The video game Outriders released last week on Thursday, April 1st. However, there were some major server issues in Outriders that hindered players' progression and experience with the game.
While server issues are nothing new for games with online multiplayer, these occurred right when Outriders launched, and caught players by surprise. Of course, the game's developers, People Can Fly, were hard at work trying to resolve the situation as quickly and effectively as possible. A recent Outriders developer post revealed more details about the server issues.
On Reddit, the Senior Community Manager for Square Enix, Tobias Palm, shared the post explaining the primary causes for the server issues during Outriders' launch. According to the post, the developers were debugging a complex issue that was not experienced during the Outriders demo launch earlier this year. This was why some of the metric calls were bringing down the externally hosted database for the game. The database is used to hold players' gear, legendaries, profiles, and even their progression.
The post then provided a technical explanation behind the Outriders server issues. According to the post, the developers first realized that many server calls were being managed by a different data management method instead of RAM. Additionally, it was too slow for that amount of data leading to the data queueing back too far, which caused the service to fail. The developers spent the past Easter weekend troubleshooting the issue of why it wasn't using RAM with staff from multiple partners.
According to the post, the developers applied various changes and improvements to help resolve the issue. This includes doubling the database servers, re-balancing user profiles & inventories to new servers, increasing disk IOPs, and more changes to force data into RAM. Most of these improved the database's resilience but none were the big "fix" the developers were looking for. What did help resolve the overloading issue for the servers was reconfiguring the database cache cleanup operations.
The database cache cleaning operations were running every 60 seconds, and demanded too many resources. This led to the previously mentioned RAM issues, which snowballed into the connectivity issues with Outriders' servers. After reconfiguring the cache cleanup to run with fewer resources, this caused everything to start running at a more "comfortable capacity" again.
Currently, the developers are still waiting on further results from the partners for a final Root Cause Analysis (RCA), but the team was able to get a handle on the situation. It is stated in the post that the developers wanted to stay fully transparent with players on the status of Outriders. According to the post, this is why all of these technical details were shared instead of giving a statement like, "server demand was too much for us."
Outriders is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Reddit