Infinite loading screens, game crashes, sound breaks and whatnot. All of that was encountered on a high scale, pushing some of the participants out of the Anthem’s VIP Demo. Nonetheless, those sticking around could easily confirm the playtime they had was still satisfying.
Now that the Anthem VIP Demo is finished, we have received an apology, but also an explanation to each cause to those issues.
According to BioWare’s Head of Live, each of the issue has its own response code, except the fact that the servers reached max capacity, which was most likely caused due to a high number of players connecting at the same time. Once again, an issue that hasn’t been encountered during internal testing.
According to BioWare’s official blog, we’ve been acknowledged with all the issues and their deciding factors:
We’ve been testing the entire game and platform for several months, but there were a few things we missed; real-world play frequently leads to unexpected issues. Before I share details on this and what we’re still facing, I want to dispel one comment we’ve seen: that we under-planned for server capacity. To ensure stability, we intended to manage our servers to match the player population as it grew. Overall, we had excess capacity prepared for population increases, and continue to do so. That said, what’s important is that all parts of the game work as designed to meet players’ needs, and that did not happen in the opening hours.
- 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.
The issues being caused by somewhat an external trigger makes us breathe a lot easier, which means at launch, things are about to get a lot tidier.
If you ask us, we’re quite satisfied with the Anthem VIP Demo event, despite the countless of problems encountered. The time spent into it even after multiple crashes paid out just well.
