ArcheAge suffers lengthy downtime over vanishing NPCs

ArcheAge just cannot catch a break. Disappearing NPCs prompted another complete restart of the North American servers yesterday, which didn’t solve the problem. Trion community dynamic duo Brasse and Celestrata spent the afternoon keeping players updated on the outages as Trion and XLGAMES whipped up new builds.

“The primary reason the NPCs are disappearing is due to the massive number of NPCs and interactable items (harvestables) spawned in the world,” Khrolan explained last night.

“This state is occurring more now than previously due to land being established (primarily Auroria) and a high number of dungeon instances being open. To help diffuse the problem, we’re deactivating the third instances of the Ayanad Library (on each floor), reducing the number of arena and mirage island instances and disabling a large number of the Warborn starting instances. If we reach the item limit again, dungeons will be affected first, followed by the overworld. A more permanent solution will be provided by XL Games overnight, but we’ll be applying these changes shortly, in an attempt to restore the service this evening. On a side note, the issue originates from Reckoning and Vengeance due to high server loads, but it is spreading to all NA legacy servers, because they all share the same environment back end.”

Compensation is on the way but hasn’t yet been detailed. Very late last night, Celestrata noted that the latest deployment could take up to 12 hours to complete before being applied to the servers. Expect updates later this morning as the west coast rolls out of bed.

Unfortunately, this incident is one in a long string of issues for the game since the release of Revelation last month.