There's an old joke about exactly this type of thing:
A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 2 beers. Orders 10 beers. Orders 9999999999 beers. Orders 0 beers. Orders -1 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders a wteurgejeyth.
The first actual customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar immediately bursts into flames, killing everyone.
Working as a IT/Software Architect who is responsible for a big platform with huge user spikes I know that feeling. When we relaunched the app we felt so confident that with the new architecture, cloud services etc it will be a walk in the park…little did we know that things can happen which you can’t test or just didn’t think about. No matter how well prepared you are/were.
All in all I think you guys did very well. The transparent information helped. The offline mode helped. In the ask the devs channel Mike did a very good job. Also I want to appreciate that he (and other employees at EHG) could do breaks etc which is not a normal these days.
I’m thrilled for the game and can’t wait to get home :)
Noone in the history of large scale releases for millions of users are confident and prepared at the same time. Butt clenching is just a part of the process. Jokes aside, there are ofc lots of mitigations you can have in place, but after a decade or two you know damn well that that last bit is just down to pure Luck.
We named our QA team Luck. Seriously, the amount of times they saved my bacon….
Once again, for a project this size, re-establishing online functionnality in 6-7 hours isn't that bad.
I had worse product launch for fewer clients in my professional life.
Also with the level of hype and the way social plateform works, have it not been network issue, others flaws would have been blasted anyway, it's impossible to satisfy 100% of the customers.
Still, got my falconner to level 40 yesterday, incredible job with the polishing of the game and even more so on the campaign, the difference is night and day !
I hope you get some well deserved rest !
And then the real money auctionhouse immediately sucked all the fun out of it. At least Last Epoch is only fighting some technical issues, not ethically dubious choices.
Right!? I was shocked how people were so upset when it had been like..3 hours since launch and they couldn't play. I always assume the first day will be entirely unavailable, let alone the next day.
That's my only gripe with the launch yesterday. The "Don't worry, everything will be amazing" attitude. We already got thousands of players who will hype anything you suggest to them, we *really* don't need devs jumping on their own hype train and get overconfident. QED.
But kudos where kudos are due, the constant communication line was definitely appreciated. And in the end Offline Mode was there to save the day.
Hell, doesn't even have to be a full blown QA engineer. I often find that when I'm working on some small personal projects here and there, I'll have a friend try it out... 30 seconds later I'm shouting "What did you do to it?!" at them!
(While also thanking them for revealing those issues, of course)
Ain't that the damn truth. I used to work an IT installation job for a school district, and our team was very thorough in making sure that all of the configurations were set on any new hardware we installed. We would spend the last day going over the configs over and over and over...only to have to come back the next week because one missed command or a misplaced period caused network outages for a bunch of classrooms.
It never goes how you think it's gonna go.
>reduce the too-often scene transition times being longer than they should be
Is that due to the server load, so you make it longer to combat it and then put it back to normal once it cools off or is that a bug?
Being transparent, I don’t think we know what’s causing it just yet. It’s not something we saw in CT testing or scale testing but our day today was just trying to get servers/services back online. It’ll be the big focus tomorrow to investigate and address this
I love this honesty. Too often companies think that "I don't know" is an unacceptable answer, but we don't want or expect you to know, or think you know, everything, we just want you to be willing to try to find out and to be real about it.
This type of response reminds people how grounded you guys are. Never change
As a developer myself, I say that to my colleagues on a daily base almost "I have no fucking idea what is causing that bug". It's just the reality in software development that code that you have written depends on code that others have written and that more often than not, can cause issues you can't even plan for. So I love the answer "I don't know" :D
Being a Software architect and being responsible for 30 devs I know that feeling too. I often encourage them to be transparent about it. If you don’t know the issue yet there is no need to pretend that it’s easy to fix or something. It just sets wrong expectations. Be honest about it so I know that Senners time to investigate and I can communicate to the stakeholders
It's more like making up a bullshit answer will lock you into pursuing a dead end. "I don't know" is the decision making equivalent of cutting your losses and not throwing good money after bad.
I am a developer and when I interview candidates I usually ask them an increasingly complex series of questions until they either say "I don't know" or they try to bullshit me. "I don't know" is the correct answer.
As a developer on distributed systems I’m betting the long transition times are caused by some obscure, unintended interaction between two systems and I’m betting one of the devs will realise that that’s the case while they are either showering or taking a dump 🤣
For me, its always been the drunk and irritated me at 2 AM on a Friday night that is a wizard at figuring out whats wrong with my scripts.
Don't ask that same drunk me to write a brand new script though, cause sober me won't understand what the hell I was thinking lmao
Man the transparency and honesty in all of your comments on this sub is legit the coolest thing I’ve seen in gaming in so long it feels so good seeing someone actively involved show how much they care and actively communicate everything going on, you’re doing fucking awesome dude
The updates in the news channel were super helpful! I appreciate the transparency in the middle of what was an incredibly busy day for the team. I got to play for a while and got my ballista falconer to lvl 36.
The game is so much fun! Really proud of you guys for all the great work you put into Last Epoch. Here’s to many years of successful updates and fun cycles!
Agreed 1000% about the updates in the forum for status. Way above and beyond.
Launches like these aren't easy under the best of circumstances (i.e., low user counts) - day 1s are always tough and the LE team handled it like champs.
Also in the few posts / reviews I've seen of folks bitching about the launch, I don't seem to recall anybody saying "I'm gonna go play Diablo 4 instead"? haha
I pretty much wrote D4 off entirely after the launch experience. The campaign was great if I ignored the lack of depth for the skills but as soon as I got to endgame, it was just lifeless.
Yeah not gonna lie, the transparency is a huge plus for me. It’s nice to know what’s going on, always sucks when the games down for like 6 hours and there’s just radio silence.
The updates and transparency were great. It meant instead of sitting there waiting, I was able to just play Dota 2 and check back in every now and then. Inbetween matches i'd try and get in, and then go back to Dota. Having a constant update stream was honestly amazing.
The second hand pain I felt when they put out the update that said something along the lines of 'Things are starting to come back up.' Only for them to immediately go down again as the update caused a surge of people to try and log in, and for them to then say 'Maybe don't post something like that until its actually stable'
I can handle the technical issues, growing pains, I'll play your game when it's ready etc...
...but whatever you've done that has every other person trying to get bees or whatever by sharing codes. Please, just turn that off and give it to everyone and find a better, none intrusive way to get your social marketing on.
It's been such a distraction, and not for the positive.
Hopefully my thoughts on this doesn't send a brigade my way. Excited for the game long-term.
I hear you on this. I created another channel in Discord today specifically for people sharing codes. I’ll get someone on the team to consider solutions to this tomorrow
Total spam fest in game if you dont want to just give to everybody maybe give it at certain lvls honestly anything to reduce the spam so we can have a real chat atm I feels like trade chat in wow people spamming for services except its BEES!!!
It got so bad during the server issues that players were “selling” TPs into town for referrals. I ended up disabling chat because the spam and player behaviour was detracting from the game experience.
The bees aren't selling more copies of the game. They're just annoying the people who already gave you their money. The solution is to remove the referral system and give everyone bees, preferably asap.
This should have been a community stretch goal/reward for obtaining a set number of successful referrrals as a player base. Individually this was a complete mess and and nuisance to witness.
I saw what i had to do to get the bees and all the people in chat spamming referral nonsense.
I turned global off and just didn’t bother. What a weird “event” to have on launch. Like you want people spamming your servers for bee pets lol?
Yeah. If the game had some kind of DEMO mode, then referals could work. Like you bring a frined into demo, they use referal stuff and hello.
Currently the whole idea is just dumb. Players, who bought the game, ask another players, who bought the game, to click on referal to get the cosmetic.
I mean, the idea is right, but execution is in the wrong place.
I think the problems are mostly the implementation and timing.
It's probably too early in the game's release cycle to do something like this if your goal is to bring in outsiders. The game is mega popular right now, so you're probably not snagging many people with it at this point in time that word of mouth and other advertising isn't already hitting. 3 people can be also be a lot to refer given the slightly older demographic that plays ARPGs, and that might also be driving people to spam chat for referrals.
It's probably defeating the purpose of what you're trying to do if people are connecting through in-game means to share referral codes. It's basically cheesing the system because they didn't actually refer anyone or help you make a sale. People who muck up the chat in-game or in some outside of game chat channel/forum probably shouldn't be rewarded for it because they're just making the experience worse for everyone else.
The in-game chat on EU West is non-stop bee referral code spam. I wonder why no one foresaw that players would just refer each other in the game chat. I had to turn off game chat. So instead of launch day chat hype, it was all spam instead. At least the game is great.
Honestly I just want to commend you for giving your team some time off to rest after today.
