We’ve already reported earlier on the overload that hit the servers in the waking hours of the Halo: Reach beta. One would imagine that kind of overload, even with the anticipated 3 million players for the overall beta, would need a lot of people to cause that kind of slowdown. IndustryGamers caught up with Bungie's Brian Jarrard to clear up a few things about the server issues and to get Bungie's reaction to the first day of the highly anticipated beta.
“By our counts, we had 1,170,112 unique players participate in the Reach beta through Monday. That's already more players than we saw over the entire life of the Halo 3 beta... in the FIRST day of the Reach beta. And even more awesome - each of these nearly 1.2 million players played an average of 14 games. That's a tremendous amount of data…” states Jarrard. “As much as we did to brace ourselves for the flood gates being opened on Monday at 10AM, we did find ourselves tackling a few early issues related to our backend servers and systems. Ultimately this is exactly the type of challenge and resulting solution we hope to get out of this beta. We were able to identify a hardware failure on a server cluster in addition to making optimizations in how the game clients communicate and share information with our server.”
Even though there was some down time, Bungie remains not only gleeful, but practically ecstatic about the reaction they're seeing. Jarrard goes on further, “Day one server hiccup aside, we're off to a great start and couldn't be happier with how the Beta is going. This Friday we will add the new Spartan vs. Elite, multi-tiered objective gametype 'Invasion' to the playlists so there will be even more to do going into the weekend.”
What about those reports of an actual fire breaking out on the Bungie servers? “Reports of an actual fire may have been exaggerated though the beta is still considered quite ‘hot’,” adds Jarrard.
1.2 million players is a big number to swallow, but it looks as though everything is back to normal. Players (most likely) have until May 19 to get their fill of Halo: Reach. “We'll see how it goes but our current plan of record is to turn off the beta on May 19th. We realize this short duration is probably disappointing to a lot of our fans but our priority is achieving our test goals then digesting the data and feedback so we can get back to work finishing the game,” Jarrard states.
