Redwood City, Silicon Valley Online headquarters.
The monitoring center on the third floor.
Mark Cerny held a cup of cold coffee as he looked over the newly printed backend data summary.
Sato Hideki and several Sega engineers stood beside him, flipping through bug reports players had sent in by email.
"Three days of public testing, one thousand accounts, with peak concurrent users reaching nine hundred and seventy." Mark pointed at the line graph on the report. "Average daily online time exceeded six hours. Put in today's PC game market, these numbers can really fight."
Sato Hideki turned a page of the feedback emails in his hand.
"Players reported fewer bugs than expected." Sato pointed at a few of them. "Most are model clipping, texture errors, or individual quest items being impossible to pick up. One player wrote in his email that he was talking to an NPC in a tavern, then the network lagged, and the NPC's line repeated ten times. He almost thought the guy had a stutter. But it was fine after restarting. There's been no major collapse in the core combat logic or network synchronization."
"That's thanks to the turn-based framework we adopted. It has a high tolerance for errors." Mark set down his coffee cup. "This disconnect-and-reconnect mechanism has done great work. When a minor bug locks things up, players can force-quit and re-enter, and the server preserves their previous position and status, letting them pick up right where they left off. For the current network environment, that kind of experience is life-saving."
Sato Hideki felt the same way deeply.
These three days of observation had let him thoroughly see the operating logic of online games.
Hardware was not omnipotent. There had to be software mechanisms to catch it from below.
"Mark, we've already recorded the