I was doing my rounds to some of the sites, found a note from Homey that they have decided to merge the AAO Tracker with Battletracker.com. With the many changes in AA recently, one shouldn’t be to surprised by this move. I just wonder how many folks are gonna be mad after they donated so much the last month or two to the AAO Tracker bank fund to have it shut down so soon after that?

Hey,

While the website is down, feel free to join us in IRC Chat:
Gamesurge.net: #MergingWorlds or #aaotracker

Since the launch of America’s Army 3 (AA3) on June 17, America’s Army has seen data transfer demands upon our game infrastructure that far exceeded our expectations and capacity to support new game registrations and game play. Data transactions associated with all existing and new players attempting to complete the Basic Combat Training (BCT) portion of the AA3 game over the span of a few days overwhelmed our authentication and database systems. These sections of AA3 include key new features of the game that are particularly data intensive and which we clearly did not adequately load test during our closed and open beta process. As Director of the Army Game Project, I apologize for this gap in service and want to outline below the actions we have taken and are taking to close this gap.

First, AA3 is designed to provide players a great deal of data regarding their performance and key aspects of the online experience. As a result, compared with prior versions of America’s Army, AA3 generates about ten times more traffic between game instances and our middleware and backend infrastructure. While we accounted for this level of data exchange when designing our AA3 infrastructure, we did not anticipate the unprecedented demand and data transfer levels we are witnessing as tens of thousands of players are simultaneously establishing accounts and working through the BCT portion of the Game. This was due to the fact that we did not adequately replicate the data transaction loads associated with this game activity during our beta test. As a result, immediately following the launch of AA3, we saw a mismatch between incoming data transactions and our infrastructure capacity. Therefore, we immediately began adjusting our infrastructure resources to maximize capacity and undertook substantial tuning of our database systems. Shortly after launch, we also discovered a hardware fault at our data center that created significant network lag. After addressing these faults, we achieved improvement in our infrastructure performance. However, demand for the game quickly consumed the capacity we created with the foregoing steps. Therefore, while we were able to support additional users, individual players did not see substantial improvement in game performance.

Since last Friday, to further improve system performance, we created a data handling modification for the game designed to moderate data flows during this launch period. This modification was released on Friday evening via Steam and our Deploy Client to automatically upgrade AA3 games installed on players’ computers. Additionally, we began crediting all players for completion of BCT levels so that they could proceed directly to multi-player missions; thereby removing the bottleneck created by the high volume of players engaging in BCT maps and improving the overall player experience.

We also began addressing performance and stability issues on the game servers by implementing memory upgrades and adding more database nodes to carry the load of authentication and player stats traffic between game instances and our infrastructure. We are correcting map rotation reporting deficiencies and issues with the Master Browser System (MBS) that prevent players from identifying servers with available Soldier positions. To improve network traffic, we continue to tune game network code, add more game servers, and correct server administration features so that server providers can better manage their servers. Finally, we are remedying instances where we identified memory leaks and are reducing server memory requirements to eliminate network lag while increasing server stability.

In summary, we are working to add capacity, and correct faults that have significantly impaired player access to America’s Army 3. We appreciate player patience as we ramp up our infrastructure to meet the demand that clearly exceeded our capacity on launch day.

Casey Wardynski
Colonel, U.S. Army
Director, Army Game Project (America’s Army)

Source: America’s Army

America’s Army Development Studio Closed
Jun 18, 2009 at 2:36 PM - Andrew Burnes on http://ve3d.ign.com/
The American Army has closed their publicly-staffed America’s Army 3 development studio one day after the free-to-play action-recruitment-sim was launched on Steam. According to Shacknews, development will continue in an office somewhere in Redstone, Alabama, presumably under complete military control (rumours persisted throughout AA3’s development of internal discourse, with several high-profile, long-term staffers departing under mysterious circumstances):

“This consolidation will allow us to gain efficiencies between our public and government applications,” the representative explained. ” We appreciate all the hard work that every member of the America’s Army team has contributed to the project, and we look forward to delivering future America’s Army game releases in the months ahead.”

As for the game itself, the launch has been less than fantastic.

Shacknews Article

Kotaku Article

Tracker Discussion

[Dev]Pye’s Departure News

Fudzilla Story

Gaming Age Story

The Escapist News Story

This post appeared on the official forums, I am copying it here so this person’s words can be shared and another point of view beyond folks picking at a group of people without knowing the facts.

Feydr:

I worked as a Dev at AA Emeryville for the last year and a half and I hope I can appeal to your rationality and common sense. I would like you to imagine trying to build a game with an impossible deadline, steadily declining workforce (via firings), A hiring freeze, constantly being fed misinformation, having the “higher ups” completely ignore your weekly plea for either A) more time, or B) more manpower, working a ton of unpaid overtime, pouring your heart and soul into a misadventure only to have the uniformed community scoff at you for uncontrollable variables….. RIGHT when you’ve just lost your job.

There are problems with the release beyond the devs control. In fact, the bureaucracy is so convoluted that you can’t even begin to imagine the breadth and scope of B.S. the devs had to deal with daily. in short, imagine being the subcontractor of a subcontractor of a contractor to the government. Sure Millions of dollars may have been poured into this project, but how much do you think made it to the actual DEV team, the people MAKING the game, after it was filtered by the bureaucracy?

I realize if you are a gamer, you rightly expect a game to work. period. But I would ask that you imagine for a second that you actually DON’T understand what it takes to make this particular game, and you really don’t understand the many obstacles that were placed in front of the Devs… in nerdy terms: A Kobiyashi maru.

What I would like you to understand is that the Devs did everything they could, worked a TON of unpaid overtime, put their time and passion into an un-winnable situation, and were effectively stabbed in the back. Many of these guys are my close friends, they have family to take care of, and overpriced rent to deal with. They just came off busting their butts for months, to be let go, without warning. Perhaps a little empathy is in order here.

Almost every multiplayer online game has problems upon release. These problems become exaggerated when a development team is kept in constant turmoil and paranoia via misinformation and a high rate of employee turnover. When the people you trust around you are being let go, it becomes difficult to emotionally invest yourself in the titanic sinking ship. Nonetheless, I can tell you the Devs STILL pushed themselves as hard as they could.

Furthermore, the problem with the game at this point, has everything to do with the authentication servers being slammed, A.K.A not a controllable variable by the Devs. Sure there are bugs, they WERE being fixed, and now you’ll be lucky to see any fixes in the near future.

For those of you who think Redstone arsenal will do a better job, well…. I won’t have to tell you that you’re sadly mistaken because you’ll see for yourself.

I’m not sure why i’ve felt compelled to write this when I’m sure it will get deleted, or even scoffed at further, but I hoped to let the fans know that we tried as hard as we could and are very bummed to see the fruits of our labor shoved at gamers like a heaping pile of crap.

Hobo was good enough to save an image of the post before it disappeared HERE

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