tl;dr
- Sorry for the huge launch week misses
- We’ve fixed the matchmaker, reduced pricing, improved server stability, and
- increased progression speed
- As an indie studio self-publishing our first game, we’re working around the clock
- to make the game better every day
- We have a big update coming next week with a focus on improving performance
- We’re absolutely energized by your feedback and excitement – keep it coming
- Have suggestions for what you want to see? Drop us a note in the Discord
Santai Competitors,
Spectre Divide has officially been live for just over a week. As an indie team launching and self-publishing our first game, it’s been an exciting and exhausting first seven days.
The team is grinding around the clock to ship fixes, make improvements, and address your feedback.
Yesterday we shipped a patch with big updates, including 2x progression speed, Custom Matches of any player count, improved server stability, and more.
Our top priority for the next patch is improving client performance.
There’s lots to do, but we’re just getting started.
As we enter week two, it feels like the right moment to reflect on launch week, take you behind the curtain, and share a preview of what’s next.
But let’s start with Tuesday morning of last week, and our missteps right out of the gate.
FIXING THE MATCHMAKER
Within the first hour of being live, it became clear that our matchmaker wasn’t up to the task of processing the 30,000+ players that dove into queue.
After investigating, we discovered our matchmaking service – which puts you into a healthy match based on skill, region, party size, etc. – was taking minutes per cycle (way outside the expected bounds).
We immediately identified a bottleneck in the matchmaking architecture that prevented players from joining or leaving the queue while the matchmaking loop was in progress.
It took us the better part of launch day to narrow in on a fix, but the patch we rolled out in the early evening resolved the issues around joining/leaving the queue and reduced the matchmaking loop to a few seconds.
This was a huge miss on our part. We should have caught this architecture bottleneck ahead of launch. In hindsight, we missed some key indicators during load tests that were obvious red flags that matchmaking at scale with real players would fall over.
BETTER COSMETIC PRICING
Second, we moved quickly to improve pricing for cosmetics across the board after we missed the mark with launch.
We really appreciate your direct feedback on this. Sorry again that we got this wrong.
BopNSwap, Spectre Divide’s Game Director, shared all the context in a blog post on the evening of launch day.
A massive thank you to everyone who’s spent anything to support Spectre so far.
We plan to keep the game 100% free to play. As an independent studio who’s self-publishing, every dollar you spend directly funds development and goes toward making the game better.
SERVERS UNDER SIEGE
To cap off launch day, at around 9pm PT we started seeing random CCU drops fitting the pattern of a single-source denial of service (DoS) attack.
For players, this manifested as being stuck unable to login to the game or being stuck loading – the ultimate nightmare.
We worked with our backend and server partners to setup protections to prevent single-IP attacks. That resolved the outage, but we ran into similar unexpected CCU drops during the next few days.
Over the course of the investigation, we’ve discovered a series of minor issues, which ranged from hitting invisible rate limits within our hosting provider to misconfigured admin tooling that we use to manage the game. We’ve addressed all these, and we’ve been working around the clock to set up additional metrics and alerting for future detection and mitigation.
On Saturday morning, we were the target of a malicious DDoS attack on our backend. Fortunately, our backend partners gracefully handled this for us with minimal impact to players thanks to the protections we put in place earlier in the week.
Special shout out to our partners at Pragma, AWS, and Hathora who’ve been in the trenches with us investigating these issues.
LOGIN ISSUES
A large number of players, especially those behind network firewalls, had trouble connecting to our platform services, receiving an innocuous “Cannot Create Party Join Request” error.
We discovered this was related to our region detection flow – what we use to make sure you’re playing at the lowest possible ping.
On Saturday morning, we simply moved our ping endpoints to a different port which seems to have resolved the issue for most players.
If you still find yourself running into this, you’ll receive a new error message with more context. We’re currently working on a solution for this that should be ready in an upcoming patch.
ADDRESSING YOUR FEEDBACK
Despite all the launch week havoc, we have been absolutely energized by your feedback. Keep it coming.
We’ll be deploying a few patches over the next two weeks. Our top priorities:
- Nailing client performance and reducing framerate spikes
- Improving core gameplay based on your feedback
- Making sure servers are online around the clock
- Tuning and improving our anti-cheat systems based on live data
- Fixing bugs that take away from the moment-to-moment fun
If you have suggestions for what you’d like to see, make sure to drop them in #give-feedback channel in Discord. We’re reviewing every single post.
Also, the team was able to pull forward Ranked for a surprise Friday launch and lower the requirement to 5 Casual Wins based on your feedback. You asked – they delivered.
We started on Spectre Divide because we love competitive shooters and wanted to share something fresh with this community. We’re in it for the long haul, and we can’t do it without you.
Thanks again for all your support. Between the long hours putting out these fires, we’ve been out there grinding the Ranked ladder alongside you.
If you're enjoying Spectre Divide, please consider leaving a review on Steam.
This helps new players to discover the game. And if you've already left a review, thank you! We appreciate your support. 🙏
If you see us in Discord or a heads-up match, make sure to say Hi.
gl hf,
Nate, CEO & Cofounder