[WoRBot]

The Universe Behind World of Warcraft

The Austin Game Developers Conference is currently going on in Austin, Texas and Blizzard is attending for keynotes again this year. Today J. Allen Brack (Production Director) and Franck Pearce (Executive Vice President) spoke on the teams that keep the gears turning on such a large MMO. Here's a recap of some of the interesting pieces of information.

• 32 Programmers
  
  
  • They maintain over 5.5 million lines of code
    
  
  
• 51 Artists
  
  
  • They've created 1.5 million assets for World of Warcraft to-date; everything from models, textures, logos, etc.
    
  
  
• 37 Designers
  
  
  • Made up of 3 different teams: Systems Design, Content Design and World Design.
    
  • The design team has created 70,000 spells and 40,000 unique NPCs.
    
  • Content Design - Team Lead: Cory Stockton
    
    
    • The Content Design team uses assets created by the artists to actually create the zones in the game.
      
    
    
  • Systems Design - Team Lead: Greg Street
    
    
    • Systems Design focuses on classes, itemization and professions.
      
    
    
  • World Design - Team Lead: Alex Afrasiabi
    
    
    • The World Design team is comprised of encounter designers and quest designers who create all of the quests and NPC encounters in the game.
      
    • They've created 7650 quests so far in the game.
      
    
    
  
  
• 10 Producers
  
  
  • They have tracked over 33,000 tasks to-date.
    
  
  
• 218 Quality Assurance
  
  
  • The QA team tracks 179,184 bugs as of AGDC.
    
  
  
• 2,056 Game Masters
  
• 1,724 international employees
  
• There have been over 4.5 billion achievements unlocked by players.
  
• There are over 27 hours of music in World of Warcraft.
  
• Over 358,680 localized strings in the game, totaling 3,211,102 words.
  
• Patch 3.1 delivered more than 4.7 petabytes of data when it was deployed (that's over 4.7 million gigabytes)
  
• Whenever a patch is ready to be released, Blizzard must create 126 different versions of the patch for various localizations, versions of the game players are at, etc.
  
• Blizzard Online Network Service ("BONS") - The server network that makes up the realms players play on, utilizes -
  
  
  • 13,250 total server blades
    
  • 75,000 CPU cores
    
  • 112.5 terabytes of RAM
    
  
  
• Blizzard has more than 20,000 computer systems at their offices globally.
  
• There are already more than 12,000,000 active Battle.net accounts.
  
• The total global size of Blizzard is now more than 4,600 people.
  
• Employees have to pay for BlizzCon tickets like anyone else, but even with that (and other ticket sales) BlizzCon still results in a substantial monetary loss for the company.
  

This isn't all that goes on to keep World of Warcraft running. Blizzard has licensing and legal teams, marketing, public relations, community, etc. It's an interesting look inside of the development of the game for sure, and knowing now that they have to create 126 versions of a patch each time they update the game, the delays between patches make a lot more sense.

[Geschan]

Quote

# Employees have to pay for BlizzCon tickets like anyone else, but even with that (and other ticket sales) BlizzCon still results in a substantial monetary loss for the company.

I wish they would show us their cashflow. What server/employees/etc cost.. the money they earn of abonements we can guess but how many still buy their games and what paid services bring in, etc, we dont know.
If they show us, I think, the monthly fee for us wouldnt be reasonable.
Highly interesting tho..

[koenigsegg]

Intresting numbers But sounds to me like they try to brag about the patchday data-traffic...isn't it some kind of torrent we're using? Downloading from eachothers (most of it)?

[Pintaphilly]

sigh, learn more about the game business people! especially when it comes to MMOs, if this doesnt convince you that the amount of work they have to do and maintain is HUGE and making updates is not even close to being as easy as people think then lol.

[zoradin]

Geschan said:

I wish they would show us their cashflow. What server/employees/etc cost.. the money they earn of abonements we can guess but how many still buy their games and what paid services bring in, etc, we dont know.
If they show us, I think, the monthly fee for us wouldnt be reasonable.
Highly interesting tho..

Funny you should say that, coz i used to think that way too so i went and played other MMOs (WAR, AoC) and after seeing the sheer difference in quality in almost all aspects, id gladly pay 20$ to play WoW and not think of it being unreasonable

[Jimmy]

126 versions of one patch? what the hell? Whats that versions? If there will be wow on 15 diferent versions for countries *2 for mac, why are they have so many versions? Dont tell me they do difirent patche for every small county in the world, they just have enGB, enUS, russians, chinese, french etc, but 63? (*2 for mac i assume)

[Jonno]

Jimmy said:

126 versions of one patch? what the hell? Whats that versions? If there will be wow on 15 diferent versions for countries *2 for mac, why are they have so many versions? Dont tell me they do difirent patche for every small county in the world, they just have enGB, enUS, russians, chinese, french etc, but 63? (*2 for mac i assume)

Perhaps there are different versions depending on the realm type - pve/pvp realms must use different programming somewhere along the way. also maybe a linux OS version is still being made. Though not released - I am sure I remember someone, somewhere mentioning it exists.
Hell, I'm just pulling these out of the top of my head it does seen quite a large number.


Hopefully, this little bit of released info may help with the "OMG 12 MILLION PEOPLE PAYING MONTHLY AND STILL CRAP SERVICE" arguement, paying 4600 employees, maintaining 20k computer systems and 75k cpus (just to pick some numbers from the list) must cost a fair bit.

