Many (most?) MMO have had their own server issues, and when making changes to server code and how things communicate, it is hard to stress test properly.
Now we do not know what the issue we experienced was,
1. Was FDev cheap and had to few servers available? At first this suggestion have some merits, as the game client could take a really long time even give you the option choose game mode and try to enter the game. Suggestion that the "logon/session" servers could not handle all the players. This went problem went away later on. So either players gave up or more servers where added to increase capacity.
2. Was there some changes made to the inter-server communication that caused the issue under heavy load?
Now the adjudication error, I have no good grasp of what is hiding behind this message, but a guess is some sort of session/instancing management, and this could be caused by changes made to the how this works. We know several things affects this, like system wide chat, that regardless of what instance you are in, you share the same chat. So here it could be both options, as there could be to few servers, and it could also be changes to the netcode that created new bottlenecks server side when different functions need to exchange information.
So we know they changed the mission system, before they created mission on the "session" servers, this created alot of load on these, and this is why mode switching worked, as you hit a new session server, and saw new missions. This also had quite a few other issues in making better missions etc. So they made a change, to move all the mission generation to its own set of servers, "mission" servers, this will make the load on the "session" servers go down, as the expensive mission generation does not happen here.
Potential issues with the new system are
1. To few "mission" servers, ie, they take to long to generate missions. Usually solved by adding more servers to the pool
2. "Mission" servers have a flaw in how they spread the load to generate missions, so instead of gaining performance by adding more servers, we get the opposite effect. 3. The communication between "session" servers and "mission" servers might be flawed, causing extra load on the "session" servers, and thus the expected performance we should gain does not happen, and we now have to few "session" servers, due to this new bug.
And during testing, all could be working great, it is only under heavy load that some of these issues are seen.
To say I was happy with the launch yesterday is lie, but I do understand the complexities involved and I do hope FDev had their staff sitting their checking what is happening, how is it working, and I do believe they all could see that they had some major issues here, and that they frantically was trying to understand what the problems was and finding the root cause, as I do believe one the first thing the probably did, was to launch more servers, if they had indications that the server load was to high. But I suspect most of the issues yesterday was not due lack of to few server, but actual issues with the server code. And that takes some time to fix, and deploy.
Also they might have had to enable extra debug information, that in itself, can also lead to even more performance issues, so when they are trying to fix things, they could have made things worse, to actually get the information they needed to fix the root cause.
So, in one way or another most other multiplayer games have had these kind of issues. I do not believe we are ever going to be safe from this, but how the developer manages this, and do they learn from this is what matters.
This is a very simplified version on the complexity here. And yes this sucked, and FDev most definitely knows they messed up, and with streamers etc streaming those problems instead showing off their shiny new content is BAD PR for the game.
