Payday 3's launch is another great advert for not making your game 'always online'

You can already guess the third sentence: the servers have been a disaster at launch, with players forced to queue for long periods just to play alone, if they can manage to play at all. It currently sits "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam - that's 31% positive after almost 19,000 reviews.

"Online only was a huge mistake," says one review. "Imagine waiting for an hour and ten minutes and still not being able to get into a private game," says the one underneath. "this game makes me feel the developers made this game just so they could pull off the biggest heist of all time. robbing us of an offline mode," says another. There are hundreds more like this.

The official Payday X (formerly Twitter) account has been tracking the issues, noting "slow matchmaking" on September 21st, and an outright "matchmaking outage" yesterday on September 22nd. As of twelve hours ago, the account posted that they're "seeing players being able to create lobbies again," but that there "still might have a few issues" that they're working on. Throughout it all, the account has been getting roasted by players who can't play, or who simply want an offline mode.

shiveyarbles,

Yeah tried on gamepass, 10 minutes waiting in the lobby, uninstall.

HughJanus,

“Online only was a huge mistake,” says one review.

“Mistake” implies that they didn’t foresee this coming or that they actually care. It was not a mistake. They just don’t care. Because people will buy the shit anyway. That’s the sad truth. People have no principles. It’s why the world continues to devolve every day.

tal,
tal avatar

Setting aside the online/offline issue, I think that there's a fair argument that this shouldn't happen for online games either.

If it's not the case already, I'm kind of surprised that there isn't a "server engine", the equivalent of what a game engine is for the client side.

I would guess that an awful lot of what game servers do is reinventing the wheel.

Matchmaking and lobbies aren't a new problem.

pgetsos,
pgetsos avatar

It's not that they try to reinvent the wheel, it is that they allocate resources for X amount of players that they expect on a daily basis, and on launch they get 5X players. So everything crashes

Itty53,
Itty53 avatar

It's this. It's a business decision. You don't spin servers up in a second and take them down hours later, there's contracts involved. You spin up enough servers to handle the load you expect normally, not at launch.

Honestly I played Payday 1 A LOT, enough to be in the top 1% of 1% of players. Got invited to the studios after being among the first to complete the ARG.
Then played Payday 2 A LOT.

But I quit halfway through the lifetime of 2 because it was clearly not getting any better, but worse. They stopped innovating and just started looking at player builds and releasing more and more powerful bulldozers. Got boring really fast.

So when 3 was announced? I haven't even looked at it.

ImplyingImplications,

Nothing has changed since Payday 2 then? The game where the devs said at launch they’d never have microtransactions in their game and even mocked players for suggesting they would do such a thing, only for them to add some of the most aggressive microtransactions typically only found in phone games that lead to a huge backlash with fans posting things like “the real heist is the devs stealing money from their fans”?

People have short memories, huh?

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