Upgrade the Servers: The Financial Argument

[Gorbadoc]

I've been having fun with the Mabar event, and on a whim I decided I'd give the Draught of Midnight a try. Ctrl-S brought up the store... and it was blank. Did not want to load.

"No problem," I thought, "Relogging usually clears this up, and it's about time I restarted my DDO client anyway." Ten minutes later, the game has finally reloaded. I pull up the store again, and again it is blank.

At this point I have to ask myself, how badly do I really want to try this item? I may end up trying it in a couple days anyway, but at this point it's a game of probability. I had to wait longer than usual on a load screen, and it looks like I'd have to wait repeatedly to access the store. This makes me less likely to buy things.

This is D&D; I'm sure we all know how probability and repeated samples work. To figure out how many sales you're losing, multiply the decrease in probability of a purchase by the number of players who experience that decrease.

The actual math is a bit more subtle (some players get their points from subscriptions, for example), but the situation is still this: These delays (which I find annoying) are ultimately costing Turbine money. If you improve the game's ability to support all the players participating in big events like this, you not only do right by your players; you also do right financially.

[helicalius]

hey gorbadoc, i agree with you on the cause. That latency reduction = more profit. but as an electrition im thinking that latency might also be caused by the net itself and that just buying a bigger tera server wont help you at all just make maitenance more complicating. the only thing that can reduce lagg if the network is the cause is by distributing servers in all regions and buying a private line that noone else uses. I dont even know what im talking about or if it is even possible because thats not my field lol.