It’s not often you hear MMO developers outright call their own stress test a “mess” with a cheeky grin, but hey, expect no less than absolute honesty from Fractured studio Dynamight. In this case, the mess was partly a result of just how many people showed up for the stress test.
“The Open Test Weekend revealed an amount of interest in Fractured that surprised us – and greatly contributed to the demise of the server,” the devs write in their post-mortem. “Over 4,000 new accounts were created from the day the test was announced (Wednesday) until it was closed (Saturday). Almost 13,000 characters were created during the test (belonging to ~9,000 distinct accounts). In the very moment we would open up the servers after a patch, dozens of users would try to login at the same time (RIP login server). This was exciting to watch and we look forward to what will happen during our next stress test!”
Apparently, the studio determined that a runtime component in SpatialOS that handles the game’s persistent data, along with the login server and web API, were the most troublesome elements of keeping the whole game up under the load, and that’s what it’ll be focused on for the next test. Yes, there’s another one, more than one, coming up in December or January, and potentially open to more backers this time. Go in and break stuff!