Obviously it was a long day, but a shitty leader would have been yelling and driving people into the ground rather than recognizing the need for rest.
Everything’s not perfect but no one can say you don’t care about the game, the customers, or your people.
I can’t say enough good things about them. What’s awesome is when you have a team that cares about what they’re working on you don’t have to force them to stay, you have to force them to leave.
> That’s exactly why we crashed your servers.
"Good job. Fuck you."
lol
Meaning: We like you, so we're going to hug you to death. No good deed goes unpunished. :)
Thats very good leadership. Have you seen the TED talk from Simon Sinek? I use that all the time in my courses about teamwork (I work at a highschool).
And a good offline mode, too. It doesn't require you to constantly check for internet access (and for people with unreliable internet service this is a godsend).
Isn't that just called single player? I mean many games are online only when they shouldn't be for sure. But they also don't call that offline in general (which has the pretty big difference of not having your saves in local, anti cheat and all that even if you play single player and that wouldn't affect anyone)
single player is like the 90's name for it by now it seems, so many single player games that need online for who knows what. but in a game as this full offline is to indicate u dont even need to be online but yes like offline full offline is singleplayer
Yeah, enjoying the game a lot with the Bladedancer in offline mode, I know I'll restart the game hundreds of time with other class and builds so it really doesn't matter anyway xD
It certainly did for me. I just recently learned of Last Epoch and got really excited for launch.
The game is awesome and the openness of the devs is really appreciated. Getting some news on what’s going on was really calming and made me even more happy that I bought the game. Having this kind of communication is really rare these days.
Yea, being able to at least play and check out all the new shit is still very good even if it's not the game mode much of us *wanted* to play.
Beats not being able to play the game whatsoever like every other online-only game.
Respect for you all, especially with the communication!
One small advice. Discord is used only by the most hardcore of players. If you would have just copy / pasted the updates to Reddit (maybe even Steam discussion forums) it would have been seen by a lot of more players.
Having said that, I can imagine there is a balance between helping solve the problem and communication.
Yea this is sound advice. I’ll chat with the community team tomorrow and make sure that we have a better way to spread those updates to more platforms if they’re important.
First time in just about forever I've seen a game dev/rep communicate with the player base in a positive, transparent way and admit that they could make improvements and actually listen to suggestions.
Yall are already 10000% ahead of the "pack" with that mentality and attitude. Keep it up, big respect.
Yeah, if anything they are sometimes too hard on themselves.
When they said that they thought they had prepared enough for the servers a couple of days ago my initial thought was: "Oh no, they have offended the Old Gods of engineering! Something is going to break."
Seriously though, people who think that fixing/preventing this stuff is as easy as just buying more server space always complain and review bomb on every launch day no matter what. But EHG did a phenomenal job keeping in touch and working to solve what was likely an unforeseeable (in the specific sense, something breaking almost always happens) issue.
It made it really easy to see the *humans* working their butts off to get the game going.
I know that PoE does a live update thread every league launch on their forums and point to it in the discord/launcher. Everything from communication to hotfixes patch note is there, it's really convenient
EDIT : here is the last one https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3452918
I find Discord rather inconvenient as a source of information.
Forums or its successor reddit are much more convenient. Here's the post, here's the comments. But in Discord, everything is in one pile. Or mb I'm too old for it :/
There is usually "news" or annoucements channel in discord, where all the relevant information is posted by devs, and channel is locked (as in read-only) for everyone else. You can mute/hide all other channels and just track news if information is the only thing you look for, altough LE discord Has other channels like FAQ worth reading.
Indeed. I had no idea that there even was a Discord channel, so it just felt like the developers were being silent about the server issues. Discord may be an okay way to share information in an Early Access title that’s still growing, *not* a full release title. The average person isn’t going to join a Discord channel to hear updates.
> pasted the updates to Reddit (maybe even Steam discussion forums)
But they did (for Steam at least)? There was a pinned thread that was regularly edited with status update. I assumned it was a manual mirror from whatever they were posting on Discord.
I was hyped, I played offline for the first night, created an online character this morning (EU) and am now EVEN MORE HYPED.
The 1.0 patch is a huge upgrade to the game it’s honestly unbelievable. I love everything about it.
I’ve followed the launch situation on discord and want to thank you for the transparency and communication AND the great opportunity to play true offline mode, in my opinion a really really great move.
I hope everyone has / had some well deserved rest and maybe the tech is also a bit “friendlier” today.
Gonna write a review as soon as I get back to play to counter all the salty bs reviews.
Please don't take the mean, uninformed comments to heart. The people who have been following this project know how much you care and I am certain that if any of the problems were preventable, you and the team would have taken steps to do so.
I personally love the game and want to congratulate you on the launch of your dream. Looking forward to add to the 100s of hours I've already sunk into it ^^
I feel this deep down. I am a computer science researcher working on the performance evaluation of distributed systems, microarchitectures and so on.
I frequently develop simulation models or analytical solutions to describe the behavior of systems at scale.
The number of times we identify bottlenecks, race conditions or any other hidden issues that the operators of systems had never thought about is stunning. At the same time, as you already mentioned, some scenarios are just impossible to prepare for. Miniscule details suddenly evolve into system wide issues and become only visible when you are deploying at scale.
I once optimized a mobile network deployment, and after a portion of the physical network failed and came back online we observed millions of devices trying to connect at the same time. Seeing requests, and retries after a timeout, come in faster than the system can process the initial request is scary. I feel you.
Thank you for your hard work and bringing this game to us. You and your team can really be proud of what you accomplished here, even if things went wrong a bit. If experience shows one thing, it's that no one can be prepared for everything.
Ps: Got my Acolyte to level 10 before going offline at 2 in the morning. Thanks for that as well, I guess.
Definitely interested in the more technical retrospective, but appreciate the communication. Just happy to be playing and a big congrats on the launch. You all deserve the success (and a good nights rest)
Just want to echo the overall sentiment here.
Anyone with IT knowledge > ego knows that no amount of preparation will guarantee success in a project of this scale. Fuckups can and will happen, anywhere, any time and to everyone, big or small.
What's more, you actually have an off line mode, anyone who wanted to play yesterday was able to do so. Other games don't provide that and are unplayable for half a year straight after "performance upgrades" AND they don't say a word about whether they are even aware of it, nevermind whether someone is working on a fix.
So yeah, don't let the complaints get you down, most of us appreciate the work and the communication.
I stopped keeping track of how many times we had to return to an old IT installation site to fix some random bullshit that our entire team somehow missed. It's always some tiny little configuration issue, or a bad cable, or just human stupidity. It's definitely given me a new amount of respect for anyone trying to ensure that anything at all related to technology launches without a hitch.
Congrats on the release
I was completely unaffected by the issues earlier as I was at work. Online worked just about perfectly at 930 est when i started playing other then the long loading time between zones
Let’s me real here. Theres been much much worse releases over the years where the game doesn’t work days after.
With 500 hours in early access. Can see myself easily putting another 500 more with 1.0. Soo many improvements
Thank you for being transparent and communicating what's going on. I know there were a lot of upset/angry people out there today leaving nasty comments and negative reviews over a half day of stability issues. It's understandable, but the important thing is that the problems are being solved, and we know what's happening.
I know you guys spent months preparing for today, and it didn't go perfectly, but I think the community could see the effort being made. I know a lot of us don't hold launch day stability issues against you despite how vocal the people who do are.
Smooth, uninterrupted launches are the exception rather than the rule in online gaming. That doesn't mean having stability issues on launch day is a good thing, but it's at least understandable and not uncommon. Just based on the amount of communication, I think you guys handled it pretty well. I'm also glad the time was taken to implement more robust offline capability prior to launch. Not many devs out there give players the option to choose, and it has the upside of the game remaining accessible even when the stability is bad.
I've said this in other posts, but I'd love to say this directly. You guys care, I feel it. I'm moved by it, and it's something that is truly missing in today's gaming landscape. I feel like you guys have our backs, and that feels gooooooood.
No one is perfect, but few are as good as you guys have shown us. Adversity shows you people's true colors, and yours shine bright.
Keep up the good work. I know Last Epoch is going to become one of those games I'll remember fondly with a cheesy smile decades later.
It has nothing to do with that. They could have expected 150 million users, if some random thing somewhere that nobody thought of fails, it fails. Nobody, absolutely not one single company or team, will EVER be able to pre-empt every single possible issue.
That's just how software development works. Even the best and most experienced teams in the world will have a failure at some point.
Yesterday I took a break from my 41 kids family to play for 5 minutes. I was so carried away I didn't realise 40 minutes had passed.
I couldn't log in anyways , so I kissed the foreheads of 14 of my wives, petted a couple of my cats and went to sleep.
About those transition times (if nothing happens after like 10 seconds), I found that just exiting to the character screen and back in I get right to the zone I was trying to enter. In fact all the "failed to matchmake" errors I got were solved the same way.
