Chapter 117: Official Service
Chapter 117: Official Service
“Ah! I’m connected!”
After about thirty minutes, the team members who still had not been able to connect began entering the game one by one. Some of the people who had rushed in for the launch gave up or delayed logging in, and traffic began to spread out.
Of course, the server management team’s busy work probably helped too, but since there was a limit to the servers they had prepared in the first place, traffic distribution was likely the biggest reason.
If we had cloud services, this problem wouldn’t exist. It’d be convenient.
Insu missed the services he had used in his previous life. But cloud services still had about ten years left before they appeared. As far as he remembered, Amazon’s cloud service only officially began in 2006.
Of course, the concepts and technologies themselves probably existed even now, but technology always took time to commercialize.
Well, even if cloud servers existed now, we probably couldn’t use them properly because of the internet environment.
Insu continued checking the game’s condition while walking around the world and trying some hunting.
For now, it seems fine.
This kind of monitoring was extremely important.
It was a matter of confirming whether Parallel Soft had found the right balance.
They needed to accommodate as many users as possible to maximize revenue, but if they packed in so many players that it affected the play experience, gamers would not be able to enjoy the game properly and might leave because of complaints and frustration.
In other words, they had to accept as many customers as possible up to the line where the servers could endure it and comfort would not be greatly affected.
They had predicted and calculated this in advance before starting the service, but every gamer had a different environment, and MMORPGs themselves were extremely complex, so perfect prediction was difficult. That was why they needed to observe directly and adjust like this.
“How are things on the East Coast and in the South?”
“When I checked earlier, I heard there were no major problems.”
Insu kept checking the situation after stopping Clayton, who had come to report. As a server programmer, Clayton was so busy today, the official service launch day, that he barely had time to think. After all, servers were always the most unstable and unpredictable during the early launch period.
Moreover, unlike Korea, the servers were not gathered in one place. Server rooms were distributed across America’s vast territory, so remotely managing them made things even harder.
As soon as he answered Insu’s question, Clayton ran back to the server room while sweating heavily.
After that, the team members continued roaming the game and communities, searching for gamer reactions and possible bugs.
<Major bug discovered!>
<It’s an invincibility bug!>
“What?! Is it real?”
Because they were already anxious, seeing posts like this in the community made their hearts drop.
But most of them were just bait posts. The rest were simple misunderstandings.
“It can’t be reproduced, and even after checking that side’s logs and code, there’s nothing that would cause a bug like this.”
Chris had been startled by Insu’s words and spent a long time trying to reproduce the invincibility bug, but no matter what he did according to the post, there was no sign of it occurring. He reported back in a drained voice.
This kind of thing repeated several times.
There was one actual bug. It was a bug where damage spiked higher than the calculation, but the conditions were difficult to trigger and the effect was not fatal, so they simply recorded it as something to fix in a later patch.
It was minor enough that they could have left it as a fun element, but since the bug might cause other problems, they would probably debug it unless the next patch already had too many things to handle.
In this way, Insu and his team did not relax even on the first day and focused on providing stable service. Thanks to that, they recorded a peak concurrent user count of 55,000 and 380,000 total registered users.
This might not seem like a particularly special number, but 55,000 concurrent users was similar to Ultima Online’s peak from 1997 in Insu’s previous life.
Of course, this was partly because America’s internet environment was not suited to MMORPGs, and because support from its parent company, EA, was limited. By “not suited,” it meant America’s landmass was wide and its population density was low, making delays inevitable and causing major differences in internet quality by region.
Considering that Korea’s Kingdom of the Winds, which came out around the same period in a country with a much smaller population, weaker economy, and weaker internet infrastructure, still reached 130,000 concurrent users, Ultima Online’s 50,000 users showed how small that number was compared to the potential of the American market.
But Insu had resolved to pour in all available funds, and if necessary, he was even considering an IPO.
This is the first crossroads.
Insu was happy about the successful start, but he stayed alert. When he said he would conquer the world through MMORPGs, he did not simply mean selling a lot.
In his previous life, he often thought about something.
When the concept of the metaverse became popular and people everywhere predicted that the wall between reality and virtual reality would collapse, and virtual reality would become a new reality, he thought there had already been such an opportunity in the past, not the future.
(Translator’s Note: Metaverse — A concept referring to persistent virtual spaces where users interact socially, economically, and creatively, often discussed as a future convergence of online worlds and reality.)
If Ultima Online had received proper support, secured an enormous user base from the beginning, maintained that user base, properly settled those users into the virtual world, and spent vast amounts of money continuously developing the game, it might truly have created a new world that affected reality as powerfully as another reality.
And now, Insu had successfully taken a better first step than Ultima Online, one step ahead of it.
