Are you seriously comparing half a million website hits with some the scale of GTAO?
LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also a massive LOL at the thought that the entire Comic Con ticketing system is run from one server. I mean I knew people were ignorant about IT infrastructure, but I didn't think they were this f**king ignorant.
While what you wrote is technically correct. Burst peak loads are much more difficult to cater for than consistent average loads both from a technical and fiscal aspect. Do you think when google or amazon launches any of their new cloud services, that downtime is not only expected but acceptable? Even when dealing with loads that are likely to be much more significant than an online matchmaking service? Not likely.
Rockstar failed to estimate the demand correctly, nothing more, nothing less. Demand on launch day, isn't likely to be much more than demand in 2 weeks time. And we're talking about 15 million units sold across the globe, so even assuming every single unit is connecting to the service at a given peak time in each timezone, its likely a maximum of 5-6 million connections for match making and push pull requests. From a technical standpoint, that doesn't even come close to what cloud providers face on a daily basis. Certainly we haven't seen a launch of this scale for gaming, but there are certainly the tools available to load test the network correctly before launch, provided their calculations were right, which they obviously weren't.
In any case... After about 20 or so attempts, I finally managed to create a character, do the race and get access to the world. Something that annoys me already is not being able to find a way to shut off in game chatter between people. Got my bank balance up to around $50k boosting cars and killing people who were doing the same.
