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Donkey Crew, developer of Last Oasis, got a rocky reception when it tried to launch the new MMO last month. Now that the game is online again, it has explained what went wrong with the servers and what players will look forward to in the future (via MMOs).
After being in beta for one year, the game entered early access on Steam at the end of March. However, all was not well, because players were encountering connection issues which only worsened over the course of the launch weekend. “Our coders have been working day and night to solve this issue and they need some sleep,” said one Donkey Crew developer at the time. “We need to properly investigate why our load testing didn’t pick this up and what went wrong, and figure it out properly and solve it.”
The Last Oasis servers were taken offline for one week, and the developer offered full refunds for the game for those who’d weathered the worst of the issues, regardless of play time. Now, Donkey Crew has been able to understand what was causing the problems. It expressed that the team “felt prepared for the launch and wouldn’t have released yet otherwise,” but it was, in essence, a sudden surge of issues that all happened at the same time.
“We were pushing quick fixes out, but in such a short period of time, we couldn’t have truly understood the problems without proper debugging,” the studio explained. The server shutdowns were the result of “tens of thousands” of players entering and exiting servers, and the lobby and joining queues were not equipped to cope with that number of people playing simultaneously. “Our systems were essentially stuck in a loop with multiple issues affecting each other. As all the servers were shutting down and restarting, over 20k people were trying to rejoin at the same time, leading to our queue system failing, which then kept overloading the master server, letting only a few people to join a time until the master server would shut off again and take all servers down with it. And the cycle would continue,” stated Donkey Crew.
Reacting to all of this at launch “felt like rebuilding a house of cards in the middle of a hurricane,” and the developer understood players’ frustration. “Taking a lot of pressure and stress into account mixed with worsened communication due to the quarantine situation made things even more difficult,” it said. “After we announced the servers going down for maintenance, most of the team went to get some sleep after days of working non-stop and woke up to something we did not expect: a lot of you expressing understanding and support.”
“We can’t tell you how much of a morale boost that was for everyone on the team. It helped us to get our s*** together: organize properly, analyze logs and code and fully check what went wrong. Over the last few days, we can easily say we found a lot,” stated Donkey Crew. After prolific debugging and testing, the servers were switched on for a stress test, and seeing that nothing untoward has occurred since the weekend, the game will stay online. Furthermore, there is a new patch in the pipeline which will let players change their character’s name and appearance. This is on its way “soon,” and the character deletion feature will follow in time.
Last Oasis is in early access on PC through Steam.
