Crowfall launched last week and while most MMO launches don't got all that smoothly, it wasn't made easier thanks to ArtCraft dealing with DDoS attacks on its servers during launch day. The team behind the Throne War MMO took to their dev blog to share their first major communication update since the launch, talking about the issues as well as plans for the future.
The update by co-founder of ArtCraft Entertainment, Gordon Walton, took to the blog to provide...well...a Founder's Update. The blog post details what Crowfall has been dealing with since its initial launch, as well as talks a bit about why players might be seeing a more muted launch versus other MMOs which do grandiose marketing and events to celebrate its launch week.
Walton touches on the launch issues, calling the downtime an unfortunate "MMO launch day tradition," explaining that the team dealt with DDoS attacks both at launch and even some afterwards. However, ArtCraft has been able to work with Amazon's Web Services to ensure mostly smooth sailing since.
"As noted we had some downtime on launch day as we hit some issues that we had not uncovered in our pre-launch testing and we got those fixed and we have been up and running since then. We also had some (not unexpected) DDOS attacks at launch and after, and our AWS partners have been great at helping us cope with these. We’ve also had a couple of zone crashes each day (out of 90+ active zones). We are hyper-focused on fixing this issue, it’s our highest priority!"
Gordon also touched on the Dregs (Guild vs Guild) campaign going on in Crowfall, which the first started on the 9th of July and runs through the first of August. And for those who have felt the launch has been a little low-key, that is by design according to Walton himself, and does track wtih creative director Todd Coleman's statement the team is taking things "slow and steady."
"Our launch has been relatively low key on purpose, as we haven’t kicked off our advertising and serious promotional activities yet. We do plan to heavily promote and advertise the game both in our North American/EU markets and with the Brazil/Australia/New Zealand markets soon."
As far as what Crowfall players can look forward to in the future, the team is working on multiple updates, especially the first major update, which includes Eternal Kingdoms, updates affecting powers and more. The team is also looking at client optimizations to make large fights more manageable, as well as minizing queues to get players into the fights faster.
Crucially, however, there isn't a direct address of one of the major concerns Crowfall players have expressed - the population numbers floating around the internet since launch. Walton does allude that thousands of players are necessary to fill out a Dregs campaign, something that he states was "easily achieved" in the "largest markets," but the team stops short of actually overtly addressing the population concerns.
You can check out the full update on the dev blog. Addtionally, if you want to know how our reviewer, Matt, is getting on in his playthrough, you can check out our review-in-progress.
