The Numbers Behind WoW

[7F]LarryBoy

[7F]LarryBoy

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For the coder/techie types among us, some interesting numbers on what makes WoW run:

Source: http://worldofraids.com/news/859-austin-game-developers-conference-the-universe-behind-world-of-warcraft.html

The Austin Game Developers Conference is currently going on in Austin, Texas and Blizzard is attending for keynotes again this year. Today J. Allen Brack (Production Director) and Franck Pearce (Executive Vice President) spoke on the teams that keep the gears turning on such a large MMO. Here's a recap of some of the interesting pieces of information.

* 32 Programmers
o They maintain over 5.5 million lines of code
* 51 Artists
o They've created 1.5 million assets for World of Warcraft to-date; everything from models, textures, logos, etc.
* 37 Designers
o Made up of 3 different teams: Systems Design, Content Design and World Design.
o The design team has created 70,000 spells and 40,000 unique NPCs.
o Content Design - Team Lead: Cory Stockton
+ The Content Design team uses assets created by the artists to actually create the zones in the game.
o Systems Design - Team Lead: Greg Street
+ Systems Design focuses on classes, itemization and professions.
o World Design - Team Lead: Alex Afrasiabi
+ The World Design team is comprised of encounter designers and quest designers who create all of the quests and NPC encounters in the game.
+ They've created 7650 quests so far in the game.
* 10 Producers
o They have tracked over 33,000 tasks to-date.
* 218 Quality Assurance
o The QA team tracks 179,184 bugs as of AGDC.
* 2,056 Game Masters
* 1,724 international employees
* There have been over 4.5 billion achievements unlocked by players.
* There are over 27 hours of music in World of Warcraft.
* Over 358,680 localized strings in the game, totaling 3,211,102 words.
* Patch 3.1 delivered more than 4.7 petabytes of data when it was deployed (that's over 4.7 million gigabytes)
* Whenever a patch is ready to be released, Blizzard must create 126 different versions of the patch for various localizations, versions of the game players are at, etc.
* Blizzard Online Network Service ("BONS") - The server network that makes up the realms players play on, utilizes -
o 13,250 total server blades
o 75,000 CPU cores
o 112.5 terabytes of RAM
* Blizzard has more than 20,000 computer systems at their offices globally.
* There are already more than 12,000,000 active Battle.net accounts.
* The total global size of Blizzard is now more than 4,600 people.
* Employees have to pay for BlizzCon tickets like anyone else, but even with that (and other ticket sales) BlizzCon still results in a substantial monetary loss for the company.

This isn't all that goes on to keep World of Warcraft running. Blizzard has licensing and legal teams, marketing, public relations, community, etc. It's an interesting look inside of the development of the game for sure, and knowing now that they have to create 126 versions of a patch each time they update the game, the delays between patches make a lot more sense.
 
Its tough to stay at the top...

All this is very interesting, but it still doesn't explain why the servers are taken down weekly when other MMO's servers stay up much longer.
 
Odale said:
Its tough to stay at the top...

All this is very interesting, but it still doesn't explain why the servers are taken down weekly when other MMO's servers stay up much longer.
Click to expand...

Or why it looks like a cartoon, I'd be much more inclined to play if it looked more realistic...or even looked close to some of the FMVs I've seen for the game.
 
[toj.cc]phantom;354813 said:
Or why it looks like a cartoon, I'd be much more inclined to play if it looked more realistic...or even looked close to some of the FMVs I've seen for the game.
Click to expand...

I think the lack of realistic appearance is what keeps a lot of people playing... indirectly. The characters don't move and react with full body movement the way you would expect, which makes them a TON easier for your computer to draw. You can play WoW with an ancient system.

Look how many of the new games require such beefy systems that they eliminate a huge potential number of subscribers that aren't willing to put $1500 into a new system to play a game they're not sure they'll enjoy. Then take WoW, who is willing to "alienate" a fraction of the playerbase that has high-end machines. Which end do you think will bring a company more money in the long run?

Ultima Online ran into the same dilemma nearly a decade ago. They released a "3d" client which was just prettier effects, better body mechanics, more realistic interaction with the environment. It flopped hard. Blizzard seems to have learned from other companies mistakes. That's why they're still #1.
 
Odale said:
Its tough to stay at the top...

All this is very interesting, but it still doesn't explain why the servers are taken down weekly when other MMO's servers stay up much longer.
Click to expand...
WoW is far from perfect, but it has managed to "stay on top" for soon to be 5 years with currently 12million Battlenet accounts. Dethroning that kind of player base will not be an easy task.

My prediction (IMHO) will be that only another Blizzard MMO will unseat WoW from their throne. Also, on the downtime thing, the below makes sense to me regarding having weekly maintenance:

o 13,250 total server blades
o 75,000 CPU cores
o 112.5 terabytes of RAM

...they have to create 126 versions of a patch each time they update the game, the delays between patches make a lot more sense.
 