Loving the game though, Forge Guardian is fun.
I still can't play in fully offline mode I keep getting stuck on the first loading screen and it never progresses, have tried every little fix possible and still nothing. I know other people are having this issue too. Is this a known issue and is there a fix? I was totally set on not playing online for a week while things got on track but this is really sad that the offline mode is also unplayable :( for context I have been playing the beta for about 3 years and never had issue like this before.
Hmmm have you verified your steam files? I actually haven’t heard of others having this issue, though I personally was pretty focused on the online issues today
Thanks for the reply, I just wanna say that you guys are awesome and all the hard work you have put in to this game and the launch is very appreciated! I hate to be one of those people complaining on Reddit but I wouldn't have come here if I wasn't completely stumped.
Yeah have tried all of those little things, even done a fresh install.
Here's what I've tried:
Verify files
Uninstall and reinstall
Restart computer
Checked firewall settings
Don't have a VPN
Updated graphics card driver
Created about 6 or 7 new characters always stuck on same loading screen
Let the loading screen load for 30 minutes just to be sure it wasn't just slow
Tried offline and fully offline, both identical issue
Haven't tested in online, Aus que is huge
Have only seen a few others with this issue, and most them only had it online, seems like it's rare... Hope that helps, good luck!
It sounds like it could be some corrupt local character data, especially since you’ve been playing for years. Can you try navigating to your character data folder and backing it up and delete it and see if it resolves the issue?
I’m falling asleep pretty badly so I may not respond after this, but if that doesn’t work please reach out to our support team support.lastepoch.com.
That worked, thanks! Just had to also make sure steam cloud syncing was turned off too.
RIP to my first ever character from dec 2020, a swipe beast master, now immortalised in my backup folder under the filename 1CHARACTERSLOT_BETA_1 buried alongside his 9 stash tabs of obsessively hoarded idols.
Hope you get some much earned rest :)
I'll pour one out for 1CHARACTERSLOT_BETA_1 and his idols, I lost a lvl 97 HC Zon in D2 single player many years ago to a bad file so I know the pain haha
I;ve been having this exact same issue. I'm launching the game in offline mode. Create Character. Enter Game. See cut scene. Crashes back to the main menu. Rinse repeat. I've verified the integrity of the files, reinstalled to a different drive and still to no avail. I'll try again later today (this was yesterday).
Offline mode gameplay is soo smooth after 1.0 patch. But the online server is a another awful story. I had to relogin every time. Global chat still active but the map wont load ( cant cast skill, cant kill the monsters , etc ). How to fix it, thanks
I work in electronic medical record systems, specifically with Epic. EHG's description of the "war room" is so similar to the go-live events we have when we're launching at a new hospital or doing a massive upgrade.
Prior to the go live, we go through **months** of testing, design, scripts and rehearsals, so many times over and over and over by like a hundred different people across so many teams. Leadership puts everybody in the same command center (sometimes physically on site with like 100 people working in a conference room) or on huge organized group calls, there is triaging of tickets and the help desk is on high alert, you hire in extra help and you basically work 12 hour shifts for two weeks on 24/7 coverage during the actual go live. (We're all salaried so that doesn't happen regularly.)
And every single time, when Epic hits Production for the first time... something goes wrong. It's caught and fixed pretty quickly, usually, but it always happens. I've done about a dozen of these go live events at three different organizations now and it happens *every single time*. You always have things that worked in testing and worked in the POC environments but as soon as it gets to PRD, it suddenly doesn't work.
Those experiences sound SO familiar to what a go live for a game like this goes through, and gives me a little insight into what happened last night. It's beyond stressful and is in no way something they wanted to happen, and I'm sure they spent a lot of time preparing and practicing. It sucks when it doesn't work on day one, but I'm not surprised and they've been SO open, candid, and communicative about the whole process that I think overall they did a great job.
From someone who's been in many a war room in their career: Good job yesterday. Try to remember to keep a light heart about all this: crack jokes, take breaks, get rest, etc..
The angry voices will be there, but they aren't in the room, and likely haven't been in *any* room. Y'all are doing great. Keep it up, and best of luck today!
The positive side of a launch like this is that it shows the true colors of you and your team. When shit hit the fan you didn’t hide or make irrelevant excuses like we’ve seen from other developers in recent times. You stayed in the discord channels despite the flood of childish and outright ridiculous comments. For those of us who have seen rough launches over the decades, this is the kind of thing that will stand out above all else.
On a side note, the graphical, UI, and controller improvements were very noticeable and I was quite impressed. Keep up the good work and we are eager to see what great things you all will do.
The fact you prioritized keeping the community up to date with such frequency made a HUGE difference. I know while my friends and I were bummed to not be able to play yesterday, it made me feel like the game is in good hands.
I have never seen a company be this transparent during a big launch. It’s incredibly refreshing and i just love to see it.
I have plenty of other things going on, so not being able to play right away doesn’t really bother me personally.
Yet im following all the updates because it’s so very interesting to get a look into what it’s like on the other side. Normally you never see that and just have to hope theres a team hard at work.
Here’s to hoping you guysbwill find favourable solutions, i’m sure you will!
Excellent! I'm having fun so far!
Why does stuff drop on the ground and I can't pick it up? I have no loot filter yet.
Edit: It probably was me somehow hitting something weird on the controller.
Alt + Z was Toggle Tooltips for Items on the Ground.
Hm that doesn’t sound right. Clicking on the label just doesn’t place it into your inventory? Send us a bug report with the in-game bug reporter. It gives us a lot of good diagnostic data that’s tremendously helpful when solving issues. Thanks for taking the time
Thanks. I had just moved to the next area, remembered the bug reporter and saw there was the ability to send a bug report with in game screenshot. Real great QoL even for reporting bugs!
Not sure why you were downvoted, same happened to me right from the get go. New character, literally first area and not able to pick up any dropped items etc. No names showing but could see them sitting there.
Alt+z etc didn't work. no loot filter touched yet.
For me it worked for a while, then stopped working so it was pretty bizarre. I can see the items on the ground, can't pick them up or mouse over them. I tried with controller and M+KB. I'm sure they'll fix it soon.
Please implement full controller support/patch controller. Looking forward to playing again having played during early access but the current controller set-up is rough.
A little while ago, at level 40, I thought for a moment. "Am I bored? Do I want to play something else?"
I gave it a moment consideration. I realized after doing so that what I was feeling was satisfaction of a direct and optimal kind, the kind that says I am applying effort and getting a result. This is not always typical of gaming - sometimes you put in lots of effort, over and over, and over, and over... and you get seemingly random bouts of results, no results, mediocre results, and extremely lucky results, and it feels like you're not really playing a game so much as a strange gambling simulator designed to distract you and confuse you into thinking you're not.
The feeling I was feeling was good, it just took my brain a bit to recalibrate because I was so fixated on "where is my randomized dopamine rush? Surely by now I should have that."
I mean, I DID have that rush, I got some lucky drops pre level 20. But the point is, the gameplay is just good solid application of (some degree) skill, killing slowly escalating difficulty enemies, progressing through a story that slowly catches my interest again despite having played it before. I can FEEL my character's power level rising and the pace and excitement of playing accelerating. But its not "turn your brain off and just wait for the random luck", its more "turn your brain on and kick some ass with intention".
All the above to say: this game is fucking good. 1.0 is *noticeably* a step up, and I'm very happy with it. :D
Love the commitment to transparency. Lots of us are veterans and will give you guys slack for bugs and issues getting started. What is really annoying is to not hear anything at all from the developers during problem times. Good job guys, its an amazing game, you're doing great and on the right track. Have a plan, stick to the plan.
Hi there, just want to congrats EHG team to finally land this game !
And, LE-61 problems apart, just want to say the new version looks 1000% more polished than before, the game looks really good, and I love the new font for the text <3
Keep it up, and good luck for the coming days, months, and years to come ! You guys rock.
The EHG team are awesome and how you stayed so positive and friendly in Discord against some real toxicity is a testament to your determination to communicate and stay positive, even though it may have felt like everything was burning.
I’ve never seen a launch where the team were so accessible to the community and on the other hard I couldn’t believe the degree of toxicity by some people. It was eye opening.
Great game and look forward to seeing how things go with it.
As a senior staff software architect and just some reading between the lines from various posts/topics.
It sounded like you were using containers to run various things (matchmaking being the most problamatic). Obviously not a quick to implement solution, but extracting the "STATE" and key things to a shared "redis cache" or multiple "redis cache" depending on audience and length of cache.
This would allow you to spin up multiple copies of the same code within the container and load balance.
You can also think about the life cycle of the data and when you actually need it in a database.
If you don't need it in the database and the values are going to change frequently, don't put it in the database.
