No one can stop the pace of time. Although in the eyes of Hatsune Entertainment and Blizzard Entertainment employees, they wish that time would have gone slower so that they could have more time to test the results of the migration and debug the stability of the server; But the May Day Golden Week is still coming inexorably.

It's a total explosion of tens of millions of online game users after at least three or four months of inhibition - at the peak of 2007 in history, the highest number of simultaneous online users in China reached four or five million. Considering that the total number of paying players in an online game is often four or five times the number of people who are online at the same time, World of Warcraft has at least 20 million paying players.

What's more, historically, this number was achieved after October 07, after ninety percent belatedly negotiated the alliance under the city and upgraded to the "Burning Crusade", at least four or five million players left the game permanently because they did not upgrade for a long time.

A market research company in the game and software industry once made a statistic that if the expansion of an online game is upgraded and bounced for more than one semester, there will be an obvious sticky user being squeezed out. Because many people will face various changes such as going to another school after the start of school in September, and even graduating and working. When you start the game again in October, many people will leave helplessly.

Now, because of the butterfly effect brought by Hatsune Entertainment, the Burning Expedition was launched more than five months ahead of schedule, and the popularity of the game has naturally not faded. The three-month bounce not only did not make players lose permanently, but it happened to form a moderate hunger marketing.

From the standpoint of a third party, to be fair, in fact, in terms of plot attractiveness, World of Warcraft is constantly improving from 1.0 to 3.0, because the vast majority of Chinese players have not played Warcraft 1 and 2 on a stand-alone basis, and they started directly from 3 when they first came into contact with Warcraft. In terms of the plot of World of Warcraft, the 2.0 Burning Expedition only appeared in the popular boss Illidan, and the 3.0 Wrath of the Lich King appeared in the first protagonist Arthas, in the Chinese market, its popularity in the 1.0 era was originally appropriate. The reason why history has not exploded is completely due to ninety percent of procrastination.

……

"Whew...... It's finally done, start the server test! Pay attention to queuing up first to limit the current! The network communication service and the telecom server are started at the wrong time, and distributed reserve servers are reserved to prepare to resist pressure. Du Junqiang gave an order, and hundreds of engineers did the final checks, and then merged the servers into the open server mode.

Du Junqiang was the first batch of programmers in Hatsune, but he was not the strongest among those programmers. More than three years ago, when Gu Mojie was renting two offices in the Eastern Software Park to engage in input methods, he had already followed Gu Mojie.

Zhu Haibo and other program enthusiasts at the same time as him have now become large-scale project managers, with an annual salary of nearly one million, as well as dividends and year-end bonuses totaling more than one million.

Only Du Junqiang gradually felt difficult to do large-scale original R&D projects because of his poor educational background and programming ideas, so he became the technical leader of some maintenance project teams, but his income is still not low, and he has more than one million in a year. Today, he is the logical leader of the World of Warcraft project.

With the strength of this kind of person, Gu Mojie's treatment can be regarded as very nostalgic, after all, he is just a middle-aged talent, and he is put into other companies as a programmer and a project manager, and the maximum is three or four hundred thousand a year. Give you a million just to see if you follow the boss at the earliest.

The sound of electricity, the sound of fans, the sound of water cooling cycles, and the dense server lights that crash the dense phobia make up a magical picture.

There are thousands of blade cabinets here, and all of them are bought, not leased and hosted as in the ninety percent era, and the one-time purchase cost alone is hundreds of millions of dollars - Hatsune contributed $220 million to the joint venture, and a considerable part of it is used to purchase these hardware materials in one go.

As one of the top 10 Internet giants in China, Hatsune certainly won't rely on leasing and hosting to solve its own digital center problem like Jiucheng Erdao dealers. Hatsune, which has been laid out for many years, is now fully changing shotguns, and in various parts of Qianjiang Province and even in Hujiang, many number of jù centers have risen from the ground and the layout is rigorous, and these server clusters in World of Warcraft are just a corner of the center of Hatsune new number jù.

"A qiē number jù stable dìng, the threshold margin is sufficient. It can be taken in the whole line. ”

With the execution of the last few sets of instructions, tens of millions of players waiting in front of the computer poured in! The fate of the World of Warcraft land service being dragged to death was officially adapted at this moment.

……

"Holy! Still in line? I want to squeeze in quickly! ”

"No way, let's go to World of Warcraft for a while."

