The amount of business lost by a bad launch for a small company without an established reputation warrants a real strong focus on getting it right. Its too easy for people to just return the game and move on.
Its really too bad, I love the game and really want to see them succeed.
How did your game launch go? I assume it went much better than this based on your experience as a game dev.
This person is not wrong. You can bash or troll him all you want. But a bad launch can and has destroyed games. Even once they became great in time it took a big hit at launch. Which could be bad for a smaller studio. I donât think it will truly hurt EHG since the game has been around for a while now. But the OP has a point.
Such a lazy response. I have to be a game developer to judge that 10 hours after a hugely anticipated launch; a game being unplayable is bad for business?
Agreed to this. And my question is. Is 10 times unreasonable?
Last Epoch has had a consistent average of about 20k players for the past few months.
The Servers are currently struggling with 120-140k players.
Would asking the devâs to have prepared server capacity in advanced for 10x their average. (200k players) be too much of an ask? I really donât know. I donât know if thats reasonable monetarily. I donât know if thats a reasonable expectation⌠But my personal standpoint is⌠Itâs probably a lot easier to Drop servers than it is to Add them >> Why not eat the cost for month or whatever, and if you dont need themâŚdrop them later? Is that unreasonable?
I was wondering if it was a capacity issue or something else. Like the servers may not be in EHG control to a point. They maybe renting the servers from a company which is causing the issue and EHG and that company are working to fix the flow of players. Not like a capacity cap issue but with the rush of players to the servers caused an issue they are still trying to fix.
I believe that pretty much every user, these days, expects launches to faceplant, especially first run launches. Updates and leagues to existing games (PoE, WoT, WoW, D4) are also expected to trip and stumble, sometimes even faceplant.
Remember, theyâve only got a finite number of internal testers and external testers and then they open it up to tens of THOUSANDS or even hundreds and suddenly all of the bugs that could not even be created during testing rear their ugly heads.
And, of course, all the hackers and bot developers trying to dig into the new code to create their cheats or insert malignant code while the game is fresh and ostensibly unstable hoping that their intrusions might be overlooked.
All we can do is sit back, sigh, and play another game for another day, hoping that the faceplant didnât break the companyâs nose, or worse, so they can pick themselves up and move forward.
I have some experience launching products at multi million user scale, although not gaming related. Itâs extremely difficult - itâs not just the amount of servers that you have, itâs balancing concurrent requests, making sure all your endpoints can horizontally scale, etc. Once something tips over, depending on how the clusters are set up, it could tip multiple things over.
You make a good point, although I would say itâs impossible to accurately assess what EXACTLY is required to scale to 200k players. Just having the server capacity for 200k players isnât enough. They might already have that. But say 100k players hit your login endpoint at the same time, that causes a fallover in your login infra, which tips the cluster that houses other parts of your infra, on and on.
I feel for the devs lol.
I feel for em too. Also literally just went through this a week ago with Helldivers. (tho helldivers has Sony Money so they could fix stuff a bit faster).
The thing is you clearly donât understand whatâs the issue at hand. Itâs not a server issue. Server capacity is elastic and infinitely scalable on demand.
Whatâs unreasonable is you jumping to conclusions as an armchair critic. If youâre interested to better understand the issue at hand, Judd is providing updates on what is affecting online play on discord.
Many of us do not use Discord.
I, for one, loath the spammy thing. And itâs scrolling by faster than a twitch stream (another spam filled platform I loathe. I log in, turn on a stream, and shove it to a tertiary display shrunk down to nothing with the sound off).
Discord may be convenient but, like every other game company out there, they completely ignore their own forums where updates could be posted on locked threads.
Nevermind the service status thread theyâve had going all day.
Is not measured by the amount of shrieking that unreasonably salty people do on forums, Steam reviews, and (I assume) Discord.
In reality, itâs so small that they wonât notice it, and the community is better off without the kind of player that ragequits a game thatâs gotten a lot of praise just because of problems on launch day.
While I feel bad for those that canât get in or are having issue progressing, that is not my experience. I can also see the immense amount of improvements to the game for launch, having played 1k hours since .8.1. Iâm very pleased with the game launch and what they have delivered with 1.0 . For example I went from having to play on medium settings to playing on very high setting with a 1060 3gb 6yr old i7 only 16GB RAM and no SSD.
Iâm sorry if you feel put off by the situation which has and will only last but a few hours, but picture this- you are working at your job, and look up and see 250,000 people staring at you over the counter waiting for their latteâŚ
Which will get your latte done faster? Being friendly and supportive, or trolling?
Think about the stress and anxiety these guys probably feel after the last few days of waiting for this little event which weâll all forget about next week. At this point, Iâm sure many of them havenât even slept in a day or two. This is a very small team and they are pulling off the impossible- creating a very high caliber game that exceeds our expectations of billion dollar companies, which this is not.
actual worthless shill take. what the hell does that contribute to the discussion other than establishing you donât give a fuck about the game or company at all and just want to try to look edgy and smart on a video game forum like itâs 2008? >.<
Necro just to rage.
It was much more than one dayâŚ
Iâve been in many rough game launches, it happens regularly. Helldivers was so much worse than this and look at it continue to be popular.
We went through a software launch at my company. It was rough. For months. This company is one of the largest in its industry. It happens, you can read about this stuff all the time.
Young gamers donât know how bad itâs always been, how worse it has been in other games. Entitled gamers donât care, because you know⌠they are entitled.
Itâs never perfect. Thereâs always room for improvement. The reason most of us are here is because the game is great. Other games that failed didnât fail because of a rough launch. They failed because the game wasnât good enough to keep people around.
this gets posted a lot and frankly, i find it hilarious, and i honestly doubt when these people come up with background stories like yours, cause i do have problems even considering these people to be adults.
Who in their right mind can say that expecting a product you purchased to work is considered entitlement?
It wasnt the customers decision to set this release date and advertise a product to launch. These were business decisions EHG made and they are to be taken accountable for that release. It was also their decision to not run a public and free stress test, so they could see the general interest in the game. They released the game, while obviously lacking the data, and technical know/how or resources.
Now granted, i did like that they kept communicating, and as it seems, they finally fixed the biggest issues. Still, the Launch reviews are very well deserved. It doesnt matter how many hours they put into fixing stuff. They arent our friends. They are a business that underdelivered and it is literally their job to get things right.
As i said, im glad they got stuff sorted out and i will change my review at a given point, but that twisted sense of what you consider âentiltementâ is absolutely toxic.