Crowfall’s launch didn’t entirely go to plan yesterday. While early on in the day, the servers were apparently handling the load just fine, by evening that was not the case as – if you’ll permit me to quote MMO Fallout’s Connor here – the servers “pooped the poop.”
“We are continuing to work on the server issues,” ArtCraft’s J. Todd Coleman told players last night. “We had a good 7-hour+ run this morning, so hopefully once we isolate this issue and resolve it, we can get back to that level of predictability. Thanks for your patience.” At one point, the game was apparently being slammed by DDOS attacks too:
Several of MOP’s own writers had difficulties logging in at several points yesterday evening; I got an email from Crowfall support inviting me to the closed beta (yes really it said that) at 7:37 p.m.; and one writer submitted a support ticket and got no less than Executive Producer Gordon Walton answering him, which shows how thin support must have been stretched. Even so, a fourth writer still called it unironically a good launch in the grand context of disastrous MMORPG launches.
To its credit, ArtCraft maintained a forum thread where support were continuously updating players throughout the situation, with the last message just a few hours ago. The servers are still down for maintenance as I type this.
We delivered our impressions of the the game, minus the actual launch difficulties, yesterday, as MOP’s Andrew Ross found the game a genuinely compelling economy sandbox but worried about population retention for PvM and PvP players – sentiments echoed on Reddit, which pointed to low pop but a lot of people watching on Twitch.
ArtCraft also held a brief launch stream and Q&A yesterday.
Want to keep everyone updated on the service.
We have temporarily disabled reward redemption in the lobby as we investigate an issue.
We will update everyone again once the issue has been resolved, and the in-box re-enabled.
Thanks for your support!
— Crowfall (@CrowfallGame) July 7, 2021
Do note that Gordon Walton has said that players who used the “claim all” button to collect their rewards ran into a bug where your items are locked and appear to be lost. They aren’t lost, however, and the studio says it’ll be fixed tomorrow and will email players as soon as it is. Players can email support with additional issues.
