Origin programmers also designed a way to track the performance of the Internet service providers used by customers so that they could eliminate the slower links in the network. Ultima was able to scale up the number of worlds from one to nine. Scalability will make you either a success or a failure. We now build all of our plans with this idea in mind. Scalability, the technological hurdle Ultima had to leap, is hardly limited to Web sites that are built to play games.
Most Web developers hope to at- tract the kind of crowds that flocked to the Ultima site.
If they succeed in attracting those crowds, they will face the same problems that kept McCurdy awake all of those nights that his customers were playing games. And while many people who visit corporate Web sites today may be more accepting of glitches and goofs than McCurdy's savvy crowd, such tolerance is likely to wane. As more people spend more time online, the demand for improved performance will grow. To learn how to satisfy those demands, Web developers of today would do well to study the tricks used by game sites whose developers have already been there and done that. The game sites' successes, as well as their failures, stand as lessons to all who follow.