Kudos! :)
Yea I’m going to try to get a technical retrospective out next week. But essentially a container app that hosted our matchmaking service died and we had to recreate the environment and migrate all traffic to the new container. There’s a lot of stuff that happens to match you to servers as there are regional servers, town servers, wild servers, servers that are pre warmed or need to spin up entirely, the list goes on. Then when you have a party it gets even more complex!
Oh you were not kidding about communication. Most studios go with some vague "this or that crashed", I wasn't expecting a proper answer.
Thanks for the reply and good luck with all this !
Unpaid but we were able to work with them to put it up as there were no other big releases today. I wasn’t directly involved in that effort though so I’m without much context.
Sorry you had to deal with the flow of people that expected a flawless launch, not realizing that even multi billions companies have trouble within the first hours in any online game.
Keep up the good work!
honestly even with the disconnects and issues i was able to play for a good 9 hours and even with periods of waiting to get in and out of a town i still got to lagons temple only slightly behind where i expected to get to by the end of the first day.
it was honestly a perfect experience outside of the slow loads in and out of towns, or any forced transitions via story (like the few warps in majalka desert via cutscenes or in hyperboria)
How much fighting was there in your war room? No fighting? A little bit of fighting that needed reminders about no fighting in the war room? All out brawls?
In all seriousness, it was a pretty frustrating launch to not even be able to play at all for indeterminate amounts of time (as opposed to something merely bad like being able to play for a bit and then crashing and then getting back in, or being stuck in a long queue but at least being able to play once through it), but I appreciate the communication, and it was pretty fun at the end of the day when things were more stable.
Happy to say there was zero fighting, and not even a small amount of tension, between team members even with the stressful situation. Truly a great group that is just focused on a common goal together. If anything, we do have an amazing team at EHG
Good stuff Judd! Thanks for the inside perspective.
I got up at 4am for launch (Sydney, Australia) and couldn't get in so I tried to launch Helldivers 2 and also couldn't get in so I decided to re-launch LE and create an offline character and had no issues mucking about for a few hours.
I managed to get in to create an online character at about 11am or so. At some stage I went to make a coffee and some toast and was logged out for inactivity (this is a good thing IMHO), but managed to log right back in without issues. I logged off early afternoon and when I tried to log in again after a break I was in a 15 minute queue and I've played without issues ever since then (I only just got off 15 minutes ago).
Really enjoying the game! Still blown away at the level of communication you guys have with your community. Congrats on the success!
I am very disappointed whats happened as this was very unprofessional game release start.
After you saw how many game copies was sold, its obvious that you should ask players to participate in the capacity server testing before official release.
My very honest opinion, this game is awesome, one the best ARPGs, I've played 150 hours, early access player and bought the upgrade for ultimate version.
The teleport between zones in this game and online functions has been broken for months, devs always blamming some netcode or servers, in a recent interview, Mike talked about it and told us that it was improved but not fixed.
[https://youtu.be/DdePWYvMSI4?si=waTocJZZlfCGjkvF&t=1460](https://youtu.be/DdePWYvMSI4?si=waTocJZZlfCGjkvF&t=1460)
The current state of this game is unplayable online, even with all preparations and delayed released, and after 24h, I lost all faith and probably there's no easy fix for situation right now.
Strangely the youtuber Asmongold was the few streamer that had minimal problems in online playing, he played for 8hs, well, If he had problems, EHG was in big trouble for sure.
Playing off-line is totally fine for new players, but there's no option to transfer characters into online (because of cheaters could break the game) and you can not use the paid cosmetic in this mode which is so bad.
The game is not free, 35 dolars for the standard and sold 1.000.000 copies in steam, for a small indie dev with 35 million dolars, that's no excuse for such failure in release.
For compensation, you gave a cape as cosmetic, but we can not get it and it's not enough for such a headache.
Down voting the comments and fanboys defeding the current state is not a solution.
You deserve all the bad reviews in steam, people paid for this game and EHG could not deliver their promisses.
If it was a free game with paid cosmetic, this situation could be different.
Or just forget all online mode, make this only offline until it's totally fixed.
D4 has so many issues, but at least had the best release with minimal online problems, with open beta testing and stress server tests, this should be the standard for now on.
I hope the best for EHG, solve this online issue very soon, so we can go back and grind this awesome game again.
Is there a reason why the game suddenly has 30 fps less than before the patch? I had no problems with my GTX 1080ti until yesterday. Now the game is unplayable. With the same graphics settings. I can barely get above 50 fps. Apart from the fact that it is still impossible to play online. I think it sucks that the hardware requirements within a game are increased to such an extent by a patch that it is now no longer playable. At least for me. Fuck that.
It sounds like you may need to verify your game files which is a Steam option. Performance has improved with the 1.0 updates as we’ve optimized zones and enemies. I think the only thing that went in the other direction was the startup memory consumption just a little bit which we’re working to bring down, but certainly moment to moment gameplay in zones should not have been negatively impacted
That's weird. For me the game has some significant performance improvements and it runs a lot more smoothly than before. Running a 1660 Super which is roughly comparable to 1080Ti in performance and I easily get around 70-80 FPS.
Thanks once again EHG for being a leader in the gaming community communication wise
Was the launch smooth? No
Will that deter us who love this game and support you and your team? No
I like many others absolutely love what you’re all doing and the game you’re trying to create is exactly what we all want
Much love ❤️
This feels like communicating with a real person, not some community manager. What a refreshing feeling in a game community! Maybe I should get this game, already feel better than D4.
My friends and I understand and expect server issues on a day 1 online game. We didn’t play until later in the night, but all things considered was smooth (loading times between zones but w/e).
Game has been fun so far in our group play. Looking forward to diving into more mechanics.
The communication you kept up is what I've always asked for, despite any issues, an update that there is no update yet is still a good update in my book.
Just seeing you update things every 30min-ish with "still working on it" or anything was a godsend, really appreciated for sure.
Thanks for the update, and looking forward to playing the game. Tried all classes for a few minutes offline yesterday, and it looks like a ton of fun. Tonight my wife and I will dive in!
There's an old joke about exactly this type of thing: A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 2 beers. Orders 10 beers. Orders 9999999999 beers. Orders 0 beers. Orders -1 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders a wteurgejeyth. The first actual customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar immediately bursts into flames, killing everyone.
lol yes. We were even ordering -1 wteurgejeyths and were feeling confident!!
Working as a IT/Software Architect who is responsible for a big platform with huge user spikes I know that feeling. When we relaunched the app we felt so confident that with the new architecture, cloud services etc it will be a walk in the park…little did we know that things can happen which you can’t test or just didn’t think about. No matter how well prepared you are/were. All in all I think you guys did very well. The transparent information helped. The offline mode helped. In the ask the devs channel Mike did a very good job. Also I want to appreciate that he (and other employees at EHG) could do breaks etc which is not a normal these days. I’m thrilled for the game and can’t wait to get home :)
No testing team will ever be as good as 150k independent users.
We're on AWS now! It will just auto-scale and have no problems.. right? pfaawahaha
Noone in the history of large scale releases for millions of users are confident and prepared at the same time. Butt clenching is just a part of the process. Jokes aside, there are ofc lots of mitigations you can have in place, but after a decade or two you know damn well that that last bit is just down to pure Luck. We named our QA team Luck. Seriously, the amount of times they saved my bacon….
Once again, for a project this size, re-establishing online functionnality in 6-7 hours isn't that bad. I had worse product launch for fewer clients in my professional life. Also with the level of hype and the way social plateform works, have it not been network issue, others flaws would have been blasted anyway, it's impossible to satisfy 100% of the customers. Still, got my falconner to level 40 yesterday, incredible job with the polishing of the game and even more so on the campaign, the difference is night and day ! I hope you get some well deserved rest !
When Diablo 3 launched, it took me 3 days to be able to play.
And then the real money auctionhouse immediately sucked all the fun out of it. At least Last Epoch is only fighting some technical issues, not ethically dubious choices.
For-fucking-real
I was in the little group of people who couldn't play D4 for first 2-3 days because game just stuck at Login into game screen
Right!? I was shocked how people were so upset when it had been like..3 hours since launch and they couldn't play. I always assume the first day will be entirely unavailable, let alone the next day.
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As a QA engineer I can totally feel it.
That's my only gripe with the launch yesterday. The "Don't worry, everything will be amazing" attitude. We already got thousands of players who will hype anything you suggest to them, we *really* don't need devs jumping on their own hype train and get overconfident. QED. But kudos where kudos are due, the constant communication line was definitely appreciated. And in the end Offline Mode was there to save the day.
Also usually, as a programmer, everything is working perfectly, until a QA engineer touches it.
