It’s a bit of a double-edged sword when you launch your popular early access game. On one hand, you may just become the top-selling game on Steam. On the other hand, players actually expect your title to work, and when it doesn’t, that’s a big problem.
This is simultaneously the enviable and unfortunate situation in which survival MMO Last Oasis has found itself. The sheer influx of players was too much for the game’s backend to handle, with connection issues plaguing the servers over the past week. As a result, the team decided to take the game offline for seven days to work on the problem. Any disgruntled players will be offered full refunds for the next couple of days.
“Our team of engineers has been working incredibly hard to resolve the bottleneck with our master server, which prevents people from logging into the game properly,” Donkey Crew said. “The team is doing their best to implement solutions as quickly as possible, but as you have seen yourselves, the connection problems continue to appear as players join. Therefore, we decided to take all servers offline to give our engineers time to investigate without new pressure for about seven days.”
We are suspending Last Oasis servers for the next seven days. Full refunds will be offered regardless of your playtime.https://t.co/U6Ixhr1sDQ
— Last Oasis (@OasisNomad) March 29, 2020
Good for them to take it down and start over. Instead of bs-ing everyone and trying to kiss ass.
Yeah as much as it sucks for players, it must suck for them way more. Pulling down servers, thrusting them into Mixed territory, and offering no-limit refunds is a steep price to pay. So I’m hoping this means they’re very serious about making things right for their players. The short time I played this game was great.
Potentially a good problem to have. If it’s standing room only this early, then take your time and get it right. Don’t panic, the crowds will still be there if the end product is worth the wait.
On the other hand these open world survival MMOs boom-bust faster than any game I’ve ever seen and seem to rely heavily on twitch promotion. The initial rush is always way higher than any other genre and people stay hooked for a few weeks then leave the droves once the streamer community moves on.
I still think it’s a good idea to take it down and it’s amazing PR to offer refunds but I would be floored if interest remains this high for a week.
I would say they just took that spot of growth and demise from the BR games(remember them a few years ago). Also its a bit of a perfect storm now cause due to pandemic most stay at home and want to have to play something new too
While I’ll wait out the downtime and continue after they get things working again, I wish they would have done a free stress test the week or two before ea release to get these issues fixed before the release. They obviously didn’t have enough content creators playing the two days before release.
Depending on their work/office situation they could be in a spot of adjusting to a remote vs localized real life office with everything going on, so could be a necessity like a lot of smaller game dev companies are going through. At least they’re offering refunds for people unwilling to be patient or ignoring the caveats of the Early Access tag unlike a lot of devs in the genre.
They’ve been great and open about what’s going on. Nice to see a developer like that. You and I both know of at least one that is not. ;)
Those two days were pretty quiet, with all the oases displaying ‘spacious’ at any time, so there was definitely nothing like the load we saw at launch.
I know they are doing their best to get things going (you can tell by the video they put out where he looked horrible) but a stress test a week or two before would have found these issues.