Spore Servers Crap Out On Launch Day

Videogamers around the world will no doubt be shocked - shocked! - to learn that the Spore servers are choking and gagging on release day.

The Xiotex Studios blog says a server error appears immediately after the installation process, when the game attempts to verify itself with the Spore servers. According to the post, the game asks for a serial code when it first launches, then takes users to the main menu to generate an account. But after account creation, a message pops up stating the activation code cannot be verified, and as a result, all online privileges are suspended.

Hundreds of posts on the official Spore support forum have complained of the same issue, and at last report EA did not have a time frame for getting the problem fixed. The company has since sent out an email to Spore customers apologizing for the problem and promising that work to get it fixed is underway.

"We deeply apologize for the inconvenience that you are currently experiencing with Spore," the email says. "It appears that there is an ongoing issue with the accounts server and the registration process for the game. We would like to inform you that we are already investigating this concern and in the process of resolving this issue. For updates with regards this concern, you can visit the Spore site at http://www.spore.com. We appreciate your continued patience and understanding in the meantime."

"Continued patience and understanding" seems to be a prerequisite for buying videogames these days. It's hardly the first time something like this has happened, but with a game as highly anticipated as Spore, and considering the muscle EA can bring to bear - not to mention the benefit of hindsight regarding past launch debacles - I expected better. I'm really not looking forward to the bleating of the "lol torrentz ftw" crowd, but this is exactly the kind of nonsense that makes legitimate anti-piracy efforts look bad across the board.

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Now who wants to bet this is caused by that DRM they twice promised to remove? And who actually expected better from EA anyways?

This is just like what happened with the iPhone 3G and...um, what's the name of that Microsoft photo thing that crashed on opening day? If you're not prepared, and enough people use it, your server will crash. It's simple geometry.

*thinks about raising hand, thinks about EA's major failures as of late, keeps hand down*

I hoped this wouldn't happen, but I'm not terribly surprised. Eventually, though, Spore will shine, no doubt. Just right now it looks horrid for EA.

Are the people running EA really as stupid as they seem? How could they not expect a huge run on the servers, and not be prepared? A baboon with brain damage could figure that one out. All the price of the DRM, the pirates get to play, the buyers get inconvenienced.

It's always hard to anticipate the load from a hardware perspective.

For example, say a webserver can handle 1000 concurrent users. If you have 1000 expected users, you only need the one server, and say a backup failover server.

Now if you have 2000, you can use two webservers and one or two backup servers.

Once your needs push to three or four, you suddenly realize that your database server can't handle all the connections. So you need a secondary live database server. In addition to likely 2-3 more web servers. This is handling the same increase from 3->4 servers in user terms, as you handled from 1 to 2 servers initially.

Now, expand that to a massively popular and anticipated game. This game will have initial launch day traffic that will quite possibly (depending on complexity) require 5-10 TIMES the hardware they will need for normal day-to-day traffic. Ideally, they would probably acquire temporary leased hardware to handle the spike, but that's usually a lot of set up that may be hard to justify. Of course it is EA, who should have the resources available to do such things, especially if they can re-use resources from one launch to the next...

And then you run into fun issues like saturating your local routers, or having a (usually temporary) peering issue with one of your ISPs that drops packets from parts of Europe. So you have to distribute your servers to multiple data centers around the world, which requires basic infrastructure setup and costs for each one.

It all amounts to a lot of man hours, and has to come down to how much is all that time and resources worth it to have a smooth launch day. And then of course do you plan for 60% of your shipped product to be activated in the first few days? 80%? 99%? Each is likely a geometrically larger amount of work/hardware to support simultaneously. All the money that would be sunk into having a smooth launch (tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars) gets taken away from other things.

Of course, using a less draconian registration scheme goes a long way to mitigating these headaches.

Major-release game with significant online components experiences server problems on launch day... who'da thunk it?

They're going to rake in the cash on this one no matter how they play it, so they save themselves some cash by only putting up enough hardware for normal load instead of peak launch-day load. People get pissed off, but hey... they already bought the game, who gives a rat's ass? Not EA it would seem.

Zombie_King:
It's simple geometry.

Loving that.

Also, Kross=wow.

Kross:
It's always hard to anticipate the load from a hardware perspective.

You server admin types are always covering for each other.

I can sympathize with EA's problems - launches are always hell, for reasons you explained far better than I ever could - but at the same time, if they had done away with the hard-ass copy protection they probably wouldn't be staring down this barrel. Ditching the DRM might result in a (random number) percentage rise in piracy, but it would also help ensure the good will of the real customer base, which is worth far more than a few cheap greaseballs who may be put off downloading your game by a few days.

This is EA the big mega corp will buckets of money. This really isn't acceptable.

They KNEW there would be a rush, they KNEW they needed bigger servers, just look at the creature creator, they expected 100,000 by now, they had over a million in the first week! But I think somethings up with EA servers, cause the same thing happened with mercs2, the servers were down for most people the first 2 days after the game released

Servers lagging on the launch day? NO! TELL ME IT AINT SO!!!

Anyhow, I really think that EA with the industry experience they have should have been in a position to deal with this, I mean, they've gotta have good consumer research to get to the position where they are today, so this instance is indeed a puzzling one.

Something is not right here. It was fairly clearly stated that spore comes out on the seventh. Now I am not exactly up with the times but I am fairly certain that is tomorrow.

Australia got it first for some odd reason. On the 2nd to be exact.
And then other countries got it, etc.

so they can't even handle a rush from Australia....what will happen when the rest of the world joins in the fun?

The rest of the world is already playing. Only the US isn't :P

Lt. Sera:
The rest of the world is already playing. Only the US isn't :P

ahhh i see

Craping on America's release day...

Oh whats that? We've had it for a few weeks down here now? Oh sorry, I was at the beach.