...especially about others' work.
The worst database developers in the world?If the makers of MMO RPGs (Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games) aren’t quite the worst database application developers in the world, they’re at least on the short list for consideration. The makers of Guild Wars didn’t even try to have decent database functionality. A decade later, when they introduced Guild Wars 2, the database-oriented functionality (auction house, real-money store, etc.) would crash for days at a time. Lord of the Rings Online evidently had multiple issues with database functionality. Now I’m playing Elder Scrolls Online, which on the whole is a great game, but which may have the most database screw-ups of all.
ESO has been live for less than 3 weeks, and in that time:
1. There’s been a major bug in which players’ “banks” shrank, losing items and so on. Days later, the data still hasn’t been recovered. After a patch, the problem if anything worsened.
2. Guild functionality has at times been taken down while the rest of the game functioned.
3. Those problems aside, bank and guild bank functionality are broken, via what might be considered performance bugs. Problems I repeatedly encounter include:
If you deposit a few items, the bank soon goes into a wait state where you can’t use it for a minute or more.
Similarly, when you try to access a guild — i.e. group — bank, you often find it in an unresponsive state.
If you make a series of updates a second apart, the game tells you you’re doing things too quickly, and insists that you slow down a lot.
Items that are supposed to “stack” appear in 2 or more stacks; i.e., a very simple kind of aggregation is failing. There are also several other related recurring errors, which I conjecture have the same underlying cause.
In general, it seems like that what should be a collection of database records is really just a list, parsed each time an update occurs, periodically flushed in its entirety to disk, with all the performance problems you’d expect from that kind of choice.
4. Even stupider are the in-game stores, where fictional items are sold for fictional money. They have an e-commerce interface that is literally 15+ years out of date — items are listed with VERY few filtering options, and there is no way to change the sort. But even that super-primitive interface doesn’t work; in particular, filter queries frequently return incorrect empty-set responses.
5. Much as in other games, over 10 minutes of state changes can be lost.
Except perhaps for #5, these are all functions that surely are only loosely coupled to the rest of the game. Hence the other difficulties of game scaling and performance should have no bearing on them. Hence there’s no excuse for doing such a terrible job of development on large portions of gameplay functionality.
Based on job listings, ESO developer Zenimax doesn’t see database functionality as a major area to fix. This makes me sad.
So, with no inside knowledge of platform and/or design decisions and reasons behind those- not to mention, the actual problem, but rather enquirer level reporting of rumors, you come up with this post.
*headdesk*And people actually read this and believe this, and start to denigrate developers because of this.
