Rice turnout overflows GoCrossCampus servers
Rice enthusiasts of GoCrossCampus, an online RISK game developed by students from Yale University and Columbia University, may have been disappointed to find the game put on pause Nov. 3. The game should be up and running again after Thanksgiving break, Brad Hargreaves, one of the game’s developers, said.
Hargreaves said the root cause of the problem was the combined effect of the unexpected popularity of GoCrossCampus at Rice as well as that of two games launched before it, one at Rensselear Polytechnic and an Ivy League Championship. Approximately 30 percent of Rice students signed up to play in the first three days, something Hargreaves said was unprecedented with games at other campuses.
“At RPI we had maybe that level in two or three weeks and in the Ivy League Championship after two weeks we got up to like 15 percent,” Hargreaves said. “So in three days getting maybe 5 or 10 percent is reasonable, getting 30 percent is ridiculous. It’s awesome, but it’s ridiculous.”
The heavy traffic from these games made the site lag, sometimes taking as much as 10 minutes to load a page, Hargreaves said.
“Rice deserves a better quality of game than that, so we decided to put the Rice game on pause and relaunch it when we can make sure that we have the infrastructure in place to deal with it,” Hargreaves said.
GoCrossCampus is a free game with no advertisements and was the brainchild of Hargreaves, Sean Mehra, Jeffry Reitman and Matthew Brimer, all from Yale, and Columbia student Isaac Silverman.
Wiess College junior Alex Mainor said GoCrossCampus was a fun way to procrastinate.
“I definitely enjoyed playing it,” he said. “It’s sad that it’s gone because I checked it like 20 times a day. But I look forward to it coming back because then I can have more things to distract me from real life, which is always nice.”
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