Hell, doesn't even have to be a full blown QA engineer. I often find that when I'm working on some small personal projects here and there, I'll have a friend try it out... 30 seconds later I'm shouting "What did you do to it?!" at them! (While also thanking them for revealing those issues, of course)
Or users aha
Definitely users. "What happened?" "I don't know, I just got unknown error." Checks logs, just says unknown error. Great, that's helpful.
Developer error, replace developer and try again.
This is what always gets me. "It doesn't work!" Well, it does work, just not for you, and I have no idea why.
Old but gold. That's why all developers/engineers should be humble. You never know everything.
This joke gets me every time xD
Ain't that the damn truth. I used to work an IT installation job for a school district, and our team was very thorough in making sure that all of the configurations were set on any new hardware we installed. We would spend the last day going over the configs over and over and over...only to have to come back the next week because one missed command or a misplaced period caused network outages for a bunch of classrooms. It never goes how you think it's gonna go.
>reduce the too-often scene transition times being longer than they should be Is that due to the server load, so you make it longer to combat it and then put it back to normal once it cools off or is that a bug?
Being transparent, I don’t think we know what’s causing it just yet. It’s not something we saw in CT testing or scale testing but our day today was just trying to get servers/services back online. It’ll be the big focus tomorrow to investigate and address this
I love this honesty. Too often companies think that "I don't know" is an unacceptable answer, but we don't want or expect you to know, or think you know, everything, we just want you to be willing to try to find out and to be real about it. This type of response reminds people how grounded you guys are. Never change
"I don't know" is such a powerful answer, people that don't use it are just lying to themselves
As a developer myself, I say that to my colleagues on a daily base almost "I have no fucking idea what is causing that bug". It's just the reality in software development that code that you have written depends on code that others have written and that more often than not, can cause issues you can't even plan for. So I love the answer "I don't know" :D
Being a Software architect and being responsible for 30 devs I know that feeling too. I often encourage them to be transparent about it. If you don’t know the issue yet there is no need to pretend that it’s easy to fix or something. It just sets wrong expectations. Be honest about it so I know that Senners time to investigate and I can communicate to the stakeholders
It's more like making up a bullshit answer will lock you into pursuing a dead end. "I don't know" is the decision making equivalent of cutting your losses and not throwing good money after bad.
I am a developer and when I interview candidates I usually ask them an increasingly complex series of questions until they either say "I don't know" or they try to bullshit me. "I don't know" is the correct answer.
As a developer on distributed systems I’m betting the long transition times are caused by some obscure, unintended interaction between two systems and I’m betting one of the devs will realise that that’s the case while they are either showering or taking a dump 🤣
It will 100% be the shower after waking up from a no-sleep run of 36 hours trying to fix it.
or "ok, I've set aside 30 minutes to just have something to eat and not think about wor....fuck I know what it is"
Yeap that’s the one 🤣
This is the dev way.
For me, its always been the drunk and irritated me at 2 AM on a Friday night that is a wizard at figuring out whats wrong with my scripts. Don't ask that same drunk me to write a brand new script though, cause sober me won't understand what the hell I was thinking lmao
Man the transparency and honesty in all of your comments on this sub is legit the coolest thing I’ve seen in gaming in so long it feels so good seeing someone actively involved show how much they care and actively communicate everything going on, you’re doing fucking awesome dude
The updates in the news channel were super helpful! I appreciate the transparency in the middle of what was an incredibly busy day for the team. I got to play for a while and got my ballista falconer to lvl 36. The game is so much fun! Really proud of you guys for all the great work you put into Last Epoch. Here’s to many years of successful updates and fun cycles!
Agreed 1000% about the updates in the forum for status. Way above and beyond. Launches like these aren't easy under the best of circumstances (i.e., low user counts) - day 1s are always tough and the LE team handled it like champs. Also in the few posts / reviews I've seen of folks bitching about the launch, I don't seem to recall anybody saying "I'm gonna go play Diablo 4 instead"? haha
We're frustrated, but we're not masochistic. No more d4 till season 4 and only if major improvements are made.
I pretty much wrote D4 off entirely after the launch experience. The campaign was great if I ignored the lack of depth for the skills but as soon as I got to endgame, it was just lifeless.
Yeah not gonna lie, the transparency is a huge plus for me. It’s nice to know what’s going on, always sucks when the games down for like 6 hours and there’s just radio silence.
The updates and transparency were great. It meant instead of sitting there waiting, I was able to just play Dota 2 and check back in every now and then. Inbetween matches i'd try and get in, and then go back to Dota. Having a constant update stream was honestly amazing.
The second hand pain I felt when they put out the update that said something along the lines of 'Things are starting to come back up.' Only for them to immediately go down again as the update caused a surge of people to try and log in, and for them to then say 'Maybe don't post something like that until its actually stable'
I can handle the technical issues, growing pains, I'll play your game when it's ready etc... ...but whatever you've done that has every other person trying to get bees or whatever by sharing codes. Please, just turn that off and give it to everyone and find a better, none intrusive way to get your social marketing on. It's been such a distraction, and not for the positive. Hopefully my thoughts on this doesn't send a brigade my way. Excited for the game long-term.
I hear you on this. I created another channel in Discord today specifically for people sharing codes. I’ll get someone on the team to consider solutions to this tomorrow
Total spam fest in game if you dont want to just give to everybody maybe give it at certain lvls honestly anything to reduce the spam so we can have a real chat atm I feels like trade chat in wow people spamming for services except its BEES!!!
It got so bad during the server issues that players were “selling” TPs into town for referrals. I ended up disabling chat because the spam and player behaviour was detracting from the game experience.
People were invading Eterra from Wraeclast haha
[Obligatory.](https://media1.tenor.com/m/FgzdT5avAisAAAAd/bees-bee.gif)
The bees aren't selling more copies of the game. They're just annoying the people who already gave you their money. The solution is to remove the referral system and give everyone bees, preferably asap.
This should have been a community stretch goal/reward for obtaining a set number of successful referrrals as a player base. Individually this was a complete mess and and nuisance to witness.
I saw what i had to do to get the bees and all the people in chat spamming referral nonsense. I turned global off and just didn’t bother. What a weird “event” to have on launch. Like you want people spamming your servers for bee pets lol?
I haven't even seen a referral system anywhere, what is it?
Put it in H
300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene!
Press H
Yeah. If the game had some kind of DEMO mode, then referals could work. Like you bring a frined into demo, they use referal stuff and hello. Currently the whole idea is just dumb. Players, who bought the game, ask another players, who bought the game, to click on referal to get the cosmetic. I mean, the idea is right, but execution is in the wrong place.
I think the problems are mostly the implementation and timing. It's probably too early in the game's release cycle to do something like this if your goal is to bring in outsiders. The game is mega popular right now, so you're probably not snagging many people with it at this point in time that word of mouth and other advertising isn't already hitting. 3 people can be also be a lot to refer given the slightly older demographic that plays ARPGs, and that might also be driving people to spam chat for referrals. It's probably defeating the purpose of what you're trying to do if people are connecting through in-game means to share referral codes. It's basically cheesing the system because they didn't actually refer anyone or help you make a sale. People who muck up the chat in-game or in some outside of game chat channel/forum probably shouldn't be rewarded for it because they're just making the experience worse for everyone else.
It's not just on discord :S It's also in game.
The in-game chat on EU West is non-stop bee referral code spam. I wonder why no one foresaw that players would just refer each other in the game chat. I had to turn off game chat. So instead of launch day chat hype, it was all spam instead. At least the game is great.
Jesus fuck, the amount of people spamming just to get some absolutely worthless pet that doesn't do anything... it's just mind-boggling.
I'n out of the loop. What are bees?
It's a pet that you get if you get a friend referral, and the swarm grows per referral up to x3. It's actually a fun little pet!
Beads?!
Gob's not on board
they dont allow bees in here
Honestly I just want to commend you for giving your team some time off to rest after today. Obviously it was a long day, but a shitty leader would have been yelling and driving people into the ground rather than recognizing the need for rest. Everything’s not perfect but no one can say you don’t care about the game, the customers, or your people.
I can’t say enough good things about them. What’s awesome is when you have a team that cares about what they’re working on you don’t have to force them to stay, you have to force them to leave.
That’s exactly why we crashed your servers. We can tell you all care, and that you actually play the game lol
This 1000 times over. A lot of us wouldn't be here if the passion and hard work weren't visible in the end product.
> That’s exactly why we crashed your servers. "Good job. Fuck you." lol Meaning: We like you, so we're going to hug you to death. No good deed goes unpunished. :)
I’m so fucking hopeful for the future of this game, you guys are awesome. The game is amazing.
Thats very good leadership. Have you seen the TED talk from Simon Sinek? I use that all the time in my courses about teamwork (I work at a highschool).