"Baidu is not very powerful! After the 'I'm sorry, for the sake of the tribe' that day, the special one actually released the 'Paste Bar Divine Beast Super Verification Horse', can Li Yanhong change the broken blade machine! On you are worthy of you! ”

"Forget it, expect to queue for 35 minutes...... Let's go to the Azeroth forums first. ”

Only half an hour after the launch of the service, such posts swept up all major related forums. Of course, there are also many people who show the Virgin Mary there and say, "What's the queue? Ninety percent of you didn't queue up at the beginning? Every time the version is first opened, there is a queue! Love to play and not play rolling, just reduce the two who rush to queue. ”

This kind of post is naturally followed by gunpowder-flavored replies, such as: "Nima! There is a kind of leave address, letter cut! ”

But no matter what the hype turned out, no one gave up queuing and gave up the opportunity to play advanced games to others. "Condemning" Hatsune's poor server resources is only the behavior of a very small number of trolls, and the vast majority of impatient players end up blaming "too many competitors" for waiting.

Double-line eight districts、A total of more than 400 game servers are full all the time,On May Day, there was even a technical accident in which 4 of the lines were stuck as a whole and restarted,But fortunately, it was quickly stabilized.,The players who were online at the time who were abnormal later got 600 minutes of game time compensation,The incident was calmed down.。

The work of the migration team was far from complete, and hundreds of engineers had been able to get through the first week of the game, with the rest of the staff just roughly divided into three shifts and kept an eye on the game's operations 24 hours a day, ensuring that the first week was as good as it could and thorough.

From beginning to end, in order to complete the migration work and ensure that the test of the new version is stable after the upgrade, Gu Mojie just gave the overtime incentive to the number of engineers and test engineers, as high as one or two million yuan - evenly spread to each number of engineers and test engineers, and if they worked hard for a month or two, they could get an additional 350,000 yuan in bonuses.

Gu Mojie insisted that the money was well spent, because the goodwill of the Hatsune Group could not be lost, and it was absolutely impossible for netizens to have a bad impression that "after Hatsune took over World of Warcraft, the stability of the game operation was not as good as that of the ninety percent era".

After the exhaustion of the first three days, Zou Sheng, the head of Hatsune Entertainment, took his subordinate Du Junqiang to report to the boss and complained.

"Mr. Gu, the number of people online at the same time has reached 6 million for three consecutive days! This is the maximum margin for the stress test of the server! Almost all servers are always in a queue to enter for 72 hours, do you think we have some new lines? After the start of the new version, the enthusiasm of the players has obviously skyrocketed a lot, and we can't meet the needs of the players with the old scale of the ninety percent era. ”

Zou Sheng only took the lead in reporting, and the specific numbers below were naturally analyzed by Du Junqiang, who was in charge. Originally, he Zou Sheng had a certain amount of decision-making power in this matter, but this time Warcraft is the top priority of the group, Gu Mojie will personally ask every day, Zou Sheng in line with the idea of respecting the boss of Dà, he thinks it is better to ask for instructions.

Sure enough, Gu Mojie refused at first: "I think we should be cautious about this matter, the game has just started and it was very popular in the first week, which is normal." But it's hard to say whether the heat will always be maintained in the future. If you increase the size of the server too much at once, it will fall back in the future, and the cost of so many servers piled up there is not a small number. We are not more than ninety percent, not looking for someone to rent the hosting server, we are now self-operated number of centers, the planning efficiency of server resources can not be improved, it is a big waste to the group. ”

An online game company, making its own number of centers, and finding someone else to rent and host, actually has its own advantages.

The biggest advantage of self-operation is that the response to technical problems is fast and the team is more familiar with the problems, so the game's server freezes and packet loss, which reduce the user experience, will be much less faulty, and the business operation will be smoother.

Based on this understanding, many laymen will have a contrast, thinking: since the quality of self-operation is good and there is less lag, why are so many companies keen on hosting? In addition to those small shrimp that are small in size and cannot operate their own number of centers, large companies use hosting centers because hosting is more cost-effective, right?

In fact, this idea is really wrong - in terms of the flat allocation of leasing costs, hosting is not cheaper than self-operation at all, of course, the leasing model will be less pressure on the capital appropriation, which is beyond doubt. The biggest advantage of the hosting model is its flexibility to exit.

For example, Ninety Percent is a pure online game company, and more than 90% of its business was originally provided by World of Warcraft, and more than 90% of its server resources were also spent on Warcraft, and the company hosted a large number of servers for Warcraft Rental. In this way, when Warcraft wants to open more servers, it is very convenient to rent a batch of servers, and then immediately open a few more lines or even a few new areas; And once the market price of the game Warcraft goes down and the number of players online at the same time decreases, he can merge some game servers and return the extra server hardware.

It is more convenient to return things that you rent. When the market is not good, it can shrink at any time - this is the biggest advantage of the leasing and hosting model.

Hatsune's Shujù Center is self-operated, which is low cost and reliable in quality, and the only drawback is that it is not flexible enough to increase or decrease in scale. In view of Zou Sheng's proposal to build an additional server in view of the Warcraft fire, Gu Mojie naturally had to consider it. (To be continued.) )