So the new MMO launched yesterday, and have been more than a little bit distracted as a result. Although the game itself runs well, and is very popular (they hit 700k concurrent users), the launch of course had its issues.
The major concern for a lot of players was initially just the naming of characters. By the settings, a given character name is locked to your account, and is shared across all servers and regions. Thus, if someone in the EU connected and used your chosen name before you (since EU went live first), you lose your chosen name. Purely cosmetic of course, but lots of players get very concerned about that. The solution was to log into the EU servers at launch (approximately 2 AM EST), make a placeholder character, and claim the name. Then recreate the character on the long term server once it launched later in the day. Unfortunately, that then complicated the issues in EU, by adding a lot of additional volume to the connectivity, rapidly pushing those servers into a queueing state. For us, eager to ride the wave, the process was not really all that painful, and we were done and offline within the first 30 minutes.
The much bigger concern came in as the US east coast servers started to launch, and the volume was notably higher than apparently planned. Very quickly, all existing servers became full, and the queues began to grow. Each server is capped at 2000 players, and another player could not sign in until a previous one dropped. Thru the day, Amazon added more servers, effectively doubling their capacity, but even late last night it was multiple hours waiting before an account could connect. From some sites, queue times were showing as a few hours, to multiple days.
To react, we opted to move to a less populated server, at least at the time we chose it, and settled on the Frislandia server. For most of the day time that was fine, but late in the US afternoon, it too became choked, so the kids ended up having to wait multiple hours before they could finally connect. Given that the game will disconnect away from keyboard or inactive characters, it became a bit of a juggling game for me, showing some activity on my system, the wife’s, and both kids, while they were out at their various activities. It wasnt until late in the evening before all four of us were cleanly on the game, and our friends were online, allowing me to finally link the friends and form the company.
In comparison, checking this morning, and the server is only at 50% capacity, with zero wait time. By about 11 AM, the queue was just starting, and I expect by this evening the wait time will be long again. Fortunately (or unfortunately) we have lots of sporting activities this evening, so it likely wont be a factor regardless.
If you opt to join us, look for the Frislandia server. Our company is Zephyr Guard (a placeholder, and potential to change), and a member of the Syndicate faction. Haven’t really sorted out a base of operations yet, but leaning towards Monarch’s Bluff. In particular, my character presence is Gavvin, and I welcome any future contacts.
Once things settle down, my plan is still to stream our adventures, though the schedule is to be determined and I haven’t settled on Twitch or YouTube. Advantages to both, but really prefer YouTube.
