As we’ve been covering for the past couple of days, the second alpha test for the OARPG Corepunk hasn’t exactly been going well: The test had to be reset and delayed several times, and we even had to switch gears from our planned Friday livestream of the game because of an unexpected two-hour maintenance. And though the delay of the alpha originally meant that testing would be extended into June 4th, Artificial Core has since elected to axe the test wholesale a full three days early.
The studio first announced plans to cancel testing early in the morning on the East Coast, roughly 50 minutes before it was planning on shutting the servers down at 5:00 a.m. EDT. The announcements explain that connection issues continued to rear their head, causing “discomfort” and making the game unplayable. In other words, if you set aside your weekend to test like our own writers did, you’re waking up to finding that no longer possible.
“We turned off the servers because the number of disconnects was causing too much discomfort, making the gaming experience less enjoyable than we would like. So we decided to end the test.
“For us as developers, it was very successful because now we know where and what broke. The previous test with 2,000 people was more stable, but with 15,000 people, bugs started to appear. This is what we wanted to see, to test the infrastructure and address any problems identified. Now we need to fix disconnects, shard issues, lags and other things to test game flow without distractions.”
Timing for the game’s next test will be announced sometime next week, which promises to not only attack the bugs that emerged but also improve optimization and balance. In the meantime, the devs are thanking players for helping them discover these snarl-ups and are humbled by the number of players who were eager to get in to the game. Even if it looks as if most of them didn’t.
