Don't Fall For It

[Krotoan]

They shouldn't have been caught THIS off guard though. Yeah there was a large influx of players a few months ago but it's not like their game was super unpopular before. There should have been plans to increase capacity well in advance if needed.

There were, and those plans were likely affected by the shortage. I think a lot of people (like yourself) think that "get new servers" is about as easy as ordering shoes on Amazon. This isn't put an order in and then wait for your stuff to show up on your doorstep.

SE has a process that involves a personal inspection of the site or equipment (they mentioned this specifically in one of their live letters) and getting their certified inspection team to the site is difficult even if the hardware was available. They likely have very specific tolerances and specifications that have to be met to handle metrics they've dealt with before (note that the new amount of player influx is unprecedented for them) so it's not like they can just grab any available equipment that's lying around or "just use cloud servers".

A doubling of a player base in a year during a supply shortage and time of travel restriction due to an unprecedented pandemic is not something you can plan for. That's what everyone is trying to get across but it seems people can't imagine anything being harder than a hardware run to Frys (RIP).

SE HAS had plans to expand and those plans got whacked by the past 2 years of crazyness. So now on top of their old plans being delayed as hell they have a NEW problem on top of it that isn't solveable by throwing money at it.



Lets try to simplify this down to say.. a cookie stand on the corner. You make 20 cookies a day and manage to sell 16-18 of them. You don't want to buy too many eggs cause they spoil and that would be wasted cost (think server rent and maintenance, you pay for it regardless of use). As your stand gets more popular you notice you're now able to sell all 20 cookies pretty well so you start buying enough ingredients for 30 cookies. Now you sell 25-28 cookies a day. Again the business grows and you notice a trend of being able to sell more cookies at a regular growth rate. You buy ingredients at a certain rate of increase to keep up with this and plan for maybe next year , ramping up at a rate to keep up with demand so that there are always enough cookies for the newer customers coming in but not so many ingredients that you waste money on things you never use also noting that ingredient orders have to be put in for several months at a time.

NOW.. if you've made it through all that, what is happening here is suddenly your cookie stand went viral because the other cookie people in the town .. I dunno.. were found out to be baking rats into their cookies to save cost. So now everyone in the market wants cookies from you. You bought ingredients to make cookies for 200 people but there are 600 people who want cookies. All your suppliers CANNOT provide you more ingredients because of avian flu and wheat fires and chocolate worker strikes which have been happening for a while but you still could get your planned growth accounted for. These conditions were OK last month because your growth was still within the supply means.

Now apparently you are about to be lynched by the cookie wanting mob because you should have seen this coming and made sure you grew your cookie business to 600 cookies a day regardless of how many you were selling and how much it would have cost you.


... aside from me now wanting a cookie really badly, do you understand now why "they should have prepared for this" is not an educated response?