ADDRESSING ISSUES WITH INFLUX OF PLAYERS
Battalion 1944 launched at 17:00 GMT and players were instantly put into games. Across that hour, Battalion has seen tens of thousands of players launch the game at once.
During our beta we had over 4,000 concurrent players, this is the number we used to anticipate day one players. We have seen four times that amount, all trying to matchmake at once and our server loads are currently MUCH higher than anticipated from those numbers. This is why you’re currently seeing the issues that are happening right now.
The future looks bright, but we need to work right now because we owe that to our community. Our existing fans know we like to operate as an open book, so we’d like to explain exactly what’s happening.
Client Update Available Tonight
We will be pushing a client update tonight to help solve the issue below, aiming to fix our second process. Please watch our social media accounts on twitter @Battalion1944 and @Brammertron or on Reddit /r/Battalion1944
So why exactly is this happening?
Our matchmaker uses two processes to get players into games. One is on our end, the matchmaking code is functioning how it was intended to function, this is almost entirely thanks to the testing from our alpha & beta testers. Players will be queued into games and eventually get into a game once the server has been created for them.
The second process is the allocation - which is handled by a third party. This is the part of the matchmaking process which has put a large halt on players getting into games because of the high server load - to the extent of fully stopping players from entering the game entirely.
We have hit a cap on this third party account that was never intended to be hit and the service provider are freezing all traffic through our servers. This is a protocol built in to protect us in the event of a DDOS attack, however, in this instance where Battalion is extremely popular the service is working against us. This same service is affecting joining community servers.
We are working on a fix for this issue and you should be able to begin matchmaking again soon.
Server Browser/Community Servers
Community Servers also speak to the matchmaking service as part of our anticheat service.
“The fault lies with Bulkhead Interactive & Square Enix Collective for incorrectly anticipating the huge influx of players we would receive, we are incredibly humbled to receive this many players on Day one. It’s up to my team and I over the next few hours, days, and weeks to show you what we’re made of and show you we’re a dev team you can trust. I hope you see our updates as good communication. We will absolutely be learning from this and we’ll be showing you our updates through the weekend and next week”
BRAMMERTRON
Studio Lead @ Bulkhead Interactive
The most important information from us as developers to you as players:
We are working on and releasing a fix to resolve the complete halt on matchmaking.
Very soon there will be a small patch and client update. You must install this update to be able to get into unranked and arcade games. What this patch does is entirely remove the function of the third party and puts the stress back onto the servers and no longer the third party.
This means you WILL be able to get into games, however there will be long wait times with the ‘Match Ready - Allocating Server’ message. There will be a long wait time but this does mean you will be able to get into games.
How are we compensating players?
Currently, our focus is on how to fix the existing issues. But players will be rewarded for their patience and for supporting us in our first days of Early Access.
This is a TEMPORARY launch day solution.
Early Access is intended as a constant development period for us and matchmaking systems are a part of that development process. Throughout Early Access we will learn to manage our player numbers much better. It will also quickly become very easy to anticipate how many players we have and at what time as well as improve the entire matchmaking experience.
We need to thank you all so much for your enthusiasm and patience.
We’re seeing feedback that when players are getting into games that the game itself is awesome and exactly the back to the roots experience people wanted. We now need to deliver on getting players into games to make sure players can access that experience and rest assured we are doing everything we can to make that happen as soon as possible.
TL;DR
Client update and fix coming within the next few hours. This is a temporary fix - server wait times will still be sometimes up to 10 minutes, but this will be fixed this week.