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So for anyone who wants a better idea on what the "Technical Debt" is all about please read. Also if I missed any sources, feel free to mention them. Enjoy!
Posted October 29, 2012, taken from a news article, VB GamesBeat, the then chief executive of Seattle-based Meteor Entertainment, Mark Long said, “Trying to run dedicated servers on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon’s data center outsourcing service) was something nobody had tried before. Early on, we tested it to see if it would work. As we move into it, it works better than we could have hoped for” as it can handle 10,000 players in simultaneous gaming without any hiccups. The latency, or delays in interaction, is so low that the service quality is good in beta testing, Long said. That saves a lot of money on data center costs, he said. (read full article here: http://venturebeat.c...nch-draws-near/)
Posted November 30, 2012, (http://www.forbes.co...onal-marketing/), Mark Long said, "Our server technology has panned out much better than we had hoped. We have dedicated servers on virtual machines. We’re using the cloud as a virtual OS on different cores of a server, which provides greater efficiency. Those machine copies can do anything. We didn’t know if latency would be a problem, but it turns out it’s not an issue at all. We have servers on the East and West Coasts of the U.S., in the UK, Japan and Australia. We get such good pings that we can play on a Japanese or Australian server like it’s downtown Seattle from our Seattle studio. Things work so well that we advanced our plans to go global on Day One. The only territory we aren’t going to be in is China. We’re excited to see what happens as the markets emerge naturally."
Posted April 11, 2014, https://community.pl...post__p__495831, [HWK]HUGHES said, "Rather than spend additional time on the feature itself, work to fix issues with the scaling of the platform was prioritized. You may recall us mentioning this in the past (the weeks prior to the Steam launch) where we needed to make sure the platform would be able to scale to the number of users desired and for those of you who have been with us for a while, the difference is indeed noticeable despite the roughness for a while that was a "necessary evil".
For a while after that, tool fixing and bug fixing was a priority for the platform team until work shifted to removing our dependency on AWS; transitioning to a completely new database. This is no small project but is a requirement for cost consideration, performance and for regions of the world where AWS is not an available solution. This work is in progress."
Posted April 22, 2014,/hawken/forums/mtr-era/topic/54728-development-update-4222014/#entry504660, [HWK]HUGHES said, "Our team has made great strides in our migration away from AWS dependencies and we now have a separate build of the game running in a completely isolated environment with a new database and that was no small task to accomplish. It's still a significant amount of work to migrate the live version of HAWKEN to a new database, but we plan on making that a smooth transition that won't negatively effect players. Hopefully in an upcoming Development Update we'll be able to announce the completion of this work and you will have never even known it took place."
AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. It's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) mentioned above.
Posted June 03, 2014, (https://community.pl..._40#entry535365), [HWK]HUGHES said, "Some aspects of the game needed more tuning than originally planned and some platform decisions made months and months and months ago proved to be less than ideal and making changes then has ripple effects across the company. Some bumps surfaced during open beta that were in ways not expected so yeah... that helped to contribute to a longer than intended beta duration."
Posted June 27, 2014, (https://community.pl..._40#entry544702), [HWK]HUGHES said,"I'm not going to discuss the realities of our bandwidth or technical debt incurred from decisions made years ago...
Posted June 29, 2014, (https://community.pl...14/#entry545084),[HWK]HUGHES said,"Something that's happening with the project right now is a bit of incurred technical debt that continues to surface and impacts the goals of the company as a whole, not just HAWKEN. We have contracted an external strike team to resolve some of this technical debt and even for them, it takes time. I'll dive into a little more detail on what's going on with this in a below section but it won't change the fact that you, the dedicated players want to know what's coming up.
....
MIGRATION STATUS / STABILITY
As discussed in the last Development Update, we are in the process of migrating databases which includes new software and new hardware. This is still ongoing but has also continued to cause some hiccups in services recently. We had a failing on the new database hardware on Monday and that took HAWKEN down for a while as a more recent example. The further down the rabbit hole we go with this migration, the more issues that tend to surface. It impacts stability in live without question, sometimes taking the service down completely for small chunks of time. It goes without saying this isn't a desired result but the strike team is working on this every day. We have a room in our company wide IM service that's an ongoing conversation on the status of services, servers and automated alarms. I assure you it's a non-stop topic. We are however starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and we're really looking forward to that time!"
So the above is what I've been able to piece together. Can anyone here make sense of the "Technical Debt" and how it relates to the Company going silent_
Could it simply be that they told us as much as they can already, that they asked us to be patient, but we keep begged for more updates/information, that they are past the point of being annoyed at us and are now just ignoring us.
With that idea already mentioned, lets try to have a serious discussion on this topic.
Thanks!
Edited by BurnsHot, September 19 2014 - 11:27 AM.
