Gamasutra - News - GDC Austin: An Inside Look At The Universe Of Warcraft
I liked the specific numbers
Gamasutra - News - GDC Austin: An Inside Look At The Universe Of Warcraft
I liked the specific numbers
Thank you for the post.
While I am not a fan I certainly welcome the flow chart of how a successful mmo company works. What kind of positions and departments they have as well as how many employees each department requires, this is very intriguing to me.
I enjoyed reading about the art department the most, since I have idle fantasy about working in the game industry as an artist.
This quote fascinated me:
Incoming random question:The Blizzard Online Network services group is Pearce's next focus. A huge group, they have data centers from Texas to Seoul, and monitor over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. He points out the picture of the GNOC in their slideshow, a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations. They use those to ensure that conditions of the data center are up to their standards; with only a staff of 68 people they ensure connectivity across the globe for the numerous WoW servers.
Does wow use region specific servers or do they integrate? Example: China and USA on separate servers instead of on the same one.
Separate servers. Even EU servers are further blocked out by language if players so choose, but a lot of Euro guilds speak English anyway (yay European educational system).
Oh interesting. So you mean "blocked out" like you can remove other languages and communication from your chat log or do you mean that you can remove them entirely from your game experience?
I found this to be really nice.. I wonder if the security aspect is difficult but I am still reading this part.
From Wiki when I searched for a meaning of Gamasutra's use of the term "WoW Armory" in the article :
Lol sorry for my child-like fascination with this stuff but I have not previously been exposed to anything beyond the video perspective of the game workings.Guilds can also make use of an in-game calendar, allowing guild members to view scheduled events, and respond to them with whether they can attend or not. This calendar can also be accessed without need to log-in to the game, using the Armory feature.
'blocked out' = further separated and has nothing to do with in game communication options. But there are French/German/Russian servers, etc. for each particular localization should players desire such an environment. Again, though, due to server transfers and PvE guild competition, a lot of EU guilds recruit from any language and just speak English to each other.
Oh I see. Thank you for explaining that for me.
And I find it interesting that they have a "corporate applications team" maintaining an "internal game wiki". I want to find out how content editing is different for players in that application in comparison to the traditional community-based wikis I am guessing they also have. Lots of reading for me this morning!