Early Access Begins Tomorrow!

Our Headstart is officially ending at midnight tonight, ushering in Early Access as thousands of you have already made Aria your home. Our servers are growing daily; we’d like to thank everyone who has taken part thus far and welcome all who are joining us. Each and every time we reach a new and challenging milestone your support blows us away and glues us to our seats.

We have an important announcement today detailing our decision to delay our release on the Steam platform until after the new year. We’d also like to share some useful information in this update regarding what we’ve been working on, the status of some of the technical issues we faced during this headstart and what we’re focusing on next.

Headstart Technical Issues

There’s been a lot of speculation about issues experienced during Headstart so we’d like to shed some light on what has been going on behind the scenes.

The good news is that our population has exploded since going live and that our servers have been running (largely) stable. They have performed valiantly and are running well above capacity. All the early indicators with respect to how the servers have scaled to meet these demands have been very well met. We experienced some substantial annihilation of our login servers earlier in the week, but this problem has now been solved and we’re in a good position with respect to these aspects of our server performance.

The bad news is that we’ve been dealing with a substantial but manageable problem with our data synchronization. The worse news is that this problem up until now was greatly exacerbated by server shutdowns and has greatly hindered our ability to patch the live server. Furthermore, as this is a synchronization issue, problems which can arise from such de-syncs can be random and wide reaching.

Whilst we have safely managed to navigate these issues and are close to resolving them, it is fair to say that the containment, solution and servicing of these problems has consumed our small team.

We’d like to reassure everyone that despite this, we’re working diligently to solve these issues once and for all with as minimal impact as possible on the live service.

Steam Must Wait.

We will not be releasing Legends of Aria on Steam on December 4th. We made this decision for the following reasons:

We need time to ramp up. We are actively expanding our customer service and development team to meet both this weeks growth and the growth we anticipated when we bring Legends of Aria to Steam.

We need time to internally and publicly test our fixes for data synchronization. We will not take an unstable product to Steam, even if it is in Early Access.

We need a break. Our team has been captured in a frenzy, our core programmers working at least 12 hours a day 7 days a week. This isn’t mentioned for sympathy, but if we don’t slow down then we’ll start dropping out of our seats (and there’s not that many of us).

This launch has been a huge milestone for us, our user count is growing every day and this is the opportunity for us to grow with our user base.

Up until this week all preparations had been made, our client has been accepted by Steam and we’re in a position to push the button. We’ll push that button when we’re ready; we’re looking at a date shortly after the holidays.

What Happens Next?

Legends of Aria is live in Early Access and is available to purchase from www.legendsofaria.com/purchase. Founders Pack sales will end midnight tonight (EST), replaced by a Digital Edition of Legends of Aria purchasable for $30. We appreciate that many of you wish to further support us through larger purchases; the feeling is mutual and we will be increasing opportunities to do so soon™.

Our team is already hard at work destroying this synchronization problem and returning the live servers’ stability. We expect to have the data synchronization issue patched out in the next week or two along with a host of fixes for other peripheral issues and gameplay patches.

As our servers grow; so do our operations. To ensure that we’re ready to accommodate this growing population, additional servers must be prepared along with what it takes to manage nearly half a dozen worlds (possibly more!).

Our customer service team is seeing light at the end of the ticket tunnel and we will be implementing new Customer Service tools this week in addition to introducing some new in-game GM’s to increase player support.

Addendum – How Citadel makes decisions

We are an independent studio founded on Kickstarter revenue. Decisions are not made on behalf of board members, investors or publishers. We have budgeted wisely over the years to ensure that we’re not making decisions out of financial necessity, but solely in the interest of the game and it’s community.

We’ve no interest in making a quick profit; each and every sale goes back into LoA and our strategy from the beginning has been to grow our title to organically meet it’s ever expanding audience.

Steam is an enormous milestone, but we have no interest in rushing our game to Steam unless we know we’re in a position to succeed. We could chance it, apply our fixes and be on Steam on time, but every success we’ve had thus far has been a result of making the difficult decision to be patient & prepared.

We’re going to take a little longer. Based on the success of the last 7 days and the lessons learnt about bringing our systems to a much wider audience, we’re confident that when Steam comes around, we’re going to knock it out of the park.

Discover a world forged by players, where your choices write the story. What role will you play?

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