Greetings, Soldiers!

This week’s Report is a bit later than normal, but there’s a good reason for it – we wanted to sum up the Free Weekend and to do that – it had to end. We’ve got some cool stats for you as well as our summary of what happened and what we learned.

The most important thing for us was to keep the systems stable and make sure the Master Servers are not slowing down and crashing. This was a resounding success, as there was just a minor incident that rendered one of the login servers inoperable for less than 1 minute at 2:54 am local time on Friday. The automated recovery worked as it should and the system came back without human interference in about 50 seconds.

We’ve had a lot of new players join us in testing the game and making sure we’re doing the right things. We’ve had a lot of new feedback from new players, which is invaluable – while veterans can generally provide better quality bug reports and feedback, new players have a unique perspective on the game that seasoned players can’t have – and that’s very important for us. Thanks to the feedback we got we can now make the new player experience better and make sure more and more players are happy with the game in those critical first few hours of playing.

We’ve also gathered a lot of data, bug reports and we learned a lot about both how the game works with the influx of new players, how our systems work and how to handle the communication on social media, forums and Discord.

Of course, there were some problems, crashes and server instability, but that’s to be expected – we are still far away from release. One very encouraging thing that came out of the negative part of the feedback and comments is this though: in general, our players are happy with the game design and how the game plays – it’s the technical issues that are preventing some people from enjoying the game. And technical issues are a lot easier to fix than core game design.

We’ve learned and tested so much during this Free Weekend, that it’s a no-brainer to do more of them. We don’t know when yet, but for now, let’s take a look at some stats (for a more visual version, check out the image at the end of this Report):

Top daily unique players: 22 411

Avg. daily unique players: 18 350

Peak online: 2 513

Game launches: 170 906

Automated cheater bans: 4

Steam store visits: 4 631 020

Peak Twitch viewers: 1 393

Overall we see this Free Weekend as a big success. We’ve learned a lot, tested a lot, got heaps of feedback and introduced the game to a lot of new players. Even our Steam review score went up for the last 30 days, which means that it’s not only us that think the game is getting better and better.

Now it’s time to get back to work on 0.7 and the Engine Update. This update should improve server stability and performance, reduce stuttering and make the game more stable. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff slated for 0.7, so make sure to check future Weekly Reports for more information.

Thank you for playing with us over the weekend and see you in the next Report!