First thoughts on the F2P launch and why we're not advertising yet...

Well, we finally did it. Valve gave us a little panic right at the end, but we switched over at the time we had planned.







The impressions from new players is good so far. Our recent steam review score has already gone from Mixed to Mostly Positive and there are matches being played constantly. We currently have about ten times as many players as before. I know some were expecting an immediate influx of thousands of players, but what we have is actually desirable in the very short term. Let me explain...





There were several question marks over how well our matchmaking system would hold up, and the answer was "could be better". Had we seen thousands of players, this would have left a very bad first impression. With the relatively gentle increase we actually see, we have the opportunity to identify and fix problems before we start trying to make some real noise. As I've mentioned before, we are limited in the scope of the testing we can do, and we knew that the burst of activity would highlight where we went wrong.





Here are some of the issues we have seen in the last couple of days and are fixing/have fixed:

- Matchmaking queue timer getting reset each time a new player joined.

- Players taking a long time to join matches making the system think they had left. Apparently we underestimated how long a slow pc takes to start the game.

- Ghost servers in Australia causing matchmaking to fail for Oceania region. Somehow some year-old servers which are out of our control were still running and were flagged as matchmaking servers.

- Problems purchasing keys/chests. This is being investigated by Valve.

- Routing in South America means our chosen data centre is not able to serve many players with low enough latency.

- Dynamic servers starting more slowly than people are prepared to wait.





We don't have any officially planned work right now, we are just reacting to issues as quickly as we can. Once the firefighting period is over, we will be trying to increase our visibility, and start getting back to our regularly scheduled development process.