Yet another moment in GH3’s comedy of errors

The guitarhero.com portal launched alongside the game, so it’s been up for almost a week now. In that time, I have yet to be able to link my portal account to my game account.

I decided to try again this morning, when I was presented with a message stating the portal was undergoing maintenance. At 12:00 noon central time on a Friday? What a bunch of yahoo’s. Apparently the launch for this portal included no capacity planning, as the company that maintains the site(Agora Games) has maintained since launch that the site was getting hammered, and they had experienced unexpected load.

Gee. Let’s consider. Activision had a product roll-out plan. They had projections months ago about how many units would be shipped for all platforms at launch. I’m sure as the launch approached, those numbers became more and more concrete. So the number of units available at launch could be used as a reasonable ceiling for the number of accounts created on the guitarhero.com portal at launch. Seems only logical.

From there, any competent team producing a web application could size the approximate processor and bandwidth load per user. The team obviously knows which stored procedures/triggers are fired whenever an action occurs, either on the portal itself or when data is uploaded from the game. It’s reasonable to assume that the team had produced transactions per minute figures for each component within the application: forums, portal, and data upload/synchronization. Combine those figures with the projected number of accounts created, and one can arrive at a worst possible case for application demand/load. That’s called capacity planning.

Yet the site, other than forums, has all but been inoperable for the site’s first week. And here we are, right in the middle of the day in North America, and it’s down for maintenance. If that’s not enough, users are presented with a friendly message stating “We expet to restore functionality around 1 PM EDT.” Expet? Really? Did any one bother reading the message before promoting the page to the production environment? Do they have a production environment, or have we all been hammering the dev boxes for the past week?