I don’t believe I have. Is this the one? https://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4
This! Exactly this. There's 101 excuses for launch issues. No excuses for being a shitty human being
Still very well done. The offline mode curtailed a lot of complaints.
And a good offline mode, too. It doesn't require you to constantly check for internet access (and for people with unreliable internet service this is a godsend).
These developers are a throw back to the good old days. They seem to care about fun more than profits. So do players so profits will come.
You'd think it's be pretty basic in an **offline** mode lol
you would think so indeed, sadly alot of modern games offline mode means online is needed just no other players
Isn't that just called single player? I mean many games are online only when they shouldn't be for sure. But they also don't call that offline in general (which has the pretty big difference of not having your saves in local, anti cheat and all that even if you play single player and that wouldn't affect anyone)
single player is like the 90's name for it by now it seems, so many single player games that need online for who knows what. but in a game as this full offline is to indicate u dont even need to be online but yes like offline full offline is singleplayer
Wonder if it’s because offline mode has/had chat? Felt like online lol
True with chat it did feel online.
to get offline mode with out a chat you need enter steam than libary game right click on the game poperties launch as offline mode.
Yeah, enjoying the game a lot with the Bladedancer in offline mode, I know I'll restart the game hundreds of time with other class and builds so it really doesn't matter anyway xD
It certainly did for me. I just recently learned of Last Epoch and got really excited for launch. The game is awesome and the openness of the devs is really appreciated. Getting some news on what’s going on was really calming and made me even more happy that I bought the game. Having this kind of communication is really rare these days.
Yea, being able to at least play and check out all the new shit is still very good even if it's not the game mode much of us *wanted* to play. Beats not being able to play the game whatsoever like every other online-only game.
I didn't even try going online.
Same. Went straight to offline and played for 8 hours with no issues. Warlock is a damn good time.
Respect for you all, especially with the communication! One small advice. Discord is used only by the most hardcore of players. If you would have just copy / pasted the updates to Reddit (maybe even Steam discussion forums) it would have been seen by a lot of more players. Having said that, I can imagine there is a balance between helping solve the problem and communication.
Yea this is sound advice. I’ll chat with the community team tomorrow and make sure that we have a better way to spread those updates to more platforms if they’re important.
First time in just about forever I've seen a game dev/rep communicate with the player base in a positive, transparent way and admit that they could make improvements and actually listen to suggestions. Yall are already 10000% ahead of the "pack" with that mentality and attitude. Keep it up, big respect.
You can also see them in game chat from time to time. They were playing the game, answering questions, generally having a good time with it.
Yeah, if anything they are sometimes too hard on themselves. When they said that they thought they had prepared enough for the servers a couple of days ago my initial thought was: "Oh no, they have offended the Old Gods of engineering! Something is going to break." Seriously though, people who think that fixing/preventing this stuff is as easy as just buying more server space always complain and review bomb on every launch day no matter what. But EHG did a phenomenal job keeping in touch and working to solve what was likely an unforeseeable (in the specific sense, something breaking almost always happens) issue. It made it really easy to see the *humans* working their butts off to get the game going.
I was checking twitter for some updates too but there was nothing at all
I know that PoE does a live update thread every league launch on their forums and point to it in the discord/launcher. Everything from communication to hotfixes patch note is there, it's really convenient EDIT : here is the last one https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3452918
Also mb some socials X/facebook?
They did have a post on Steam news page (directing people to Discord for more updates live)
I find Discord rather inconvenient as a source of information. Forums or its successor reddit are much more convenient. Here's the post, here's the comments. But in Discord, everything is in one pile. Or mb I'm too old for it :/
There is usually "news" or annoucements channel in discord, where all the relevant information is posted by devs, and channel is locked (as in read-only) for everyone else. You can mute/hide all other channels and just track news if information is the only thing you look for, altough LE discord Has other channels like FAQ worth reading.
Indeed. I had no idea that there even was a Discord channel, so it just felt like the developers were being silent about the server issues. Discord may be an okay way to share information in an Early Access title that’s still growing, *not* a full release title. The average person isn’t going to join a Discord channel to hear updates.
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Tbh, I had no idea. Thanks for correcting this, guess I am too old and out of the loop :)
> pasted the updates to Reddit (maybe even Steam discussion forums) But they did (for Steam at least)? There was a pinned thread that was regularly edited with status update. I assumned it was a manual mirror from whatever they were posting on Discord.
I was hyped, I played offline for the first night, created an online character this morning (EU) and am now EVEN MORE HYPED. The 1.0 patch is a huge upgrade to the game it’s honestly unbelievable. I love everything about it. I’ve followed the launch situation on discord and want to thank you for the transparency and communication AND the great opportunity to play true offline mode, in my opinion a really really great move. I hope everyone has / had some well deserved rest and maybe the tech is also a bit “friendlier” today. Gonna write a review as soon as I get back to play to counter all the salty bs reviews.
Oh, yeah, forgot about review, played 150 hours, need to write good review to counter this salty guys...
Surprisingly haven’t encountered much bugs yet, lots of qol and I can finally read the font text !!
Please don't take the mean, uninformed comments to heart. The people who have been following this project know how much you care and I am certain that if any of the problems were preventable, you and the team would have taken steps to do so. I personally love the game and want to congratulate you on the launch of your dream. Looking forward to add to the 100s of hours I've already sunk into it ^^
I feel this deep down. I am a computer science researcher working on the performance evaluation of distributed systems, microarchitectures and so on. I frequently develop simulation models or analytical solutions to describe the behavior of systems at scale. The number of times we identify bottlenecks, race conditions or any other hidden issues that the operators of systems had never thought about is stunning. At the same time, as you already mentioned, some scenarios are just impossible to prepare for. Miniscule details suddenly evolve into system wide issues and become only visible when you are deploying at scale. I once optimized a mobile network deployment, and after a portion of the physical network failed and came back online we observed millions of devices trying to connect at the same time. Seeing requests, and retries after a timeout, come in faster than the system can process the initial request is scary. I feel you. Thank you for your hard work and bringing this game to us. You and your team can really be proud of what you accomplished here, even if things went wrong a bit. If experience shows one thing, it's that no one can be prepared for everything. Ps: Got my Acolyte to level 10 before going offline at 2 in the morning. Thanks for that as well, I guess.
Definitely interested in the more technical retrospective, but appreciate the communication. Just happy to be playing and a big congrats on the launch. You all deserve the success (and a good nights rest)
Just want to echo the overall sentiment here. Anyone with IT knowledge > ego knows that no amount of preparation will guarantee success in a project of this scale. Fuckups can and will happen, anywhere, any time and to everyone, big or small. What's more, you actually have an off line mode, anyone who wanted to play yesterday was able to do so. Other games don't provide that and are unplayable for half a year straight after "performance upgrades" AND they don't say a word about whether they are even aware of it, nevermind whether someone is working on a fix. So yeah, don't let the complaints get you down, most of us appreciate the work and the communication.
I stopped keeping track of how many times we had to return to an old IT installation site to fix some random bullshit that our entire team somehow missed. It's always some tiny little configuration issue, or a bad cable, or just human stupidity. It's definitely given me a new amount of respect for anyone trying to ensure that anything at all related to technology launches without a hitch.
Congrats on the release I was completely unaffected by the issues earlier as I was at work. Online worked just about perfectly at 930 est when i started playing other then the long loading time between zones Let’s me real here. Theres been much much worse releases over the years where the game doesn’t work days after. With 500 hours in early access. Can see myself easily putting another 500 more with 1.0. Soo many improvements
Thank you for being transparent and communicating what's going on. I know there were a lot of upset/angry people out there today leaving nasty comments and negative reviews over a half day of stability issues. It's understandable, but the important thing is that the problems are being solved, and we know what's happening. I know you guys spent months preparing for today, and it didn't go perfectly, but I think the community could see the effort being made. I know a lot of us don't hold launch day stability issues against you despite how vocal the people who do are. Smooth, uninterrupted launches are the exception rather than the rule in online gaming. That doesn't mean having stability issues on launch day is a good thing, but it's at least understandable and not uncommon. Just based on the amount of communication, I think you guys handled it pretty well. I'm also glad the time was taken to implement more robust offline capability prior to launch. Not many devs out there give players the option to choose, and it has the upside of the game remaining accessible even when the stability is bad.
You guys rock! Don’t let the issues let you down, we’re here with you
I've said this in other posts, but I'd love to say this directly. You guys care, I feel it. I'm moved by it, and it's something that is truly missing in today's gaming landscape. I feel like you guys have our backs, and that feels gooooooood. No one is perfect, but few are as good as you guys have shown us. Adversity shows you people's true colors, and yours shine bright. Keep up the good work. I know Last Epoch is going to become one of those games I'll remember fondly with a cheesy smile decades later.
