How a Classic MMO Survived a Disastrous Launch

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Written by BuckGB on October 12th, 2011

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All day on the 9th, we watched as the server numbers grew and grew. I ran the login utility on my laptop all day, just so I could see the population numbers of each server, real time. The population numbers started small around 10:00am on the 9th, and grew slowly but steadily until around 5:00pm, when they exploded. All servers in the space of about an hour after 5:00pm were jammed full and we had a very large server population setting (about 3,000 players). Even with full servers, everything ran smoothly.

By about 8:00 we were jubilant. Everything was smooth and easy. CS was functioning, and had already responded to many trouble tickets and issues. People were playing, the servers were up.

A group of us formed in Rob's office, talking and generally basking in the glory of the moment. Each of those 20,000 (max peak players that night) was a paying customer, and each represented significant revenue to us (remember we were very small at the time). It appeared that we finally were going to make money on one of our products. We were giddy with excitement everything was going awesomely.

Brian Axelson, the 21 year old whiz-kid programmer/designer who had been working for us since he was 16 responsible for inventing, implementing, and designing Camelot's combat system, including Combat Styles was so happy he slammed his fist down on Rob's desk and said, "Ain't nothing going to bring this house down!".

At that moment, all the servers crashed, simultaneously.

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