Dhruin
SasqWatch
Dragon Age Online Producer Fernando Melo has posted a lengthy letter on the official forums explaining the launch and apologising for the issues. For the Social site issues, apparently they seriously underestimated the servers required. After discussion with EA, they used Spore as a baseline for server load and then later doubled that capacity - only to be seriously under resourced in the end. For DLC, there were issues with the installation of the Windows Service used to deliver the updates. Here's a small snip:
More information.Much closer to launch, we revised our figures coming out of the data we saw from the stand alone character creator app launch – just about doubling capacity yet again from our initial figures. For good measure, we then set in place a contingency plan – our plan B – to allow for further rapid deployment of additional capacity to yet again nearly double that amount, should things really get going.
As it turns out, before the end of the first day (Nov. 3rd - US & Asia launch) we had not only exceeded our initial capacity, but our plan B as well! For a single player game with online features, this was unprecendented and the levels we were seeing was completely unexpected. Had this been an MMO, such as TOR, the initial setup and type of setup would have been very different indeed and we'd be laughing even with traffic in the orders of magnitude higher - but for a single player game no would predicted it would exceed this type of setup.