Act as a Solutions Architect. Design a high-level microservices architecture for a global e-commerce platform expecting high traffic during seasonal sales. Define the key services required (e.g., User Service, Order Service, Inventory Service, Payment Gateway). Explain the inter-service communication patterns (synchronous vs. asynchronous) you would use for specific critical paths, such as order placement and payment verification. Additionally, describe how you would handle data consistency across services, specifically addressing the distributed transaction problem, and propose a strategy for service discovery and load balancing.