The Wayfinder team has moved the start of its global closed beta to May 24th due to server issues and the need for additional work.
According to the announcement to push the closed beta back by a couple of weeks, there are several reasons behind the decision:
“We’re committed to being transparent throughout Wayfinder’s development: so what happened?
Expanding this test from North America to the entire world is no small task. Since announcing our May 10th beta date, we’ve been working to ensure everything is in place to get players in and gather the critical data that these tests provide. Simultaneously, we’re also preparing the game for Early Access, which means we are preparing two large milestones at once with a relatively small team for a game of this scope. During the final preparations, we discovered substantial connection and matchmaking issues. We faced a critical decision: launch the beta with potential disconnects and matchmaking errors or delay to address these issues.”
With Airship Syndicate's continued promise to be transparent about development and what players can expect at a given stage, this announcement tracks with that. Given that they are scaling up the closed beta from North America to a global beta, making sure that your capacity is there to handle everything is necessary. They’re also emphasizing that “these tests and betas are genuine learning opportunities for our team and not marketing events”, so there’s lots of work left to be done and an NDA in place for those reasons.
We’ll have to see if the new date holds, and if two weeks is enough to work out the instability issues. Yet it is a better decision to release something to playtesters that is mostly stable and fun and not only draws your testers to stay for the duration, but to get them wanting more for Early Access and beyond.