
Again though, your whole chalking this up to bad development design is negated by Calzaeth's post of what Blizzard likely intends with the design. Just because you disagree with it doesn't mean it's incorrect design. I can relate, as I do take advantage of PoE's design when I play it, but saying Blizzard's incompetent for choosing that design is ignorant on your part.
I mean, come on. Me and my friends got DC'd today and were in-game for like 3-4 minutes (!!!) after DC. Now tell me, what kind of fucking amateurs develop this game if they don't even know what timeouts are for in SOA? That's one of the basics when it comes to designing client-server systems and it's rather obvious that these guys know little of it. How can you trust your HC char to people that allow your char to stay in the game for 3-4 minutes after you've got disconnected because of their fault???
Epic, calling Blizzard "fucking amateurs", so big-shot, what have you done that can be compared to their work?
I mean, come on. Me and my friends got DC'd today and were in-game for like 3-4 minutes (!!!) after DC. Now tell me, what kind of fucking amateurs develop this game if they don't even know what timeouts are for in SOA? That's one of the basics when it comes to designing client-server systems and it's rather obvious that these guys know little of it. How can you trust your HC char to people that allow your char to stay in the game for 3-4 minutes after you've got disconnected because of their fault???
That's intended, at the start of D3 people who were about to die in HC usually cut their internet connection or alt+f4 to survive, Blizzard made it so that characters stay in game a while after being DC so that you can't do that.
No rerolls. The point of playing HC is that characters death's are permanent just like we only have one life to live in real life.
If you notice the servers are not that stable or laggy. That should be enough for you to decide it is not the time to play HC and play some SC if you need to have a Diablo fix.
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On Strike and supporting Fallout 4 Mod Makers
Some fallout 4 mod makers have had their mods stolen and uploaded and downloaded on Bethesda's site for the Xbox One.
Dude, grow up. You're being a whiner. The entire point of hardcore is that anything can randomly kill you. Lag is just the unseen enemy, suck it up and reroll. RoS has been live for like 6 days, do you have any clue what playing games was like in the 90s?
Never play HC in the first 2 weeks after a release. Servers crash a lot, high latency, etc. I already lost a HC hero when D3 first came out. Server spike = GG without proper gear. Don't QQ and build another toon ASAP. The only certain you have while playing HC is: YOUR HERO WILL DIE. Not today, not tomorrow, just one day =)
I mean, come on. Me and my friends got DC'd today and were in-game for like 3-4 minutes (!!!) after DC. Now tell me, what kind of fucking amateurs develop this game if they don't even know what timeouts are for in SOA? That's one of the basics when it comes to designing client-server systems and it's rather obvious that these guys know little of it. How can you trust your HC char to people that allow your char to stay in the game for 3-4 minutes after you've got disconnected because of their fault???
Epic, calling Blizzard "fucking amateurs", so big-shot, what have you done that can be compared to their work?
Ask Blizzard employees the same question, make their dev lead answer it, then ask me again. Ok?
I'm not saying that I personally outsourced any part of D3 or ROS, because I didn't. Just pointing out that some (huge well-known) companies don't want you ("walking wallets") to know that they actually outsource huge chunks of their work to Russian/Indian/Brazilian/God-knows-what-else developers, whenever they can, because in most cases it's WAY cheaper than having a whole US-based team. We (outsourcers) sign contracts that explicitly state that we can be pretty much ass-raped during the next 10+ years if we somehow disclose the names of our clients, which is why I can't do that - large companies have lots of tools to track mentionings of the names of "their" projects on the Internet (ironically, I've written one of those tools).
You see, what you have to realize is the internet is a GIANT network and sub-network of servers, routers, and etc hardware. There are certain routers that thousands of people have to connect to in order to reach the blizzard servers. In the following picture lets assume the GREEN dot is you, the green circle is your isp's network... the BLUE dot is blizzard, the blue circle is blizzard's isp network (this is by no means an actual representation just a simple example)....
Lets assume that the black line is the path you take to get to Blizzard and the pink line is all other possible paths... if one of the red dots goes down, the network as a whole (which is made up of lots of sub-networks) has to reroute ALL the traffic, that could be thousands of D3 players. This of course takes time. Now, does this exactly describe YOUR situation and why YOU died. No, possibly not. However, this is why blizzard can not be held responsible. They can only be responsible of their network. If any of the red dots inside your isp's network or between you and blizzazrd fail, they can not be responsible. This is just the internet and this is just life. It is the risk we take playing HC....
You see, what you have to realize is the internet is a GIANT network and sub-network of servers, routers, and etc hardware. There are certain routers that thousands of people have to connect to in order to reach the blizzard servers. In the following picture lets assume the GREEN dot is you, the green circle is your isp's network... the BLUE dot is blizzard, the blue circle is blizzard's isp network (this is by no means an actual representation just a simple example)....
http://i.imgur.com/46W9F34.png
Lets assume that the black line is the path you take to get to Blizzard and the pink line is all other possible paths... if one of the red dots goes down, the network as a whole (which is made up of lots of sub-networks) has to reroute ALL the traffic, that could be thousands of D3 players. This of course takes time. Now, does this exactly describe YOUR situation and why YOU died. No, possibly not. However, this is why blizzard can not be held responsible. They can only be responsible of their network. If any of the red dots inside your isp's network or between you and blizzazrd fail, they can not be responsible. This is just the internet and this is just life. It is the risk we take playing HC....
