Originally Posted by Scott Hartsman (view original source)
ArcheAge Launch Update #2 – More Capacity, Bonuses, and Faster Service
Hello again, all – We wanted to update you on how everything’s looking and share a progress report on where we’ve been since the last update a few days ago. I’m writing this on a Sunday night, as we’ve all been working through the weekend to bring you the best ArcheAge experience possible.
I’ve hopped around a half dozen servers this weekend, both in Europe and North America, and it’s incredible to see so many people having this amount of fun.
SERVER CAPACITY
Since our last update, we’ve welcomed three new North American worlds Ezi, Lucius, and Calleil into service. They’ve had an effect on improving queue times, as new folks have been steering themselves to the new ones as expected. The experience isn’t globally perfect yet, and queues do still exist, but the new servers and the patron queuing changes have had a noticeably positive impact overall. We’re seeing a lot more of: “I picked a new server, had a short wait, and no problems.” Progress, but still work ahead.
In Europe, we thank you for your incredible patience, and once again wish that there was an even faster way to get your hardware in place. On the internet, an hour feels like a day, and a day might as well be a week. We get that. Your new server hardware is in customs and is expected to be released to us on Tuesday your time. We have people standing by and ready to move as fast as humanly possible to get things rolled out for you.
We have moved to daily restarts to flush out AFKs clogging the servers making it take too long to get in – and we’ve been being aggressive with manual sweeps and bot/fraud banning as well. Around 10k of those have been banned over the last few days.
We’re aware of the bug that some folks are using to hold a spot indefinitely, and a fix is incoming. If all goes well, we’ll be receiving that in the next day and deploying it as soon as we get it through our QA. We do expect that one to help a lot, as we’ve seen cases at peak where far too much of a given world’s capacity was occupied by idle placeholders. Once that’s in, we’ll be able to more accurately evaluate where we should go with hardware capacity from here.
PATRON BONUS TIME
If you were a patron as of launch day, last week you were granted a bonus amount of patron time to cover the head start period. In an update we did while the servers were running on Saturday, we expanded that to more time and more people, essentially making Patron time only begin ticking as of yesterday.
Making sure that all patrons have their bonuses has been incredibly important to us, as is making sure we’re as generous as we can be, wherever we can, and things are now working well for the vast majority. There are still a handful of patrons who need touching up, and making sure that they’re taken care of remains the priority for our software teams.
BONUS FOUNDER’S ITEMS
Another thing that we’d like to make sure everyone knows – If you’ve already used up all six of your sets of Founder’s items, and if that’s what’s holding you back from trying out a new server, or if you just want one extra set to put on one of your existing characters, you can go to the account page at http://archeage.trionworlds.com/ and do this yourself!
This option went up last Friday, and you’re welcome to it whether or not you’ve had any issues. Look for the option up top that contains the words Founder’s Pack – Bonus and enjoy with our compliments. Do remember that you can only do this one time!
Even on top of the above bonuses, we are continuing to look into ways to make sure that everyone’s made good for their troubles during this launch.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Our CS capacity has continuously been increasing even in the short time since launch. Chat wait times are about two thirds faster than what they were last week, even though the weekend’s been the busiest time ArcheAge has seen as a whole. We‘re still pushing hard here to make sure even more people are wanting to help, and the next group of folks ready to help starts work first thing Monday morning.
AND A LIVE SERVICE NOTE
On Sunday, our North American servers did get poked at by a handful of DDOSes. Europe did not. Our network folks have been working with our ISPs on this and other security topics regularly, and were able to compensate and protect your experience quickly.
The game did stay up and full the entire time, both our infrastructure and countermeasures held, and we do sincerely apologize to those of you who got disconnected briefly. This isn’t the kind of thing we want any of you to be impacted by, and we continue to find new protections here as well.
As always, for faster information, the Launch FAQ thread is where you can go for more rapid updates. The team continues to update that as everything progresses.
And with that, I’ll let you get back to ArcheAge! We look forward to even more improvements this week, and will let you know as they happen.
- Scott
I know many people out there are having dificulties enjoying the game and are quick to dismiss Trion as anything other than a shady company just trying to rip them off, but I think this article does a nice job of showing all the things the are doing to ensure we all are having a positive gaming experience. They've added more customer support staff and even dealt with another DDoS attack (albeit it a smaller one than earlier in the week that caused server instability).
The bonus patron time is a nice addition for the many people out there demanding compensation, if you started with head start then you are getting over a week of free patron time, and they have given out the bonus founder's items to help out people that switched servers due to the queues.
It's music to my ears to hear that they've banned over 10k bots already, now if we could just get something done about all the gold sellers spamming chat.
What are your thoughts on this letter from Scott Hartsman? Do you feel like Trion is really trying to make things better? What actions would you like to be taken that you aren't seeing yet?
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