Things may have leveled off for the online multiplayer experience in Last Epoch, but that certainly wasn’t the case in the OARPG’s first week, which saw its move from early access to full product marred by several server issues. Now that the dust has settled, Eleventh Hour’s engineers have put together a postmortem that tries to explain just what happened.
The dev blog spends about 2,000 words that go into deep detail about what it characterizes as “cascading failure” of its server matcher as the onrush of players set things on fire, forcing the devs to scale things up to a point that it could pinpoint the source of its server problems, on top of code issues that were cropping up. “Each time we found a problem and fixed it, we immediately saw improvement, but this allowed even more players to enter the game and play, which would uncover the next problem, and so on,” the post reads.
Despite the emergencies that kept springing up and the frustration on players’ end, the devs say they learned several important things about the game’s backend services and how to better anticipate how player numbers affect things. “With the launch behind us, we’re all very thankful to you players for showing so much passion for the game, despite the rocky start,” the post closes. “Our team could not have made Last Epoch what it is today without you, and we will endeavor to keep making the game you all deserve.”
