Demigod Servers pounded by Pirates

Stardock's Brad Wardell has sounded off in his blog on the Demigod Server issues which have plagued it since launch. Here is the poop below :)

"Today

The system works pretty well if you have a few thousand people online at once. The system works…less well if there are tens of thousands of people online at once. And if there are over 100,000 people, well, you get horrific results such as the game being incredibly unresponsive due to simple web service calls that were considered pretty benign during the beta that suddenly start to bring down firewalls and such due to the sheer massive number of calls that are being made.

Sadly, most of the ~120,000 connections are not customers but via warez. About 18,000 are legitimate. So anyway, we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users (it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there’d be no friendly “ha ha pirate” message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy). Mind you, the game makes relatively few server calls, it’s just the sheer number of people.

Our stress tests had counted on having maybe 50,000 people playing at once at peak and that wouldn’t be reached for a few weeks by which time we would have slowly seen things becoming problematic. With Sins of a Solar Empire, the game was incredibly successful but its user base grew slowly and steadily over time. Sometimes on a peak time the server would start to get slow and we would adjust so that it would be better next time.

But here, when you’re getting that many connections at once, you’re no longer talking about dealing with the basics like having a good SAN and lots of redundant servers. You instead fall into all kinds of weird secondary issues that start to pop up like yesterday’s case where an older network card couldn’t handle all the packets (not bandwidth limited but # of tiny packets being sent out at once).

So during the day today, people couldn’t even logon and in some cases, the Demigod forums, which use one of the affected databases for some piddly thing were even down. Even getting the game running was a pain today because a simple HTTP call to see what the latest version would get hung leaving people looking at a black screen. Stuff of nightmares.

Before the game shipped, I wrote a scary email to our team saying how disastrous things would be and predicted doom for us and GPG if there were problems with multiplayer. At the time, my worry was about things like disconnects and CVP. It didn’t occur to me that we’d have near MMO user connections to throw in."

My Opinion:
I applaud Stardock for not putting DRM on Demigod but this was certainly unavoidable. CD-Key verifications pounding a server continously can bring any server to it's knees if the load is large enough. I feel for the legit customers who were trying to enjoy playing the multiplayer game part but hopefully the folks at Stardock & GPG can get this all sorted out soon. Another Patch will be released soon as well.