BSG introduced some – absolutely – revolutionary game mechanics. That plane drop? The flickering you have when you move an item just a slot over? The delay when you collect Rubles or sell an item as the transaction moves? The thing that’s special about all of these… isn’t that there’s a plane flying over head and dropping goodies. It’s that ALL these activities get synchronized across EVERY system. Across all devices… and servers… and client machines. In realtime. That is an immense load on servers. …. PLUS an influx of new players. It’s not as simple as “just got more folks” . With these new mechanics…. 1 new player… is 10x the load it was 1 year ago on the servers.
It’s so immense – that it’s never been done before in a game. The development and what BSG tries …. how they release new guns, how they calculate the bullet trajectory…. Fragmentation ratios… all of that realtime across 200,000+ accounts all playing at the same time… around the world…
It’s truly remarkable and astounding. If anything, this is a small-ish group …. doing something MATERIAL and practical… that’s a solid toe dipping into the metaverse ocean. They are introducing something akin to a blockchain …. In an entertainment scenario.
That’s also resulting in horrible queue times. And people getting really really pissed.
There’s no denying that what they did is amazing, and they are talented. That’s where the praise stops. They introduced a new mechanic, that’s incredibly risky and experimental — DURING a year and freeze.
Organizatons, including their hosting partners and server asset business leads, all have holidays now. (Orthodox Christmas is Jan 7th this year). This time of year is basically when everyone is off work, and NO sane – upstanding company – with a customer focused mentality – pushes out changes from 3rd week of December to mid January. It’s a year-end freeze. This is why your phones/computers… don’t get updates during the freeze. Not cause they don’t have code changes… it’s cause they have no support base to help in case of an outage.
BSG CHOSE to say “screw that” … and went ahead and released a MASSIVE code change at the worst possible time … right AFTER a giant patch.
“Oh but have some pity and sympathy for the hard working developers”. …. absolutely we should. But which ones? The ones at BSG that took off for the holidays? Surely, no. or you mean the ones that are stuck working through this mess? It’s a small team… but they didn’t choose this date. it’s possible even Nikita didn’t choose this date. The timeline could have been related to other partner obligations they have for the upcoming year. The folks left behind to work on this for Nikita…. Are absolutely working as hard as possible. Thing is, BSG put them in that position and is now squeezing those left behind to fix this mess. Feel bad for them. But also remember, they didn’t do this to the game. They are left behind to pick up the pieces…. suffering and having to work through this nightmare. The ones that SAID NO… to NOT do this now…. And stuck having to fix it. While we scream. Pity them and yes, have sympathy. Cause it TRULY sucks for them.
As for the – go play something else- folks. Yeah. Most of the Tarkov community has OTHER crap to do most of the time. The holidays, for most of us, WAS the only time we had that we were looking to spend our time playing this game. That means less family time, compromises on other events and activities. Wives and GF’s that we had to convince to let us spend time alone to play this game…. It’s not about “go do something else”. We waited for this for a whole year…. And foolishly put our trust in an organization’s SDLC…. And got burned.
“In the days of WOW or XYZ game… queues are a normal thing”…. Yeah. That’s why we don’t play those games. We came to Tarkov because we tend to have personalities that are a bit more ….. attuned to a game that’s entertaining in it’s realism. Sure, real life sucks and waiting sucks. Welcome to Tarkov.
“It’s a beta!” It’s been a beta for years. … except… BSG doesn’t treat their core business model like a test pilot. They sure take money and treat their customers like normal customers. They have tons of rules and regulations what you can / cannot do. they use the term “beta” just to cover their legal responsibilities. But they do NOT treat this like an experimental pilot.
What IS beta testing about this? Well, they don’t have test servers. Most organizations have dev / SIT/UAT/ production servers for redundancy. BSG has none of that. They have 1 layer of servers. The one we playing on. They put all their code out on those servers, and skipped load balance testing. They had NO idea that this would happen. They didn’t have an environment to test their server sync impacts. WE are the testers. They didn’t have a place to put these changes, run them in a simulation… and SEE the massive server load it brings. WE are that place.
That’s all understandable and if you read the TOS, that makes sense. Except… that’s NOT how they treat us. Try to mess around with the code. Try to tweak things. Do a video of their product in a way or fashion they don’t like…. See how that goes. Suddenly it’s a “legit business brand”… and not a beta? They picking and choosing when to fall on the beta claim. They cherry pick when it suits them to be a beta.
In fairness to them… this is ENTIRELY normal. Most companies. Apple’s iMessage was in “beta” for 8 years… because they didn’t wanna be liable for losing customer messages. This doesn’t make BSG evil. but stop telling folks that because it’s a beta they can’t complain. The company itself is setting the expectation that it’s not a beta. They SAY it’s a beta…and surely dev. Like it’s a beta…. But they treat their customers like actual customers with legally binding obligations.
Could this have all been avoided? No. What BSG has done … was going to bring the walls crumbling down at some point. But, the best times to do code deploys are usually mid month – in any month from January till June… and again September to November. They could have picked any one of those… and had a better time at it.
Hopefully BSG learned something from all of this, and will behave better next year. Happy new year y’all. Here’s to 2022 and maybe Escaping Tarkov a bit more.