The launch of the Anthem VIP demo turned into problems for EA systems, despite the harvested server capacities
On January 25, Origin launched a closed demo of Anthem, a game service from BioWare. Electronic Arts gave access to the title to a limited number of users for three days. But Anthem just doesn’t let them play with themselves.
Since Friday, players have been unable to break into the VIP demo for hours. Many of those who succeeded were waiting for endless downloads, crashes and technical errors. Some could not connect to the game at all — there were no login rights.
Moreover, after launching the Anthem demo, problems began even on the servers of other titles presented in Origin (for example, Battlefield, FIFA, Command & Conquer). And Origin itself was unavailable to many players. It turned out that because of the VIP demo of a new product from BioWare, the entire EA infrastructure suffered.
As a result, the very trial version that was supposed to sell Anthem to VIP users may bury the hopes of EA and BioWare for a successful release. Many players fear that the public demo, which will be launched this week, will have the same problems. And the fact that BioWare had to apologize for its next project does not inspire optimism at all.
How does BioWare explain all this
These problems were a “surprise” for BioWare. Although she was clearly preparing for any surprises, for which she tested the game for “months”. This was stated by the head of the development of live services at BioWare Chad Robertson (Chad Robertson).
We missed an important thing: real-time gaming is often accompanied by unexpected problems.
Head of Live Services Development at BioWare
According to Robertson, BioWare made a mistake when planning the server capacity. The developers had prepared additional capacities in advance and wanted to increase the capacity of servers in proportion to the growth of the audience. Anyway, BioWare’s plan didn’t work out.
By the way, some people had problems with online and access to Anthem servers even at the stage of closed alpha testing (it took place on December 8 and 9).
How does BioWare fix it all
The developers spent the whole weekend correcting the situation. First of all, they try to solve the problem with endless downloads. This problem is promised to be fixed by February 1.
The studio is also working on improving servers. But to do this, you need to understand the reason why players could not en masse get into the game, says Robertson. *
* One of the players suggested that this problem arose due to an ill-conceived reconnection system. When trying to reconnect, Anthem sends so many requests to the server that it turns into a DDoS attack.
Anthem will be released on February 22.
Also on the topic:
- Kotaku: Anthem will determine the fate of BioWareBioWare chose the Frostbite engine because of the multiplayer
