After seeing a lot of the flame, I feel like it needs to be said:
Y’all are killing it.
As a fellow game dev/platform engineer that’s seen a few game launches, I’ve been there. Servers are on fire, you can’t ‘fix’ platform because contrary to popular believe, scalability problems aren’t just “throw more servers at it” or even-shock & horror, there are no more servers to throw at it (what?! the cloud ISN’T infinite?!).
I’m not going to say that it’s not a little frustrating to have my game sessions interrupted by unexpected maintenance but I get it:
You can take the platform down now to fix a known issue or you can leave it running without the fix. What happens? Is it going crash if we leave it running? If it crashes, what exactly happens?
These are not easy decisions to make in a vacuum, much less with 10m+ players yelling at you.
Despite that, y’all have kept your cool. You haven’t buried your head in the sand. As I trawl the dev tracker for technical tidbits to satiate my professional curiosity, it’s really a joy to see your transparency with the community and I appreciate the hell out of y’all.
This is all a long-winded way to recognize the hard work that’s going on behind the scenes and bring a bit of compassion–we’re still all human beings and working at a games company shouldn’t change that.
Hugs, fistbumps, and hoping that launch week goes back into being a normal day at work for y’all.
And hey, maybe we’ll randomly run into each other at a GDC some time and swap horror stories.
I don’t know if you will see this, but I hope you do.
– Venia