This post has been edited by Jonno: 18 September 2009 - 03:48 AM
Reason for edit: cleaning up my punk-chew-a-shun

[Thoorleif]

Jimmy said:

126 versions of one patch? what the hell? Whats that versions? If there will be wow on 15 diferent versions for countries *2 for mac, why are they have so many versions? Dont tell me they do difirent patche for every small county in the world, they just have enGB, enUS, russians, chinese, french etc, but 63? (*2 for mac i assume)

If you listen to the whole sound from the event you can hear him explain it....
http://podcasts.aolc...BlizzardKey.mp3

It's 10 diffrent languages, it's update from last expansion, from last patch, stand alown updates for both versions, the torrent versions with 2-3 parts, and all x2 adding PC and MAC into it. So it grows pretty fast when you think about it....

//Thoorleif

This post has been edited by Thoorleif: 18 September 2009 - 04:23 AM

[Yoshiyuki Blade]

Imagine the amount of energy and bandwidth to keep these monster systems running around the clock each month (with maybe about 2 days worth of downtime total). The systems are still up and running during maintenance days too I imagine, just not available for play.

Add that to the cost of paying all the employees, the hundreds of computer hardware they work on (including licensing professional development software), and funding their other projects, etc. I could easily imagine that taking a chunk of their revenue each month.

[adrenalize]

Geschan said:

I wish they would show us their cashflow. What server/employees/etc cost.. the money they earn of abonements we can guess but how many still buy their games and what paid services bring in, etc, we dont know.
If they show us, I think, the monthly fee for us wouldnt be reasonable.
Highly interesting tho..

This is irrelevant.

If you don't feel the quality of the services they provide is adequate, then you have a choice to not pay the subscription. This means, you decide wether or not you WANT to play the game

[Jimmy]

Thoorleif said:

If you listen to the whole sound from the event you can hear him explain it....
http://podcasts.aolc...BlizzardKey.mp3

It's 10 diffrent languages, it's update from last expansion, from last patch, stand alown updates for both versions, the torrent versions with 2-3 parts, and all x2 adding PC and MAC into it. So it grows pretty fast when you think about it....

//Thoorleif

Oh, thanks, I read only that on this page, but i forgot relase from last patche, from datadisk etc.

[dapura]

LOL!!!!

they got 12,000,000 active battle.net account and that's 15

(12,000,000 *15= 180,000,000 euro/month!!!!)

[Nicarras]

can have multiple WoW accounts in one battle.net account...

infrastructure is expensive

[slayme]

Not necessarily all battle.net accounts have a wow account you can make it for diablo or starcraft too...

[darkthunder]

# 2,056 Game Masters

Why is it I never seem to manage to get a hold of one of them, within a timely manner?

Last time I tried contacting a GM, I waited over 24 hours for a response. When I finally did get an answer, it was through the in-game mail system. I haven't spoken to a GM in real time for months. Are they all on vacation?

[Yoshiyuki Blade]

darkthunder said:

# 2,056 Game Masters

Why is it I never seem to manage to get a hold of one of them, within a timely manner?

Last time I tried contacting a GM, I waited over 24 hours for a response. When I finally did get an answer, it was through the in-game mail system. I haven't spoken to a GM in real time for months. Are they all on vacation?

That really doesn't sound like a whole lot when trying to serve tens of thousands of players on a 1-on-1 basis. Imagine being 20th in line and have to wait 5-10 minutes per person. It's quite a long wait.

[darkthunder]

Of the 24 hours that I waited, I was actually logged into the game for atleast half of that time. You can't tell me that a 12 hour+ waiting time should be considered "acceptable".

[koenigsegg]

Jonno said:

Perhaps there are different versions depending on the realm type - pve/pvp realms must use different programming somewhere along the way. also maybe a linux OS version is still being made. Though not released - I am sure I remember someone, somewhere mentioning it exists.
Hell, I'm just pulling these out of the top of my head it does seen quite a large number.


Hopefully, this little bit of released info may help with the "OMG 12 MILLION PEOPLE PAYING MONTHLY AND STILL CRAP SERVICE" arguement, paying 4600 employees, maintaining 20k computer systems and 75k cpus (just to pick some numbers from the list) must cost a fair bit.

Nah, think it's more the part that there are ppl with vanilla WoW only, some with vanilla+TBC, some all including LK. Guessing that each of them need their own patch.

I also believe that they have one for each country/region.

I also believe that they make big patches like 3.0.1->todays patch and 3.1.0->todays etc.

When I installed WoW last time I used the complete install (by download) from official Blizzard. By just checking the catalogue it made...seems it's 10-15 patches just only for that part.

[Halbarad]

darkthunder said:

# 2,056 Game Masters

Why is it I never seem to manage to get a hold of one of them, within a timely manner?

Last time I tried contacting a GM, I waited over 24 hours for a response. When I finally did get an answer, it was through the in-game mail system. I haven't spoken to a GM in real time for months. Are they all on vacation?

I've never had a real issue with GM times

This post has been edited by Halbarad: 18 September 2009 - 10:09 AM

[Crusherix]

darkthunder said:

# 2,056 Game Masters

Why is it I never seem to manage to get a hold of one of them, within a timely manner?

Last time I tried contacting a GM, I waited over 24 hours for a response. When I finally did get an answer, it was through the in-game mail system. I haven't spoken to a GM in real time for months. Are they all on vacation?

2056 GMs vs 12.000.000 active players