In yesterday's update we introduced a highly-anticipated outpost mission including the entirety of the Olympus map. Unfortunately this was gated behind the 'Nightfall' mission incorrectly, and players were still unable to access it even after completing the pre-requisite mission.
Hotfixes are disruptive due to downloads
We do apologize for doing the hotfix, as we know it is disruptive with how the downloads work and Steam has to verify the entire game. This can take a long time, depending on your storage hardware. Unfortunately we really do need to get this change out, as it restricts access to the main feature of this week's update.
'Daybreak' Outpost Pre-Requisites Removed
As many players have already completed the 'Nightfall' mission, 'fixing' the problem would require us to manually update their database records to reflect the correct value. After the server outages experienced last night, we've opted to instead avoid these changes by removing the mission completion requirement entirely- making the 'Daybreak' outpost mission available to everyone.
A Note on Server Outages
In the ~15 or so hours since yesterday's update, we've experienced several outages lasting from 1-2 hours each. We've experienced similar outages in the past, and as part of a long-term effort to mitigate these issues have been working towards a solution that places less dependency on our online infrastructure and puts more control in the hands of players through offerings like a dedicated server package. While this work has already been underway for some time, the outages tonight will force us to look at how we can expedite this even further - possibly at the expense of other development work. These discussions will certainly be top of the agenda for Monday morning.
In the meantime, in the active connections graph below you'll see we've performed a couple of reinstalls of one part of our back-end infrastructure. We've reduced the number of nodes with each successive attempt, with an aim to reduce the overall memory footprint. As Dean mentioned in his 4AM announcement, this treats the symptoms but is not a permanent solution. We're hopeful this will keep the system available while we work through our expedited replacement plans already underway.
Finally, I'd like to apologize to all the players who were affected by these outages, and extend a massive thanks to Dean, Ben, Shin and the other engineers who worked through the night to either work directly on the issue or to keep people on Discord and the Steam forums informed on their progress.