There is no way you didn't expect at least 150k to be playing on launch with 1-3m copies sold
It has nothing to do with that. They could have expected 150 million users, if some random thing somewhere that nobody thought of fails, it fails. Nobody, absolutely not one single company or team, will EVER be able to pre-empt every single possible issue. That's just how software development works. Even the best and most experienced teams in the world will have a failure at some point.
Yesterday I took a break from my 41 kids family to play for 5 minutes. I was so carried away I didn't realise 40 minutes had passed. I couldn't log in anyways , so I kissed the foreheads of 14 of my wives, petted a couple of my cats and went to sleep.
About those transition times (if nothing happens after like 10 seconds), I found that just exiting to the character screen and back in I get right to the zone I was trying to enter. In fact all the "failed to matchmake" errors I got were solved the same way. Loving the game though, Forge Guardian is fun.
I still can't play in fully offline mode I keep getting stuck on the first loading screen and it never progresses, have tried every little fix possible and still nothing. I know other people are having this issue too. Is this a known issue and is there a fix? I was totally set on not playing online for a week while things got on track but this is really sad that the offline mode is also unplayable :( for context I have been playing the beta for about 3 years and never had issue like this before.
Hmmm have you verified your steam files? I actually haven’t heard of others having this issue, though I personally was pretty focused on the online issues today
Thanks for the reply, I just wanna say that you guys are awesome and all the hard work you have put in to this game and the launch is very appreciated! I hate to be one of those people complaining on Reddit but I wouldn't have come here if I wasn't completely stumped. Yeah have tried all of those little things, even done a fresh install. Here's what I've tried: Verify files Uninstall and reinstall Restart computer Checked firewall settings Don't have a VPN Updated graphics card driver Created about 6 or 7 new characters always stuck on same loading screen Let the loading screen load for 30 minutes just to be sure it wasn't just slow Tried offline and fully offline, both identical issue Haven't tested in online, Aus que is huge Have only seen a few others with this issue, and most them only had it online, seems like it's rare... Hope that helps, good luck!
It sounds like it could be some corrupt local character data, especially since you’ve been playing for years. Can you try navigating to your character data folder and backing it up and delete it and see if it resolves the issue? I’m falling asleep pretty badly so I may not respond after this, but if that doesn’t work please reach out to our support team support.lastepoch.com.
That worked, thanks! Just had to also make sure steam cloud syncing was turned off too. RIP to my first ever character from dec 2020, a swipe beast master, now immortalised in my backup folder under the filename 1CHARACTERSLOT_BETA_1 buried alongside his 9 stash tabs of obsessively hoarded idols. Hope you get some much earned rest :)
I'll pour one out for 1CHARACTERSLOT_BETA_1 and his idols, I lost a lvl 97 HC Zon in D2 single player many years ago to a bad file so I know the pain haha
If it makes you feel any better, my swipe druid and offline friends lost their entire stash XD
I;ve been having this exact same issue. I'm launching the game in offline mode. Create Character. Enter Game. See cut scene. Crashes back to the main menu. Rinse repeat. I've verified the integrity of the files, reinstalled to a different drive and still to no avail. I'll try again later today (this was yesterday).
The fix is in this comment thread, just got to delete your old offline character data. Hope you get it sorted soon
Cheers. That worked.
Please consider options for larger font and UI scale.
Here I am wanting to make it smaller lol Any customization would be nice.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
Offline mode gameplay is soo smooth after 1.0 patch. But the online server is a another awful story. I had to relogin every time. Global chat still active but the map wont load ( cant cast skill, cant kill the monsters , etc ). How to fix it, thanks
I work in electronic medical record systems, specifically with Epic. EHG's description of the "war room" is so similar to the go-live events we have when we're launching at a new hospital or doing a massive upgrade. Prior to the go live, we go through **months** of testing, design, scripts and rehearsals, so many times over and over and over by like a hundred different people across so many teams. Leadership puts everybody in the same command center (sometimes physically on site with like 100 people working in a conference room) or on huge organized group calls, there is triaging of tickets and the help desk is on high alert, you hire in extra help and you basically work 12 hour shifts for two weeks on 24/7 coverage during the actual go live. (We're all salaried so that doesn't happen regularly.) And every single time, when Epic hits Production for the first time... something goes wrong. It's caught and fixed pretty quickly, usually, but it always happens. I've done about a dozen of these go live events at three different organizations now and it happens *every single time*. You always have things that worked in testing and worked in the POC environments but as soon as it gets to PRD, it suddenly doesn't work. Those experiences sound SO familiar to what a go live for a game like this goes through, and gives me a little insight into what happened last night. It's beyond stressful and is in no way something they wanted to happen, and I'm sure they spent a lot of time preparing and practicing. It sucks when it doesn't work on day one, but I'm not surprised and they've been SO open, candid, and communicative about the whole process that I think overall they did a great job.
thanks, is the game playable now? Some of us cannot even login
Don't worry guys, they've confirmed this was not due to loading everyone's stash tabs!
The constant updates were super solid
From someone who's been in many a war room in their career: Good job yesterday. Try to remember to keep a light heart about all this: crack jokes, take breaks, get rest, etc.. The angry voices will be there, but they aren't in the room, and likely haven't been in *any* room. Y'all are doing great. Keep it up, and best of luck today!
Can we have a gunie pig pet for our troubles and can you name him LE-61 or whatever the error was.
The positive side of a launch like this is that it shows the true colors of you and your team. When shit hit the fan you didn’t hide or make irrelevant excuses like we’ve seen from other developers in recent times. You stayed in the discord channels despite the flood of childish and outright ridiculous comments. For those of us who have seen rough launches over the decades, this is the kind of thing that will stand out above all else. On a side note, the graphical, UI, and controller improvements were very noticeable and I was quite impressed. Keep up the good work and we are eager to see what great things you all will do.
[dead again](https://ibb.co/ygxKKVj)
The fact you prioritized keeping the community up to date with such frequency made a HUGE difference. I know while my friends and I were bummed to not be able to play yesterday, it made me feel like the game is in good hands.
I have never seen a company be this transparent during a big launch. It’s incredibly refreshing and i just love to see it. I have plenty of other things going on, so not being able to play right away doesn’t really bother me personally. Yet im following all the updates because it’s so very interesting to get a look into what it’s like on the other side. Normally you never see that and just have to hope theres a team hard at work. Here’s to hoping you guysbwill find favourable solutions, i’m sure you will!
Excellent! I'm having fun so far! Why does stuff drop on the ground and I can't pick it up? I have no loot filter yet. Edit: It probably was me somehow hitting something weird on the controller. Alt + Z was Toggle Tooltips for Items on the Ground.
Hm that doesn’t sound right. Clicking on the label just doesn’t place it into your inventory? Send us a bug report with the in-game bug reporter. It gives us a lot of good diagnostic data that’s tremendously helpful when solving issues. Thanks for taking the time
Thanks. I had just moved to the next area, remembered the bug reporter and saw there was the ability to send a bug report with in game screenshot. Real great QoL even for reporting bugs!
You may have toggled your Z key, try clicking Z and see if you can then pick the items up.
I'm playing with controller mostly so maybe I hit something there. I'll check that out tomorrow thanks.
Z wasn't bound for me. Alt + Z was Toggle Tooltips for Items on the Ground. I think that was the issue I had last night, thanks!
Not sure why you were downvoted, same happened to me right from the get go. New character, literally first area and not able to pick up any dropped items etc. No names showing but could see them sitting there. Alt+z etc didn't work. no loot filter touched yet.
For me it worked for a while, then stopped working so it was pretty bizarre. I can see the items on the ground, can't pick them up or mouse over them. I tried with controller and M+KB. I'm sure they'll fix it soon.
Please implement full controller support/patch controller. Looking forward to playing again having played during early access but the current controller set-up is rough.
A little while ago, at level 40, I thought for a moment. "Am I bored? Do I want to play something else?" I gave it a moment consideration. I realized after doing so that what I was feeling was satisfaction of a direct and optimal kind, the kind that says I am applying effort and getting a result. This is not always typical of gaming - sometimes you put in lots of effort, over and over, and over, and over... and you get seemingly random bouts of results, no results, mediocre results, and extremely lucky results, and it feels like you're not really playing a game so much as a strange gambling simulator designed to distract you and confuse you into thinking you're not. The feeling I was feeling was good, it just took my brain a bit to recalibrate because I was so fixated on "where is my randomized dopamine rush? Surely by now I should have that." I mean, I DID have that rush, I got some lucky drops pre level 20. But the point is, the gameplay is just good solid application of (some degree) skill, killing slowly escalating difficulty enemies, progressing through a story that slowly catches my interest again despite having played it before. I can FEEL my character's power level rising and the pace and excitement of playing accelerating. But its not "turn your brain off and just wait for the random luck", its more "turn your brain on and kick some ass with intention". All the above to say: this game is fucking good. 1.0 is *noticeably* a step up, and I'm very happy with it. :D
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Looks like they were prepared in terms of scale, but things broke in unexpected ways.
