Funcom, developers of the early access survival RPG, Conan Exiles, announced on Friday that they were ending the partnership with the provider of their official servers, PingPerfect.
The announcement was made on their steam page and stated that:
Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming demand for servers and our needs for administrating them, our official partner has been unable to deliver the level of quality and service we require. Because of this we have mutually agreed to end the partnership.
Conan Exiles, which launched 31 January, has been plagued by performance issues, ranging from rubberbanding and lag, through to strange behaviour from the client such as items and buildings disappearing between relogs. There have been problems on the 200 official servers, hosted by pingperfect, as well as lag issues on the 7500 unofficial servers, some of which were provided by Pingperfect as part of the upgraded pack “Barbarian Edition” which came with a 25% lifetime discount on Pingperfect servers. This offer has now been removed from the upgrade package.
The timing of the announcement, which was followed by the immediate offlining of the official game servers, is particularly annoying to people who have been playing, as this is the first weekend after launching the early access, and so would have been expected to be a very busy time for the servers.
Many games experience server issues at launch, due to higher than expected demand for the game, I do not, however, recall any other gaming company responding in this manner, and with so little warning. The cap on the official servers had already been reduced from 100 to 40, and it had not had a large impact on the issues experienced by users.
Funcom have said that they are in the process of finding a new partner, but that this is not an instant process, due to many providers not having the hardware ready to take over running the servers. They have said on their twitter today that they cannot guarantee any replacement servers by Monday
We will do our best, but we can't guarantee that servers will be up by Monday.
— Conan Exiles (@ConanExiles) February 4, 2017
They have also said that they plan to be able to copy the databases over to the new server, so theoretically, people should be able to pick right back up where they left off
We've kept the databases from the old servers (characters, buildings, progression, etc). Plan is for you to keep your shit.
— Conan Exiles (@ConanExiles) February 4, 2017
I have been playing the game since launch day, and have been relatively lucky with my experiences on the official servers, having only minimal rubberbanding, and the lag that I encountered worked very much in my favour, as the mobs were the ones not moving, so they just stood still while I killed them.
The response from the community to the ending of the partnership with PingPerfect has been largely positive, as it is better to get these issues fixed sooner rather than later, and many companies ignore, or take their time in addressing server issues at launch.
Funcom hosted an AMA on Reddit yesterday, where they answered questions mostly about upcoming additions to the game, such as magic, trebuchets, and decay of structures.
At the time of writing, there is still no date for getting official servers back online, and I would not expect anything to happen before the end of the weekend, given that when Trion Worlds had to get new server hardware to cope with the influx of players at the launch of Archeage it took longer than a weekend to get the hardware shipped to Trion. The new partners will have to agree a deal with Funcom, and then they will have to source and install the hardware, so, I am optimistically hoping for the official servers to return sometime in the middle of next week.
There was also an issue with one of the builds for Conan Exiles being released without the Denuovo anti-tamper and DRM software, which allowed for people to pirate copies easily, and as Conan Exiles has the option to play on unofficial servers, and as single player, people who obtained a copy of this build can play it as long as they do not update the build to a more current version.
Server issues aside, I have been enjoying playing Conan Exiles, having been a fan of Age of Conan previously, and am spending the time while official servers are offline playing single player, with XP, harvest amounts and respawn timers tweaked to let me test out building before I hit the official servers again (Also so I can find the optimal location for my base!)
