In a rather surprising turn of events, BioWare’s Head of Live Service took to the company blog this weekend to explain what happened to Anthem‘s VIP Demo. Chad Robertson apologized to the players for the problems they were having, and rather than sweeping everything under the rug, he went into detail about what happened, what they fixed, and what they intend to do moving forward. Here’s a little snippet from that post.
While there are a number of issues we dealt with yesterday, the three primary areas were:
- Platform connections – this was caused by the spike in players entering the game when we opened up. Unfortunately, these issues did not present themselves during our internal testing. Investigations are ongoing, and we will continue to apply fixes throughout the weekend.
- Entitlements – these are account flags that grant players things like their pre-order incentives and demo access. During the demo weekend, we identified a bug where VIP players with a specific combination of entitlements were being blocked from accessing the demo. We believe we’ve resolved most of these, but have additional cases we are addressing.
- “Infinite loads” – this is occurring for some players, particularly when they transition from Fort Tarsis to an expedition. We saw this only in isolated cases during internal testing and believed it was resolved. Unfortunately, the problem is exacerbated in the real-world where differences with player’s ISPs and home networks introduce new behavior.
Today, our top priorities are:
- Continue to resolve any reports of issues with login and entitlement problems.
- Implement fixes to address “infinite loads”. I want to be upfront that this is a difficult one, and something we may not resolve during this weekend — many players are not seeing this issue and the last thing we want to do is destabilize the experience for everyone.
- Improve server performance. We’ve heard reports of rubber-banding and other signs of server latency. We believe we can address this and will be conducting some small-scale experiments to confirm that. We may roll some fixes out this weekend or may wait for the open demo next weekend, depending on the level of risk to the overall service.
Considering that BioWare could have done like other Electronic Arts companies and simply kept quiet, but chose not to and acknowledged their mistakes, will probably garner them a little more favor with those players. However, they’re working out bugs with a released date less than a month away on February 22nd. No word yet if they’ll do another demo run to appease players who could not connect or if we’re just waiting for the release at this point.
About Gavin Sheehan
Gavin has been a lifelong geek who can chat with you about comics, television, video games, and even pro wrestling. He can also teach you how to play Star Trek chess, be your Mercy on Overwatch, recommend random cool music, and goes rogue in D&D. He also enjoys standup comedy, Let’s Play videos and trying new games, along with hundreds of other geeky things that can’t be covered in a single paragraph. Follow @TheGavinSheehan on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vero, for random pictures and musings.
(Last Updated January 27, 2019 3:46 pm )
