Here at The Farm 51, we were thrilled to finally release World War 3 as a free-to-play Open Beta on September 29. The game has been under development for years, welcoming new players into its community across different phases such as Early Access and Closed Beta. Even after all this time, the response to the latest phase of our journey was beyond anything we could have imagined.
We want to thank all the players who helped us get to this point and everyone who’s played World War 3 in Open Beta. Your support means the world to us, and we are grateful to have such a passionate, dedicated community cheering the game on.
As you know, the launch wasn’t smooth for us or for you. We quickly became aware that our servers were not equipped to handle the demand we were facing, and required more technical adjustments. This caused critical issues affecting processes such as server connection, general gameplay, transferring items from your Inventory, and more (we’re tracking the status of most known issues in this article).
Our team has been diligently working to track and report player feedback, find bugs and issues, and resolve them as quickly as possible. The game has undergone regular maintenance to deploy critical patches, and we will continue to take these measures as and when possible to ensure World War 3 is constantly improving and stabilizing.
We achieved major breakthroughs with the patch released on October 7, and have continued to make great progress in subsequent updates, including the recent deployment of additional servers.
In addition to our ongoing work fixing all known issues, we are currently focused on three main goals:
- Game optimization
- Database optimization
- Improving the distributed master server
In a nutshell, addressing these three issues will allow for a smoother, more stable play experience, let us better track and handle user data, progression, actions, and items, and greatly ease the load distribution of the game and its database.
Let’s delve a little deeper into these focus points, and see what it means for the game and for your experience.
OPTIMIZING DATABASES AND IMPROVING THE MASTER SERVER CONNECTION
For every action a player makes in World War 3 — for example, shooting an enemy — the game sends a request to the database to update information, with those requests being handled by the master server. The more requests, the more stress loaded on the master server. The more it gets loaded, the higher the chance some requests may be left unregistered. If that happens, those requests will be sent repeatedly without action, artificially raising the number of requests. If the master server cannot handle requests, different subsystems (including authorization, information display, and matchmaking) could fail.
Improved communication with the main game database — which contains information about accounts, players, their actions, and progression — is key to improving the general World War 3 experience. Our goal is to optimize the database connection to the master server, and find the lowest possible number of requests that the database can send without impacting the functionality of the game. We have already deployed a number of great optimization mechanics in the last few weeks, which has drastically reduced the occurrence and intensity of many of the issues that players have experienced since launch.
There are a number of ways we are looking at improving in this area, including:
- Launching More Servers: Increasing the number of dedicated servers is a surefire way to improve server capacity. We launched two new servers during the week commencing October 17 and will review the need for more in the future when other optimization work is complete.
- Game Optimization: The database makes requests to the master server, while the game makes requests to both the database and the master server. The fewer requests being processed at any one time, the better.
- Distributed Master Server: Server optimization is important, but the challenge is to find a way to better distribute the load that the master server must handle among the cores used by the master server. Currently, we have four cores, but the stress is directed through only one of them. The more cores we use, the less stress on each of them. Distributing the load gives us the potential for a much higher player capacity. We have plans to deploy this in the coming week.
- Improving Matchmaking Geolocation: Some players may have experienced issues connecting to servers far from their location (for instance, EU players landing in US servers), leading to bad ping and other issues. While this redistribution can be helpful while certain servers are overloaded, or if certain servers don’t have enough players to start a match without pulling from other regions, this can create a frustrating and lower-quality play experience. Optimization and improving this process to ensure players land in the best place is very important for our targeted user experience and for handling server load.
- Increasing Data Load Capacity (Distributed Database): Similar to the distributed master server but on a database level, the higher the number of requests we can distribute to and from the database, the less stress this creates for the master server, and ultimately, the better the performance.
NEXT STEPS FOR WORLD WAR 3
Creating a great game experience for everyone playing World War 3 is our number one priority. Here are the next steps we plan to take:
- Technical Roadmap: In the week commencing October 24, we will release a detailed roadmap showcasing what we’re working on, what we’ve been working on (and fixed), and our technical plans for the near future.
- Regular Updates: We’ve already made great progress with optimizing and improving World War 3, and we plan to keep on going. Keep an eye on our official social channels for details about maintenance, patches, and more.
- New Content: Ensuring everyone can play World War 3 without issue has taken our attention recently, but new content is also on the way. Stay tuned for more details!
Thank you for your patience and understanding. It’s been a difficult few weeks, and we apologize for the rocky start. We hope we can count on your support as we right the ship and set course for a brighter horizon!