This past Saturday was an apparently busy and momentous one for the playerbase of Ashes of Creation, as creative director Steven Sharif announced on the game’s official Discord that player concurrency hit a new high water mark during the past weekend’s testing.
“Over 8,100 testers piled into the Shol realm during peak hours on Saturday,” Sharif heralded. “As far as we know, that’s not just a record for Ashes, but for any Unreal Engine 5 game on a single realm. That’s a huge milestone and a big step toward our long-term concurrency goals.”
Granted, Shol is literally the only server online right now, regardless of whether you’re an NA or EU player in order for Intrepid Studios to perform stress testing. To that point, Sharif did acknowledge intermittent issues that cropped up from that many players being crammed into one server and thanked backers for their “patience and grit during the chaos.” That’s still a ton of people for an MMORPG deep in alpha.
The devs are taking advantage of the high player numbers for this week, as the studio has elected to keep the server online all week instead of only five days to give devs the opportunity to “actively debug and deploy live fixes using the test environment.” Fans can expect multiple patches per day but also expect things to be rocky, but Sharif tries to marshal the believers by pointing out how this is precisely what alpha testing is meant to do.
