Sandbox MMO Hegemony Launch Marred By Issues, Results in Delay

Hegemony, the Minecraft-built sandbox MMO, went live earlier but ran into issues, causing a further delay.

The crux of the issue is apparently saving of objectives which provide players quest-states once players complete the necessary task to advance. A dev blog outlined that while this was fine during testing with 200 players, the launch with 2000 players brought it down.

At launch, the number of players overloaded servers, as outlined in another dev blog which cited,

• Instances crashing
• Database overloaded causing corrupted quest state and experience loss
• Website account and game account linking down

In fact, the team took to Reddit to provide a much lengthier explanation of their network infrastructure. After all this was taken into account, the team announced a delay,

“We woke up today and had a long and frank discussion on what to do and we did not make this decision lightly, the right thing to do is turn off the servers and fix things before releasing, rather than leave the game open with quest saving issues. We understand we would lose players, and also dissapoint a lot of people that feel the game is still playable, but we want we stand by closing the servers and fixing the fundamental issue with the quest saving system.”

To that end, the team will have to completely rewrite how quest-states like tasks, tags, and objectives are saved. The delay now cites March 28 as the new launch, with potential community testing taking place in the intervening weekends.