That's true. What's even more true is that even the simplest clients of cloud services usually handle the "loss of server connection" type of situations. I can only assume, why D3 client didn't handle it properly (and I did assume that).
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Being that you're privy to insider knowledge and the technological logistics of a development team, I assume you also understand the technical limitations, snafus and unavoidable "blips" which will occur when providing an online service to millions of people simultaneously on a massive international, worldwide scale?
HC online is perilous and it sucks dick to lose a char that stood up to everything sanctuary could throw at it, only to die because of the technology involved. DO NOT accept a HC account if you do not accept the x-factor of disconnection deaths.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
It's a game design decision, not a software oversight. They've been doing this for a couple decades, you know
You have no insight as to what the issues they're having actually are yet you criticize them and claim it on incompetence with little to no evidence to support it. No offense, but just because you're a software developer doesn't mean you understand the inner workings of a multi-million dollar system that has thousands users accessing it routinely and you shouldn't spout it as though you know what's going on. As I tell people I work for all the time, no amount of money or man hours can predict issues, especially when millions of people access your services daily.
Now, if you refer to my words about the 3-4 minutes long delay that was caused by god knows what failure on the Blizzard's side that caused tons of disconnects and deaths - you have to be blind to not acknowledge it. And, just so you know, by saying that, I still don't say that I know everything about "the inner workings of a multi-million dollar system". But you know what? I don't need to. Because I see the result and I know that it shouldn't happen in a well-designed SOA. I mean, no system is perfect, but there are mistakes that you should never allow to slip through your fingers if you espect your system to be used by millions of people.
What makes me angry about all this is this: if you're a dedicated HC player, you kinda expect that there's a 0.001% possibility that you'll lose control of your character - and you prepare for it. You stack Toughness and regen to be able to soak hits for 10-20 seconds or even longer. At least one of my friends did that, which is how I know that there are people that treat their HC chars THAT seriously. They test the ability to survive DC's by unplugging the Internet cable and it works just fine. Now, when Blizzard's servers fail, it turns out that it's a whole different story. It turns out that because of how their services work (incorrectly), the char can stay "online" for several minutes (or longer), while being pummeled by all kinds of stuff. No one can be prepared for that and Blizzard's disclaimer won't make you feel less screwed over when this happens to you, so you should think twice before creating a HC character. That's my point.
Networks aren't flawless, regardless of how much money is spent on them or who works on them. Issues will always arise and speculating the way you are, as though it's fact, is beyond me because we don't know the actual issues. No network, no matter how well designed will never have issues especially when miliions of people are accessing that network simultaneously. This is a fact and nothing there's actually nothing they can realistically do about it. You're judging them on one morning of network issues when in the past 3 years of D3 existing post launch they've had practically zero issues. But this is how people are, they don't complain when nothing's wrong but the second an issue arises they scream bloody murder.
Again though, your whole chalking this up to bad development design is negated by Calzaeth's post of what Blizzard likely intends with the design. Just because you disagree with it doesn't mean it's incorrect design. I can relate, as I do take advantage of PoE's design when I play it, but saying Blizzard's incompetent for choosing that design is ignorant on your part.
its immpoissble like this.
http://www.diablofans.com/blizz-tracker/topic/53443-service-interruption-march-30
If you notice the servers are not that stable or laggy. That should be enough for you to decide it is not the time to play HC and play some SC if you need to have a Diablo fix.
I'm not saying that I personally outsourced any part of D3 or ROS, because I didn't. Just pointing out that some (huge well-known) companies don't want you ("walking wallets") to know that they actually outsource huge chunks of their work to Russian/Indian/Brazilian/God-knows-what-else developers, whenever they can, because in most cases it's WAY cheaper than having a whole US-based team. We (outsourcers) sign contracts that explicitly state that we can be pretty much ass-raped during the next 10+ years if we somehow disclose the names of our clients, which is why I can't do that - large companies have lots of tools to track mentionings of the names of "their" projects on the Internet (ironically, I've written one of those tools).
http://i.imgur.com/46W9F34.png
Lets assume that the black line is the path you take to get to Blizzard and the pink line is all other possible paths... if one of the red dots goes down, the network as a whole (which is made up of lots of sub-networks) has to reroute ALL the traffic, that could be thousands of D3 players. This of course takes time. Now, does this exactly describe YOUR situation and why YOU died. No, possibly not. However, this is why blizzard can not be held responsible. They can only be responsible of their network. If any of the red dots inside your isp's network or between you and blizzazrd fail, they can not be responsible. This is just the internet and this is just life. It is the risk we take playing HC....