My belief that AI may have helped Blizzard plan, set up and smoothly launch WoW Forever is inferred and based on the poor quality of their other recent launches. WoW Classic released in 2019 and was a laggy mess for the first few days. Blizzard recently said WoW Forever is their biggest launch in history for peak concurrent players, bigger than Classic or any expansion they've released including Burning Crusade and WotLK.

Blizzard has long been derided for its poor performance when handling massive player events, showing worse performance in that regard than large private servers such as Nostalrius.

The biggest technological advancement in the past couple years that could help explain their sudden and dramatic improvement is AI, in my opinion. I think it's fantastic if AI is indeed a large part of the reason for their rapid improvement.

▲

Cthulhu_ 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm struggling to be honest; on the one side Blizzard has 20+ years of experience with large scale launches and nowadays access to all the servers and compute they could need as long as they pull out a credit card (this goes for all large scale projects really). This has been a thing for... actually AWS is coming up on having been a thing for 20 years now. In theory, scaling and day 1 launches and peak load have been a problem that has been looked at and solved for 20 years now.

I don't, therefore, really understand why AI would have made such a big difference this time compared to the launch of Classic. But I can only dream of projects and launches of such a scale.

▲

rowanG077 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm perplexed why you just apply the learnings that a company like AWS has gotten to a company that has up until recently clearly been struggling with scale.

That some company has solved something doesn't mean another company can just use it. You can't just "from aws import scale" at the top of your fresh new project and be fine with millions of concurrent users.

	▲	chrisfosterelli 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think you maybe misunderstood the parent comment, I don't they were saying that AWS figured out scaling their physical infra so therefore Blizzard could figure out scaling their physical infra. I think they were saying that tools like AWS -- which provide access to near infinitely scalable infra on demand -- are now commonplace which make scaling greenfield projects much easier than it was 20 years ago. I don't know about blizzard but a lot of game providers do run on hyperscalers nowadays so I understand what they're getting at.

▲

hhh a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow Classic was fine except for the queue. Any limitations were arbitrary to fit into the no changes mentality that the community had (e.g. queues etc due to limited layers and servers.)

▲

kakacik a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So it could be anything and everything since you are no insider but you choose one specific reason.

Lets agree to disagree, happy to attribute llm wins where respect is earned but not more, to balance out various horror stories

▲

mmooss 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's dangerous to fabricate connections between dots - between a cause you happen to know and an outcome you see. It really is buying into preconceived notions and prejudices, because lacking evidence there is no way to test it. It's the opposite of science (and law and any other serious rational field) which requires objective evidence, specifically to cut through our subjective perceptions.

▲

MisterTea a day ago | parent | prev [-]

you REALLY want AI to be the linchpin here.

	▲	DeluluDon a day ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]