To say that people were pretty excited for the relaunch of Defiance over the weekend by Fawkes Games would be an understatement, particularly since the past several days of live service for the sci-fi shooter MMO under Fawkes’ stewardship has been pretty active – and pretty rocky.
Shortly after the studio said things were stable, the game’s servers began to continually creak under the pressure, as the devs continued posting regular updates about the game crashing and multiple attempts to restart servers and shore them up through “experimental configuration fine-tuning.” Some of this backend tweaking that started yesterday afternoon has kept the servers offline well past this morning for most; the most recent updates note that a server component is limiting the scope of how many players can be in-game and that another restart is happening with maintenance taking roughly two hours.
As one might expect, the playerbase is beginning to get a bit grumpy in chat, leading the studio to offer some suggestions and basically ask for patience. “I am really sorry for the complications and there is not much we can do until we sort it out. The only thing I can do is to keep you informed in updates and promise you we will get it done,” reads a message from Charly, the MMO’s operations manager. “We just need time; old game, tons of changes, historical issues, little knowledge left plus us being a small studio. We will sweat it out and get it done, just bear with us.”
Speaking from some firsthand experience, we’ve seen some server crashes directly, both during our own livestream during launch day and over the course of personal play time during the weekend. We’ve had some pretty gnarly spikes of lag all throughout the last Friday and Saturday, and while performance later in the weekend seemed to level out, things were getting laggy during the public Arkfall events.
Some of the frustration and chatter has also spilled over to Reddit, though most people appear to be offering solace in the form of memes while others are looking to get some information on EGO builds and item drops. We also note that the MMO’s clan recruitment channel in Discord is pretty active, including several clans from the old days returning. It just looks as if things are going to continue to be rocky for a while yet. So, you know, like most other MMO launches.
