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Hey everyone,
Well, let me begin by apologizing for the absolute sh*t show today. The initial publish this morning should not have taken anywhere near as long as it did (we were over our estimate by 1.5 hours), then immediately realizing that anyone who logged in after the servers came back up were losing their accrued A7.
We decided to lock login after a bug surfaced which was causing continents with mid/high-populations to exhibit severe lag, followed by crashing and disconnecting everyone. While the A7 bug was bad, we knew we could restore any that was lost. But the stability issue was ultimately the reason we decided to keep the servers locked all afternoon, until we had a fix in place. Looking back through PTS server logs at how we could have missed the cause of this crash; the change was definitely there, but it wouldn’t have caused the server performance issues/crash until the continents had high enough populations. Going forward, we are trying to devise ways to better simulate these types of situations, but not require hundreds/thousands of actual players to login to PTS to verify.
First, for everyone that logged in after the servers came back up this morning/afternoon and had their A7 wiped - we’ve gone ahead and given you the maximum amount of A7 that you’re able to accrue (5000), regardless of how little you may have had, in an effort to make up for the bug that we failed to catch before publishing this morning.
For everyone else that didn’t lose any A7, but didn’t get to login today, we have activated 2XP for All that will run until Friday morning (Pacific). I know it doesn’t completely make up for the time lost today, but it’s the least we could do and hopefully it helps make up for today’s fiasco…
Again, I apologize for the inconvenience of today. We know we can’t let this happen.
Since I have your attention, I want to provide a brief update on some of the initiatives we’ve been working toward…
Monthly Game Updates
As we’ve seen in the past, when a major update drops, a LOT of players will comeback, new players will discover PS2 and existing players will continue playing. But if we don’t continue supporting the game at a regular cadence with new features/content, QoL improvements and bug fixes, etc, a lot of players disappear.
One of our goals for 2020 was to not just release Escalation and then go silent for months until our next big update. We have a larger team, and therefore higher expectations. Today’s game update marks five weeks since the Escalation launch, and a portion of the dev team has already been hard at work on the May update. Beyond May, we have a game update for June that preliminary work has already started. Between each of these updates, and in addition to the Outfit Wars schedule, we are working with various community groups to coordinate/promote in-game events to maintain the amazing momentum we’ve received from the Escalation launch.
In other words, the RPG team has lofty goals for 2020 and we intend to deliver them.
In-Game Events
Hopefully all of you had a chance to watch (or participate) in the first Outfit Wars last weekend. While it was a bit bumpy for some of the participants, it was amazing to watch and the broadcasters did a phenomenal job covering each match in every region around the globe. As u/Wrel mentioned in his release notes post, we have scheduled Outfit Wars Alpha Cycle 2 to begin enlistment on May 1st and the next War taking place on May 16th.
But as much as we are looking forward the next round of Outfit Wars, we are just as excited to see the events that the community has planned – like the Battle of the Bastions event on SolTech a couple weeks ago, Bastion Smash that is scheduled for Saturday April the 25th, the PSB Lane Smash and Community Smash events. Going forward, we plan to continue promoting these community driven events and provide as much dev support as we are able.
Chinese and Russian Translations
I provided a brief update a couple weeks ago that there was a delay in the delivery of the translation from our translation contractor, due to the current COVID-19 situation. However, we finally received the initial drop yesterday and should have the final drop of translations tomorrow. Once we have the final drop, we’re looking at 2-3 weeks before it hits live. However, we intend to publish to PTS before that so native Russian and Chinese speakers can provide feedback, in addition to our internal localization QA testing process.
Finally, the next dev stream…
As you know, Rogue Planet has been working from home over the past month. Even though we’ve had to work through some communication and logistical hurdles along the way, we are making every effort to not skip a beat. This includes dev streams. Even though we can’t use the Daybreak broadcast studio, we are in the process of preparing our next dev stream to take place remotely, because we are excited to share details about the next game update! So as of now, we are planning to broadcast our next dev stream the week of April 27th. It might be a bit janky, and Carto might not be wearing pants, but hey, we have to make some sacrifices. The formal announcement will likely go out later next week with an exact date and time.
Thank you all again. As usual, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask here or "@AndySites" "@WrelPlays" "@Game_Dev_Carto" on Twitter.
Thanks,
Andy
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