Once Human Dev Struggles to Cope With Huge Number of Players as Steam Hit Exceeds Expectations

ign.com:

After a weekend of server problems, Once Human developer Starry Studio has revealed how it struggled to cope with the unexpected number of players who have descended upon the game.

Once Human is a free-to-play multiplayer open world survival game from Starry Studio, a developer owned by Chinese games company NetEase. It launched on PC on July 9 and quickly found an audience, with a huge peak concurrent player count of 231,668 on Steam.

It’s a big success for NetEase, but some players have faced frustration simply playing the game. Specifically, players found they were unable to play with friends because they were already playing on a server that was full due to newly imposed player limits, or had lengthy queue times.

Now, in a post on Steam, Starry Studio said the increase in the number of players over the weekend “exceeded our previous expectations” and in turn caused big server queues. Because of this, Starry Studio said it had “no other choice” but to limit the number of players on each server.

“But we'll admit that this has indeed caused inconvenience for some players, so we are working on improving that,” the developer added. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Starry Studio went on to explain exactly why too many players on a single server causes problems for Once Human. It’s a helpful insight into the way the game works and the challenges developers face when it comes to MMO-style games such as these.

“Once Human is an open-world survival building game where resources on the map are limited in numbers,” Starry Studio said. “If too many players get on the same server, they will have a hard time finding a suitable spot to create their territory. Additionally, some late-game content such as the Stronghold Conquest for PvP servers will be affected. According to our previous test data, we discovered that the current scenarios could offer a better gaming experience if the number of players on each server was limited between 6,000 and 8,000. That's why we've set a