Cryptic had a bit too much success over the weekend. The combination of the One Year Anniversary and the long awaited return of the Featured Episode series really brought out Starfleet Captains in droves.
Unfortunately the massive turnout of players was a bit more than the servers could handle. Tipa, Thamupp, Longasc, and myself were mid-battle within the abandoned Romulan Vault when the servers crashed. While I was able to log back in right away, I wasn’t able to load back into the game.
The crash was disappointing. I expected Saturday to be a busy day, but I don’t think anyone anticipated game launch numbers of players. According to a forum post by Executive Producer Daniel Stahl, that is the level of activity they saw:
Just to add some statistics – we had more players on Holodeck this a.m. for the new Feature Episode than we’ve had in game since the launch of Season 2 back in June. A huge number and it definitely triggered an issue we haven’t seen in months.
I wasn’t able to sit down and reattempt the mission until about 11:30 pm on Saturday evening. By that time the servers had settled down and I was able to finish The Vault without any lag or other problems. Hopefully Cryptic learned enough from Saturday’s outage that further episodes won’t have problems. Although if you’re going to have a problem, too many players is a nice one to have.
Regarding the mission itself, let me just say, “Wow!” I don’t want to go into spoilers, especially since Tipa has already done a much better job of summarizing the mission (warning there are spoilers there), but it’s very good. The mission itself puts a new spin on things since you’re limited to a shuttlecraft, the story is very good and includes voice work for two of the main characters, and the visuals are amazing. Flying through the interior of the secret Romulan base was breathtaking.
I can’t wait to see what’s in store for episode two, Mine Enemy.
Lieutenant 8! *cheers*
Congratulations! Once you get to Lieutenant 11, you qualify for promotion and a new ship.
The mission is definitely very cool.
Still, this blunder is unacceptable. They probably managed to drive away a lot of players they would have won without the crash, this way they will never recover from their not so good reputation.
It really bugs me that they always manage to turn a mission into a solo-mission, crash the server or whatever else so that they always manage to screw us up when we want to play together.
Well, let’s try again next week. 🙂
I’m not so sure that they drove any players away with Saturday’s outage. Anyone who came back just to try out the new mission would’ve had to subscribe, so Cryptic has three more big Saturday’s to show that they’ve fixed the issue.
Still, it was disappointing. That said, the timing worked out pretty well for me. My son woke up a few minutes after the crash so I wouldn’t have been able to play much longer anyway. Always a silver lining. 😉
That is amusing. If it’s a problem they haven’t seen for a while, I wonder if they didn’t bother to work on it since the population numbers weren’t ever high enough to trigger the issue.
Either it wasn’t a priority, they thought they’d fixed it the first time, or they just didn’t have the right stats/tools the first time around. Working as a programmer myself (albeit not in the gaming industry) I’ve seen all three scenarios happen. There really is no substitute for having hundreds of real users pounding on your servers.
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