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Stress test leaves Pirates of the Burning Sea shipwrecked, rebuilt

By Janelle | October 13, 2007 at 12:37 am

According to its official site, the Pirates of the Burning Sea stress test was an overall success.? As the point of a stress test is obviously to see how a game handles the — wait for it — stress of having lots of players online and doing things, some problems were expected to surface, and they certainly did.?

To clear up and not make this sound more negative than it should, the dev team has been hard at work clearing things up, as the process of finding bugs and fixing them is always a part of game making.

Five (or six) “Big Bugs” were located, and the sources of all of these problems have reportedly been discovered.? What was hit hardest was something called the “Big Brother” system, which is an integral part of providing instanced zones to players who enter them, as immediately as possible.? As the minutes went on, wait times went up, till eventually players were waiting quite a while, and later, disconnected.

This kind of thing, however, is not uncommon in a stress test, and even before such a test begins, a developer will come right out and say that the whole point is to see how hard the servers must be pushed until something goes horribly wrong.? So all things considered, the Pirate of the Burning Sea stress test sounds like it went well, and should prove a big positive for developers and players alike.? Pirates, of course, is scheduled to undergo many more tests between now and commercial release.

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