Let’s recap on what’s going on with Ashes of Creation, shall we? Just ahead of the holidays, Intrepid rolled out Apocalypse, its battle royale mode, which began life as a test scenario for combat in the MMORPG’s alpha but has since become its own standalone free-to-play product, causing much grumping within and without the community worried about the fate of the MMORPG (on which production continues).
But in the meantime, the game’s website and forums have been a hot mess. Intrepid’s Steven Sharif addressed what’s going on with the site this weekend; the short version is that the new website that was meant to go live with Apocalypse is suffering from data corruption and architecture problems, hence why it’s still mostly offline weeks later.
“On December 18th we took a snapshot of the database from the old website, which was on WordPress (not a very scalable or game account centric solution) this snapshot is the source of truth for all purchases, affiliates, and data. This process took about 8 hours to do. When we activated the new website, and allowed users to claim accounts from the database by logging in, errors and code issues became apparent in the process mainly due to the large number of requests coming into the website. This revealed some major issues in the new backend of the account services architecture. As such, we attempted to hot fix these issues during the playtest, it also became apparent there was some corruption in the new database (not the snapshot, that is backed up and secure). Suffice to say, I’ve brought onboard a new web team to assist in the cleanup and repair. But it takes time. Need to make sure it is done right. You will have already noticed there is no longer 500 errors, and many can now see the appropriate shops. In due time the other issues will be fixed. Obviously I’d prefer we had 0 issues, but the benefit of having issues now, is that we will be better prepared for the Alphas, Betas and launch in the future. I know it’s hard, but we are working on it. And will have updates on our live stream this Friday.”
The Reddit community, at least, seems more or less mollified, though some backers have called out Intrepid for poor communication on this and other issues. The studio is planning a stream on Friday, so presumably it’ll address restoration progress and the resumption of the Apocalypse test, now planned for February, at that point. In the meantime, check out MOP’s own hands-on with Apocalypse.
