Understanding the limits...
Hello, I'm working on a multiplayer game using photon and I'm using PlayFab for accounts... I really like it so far but I have 2 very important questions:
1. I need to make sure that as long as I never exceed 100k accounts that I will never have to pay a penny...
2. I've heard stuff about how you can't just make client/server calls all the time. But obviously I have to call for loading and saving data... So like is there a limit to how many calls I can make? Like a user data call?
Thanks!
Best Answer
Well, 1 isn't a question, but I'm assuming it's meant to be "how do I keep from exceeding 100,000 player accounts?" and the answer is to leave your title in Development Mode. Dev Mode does not allow you to have more than 100,000 player accounts. Clients that try creating player accounts at that point will just get an error.
If you have a very limited number of people that you feel will be using your title, that may work for you. But I do need to caution you that doing this creates a horrible player experience if your game has any significant user population. Basically, once you hit the 100K player account level, everyone trying to play your game for the first time - or return to it from having taken a break, if you're deleting player accounts in order to stay under that number - will simply not be able to sign in. You're likely to see a high percentage of downloads that abandon the game, in that case.
Also, as an aside, I do need to point out that Development Mode is only free for the Core services. Use of CDN, Party, or game server hosting would be charged at the normal rates (though you do get some limited use of Party and game server hosting for free - the docs have all the details on this).
For 2, the short answer is that you should aim to have no more than a few API calls per client, per minute. If you're running into API call rate or data update rate limit errors, that means you're making a level of calls that's excessive enough that we'll have to move your title to a quarantine vertical if that goes on for a non-trivial amount of time (to prevent any performance issues to other titles). The quarantine vertical is far more strict about rate limiting than the main vertical, so you'd see error rates increase.
Thanks for your response! On 1 this is my brother and I's first game so we don't assume it will be big. But it is a fairly "large" :) scale multiplayer game. If it does hit the limit of 100k users... Is it easily possible to start paying? For question number 2, I understand what your saying but I'll give an example:
You start the game, the player logs in.
+1
Load account info.
+1
Retrieve saved settings and other saves
(around) +5
On open friends page load friends.
+1 per minute (maybe)
On refresh friends page button pressed.
+1 per minute (maybe)
On load shop.
+1 per minute (maybe)
Even though this is dramatic :) It's about 22 calls in 5 minutes. (4 per minute) Aren't these things kind of required to call or am I missing something.. Thanks!
Yes, it is trivial to move to a paid account. Just go to the Studio Settings tab (click the "..." on the main dashboard, or your user icon from any page in the title) and choose the change tier option.
As to your proposed meter "ticks", that's certainly possible. There's a massive amount of variance between titles, so there's no standard we can point to in terms of usage.
