A Blizzard of Happy Customers

The above image turns out to be less frightening than ObamaCare.

Friday we learned that the company in charge of putting Healthcare.gov put the blame for the disastrous rollout on “overwhelming interest from consumers.” In the comments, Gretz calls

Bullsh!t.

Blizzard Entertainment rolled out Diablo 3, with 3.4 million pre-activation day sales, and 1.2 million WoW subscribers able to access the game the moment it went live. On go-live, there were 4.6 million users ready to go.

Sure, it had a few genuine glitches on the go-live date. They were addressed quickly, and genuine apologies were given for the outage to paying customers.

Diablo 3 requires every game event to be checked and validated on the server, which is doing a fair amount of encryption and authentication to prevent cheating. There are an average of 2.1 million people on their servers every day, with average 8.2 million game-hours per day. They had a peak load of 5.8 million users in a single day.

There are an average of 183,962 characters created per day, or 127 per minute.

Granted, they’ve screwed up their project with the release of a real-money auction house, and alienated much of their customer base since June, but in terms of an online transaction processing powerhouse, and a massive interrelated database, serving millions of users in a global fashion, Blizzard entertainment is showing up how much of a colossal screwup that HHS and Healthcare.gov is.

Either these knuckleheads have no idea what they’re doing, or the scope of the task is overly complicated, or both.

The difference between the two results, of course, is entirely due to the fact that Blizzard was trying to earn a profit.

H.L. Mencken define Puritanism as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Progressivism — which is just Puritanism’s atheist little brother — is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be earning a profit.