Yeah, thats a good amount of servers... but that doesn't mean they need weekly maintenance.

The game doesn't have any high stress areas that cause large amounts of lag for people. Sure, zones like IF, SW and now Dalaran have large amounts of people in them, but they are spread out all throughout the zone.

The only exception is Winter grasp. There, every 3 hours, large amounts of people wind up in the courtyard of the keep to help their faction take the keep. This is the kind of stress I'm talking about. However, Blizz has always taken their servers down every Tuesday, and WG only happens once every 3 hours.

To use a more recent example, in Warhammer, there would be almost 400 or 500-ish people at one particular spot (usually a fortress). Granted, Warhammer isn't as popular as it used to be, but mythic never had to take down their servers for regularly scheduled maintenance. In its predecessor, Dark Age of Camelot, there would be relic raids and the most common way for the 3 factions to save their relics was to crash the server by getting as many people to the relic keep as possible while either (or both) of the opposing sides tried to take the relics. There would be as many as 600 people at a single keep at once! Mythic never brought down any of those servers for maintenance.

Everyone knows that the WoW servers have a LOT of players on them, but that doesn't mean they get stressed out and need a break. I don't see the meaning behind it.
 
As per the realism complaint..I can tell you that no one in this family would be playing if the characters looked more real...as it is, its distracting (or annoying) enough when some person decides that his night elf female needs to be dancing without any clothes on...if it looked more realistic the game would need a R rating.
 
I personally believe that if that made a World of Star Craft it would completely kill WoW. Heck even I'd play it!
 
WoW looks like it does because Blizzard intentionally took the art of the Warcraft games in that direction (the overblown, cartoony look), starting way back with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Since WoW is set in the same universe, it only makes sense to continue the style all of the Warcraft games have been following.

As far as the weekly maintenance window goes, I imagine their DBAs and techs need time to perform tasks on the servers that are difficult to do while the realms are live. I don't know how their architecture is set up, what tasks they have to perform on a weekly basis, and the impact of those tasks. Unless you have some inside knowledge of how their setup is run, I wouldn't be so quick to judge.

World of Warcraft is immensely popular. Blizzard must be doing something right. ;)
 
I realize they have created the world's most successful MMO in respect to subscriptions.

I just don't see why its necessary to take down servers weekly when much older MMO's don't need to.
 
Which needs more maintenance:

The Porsche 944 that sits in the garage all winder and driven only on every second weekend during the summer or the (car of your choice here) that you use everyday to go to work, do grocery shopping, take the kids to school, go on vacation in, drive the injured to the hospital, go to the golf course, go to mall.

I'm sure if DAOC had 12,000,000 subscribers it would require an intense amount of maintenance too (that is a lot of database accesses per second). Even Warhammer online servers are routinely taken down for service and to enable and disable world events.
 
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Odale: I don't know why it's necessary either. I'm pretty sure that they have hired the VERY best Oracle DBAs and network administrators they can get their hands on. I have have a reasonable amount of faith that those guys know what they are doing.

I guess I just don't have a problem with the weekly maintenance window.
 
Especially seeing as the updates are often done with rolling restarts, nowadays. We probably enjoy a Tuesday a month on average where Terenas never goes down, except for about 15 minutes at about 2 am.
 
I admit I don't play as much as I used to, but in the past on Stonemaul the server would go down every Tuesday and some days it would not be up until 5pm eastern (I'm in Atlanta, so me Tuesdays it was pretty bad lol...).

I don't doubt for a second that Blizzard hires the best and the brightest to run their equipment, and I admit I do not know the ins and outs of their setup, but once a week just seems too much.

Gods_Peon said:
Which needs more maintenance:

The Porsche 944 that sits in the garage all winder....
Click to expand...

I <3 the 944!
 
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Ah, yeah. Back in the day, Blizzard's maintenance was a lot more spotty -- often Tuesdays would be gone longer than the proscribed 4 hour downtime. I hated when that happened.
 
In my experience, anything we don't understand always takes much longer than we think it should. My personal full realization of this fact came when I was supervisor to a group of welders. I "knew" full well that it shouldn't take 2 days to make 5 weld connections stringing some 3 inch pipe together. After all, having grown up on a farm, I had to slap a weld or two on some equipment to keep it together long enough to finish a job.

The difference of course, is that my weld had no need to be sealed against liquids or gasses coming in or out, nor did neatness or uniform quantity of metal count.

After standing there for two days asking question (and making the job go even longer), I learned I knew nothing about the job and to let the professionals tell me how long it takes.

This is the same for maintenance on the servers. Many of us "think" we know better due to our experience with older MMO's or other data-base's. If we were able to stand there and actually see what was going on, I think we wouldn't question the time much anymore. It seems from this post and others, that the Blizzards database's are vastly more complex and spanning way more servers than any of the previous MMO's in existence. It does make a difference. Comparing the old MMO's to this one with respect to complexity is simply not reasonable.
 
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