Wolcen Server Woes

Wolcen had what can only be described as a rough launch week. This is a game that has been in early access for roughly two years, but was also in what I would term as a “very alpha” state for much of that time period. Throughout the early access period it had a peak concurrency in the ballpark of 1000 players. Immediately after launching on Thursday this shot up rapidly to a peak concurrency in the range of 65,000 players and Steam Spy now lists 67,375 as the current peak. There is a massive difference between balancing a server for 1000 connections and balancing one for over 60,000 connections and as a result not surprisingly the game cratered hard under the crush of this traffic.

Gamers as the masters of hyperbole as we are, jumped straight to 11 and started thrashing Wolcen in every possible venue. For me as a grizzled veteran of bad game launches sat back realizing that they were dealing with “some shit” right now and the ship would right itself in time. The only place where they failed in my eyes is that they should have communicated the depth of the problem immediately. Yesterday morning the above message showed up on the steam forums explaining what was going on and what they were trying to do in order to fix it. I probably would have lead with this message on Friday, but that is also coming from someone with management experience in situations where projects have gone south quickly. The instinct is to batten down the hatches and rush into “fix all the things” mode, but the real first step should be formulating a message to get out to your customers.

There is also a scale thing going on here with this launch and my reaction to it. When you have someone like a Blizzard, UbiSoft or Electronic Arts and they botch the launch of a game, I have way less forgiveness in my heart because “they should know better”. They are AAA publishers that have been through more than one bit “massively multiplayer” launch and also have the resources that they can bring into play in order to rapidly scale their solution. The eponymous Wolcen Studio at least at the time of writing their “meet the team” piece is a group of 13 people working out of what looks like a house. My reaction as such is commensurate to the staggering effort it is for a first time team to publish a game like this and while they could potentially learn from the sidelines, the best laid plans are discarded when your servers suddenly have a 6500% increase in traffic.

The silver lining to all of this however is that unlike most ARPGs there is a way to play the game offline without needing to care about the servers burning down around the team. As such I spent a good chunk of the weekend running around with a brand new character on the offline mode and catching up to where I was in the progress in the online mode. This is my biggest complaint right now is the inability to flip characters between these two modes. I mean I get it from a “wanting to stop cheating” standpoint, but especially in the eyes of the bad launch we are dealing with it becomes frustrating to try and keep two different characters in sync with each other. Between the various late stage beta game-play and these multiple characters I have created I more or less determined what sort of build I wanted to go with.

I’ve been focused on a tanky build with high block and resistance and then I essentially leap into battle which gives me some initial rage and then spin to win. Bladestorm is specked out so that it doesn’t cost that much rage and each time I hit something I gain rage back allowing me to keep this reaction going for quite some time. I’ve also poured some points into Rage Conservation allowing me to take a bit of time to move between packs of mobs and also took the ability that allows me to gain rage while being hit. All combined allows me to spin around the battlefield in relative safety while chewing up encounters. I am sure I could probably make a more effective version of this build if I focused on bruiser gear and maybe dual wielded onehanders… but I am me and I have a sword and shield fetish.

Last night I managed to connect with Grace who has also been playing this when the servers came back online and were more or less stable. There seems to be a hefty group xp bonus and a bit of a catch up curve because when we started playing there were 3 levels difference between us and by the end of the night we were dinging within a few minutes of each other sitting at the same level. The teleport to friend system seems to work more or less like you would expect from Diablo 3. I am not sure what the restrictions on trade are but I seemed to be able to trade pretty much anything that I got as a drop as I was funneling Grace some spells that might be useful for her “Demon Hunter” build. The biggest thing we both noticed was how much loot the game seemed to drop in group mode because we were constantly running back to town to sell. I would love to see some sort of a sell all button to speed this process up.

In the grand scheme of things I am still very happy with this game and it is effectively the thing that I have wanted for quite some time. Wolcen is a game that takes the best bits of Diablo 3 and combines them with the best bits of Path of Exile, creating a hybrid that is more enjoyable at times than either of its predecessors. Time will tell if they can grow the game into something truly amazing, and I have yet to see what the end game is like. My hope is that all of the hyperbole surrounding this game will fade as people actually get access in order to play it. Wolcen is absolutely worth picking up especially for its sub $60 price tag. Here is hoping that they can nurture the game for the long run and keep making tweaks and additions in order to keep the content fresh.