According to Luke Smith there are now over 30 million registered users on Destiny, which is a huge amount of people. This has a lot to do with why the release date for Destiny 2 was brought forward, as he revealed recently in an interview with GamesRadar.
Luke Smith told the press outlet that the new release date was changed to allow the sever teams time to adjust the scalability of servers in time for what they anticipate is going to be their busiest day.
Anyone who played the Destiny Alpha and Beta builds will know what a pain in the ass it is when servers go down due to the sheer number of players all hammering away at the servers with their requests at once. Thankfully things like Betas and early access to certain player schemes allow developers the time and some of the numbers needed to get to work making sure their servers don’t set on fire, fall over and give up, or simply exit the building after unplugging themselves due to unrealistic work levels. Put simply, of there are too many players on an uncalibrated server, it’s going to struggle.
MMOs usually have an initial period of a week or so where the game launches and there are a few bugs, but a lot more server problems. After this period the developers have fixed the severs and set them to work on the levels they can now see in the playerbase. Launch day is usually the worst, with every single person who purchased the game playing at once and sucking out all the power the servers have to offer.
Destiny 2 was originally set to release on a Friday, the day before what they anticipate will be their busiest day, Saturday. By releasing the game on the Wednesday, they allow themselves time to see how the servers manage the new influx of players, and adjust them before the weekend rush when everyone and their nan will be playing. It might seem like an odd decision, given that most games launch on a Friday because that’s when people will be excited about them and immediately play them, because the weekend is right over the hill that is Friday night. However this new release date is going to change the wider opinion of Destiny 2 before it’s had a chance to be tarnished.
Nothing is worse for an MMO than launching and having the servers crash. A similar issue occurred when The Division launched last year, which caused a number of players to ditch the game and go back to whet they were playing before. Bungie has the chance to bolster their servers with this new release date, and that will stop anyone leaving the game because they can’t play it, or complaining about it when the server goes down for them, both of which are hugely damaging at launch.
Image Source: GamesRadar
