"We test and work out the capacity load of each server in load testing and through our beta events," she continued. "We have seen play behavior and load in areas that have stressed our game server [databases] in ways that we did not experience in Beta or Load Test."<p>They didn't use chaosmonkey? <a href="http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html" rel="nofollow">http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in...</a>
"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."<p>I'm running a 2.6 quad core with 16gb of ram and a ssd hd they're saying they have better than that (to overcome the internet latency) on their end for each user playing the game? I could understand needing to sync lots of actions with other players to need the server, but calculations? I call BS, that can't be right. Sounds more like a profit driving decision than a technical one.
"A lot more people logged on than we expected"<p>So? The whole idea of 'the cloud' is that you are able to quickly (automatically) add capacity to handle temporary high demand for computing resources. With a capable provider like Amazon or Windows Azure, computing resources should not be a problem if you are actively taking care of provisioning.