Follow-Up: Starhawk BETA Stress-Test

First off, on behalf of LightBox Interactive, SONY Santa Monica and the SONY Network team in San Diego...

Thank you for your help with the
Starhawk BETA Stress-Test!

The team was able to do a ton of monitoring on a variety of Starhawk's back-end systems. They were able to see them fail. Learn how they failed and experiment with hardware and action plans on how to resolve the issues. This would not have been possible without the efforts of our players around the world, all trying to hammer on the system yesterday!

Jose Madrigal, Chris D'Ambrosio, Mark Benevente, Heath McKay, Josephine Chia, Tyler Gaede, Tim Marsh, George Chen 

Many of the players never really see what happens behind the scenes on a global online game so we wanted to take a moment to show you a pic of the team that monitors and supports our global Starhawk infrastructure (that's just a fancy word that IT-types like to use for servers, routers, switches, etc.).

This team is stationed in the SONY Network Operations Center in San Diego where they monitor Starhawk and because the sun never sets on our global community, this team is working 24 hours a day!

So thanks again for helping us stress-test the Starhawk BETA. While it was certainly very frustrating for many players as they tried to log-in, match-make, view the server-list, etc, the end result was a great test of our Starhawk servers so that we can make sure that all of you that pay your hard-earned $60 for Starhawk when we release it on May 8th will have a great multiplayer experience!

That's it for now...back to work!

Starhawk Server Stress-Test Starts Today

We all know what it's like to buy and game, be excited, get home, pop it in and then find out that there are a bunch of multiplayer and server issues that are stopping you form actually enjoying the game you just spent $60 on -- It's a crappy feeling and we all know it!

And to help make sure that doesn't happen on Starhawk, during our BETA we're doing our best to exercise our servers and code to make sure that we resolve as many of these issues as possible! And that's why we have planned a Stress-Test to start on March 21st!

What is a Stress-Test?

For starters, it's a test that is specifically geared to make the servers fail so the team here at LightBox Interactive *AND* the SONY Network team in San Diego can see where the failures are happening. This is all so that we can fix them before you spend your hard-earned $60 on Starhawk when it's released!

The Stress-Test will start right after our maintenance on March 21st at 2pm Central time and will continue until March 22nd at 2pm Central time.

We want as many players to play the Starhawk BETA during this time and especially during the *PEAK* time of 6pm Central. Why 6pm Central? well, its because that's the time when there is the biggest overlap of global players from Europe, Asia, North America and South America.

The SONY Network team in San Diego has modified the Starhawk server-set by taking some of the hardware off-line so that we're running a smaller system with much less capacity. This is of course only *TEMPORARY* for the stress-test but it will help make the Starhawk servers fail sooner and more painfully. And remember, that's a good thing!!!

Please make sure you get online today and play because the more players, the more network traffic, the better. Again, we want to make sure that any server issues are resolved before you spend your $60!!!

Thank you all for your help!!

You will experience network glitches for the duration of the Stress-Test but it will improve the final version of Starhawk!