Pax Dei’s huge Wilderness Alpha is on now, and there have been some server issues and annoying bugs affecting the servers and the experience. Mainframe has been on top of things, with the devs explaining how clay and rabbits were partly responsible for the issues.
When you invite more than 100,000 people to an alpha test, you'll have to expect some bugs and issues. even some of the most prepared teams will have them. Mainframe encountered a few technical challenges that really put the team to work, including how the test was stressing the technology stack in an unforeseen way. The team says they are running about 150 virtual servers between the US and Europe.
One region seemed to be more affected, and after much investigation, the team traced it to one database. That database, unfortunately, kept hanging and was pushing under much more strain than there should have been. Queries were timing out, and some player activities were failing unexpectedly. “This was a good example of a single loose screw having radiating effects across the whole stack,” they said on Discord in a series of updates.
While they were able to get that back up to good performance and player levels soon, it wasn't the end. The stereotype about rabbits multiplying is one to keep in mind here, Because that's what happened. Some of the memory consumption in a few zone servers were causing poor performance for those who are connected to certain nodes.
When they investigated, rabbits were everywhere. Everywhere. this was a big resource distribution error. Every rabbit counts as a full creature when they count NPCs on the server, and when player capacity pushes the servers to their limits, “NPCs need to be kept in control as they compete for the same CPU resources of the server for things like collision detection and pathfinding”. So, they had to kill the rabbits. But they didn't know which nodes were affected so they had to reboot entire zones.
This wasn’t the end of the issues. One issue involved clay spawns, and now there should be appropriate spawns. Ultimately, one of their other servers was beginning to approach 100% CPU. So of course the team had to jump into figure out the issues and address that. And then they were just your basic bugs like chests being inaccessible and some people having trouble downloading the launcher.
Throughout all of this, Mainframe is keeping to their vow to be transparent about everything, and with such a huge test going on, we’re all glad this is uncovered now. The team is too:“At the same time, there is a certain thrill to the hunt and a lot of gratification once a resolution is reached.
And this is why we are running a test like Alpha - and are so grateful to the community participating in an event like this”.
