Having too many players wanting to get in to your MMO would normally be a good problem to have, but in the case of Defiance’s re-release, it’s an actual problem considering the game’s servers are effectively throttling the number of players who can get online.
We’ll basically pick up from where we left off in yesterday’s reporting: The restart that kept the game offline through the morning extended onward into sometime into the afternoon, followed by an hour of stable online uptime thanks to some “experimental modifications.” However, the strain ultimately began to tell as restarts and disconnections happened again caused by max cap software issues. At one point the MMO’s operations manager Charly said he was sweating looking at the game metrics.
Once more from our own personal in-game experience earlier this morning, the servers were quite busy but also very stable at roughly 7:15 a.m. EDT, with no lag or disconnections to be seen, even during a large-scale Arkfall event. However, as people appeared to be waking up, the servers started to disconnect and creak again, kicking us out a couple of times.
The work of the Fawkes Games’ tech team continues today, with reports that things are indeed running better but performance is “not there yet.” There’s also the repeated message of simply trying to login again if disconnections happen – an instruction that has basically become a community meme at this point, as well as a series of Discord emotes that combine to form the in-game “try again” button.
At one point, Charly provided some context on just how many players are trying to get in after having one member of the dev team dig up numbers to see how many can’t login. “We have approximately x8 the amount of people trying to play now than what we had during the tests. Accessing the game ~x4 vs stress tests,” he confirms. And while he wouldn’t give specific numbers, when (snarkily) probed by players in chat, he did confirm that testing had a four-digit player headcount.
Obviously the game is suffering from popularity right now, but gamers have not been known to have boundless patience and the continued server population problems are now threatening to strangle Defiance’s momentum. It’s our hope that isn’t the case, of course; many MMO fans clearly have missed the game, and we’ve had a very good time when things have been functional. Fingers crossed for Fawkes, folks.