Insu’s current first-stage goal was 500,000 concurrent users and two million paid subscribers. Considering America’s current number of internet subscribers, computer penetration rate, and economic conditions, it was a fully possible number. Of course, he did not mean achieving it immediately. He was looking at a minimum of two years.
In truth, he estimated that around nine million people had the conditions needed to play TLF Online, but not everyone enjoyed computer games, and not everyone had the time or mental room to play an MMORPG.
Still, current internet subscribers were relatively interested in new things, and a high proportion of them played games, so he could set two million as the target.
Insu unconsciously imagined what would come afterward, then shook his head.
Of course, vision was important, but one could only move forward by properly watching the ground beneath one’s feet first. And this was only the first day of official service. It was far too early to fall into sweet dreams.
Eric, an aspiring game developer, had recently lost almost all motivation for development.
He had studied computer languages quite a bit and even made a short RPG practice project where players could walk around a village, do simple turn-based battles, and complete quests. But for the past year, he had completely stopped touching development.
This is all Parallel Soft’s fault!
From the moment he encountered the TLF series, he thought it was his ideal game, but once he encountered the door called multiplayer, he became insanely absorbed. After TLF Online came out and he saw a naturally emerging society within that virtual world, he could no longer understand what more could be made beyond it.
But he was not deeply frustrated or anything.
The reason Eric originally wanted to make games was because he wanted to personally make the kind of game he liked. But now, even without him struggling to create one, a game close to that ideal had been released, and he could enjoy it. In one sense, he was satisfied.
“Okay. Okay.”
Eric muttered while watching the number of people in the login queue decrease. As soon as the TLF Online package came out, he bought it, installed it in advance, and even took leave from work to match the date. But apparently there were many people like him, because even though he logged in exactly at 9 a.m., he still got caught in the queue.
[12 people waiting.]
But that was because he connected right at launch time. If he had logged in later after work, it might actually have been better.
After all, launch time was when the most people gathered. Setting the launch time at 9 a.m. on a weekday was not because it matched Parallel Soft’s work hours, but because it was their own strategy to reduce the number of people connecting and distribute traffic.
The number of people waiting decreased quickly.
If this were an issue with server capacity limits, he would have had to wait longer, but right now the delay was caused by too many login and connection requests arriving all at once, so he only had to wait for those requests to be processed.
He chose the Pacific server, just as before.
Ah, it’s all gone after all.
When he entered the character selection screen, the character he had worked hard to raise during open beta was gone. It had been announced before the open beta even began, but he could not help feeling disappointed.
Early online games were usually like this. Part of it came from the perception at the time that open beta was not official service, and that official service should begin with everyone under the same conditions. But the larger reason was technical.
At the time, there were no advanced backend systems like in 2025, so safely transferring and maintaining data was difficult.
(Translator’s Notes: Backend — The server-side portion of a software system that handles processing, databases, security, and other functions not directly visible to users.)
Moreover, even if open beta was effectively the same as official service, it still was not official service. Since they were not taking money, there was an implicit understanding that users should tolerate some problems, and in reality, there were quite a few bugs.
Because of that, open beta data could be unstable or contain errors. There could also be small system changes and balance adjustments before official service, and using data from the old structure directly in the changed new structure could cause problems.
Also, there could be items or experience gained by exploiting relatively numerous bugs during open beta, and they could not allow those things to carry over into official service.
Later, as technology developed, most of these problems could be addressed, but right now, MMORPGs were only just making their first appearance. In fact, computers and the internet themselves were still not fully widespread.
In any case, Eric, who was a person of this era and did not know the future, let it pass with only brief disappointment and thought about his character name with anticipation and impatience for the new adventure that was about to begin.
When he played the previous TLF series, he had just named characters carelessly, but during open beta, he had realized that in the online world, this character name represented him. So he became a little more careful.
Moreover, in the TLF series, the first character’s name continued as the family name, so if he did not want other gamers to mock him, he needed to avoid making it too strange.
[Hurly Sexy]
Of course, “careful” only meant careful by online game standards.
After creating the character and selecting it, he loaded briefly and dropped into a world with gray paved roads and grassland.
It was simple 2D-rendered graphics, and the screen was not very different from a single-player game, but Eric felt as though he had connected to another world, to online itself.
Only a small number of people felt this emotion yet, but in any case, it was the result of MMORPGs appearing and people experiencing and learning that world to some extent through open beta.
<Looking for party members!!>
<Level 5 or higher! Anyone want to hunt together?>
<Buying a club!>
<Anyone have a mage?>
And before he had walked far, clear proof that this place was online began to appear.
There are a lot of people.
During open beta, people had become common in the world after the midpoint. But now, it felt even more crowded than back then.
During open beta, people had increased gradually, and those people dispersed across different parts of the world. But now, everything had been reset, so everyone was gathered near the major cities. On top of that, there were more concurrent users than during open beta, so it really was more crowded.