QUAKE LIVE!
Welcome to QUAKE LIVE! Everyone on the development team and at id Software would like to thank you for stopping by and giving this very exciting new project of ours a shot. We look forward to hearing from you, playing in matches with you, and most of all hope you and your friends have a great time with the game.
For those interested, we’ve posted a lot of more detailed information regarding the beta, our philosophy, and the future of QUAKE LIVE in the developer blog.
It’s been 24 hours since opening QUAKE LIVE and we wanted to provide a quick update on the hot topics. First, we really appreciate the positive feedback from everyone that’s making it through, but also understand the frustration of waiting in line.
QUEUE
Obviously, the biggest factor we’ve had to deal with is the overwhelming number of people that have visited the site, and in nearly all cases encountered a large list of people ahead of them in the queue. Couple points on this:
1. We obviously didn’t intend for tens of thousands of people to have to wait in the queue, but it was put in place for a reason, and that was so once you made it to the site, it still performed fairly well and didn’t crash under heavy loads, which for the most part has worked well. We apologize for the frustration a line causes, but it will be in place until we can scale and optimize our back-end to accommodate “everyone.” This is our top priority right now and when we get to that point, there will be no queue. You can certainly trust us on this – for a game funded by advertising revenue, we don’t want a queue keeping you out anymore than you want it.
2. As mentioned in the developer notes post, it’s was very difficult to estimate how many people to expect when opening this. There are so many things that can affect traffic to a site, and like many online games or services during launch, we got slammed. We also had a number of hardware and software issues that we’re still working through. It’s important to at least note that we’re trying to walk a fine line with this project, in that we’re running a backend system more like an MMO than a FPS; but we’re not charging you $60 up front to help offset our costs or charging a monthly fee to play. Hopefully, it then makes sense to everyone that we need to be responsible with the costs of our infrastructure and grow or optimize as demand warrants. We’re in this process now.
3. We had a few bugs in the queue that caused a number of issues. Most of these have been addressed and the queue should be running more efficiently and reliably, including not kicking you back to the queue after downloading the plug in.
Free play
The QUAKE LIVE Team
Have fun
