[wow] Warlords of Draenor - Page 236

On November 14 2014 10:06 aksfjh wrote:

Blizzard can't give specific information. If I were to guess, having experience as a back-end developer for a company that deploys its own hardware and software, I'd have to say the limiting factor isn't hardware, but rather people. It's extremely hard to hire a competent systems administrator, much less one that you'll only NEED for a month tops. Even if you do find one, you then have to spend 1-3 months training the guy/girl on your specific infrastructure. Most likely, they won't even be the ones doing the temporary deployment, but it will be handled by the guys that have been around for awhile. Each temp worker will likely cost Blizzard $10-15k a month after all is said and done, and you'll likely need 1-2 per additional system you're bringing up, and that's on top of renting/buying the equipment. You normally wouldn't need so many if it were just a normally scheduled ordeal, but the synchronization of a launch of new software and unique load requirements. If you're expected a spike of triple your normal peak, you could easily end up with 2-3 dozen temp workers for the most ambitious of planning.

Then you have the business side of it all, as in how you're going to even put this into action, with the temp high-skilled employees, to the point where you'd have to hire extra people just to turn it into a process you can return to every 1.5-2.5 years. That would be at LEAST another highly skilled full-time hire, but not temp like the system admins. That's another $120k+ easy per year, or it means cutting content as somebody needs to take time to organize it all.

THEN you have to worry about the backend development costs of finding an elegant solution to that problem, which I assure you is quite unique. You can hire a few, skilled developers full time to take care of this ($200k+), or cut content.

Even after this, which totals to over half a million of direct costs (at the low end) that I am aware of, and there is no guarantee you're not going to run into the same problems. There's likely a LOT more than I'm missing in other departments as well that would simply support these other employees that are hired, and you also have to be aware of what temp workers do to things like company culture and worker morale. And you can't just hand-wave it away in monthly subs and cash influx from the expac, since those things are likely budgeted anyways.

Updated queue position: 1340.

Edit: I don't want to sound rude or anything or argue, nor is my breakdown any more than a lightly educated guess. I'm just waiting to get out of this queue and this passes the time.