Swords of Legends might have had a smooth EU launch last weekend, players on the other side of the pond had a less than stellar experience thanks to myriad issues with the North American server. Gameforge, the publisher of SOLO in the West, has promised to "continue to work diligently" to ensure that players are getting the best experience possible moving forward.
The North American server of Swords of Legends Online has seen its fair share of issues on launch weekend, with players reporting instability and performance problems when logging into the MMO after its launch on Friday. For their part, Gameforge has been working to alleviate the issues, with the studio promising in a statement to MMORPG.com today that they will be working to ensure that the experience of its players continues to improve.
"We are very humbled and grateful by the great reception the game has been seeing from media, players, and content creators," Gameforge says in a statement through PR. They continued: "and will continue to work diligently with partners such as Microsoft in order to ensure that we are delivering fun and immersive gaming experiences for our players."
In the same statement, Gameforge praised the EU launch of Swords of Legends Online, which by all accounts has been relatively smooth, especially in comparison to the NA launch of the MMO. The North American servers have seen players, especially those in Oceania and even on the West Coast of the United States deal with server issues, especially high ping at spots.
As I've worked through my review thus far the stuttering and rubberbanding caused by the ping issues has made SOLO nigh unplayable at times. However, when we asked the team whether or not there were plans to spin up a second NA server to try to alleviate the ping issues, Gameforge's Vice President of Products, Noemi Feller, tells us that at the moment it's not in the cards - though that's not set in stone forever.
"It is important to note that even though the network issues reported for the NA server this past weekend have now been resolved, high ping issues are a separate matter more commonly caused by physical distance from the servers, and usually reported by players that play from countries / regions that are physically too far away from the server location (for example, Oceania). This is normal for any game and cannot be solved without offering additional servers closer to their locations. While we do not have plans to provide additional servers at the moment, that could possibly change in the future depending on the number of community members that play from said territories."
As far as the current issues plaguing the MMO's NA server, SOLO's team states that much of the issues have been ironed out after extensive talks with Microsoft over the weekend. The NA server, which is based in Virginia, and throughout the weekend the team rolled out fixes during down-times to stabilize the experience. Feller tells us that more are planned in the future to "further improve the overall experience" for players across both the EU and NA servers.
Gameforge states that Swords of Legends Online is continuing to grow since the weekend, with over 200K copies sold in the first few days since launch. Feller tells MMORPG.com that the team at Gameforge are confident the current servers are able to sustain the population, "even as it continues to grow," stating that additional servers themselves would not have resolved the problems plaguing the NA server over the weekend.
"Even though our global playerbase continues to rapidly grow, we have the infrastructure necessary to continue supporting them without any detriment. Additional servers are not a solution and could not have resolved the issues reported for the NA server over this past weekend. The servers are properly equipped to sustain our playerbase, even as it continues to grow. This is verified by the performance of SOLO’s EU servers, which have been running quite smoothly since the launch. The cause was related to network issues that required action from Microsoft."
The team, according to Feller, is monitoring the servers and while players should be, as a whole, experiencing better performance and such now compared to launch, the team will "continue to monitor and implement additional changes if they become necessary."
Swords of Legends Online launched on Gameforge's own client, Steam and the Epic Games Store on July 9th, bringing one of China's most popular franchises and MMOs to the West. We're working on our review and will have the first of our features this week heading into the full review later this month.
