BioWare's Head of Live Service, Chad Robertson, discusses Anthem VIP Demo issues and problems in transparent blog post, promising fixes.

It’s been a tough day for the (very) dedicated Anthem community. After being let into the VIP Demo of the game, there were more than a few problems in the EA title — players’ inability to get past the home screen and a variety of other connectivity problems. Publisher EA and developer BioWare aren’t shying away from the criticisms, instead offering fans and hopeful purchasers insight on what happened and how they plan to fix it.

The news comes by way of Twitter, with a notably transparent Tweet coming from the official Anthem Twitter account:



The Tweet includes a blog post where the BioWare’s Head of Live Service, Chad Robertson, discusses the main points of what went wrong in Day 1 of the VIP Demo.

According to Robertson, the main three issues arose on the first day–most of which stemming from under-planning server capacity:

1. An issue with platform connections, which was supposedly caused by a flood of players entering the game as soon as the servers started up. BioWare is still investigating this, with fixes being rolled out through the weekend.
2. A problem with “entitlements” or virtual tokens that let pre-order gamers from accessing the game. According to Robertson, most of these have been fixed or are currently being addressed.
3. Infinite Loads–a problem that is affecting smaller levels of players, but is a result of the end-user’s service and IP.

Of course, problems aren’t fully resolved — today Robertson has tasked the team with resolving continuing issues from yesterday, fixing the “infinite loads,” and improver server performance to address rubber-banding and other latency issues.

However, the underlying theme through the blog post (aside from address fan concerns) was simply thanking the community for the humbling response Anthem has received so far. According to Robertson:

It’s been incredibly humbling to see so many people watching along with us on Twitch (over 300K concurrent viewers yesterday & over 100M minutes watched — those are Fortnite-type numbers!). Thank you for your support! Our goal is to get everyone into the demo having fun together.

And in case you were keeping an ear to the ground on when you can expect a roadmap and post-launch plans, Robertson acknowledged that it is coming soon. Otherwise, if you are still having problems, BioWare and EA hope that you will keep going to their Answer HQ for tech support.

Overall, this has been a banner few days for transparency in gaming. While BioWare and the Anthem team are not shying away from hard conversations, Nintendo also took a similar high road revealing that Metroid Prime 4 is rebooting development. Both announcements have been met with strong waves of approval (even if tinged with disappointment) from the dedicated communities.

Anthem is due to launch on February 22 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.



Posted: Jan 28, 2019 7:03 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/anthem-vip-demo-twitter-fix-ea-bioware/