Blizzard internals from GDC Austin | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard internals from GDC Austin

gamasutra.com

86 pointssiculars33 comments

One interesting line out of many in this article:

[WoW runs on] over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM, [...] 1.3 petabytes of storage.

"Blizzard online network services" includes Starcraft, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, as well as WoW.

I read the parent comment out loud and my wife said "Wow, what a waste!"

Which was kind of funny. Now, can we figure out something fun to do which will also make use of this type of capacity for something good?

Actually, I have several ideas. Let me get back to you...

Hey, here's a novel idea: how about we stop defining what is and isn't "something good" to use large-scale hardware for!

Your wife's comment wasn't funny; it was pompous, pretentious and shortsighted. I don't play WoW myself, but apparently it serves as entertainment for millions of people. There is value in that -- if there wasn't, Blizzard wouldn't need nor could they afford all that hardware to run such "wasteful" software. WoW may not be feeding the whales or saving the homeless, but it's fun for a lot of people and that is something.

And if you simply can't sleep at night thinking what a waste it is, remember all the people who are employed to run and develop it, not to mention the people who made all the goods and provide all the services it uses. And all the technological innovation required to make it possible, a large majority of which was funded by and first deployed to the gaming sector, due to its lucrative nature. There's a forest among all those trees, believe it or not.

Yes, I know this isn't Slashdot, where it is allowed to occasionally to make a pun or poke fun at something. If you knew me you would not react so strongly, but of course, it is unlikely that you would know me.

But I think you mistake my comment as meant to ride in on my high horse and look down on all the "waste". I actually think there is tremendous potential in the breadth and the reach of the new computing platforms which offers nearly "unlimited" server capacity and access out in the periphery using anything from mobile phones to your average computer. We have barely started to scratch on the surface on the fun and the utility (if I dare say so) which this will offer us.

But now I will go and toss and turn in my bed, worrying about all that waste! ;)

http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...

It's not necessarily a waste, but it's not unquestionably a good thing, either. There should be something other than blind acceptance or rationalization of its impact.

Edit: I love how I'm getting downvoted for expressing a reasonable and non-mean opinion.

the wife's comment was funny because it was a pun. otherwise i agree with you.

An idea that's not novel, but perhaps worth revisiting: your points are still valid without the insults and condescension.

Hey, here's a novel idea: how about we stop defining what is and isn't "something good" to use local garages for!

Your wife's comment wasn't funny; it was pompous, pretentious and shortsighted. I don't do meth myself, but apparently it serves as entertainment for millions of people. There is value in that -- if there wasn't, Meth Labs wouldn't need nor could they afford all that hardware to run such "wasteful" operations. Your local Meth Lab may not be feeding the whales or saving the homeless, but it's fun for a lot of people and that is something.

And if you simply can't sleep at night thinking what a waste it is, remember all the people who are employed to run and calibrate it, not to mention the people who buy the cough syrup that fuels it all. And all the technological innovation required to make it possible, a large majority of which was funded by Robitussin, due to its lucrative nature. There's a forest among all those trees, believe it or not.

Just like there is value in casinos. People are playing billions, it must be making their lives better.

The RAM is the standout relative to everything else -- that's a lot of RAM.

Not really. That's 1.5GB per core, and 8.5GB per slice. I'd say that's right about average, especially for a gaming server.

1.5G per core... not that much.

Brack singled out the tools team as a critical component of this group. They make tools not only for the developers, but for customer service as well.

Hey, this is what I do! Well, for a different company, not Blizzard. It seems to be an afterthought for most companies so it's nice to see him point that out in particular.

123 people on cinematics? I've played WoW since beta, and until recently have seen all the content at all levels of the game raid-wise. This seems like a lot of people for how few cut-scenes there are, and for the few pre-rendered FMV scenes. Am I missing something, or wildly underestimating what it takes to produce 3 minutes of FMV?

The groups responsibilities include "machinima sequences", which I take to include most pre-scripted in-game sequences that have NPCs doing something; triggered, say, by ending a quest. I suspect there are a lot of those.

