Star Trek Online servers overwhelmed

Published on 20-01-10 at 10:15 AM AEST by

rec

Since pre-purchasing Star Trek Online via Steam and participating in the beta, I've seen a ludicrous amount of patching and server down-time. My experiences are shared, but the developer suggests that it's not a fundamental or long term problem; it's simply because participation levels have crushed their predictions - they just weren't ready for the load. The developers have explained the situation on their official bulletin:

Reality has exceeded even our wildest expectations. We looked at numbers from Closed Beta, numbers from games we've worked on in the past, and some numbers that float around the games industry. Based on those numbers, we predicted that about 65% of the keys we generated would eventually turn into active players (some keys never get delivered, others are lost in spam boxes, some are never redeemed, etc.). And, we predicted about 1/6 of those redeemed keys would turn into players that game at the same time. It's what we call our concurrent users or CCU, for short.

The actual numbers crushed our predictions.

So, we tore apart our logs and began doing a lot of extra optimization work even while we stumbled upon some truly bizarre crashes that can only appear with this sort of load. The result? The shard has been steadily improving over the first few days of Open Beta. Given the hardware we're adding and a couple more fixes we have in the pipe, shard performance and stability should continue to improve over the coming week.

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Tags: mmo, star trek online

8 Comments

Aegis - 20-01-10, 10:43 AM
They had similar issues with Champions Online - but that game has steadily improved over the months since release and it's pretty solid now. Cryptic *does* fix things when they're broke.

Milenko - 20-01-10, 02:13 PM
Given that they are experiencing higher loads than they anticipated; their servers have been incredibly stable and lag-free.

cmdr_lynchie - 20-01-10, 03:51 PM
I finally got on to this last night (Lex on the U.S.S Astrid).

Not bad, not bad.

Rough around the edges, as one might expect, but pretty decent. If the game has a decent amount of content, I can see it being a good and worthwhile game. That is a big if though, most MMOs fail hard at providing enough content.

I was also bitterly disappointed in the ship builder, after all the hype it received. Seriously, 4 components, 3 choices per component. Colours? Four shades of gray.

The avatar builder is what I have come to expect from them though, very good.

cmdr_lynchie - 21-01-10, 01:31 PM
Been writing a rough review of the game as I play it if anyone is interested in getting an idea of what it is like. Only two parts so far, but will continue to update as I find more interesting things:

Star Trek: The MMO Generation

rec - 21-01-10, 02:47 PM
Hey Lex - just letting you know that we've just enabled blogs here at Gamers-Underground.com - feel free to use that to post your thoughts/reviews and similar content there. It's a much better medium for large posts, as opposed to using a forum thread etc.

Although I'm still needing to finalise how the blogs look.

cmdr_lynchie - 21-01-10, 02:52 PM
Sounds good. I will probably play for a few more hours tonight (if server is up), and then condense my review in to a blog post.

rec - 21-01-10, 02:56 PM
Sounds good - look forward to reading it.

Aegis - 21-01-10, 03:03 PM
nice work Lex - i had a few games in the closed beta and enjoyed it, but the lag was horrendous (not really sure how much was my machine vs the US ping) - your review makes me want to give it another go... maybe if i get my new machine setup in time i'll jump back in the beta and check it again before the lifetime sub options expire