The Agency

[Prospero]

I have heard that MxO servers were a nightmare to work with, and they didn't want to touch it. Maybe that's why the accounts were lost.

This could well be true. If it were, then it is yet another sign of bad management. This time, though, at Lith, not SOE. They should have had some professional architectural design preparing a plan of the hardware necessary to handle the load. And the code should have been optimized for the planned hardware.

Thing is, back in the day, they were able to merge nine servers into three. Obviously someone back then knew how to get stuff like this done. Too bad the process was not documented. I asked Walrus about this in a PM, and he indicated that one of the reasons they closed the game rather than a three-to-one merge was that they were not sure how to do it. Guess that was someone’s idea of job security, not to write down everything. Nice going, buddy. I’m speculating that during the bloodbath when SOE acquired MxO, they sacked the folks who knew how to do stuff like this, thinking mere infrastructure and support were commodity skills.

Buddies of mine work in IT infrastructure professionally (as do a couple of you guys, and as I did for a while), and say you can’t get a misspelling corrected on a production server without it being documented. So Walrus’s endless (well, he communicated so infrequently it makes more sense to say “consistent” I guess, than “endless”) wailing about “can’t touch the database” is a sad, sad state of affairs and a confession of amateurishness.

Rant over!