(I wanted to compare that number to the people writing the quests themselves -- it still does seem high -- but that group isn't explicitly mentioned. The keynote is definitely glossing over a lot, even at this level of detail.)

I think when he said 'cut scenes' he meant the 'machinima sequences' as opposed to the pre-rendered cinematics. And there really aren't very many of those, either, far fewer than you seem to think - it's a very rare quest that ends with or contains such a sequence.

Not that rare, I remember a dozen or two across Northrend. Almost every major quest chain ends with such a sequence (and most of them involve the Lich King taunting you). Admittedly the many many quests along the quest chain typically don't have machinima sequences.

Sorry what are you talking about? There's exactly one ingame cinematic in WoW (Wrath gate) and 3 prerendered once (intro video for each addon & maingame). That's it. The 123 people of the cinematic team at Blizzard produce videos for all Blizzard games and are currently heavily involved in Starcraft II, which is supposed to have an hour of ingame cinematics as well as several minutes of prerendered videos.

The poster is talking about things like 'Lich King stands around talking shit' and (the now defunct) 'Marshal Windsor takes an excruciatingly slow walk through Stormwind' scripted bits. They're still quite few and can't possibly require anything close to 123 people (Red vs Blue was done by two people, after all and probably has more machinima in two episodes than the entirety of WoW).

I think that's the cinematics group for all Blizzard games, not just WoW. From the article: "Machinima sequences, teasers, and the amazing pre-rendered cinemas that make Blizzard games kick off with a flash are all created in this group."

If it's across all Blizzard games that makes far more sense, but the context of the talk is WoW: "...Blizzard Entertainment's J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce took the stage to offer a detailed look into the inner workings of the genre-dominating World of Warcraft."

I was hoping it was a typo.

Another number that struck me as interesting is that the programming, art and design departments combined add up to fewer people (120) than the cinematics department (123).

There's probably some explanation for this, perhaps that directing "the creation of sword replicas, statues, and other physical objects" takes a lot more manpower than I imagine.

Even more surprising to me was this:

"Brack went on to talk about the customer support staff, a group with 2,056 game masters, 340 billing managers, and a host of other background staffers."

Programming, art and design, and cinematics adds up to maybe ~250 people. Supporting and monetizing what they make requires about 10x the manpower. Is that normal among all mega-corporations/projects, or is that something unique to MMO staffings?

The creation is scalable, but the support isn't. What if WoW had one billion players? They could still crank out the same content with the same 250 developers and designers and deploy it to all their players, but they'd need proportionally more GMs and customer liasons.

There are about 75-125 WoW servers (parallel instances of the game all hosted by Blizzard), each having several thousand to the low tens of thousands of users. 2056 GMs for that puts it at about 20-30 GMs a server. 20-30 people to police ~15,000 players seems reasonable.

If a small percentage of people are having billing issues, that's tens of thousands of people with issues, and billing requires detailed, one-on-one interaction from a Blizzard employee, so 340 to handle all that seems reasonable to me.

Based on the size of the player base the numbers seem right. The support staff will have to grow with the userbase.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/realmstatus/

That's 242 realms, US only. Probably similar number of realms in the EU and China regions.

I think this is just the nature of supporting a very large (in terms of population) interactive system. There are over 10 million active accounts. In the US, there are ~240 realms, let's say each realm has 500 to 1000 concurrent users. That means at in the US alone there are around a couple of hundred thousand paying customers online at any given moment - any one of whom might need and expect real-time or prompt offline support.

Well, WoW is a service. A service with 10 (11?) million active subscribers. So 2056 GMs sounds pretty reasonable. (I've never had to interact with a billing manager and don't really know what they do.)

Based on what I read, it's probably people devoted to account and billing issues, as well as fraud. There are an amazing amount of gold farmers from around the world who create fraudulent accounts with false credit card information, as well as average people who are trying to get a free ride out of Blizzard. Someone needs to take care of banning these people as well as dealing with any billing problems with legitimate customers, something which can require knowledge that's a world apart (literally) from Game Mastering.

It does

Tom Chilton was a guildmate in UO. Great guy. It's cool to see him doing well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com