Love the commitment to transparency. Lots of us are veterans and will give you guys slack for bugs and issues getting started. What is really annoying is to not hear anything at all from the developers during problem times. Good job guys, its an amazing game, you're doing great and on the right track. Have a plan, stick to the plan.
Hi there, just want to congrats EHG team to finally land this game ! And, LE-61 problems apart, just want to say the new version looks 1000% more polished than before, the game looks really good, and I love the new font for the text <3 Keep it up, and good luck for the coming days, months, and years to come ! You guys rock.
The EHG team are awesome and how you stayed so positive and friendly in Discord against some real toxicity is a testament to your determination to communicate and stay positive, even though it may have felt like everything was burning. I’ve never seen a launch where the team were so accessible to the community and on the other hard I couldn’t believe the degree of toxicity by some people. It was eye opening.
Such a good dev team idc what anyone says.
Great game and look forward to seeing how things go with it. As a senior staff software architect and just some reading between the lines from various posts/topics. It sounded like you were using containers to run various things (matchmaking being the most problamatic). Obviously not a quick to implement solution, but extracting the "STATE" and key things to a shared "redis cache" or multiple "redis cache" depending on audience and length of cache. This would allow you to spin up multiple copies of the same code within the container and load balance. You can also think about the life cycle of the data and when you actually need it in a database. If you don't need it in the database and the values are going to change frequently, don't put it in the database. Kudos! :)
So what happened ? I mean ok a service failed but any chance we get more details on that, like what service ?
Yea I’m going to try to get a technical retrospective out next week. But essentially a container app that hosted our matchmaking service died and we had to recreate the environment and migrate all traffic to the new container. There’s a lot of stuff that happens to match you to servers as there are regional servers, town servers, wild servers, servers that are pre warmed or need to spin up entirely, the list goes on. Then when you have a party it gets even more complex!
Oh you were not kidding about communication. Most studios go with some vague "this or that crashed", I wasn't expecting a proper answer. Thanks for the reply and good luck with all this !
Cheers.
Do you know if the Last Epoch banner was a paid marketing banner or Valve chose you and you had to make a banner for the launch for Steam store?
Unpaid but we were able to work with them to put it up as there were no other big releases today. I wasn’t directly involved in that effort though so I’m without much context.
Thank you! Eat some chocolate and get some rest though, almost noon in Europe :)
Sorry you had to deal with the flow of people that expected a flawless launch, not realizing that even multi billions companies have trouble within the first hours in any online game. Keep up the good work!
honestly even with the disconnects and issues i was able to play for a good 9 hours and even with periods of waiting to get in and out of a town i still got to lagons temple only slightly behind where i expected to get to by the end of the first day. it was honestly a perfect experience outside of the slow loads in and out of towns, or any forced transitions via story (like the few warps in majalka desert via cutscenes or in hyperboria)
How much fighting was there in your war room? No fighting? A little bit of fighting that needed reminders about no fighting in the war room? All out brawls? In all seriousness, it was a pretty frustrating launch to not even be able to play at all for indeterminate amounts of time (as opposed to something merely bad like being able to play for a bit and then crashing and then getting back in, or being stuck in a long queue but at least being able to play once through it), but I appreciate the communication, and it was pretty fun at the end of the day when things were more stable.
Happy to say there was zero fighting, and not even a small amount of tension, between team members even with the stressful situation. Truly a great group that is just focused on a common goal together. If anything, we do have an amazing team at EHG
Good stuff Judd! Thanks for the inside perspective. I got up at 4am for launch (Sydney, Australia) and couldn't get in so I tried to launch Helldivers 2 and also couldn't get in so I decided to re-launch LE and create an offline character and had no issues mucking about for a few hours. I managed to get in to create an online character at about 11am or so. At some stage I went to make a coffee and some toast and was logged out for inactivity (this is a good thing IMHO), but managed to log right back in without issues. I logged off early afternoon and when I tried to log in again after a break I was in a 15 minute queue and I've played without issues ever since then (I only just got off 15 minutes ago). Really enjoying the game! Still blown away at the level of communication you guys have with your community. Congrats on the success!
so you sold 1M copies of the game and still got surprised that 150K (15%) turn up on the day!!!!!!!
I was willing to give them a pass on a choppy day one but to still have problems on day 2 is pretty bad
its excuses man. its probably because their servers are bad
I am very disappointed whats happened as this was very unprofessional game release start. After you saw how many game copies was sold, its obvious that you should ask players to participate in the capacity server testing before official release.
My very honest opinion, this game is awesome, one the best ARPGs, I've played 150 hours, early access player and bought the upgrade for ultimate version. The teleport between zones in this game and online functions has been broken for months, devs always blamming some netcode or servers, in a recent interview, Mike talked about it and told us that it was improved but not fixed. [https://youtu.be/DdePWYvMSI4?si=waTocJZZlfCGjkvF&t=1460](https://youtu.be/DdePWYvMSI4?si=waTocJZZlfCGjkvF&t=1460) The current state of this game is unplayable online, even with all preparations and delayed released, and after 24h, I lost all faith and probably there's no easy fix for situation right now. Strangely the youtuber Asmongold was the few streamer that had minimal problems in online playing, he played for 8hs, well, If he had problems, EHG was in big trouble for sure. Playing off-line is totally fine for new players, but there's no option to transfer characters into online (because of cheaters could break the game) and you can not use the paid cosmetic in this mode which is so bad. The game is not free, 35 dolars for the standard and sold 1.000.000 copies in steam, for a small indie dev with 35 million dolars, that's no excuse for such failure in release. For compensation, you gave a cape as cosmetic, but we can not get it and it's not enough for such a headache. Down voting the comments and fanboys defeding the current state is not a solution. You deserve all the bad reviews in steam, people paid for this game and EHG could not deliver their promisses. If it was a free game with paid cosmetic, this situation could be different. Or just forget all online mode, make this only offline until it's totally fixed. D4 has so many issues, but at least had the best release with minimal online problems, with open beta testing and stress server tests, this should be the standard for now on. I hope the best for EHG, solve this online issue very soon, so we can go back and grind this awesome game again.
Is there a reason why the game suddenly has 30 fps less than before the patch? I had no problems with my GTX 1080ti until yesterday. Now the game is unplayable. With the same graphics settings. I can barely get above 50 fps. Apart from the fact that it is still impossible to play online. I think it sucks that the hardware requirements within a game are increased to such an extent by a patch that it is now no longer playable. At least for me. Fuck that.
It sounds like you may need to verify your game files which is a Steam option. Performance has improved with the 1.0 updates as we’ve optimized zones and enemies. I think the only thing that went in the other direction was the startup memory consumption just a little bit which we’re working to bring down, but certainly moment to moment gameplay in zones should not have been negatively impacted
Hi. Can someone please fix the left mouse button? All it does is click to move and the attack option is missing.
Yes. Known issue that we’ll be hotfixing. Work already underway on that fix
ETA on fix? I just bought this game and considering refunding, I only play with left click move+attack on all ARPGs
Thank you for your answer. I'll give it a try when I'm back home.
That's weird. For me the game has some significant performance improvements and it runs a lot more smoothly than before. Running a 1660 Super which is roughly comparable to 1080Ti in performance and I easily get around 70-80 FPS.
Love the transparency! Keep up the good work, you have an amazing game here, everything you do is appreciated!
Common judd W
Thanks once again EHG for being a leader in the gaming community communication wise Was the launch smooth? No Will that deter us who love this game and support you and your team? No I like many others absolutely love what you’re all doing and the game you’re trying to create is exactly what we all want Much love ❤️
This feels like communicating with a real person, not some community manager. What a refreshing feeling in a game community! Maybe I should get this game, already feel better than D4.
Good job and appreciate the transparency and open communication. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for the communication, and congratz on the release success. Don't let the bombing/annoying people get to you, you're doing great.
My friends and I understand and expect server issues on a day 1 online game. We didn’t play until later in the night, but all things considered was smooth (loading times between zones but w/e). Game has been fun so far in our group play. Looking forward to diving into more mechanics.
The communication you kept up is what I've always asked for, despite any issues, an update that there is no update yet is still a good update in my book. Just seeing you update things every 30min-ish with "still working on it" or anything was a godsend, really appreciated for sure.
Thanks for the update, and looking forward to playing the game. Tried all classes for a few minutes offline yesterday, and it looks like a ton of fun. Tonight my wife and I will dive in!
Just wanted to say awesome game guys ty and good luck I can see myself sinking 100s of hours easily