Is a bumpy start to console online gaming launch be the norm?

Caporegime
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Seeing all these majoy titles from big developers all having trouble with the online element of the game - Halo, GTA online, Drive Club, CoD AW, are all games releases that has a heavy online element to be expected not perfect at launch?

I actually think it is understandable as during beta testing, no matter how thorough you try to be, testing it with 1,000 players, for 3 months or something is not the same as 500,000 trying to join the servers at the same time. The number of man hours during all the new players trying to join and play will uncover bugs that 1,000 players won't. Add to the stress the servers being put under that they never had before. It must be a new ground for every game launch.

So, will there be a time you think when it will go smooth?

The only game that I've played from Day 1 that was smooth on next gen is Destiny, but that had a max of 16 players? per server or something and a small 3 party team system. May be Bungie knew this hence the small number of players limitation.
 
thing is, Destiny is online only. There are no customers for destiny who won't be using the online services.

This makes it very easy for projecting server usage, you need the server capacity for all the projected sales figures, and then some at top to provide overhead.

The problem that GTA , COD etc.. have is that there are lots of people who buy the game and never game online. So that makes predicting the number of people who will go online very difficult.
 
thing is, Destiny is online only. There are no customers for destiny who won't be using the online services.

This makes it very easy for projecting server usage, you need the server capacity for all the projected sales figures, and then some at top to provide overhead.

The problem that GTA , COD etc.. have is that there are lots of people who buy the game and never game online. So that makes predicting the number of people who will go online very difficult.

Similar to Titanfall, the launch was pretty smooth as far as I recall, maybe a few small issues, but nothing similar to the games mentioned above.
 
There is simply no way to properly test the kind of load the server clusters supporting a major game launch have to deal with. You can get very close to it if you have some particularly good load simulation systems and skills, but at the end of the day, there's only so much you can do.

The sort of things that do crop up under heavy load are usually the really fun stuff to find and fix like race conditions.
 
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