EQ Aradune Server and Trading One Problem for Another

I almost wrote a post this past week about how queue times had disappeared from the EverQuest Aradune server.  After all, that was the problem when it launched late last month, the problem that Daybreak was focused on addressing.

Nostalgia is live

Unfortunately, in opening up the server to allow more people to get into the game led to different problems.  Something is always the bottleneck, so when you fix one you often end up finding the next one.

In this case, people could log into the game, but moving between zones began to take as much as 15 minutes at times and often simply led to the game client getting disconnected or crashing.  Tipa declared her Aradune adventures over based on this state of the game.

The cure seeming worse than the disease, Daybreak announced that they were rolling back the population cap increase and would be working on server stability.

We wanted to update players on Aradune with some changes made recently. Since launch we have been working on solving the issues with server performance that has affected game play for many of you. In the interim we have reduced the server capacity slightly as a short term fix. Disconnects while zoning have been greatly reduced, and some of the sources of crashes while zoning will be addressed in the upcoming June update.

While the server is at a reduced capacity it is likely that you might see a queue during peak times, we know this can be frustrating and thank you for your patience while we continue to work on the outstanding issues.

So the server is back to queues again.  Those are more palatable than problems once you are in the game.  Tipa even suggested that she might return to Aradune, since queues were at least a consistent issue to deal with.

Darkpaw Games studio head Jenn Chan also put out a note to the EQ community (and the EQ2 community as well) last week about the problems that had hit their games last month when they did the server merges and add the new servers.  Players of both games got something for the problems.

So it goes.

On the bright side, being too popular to handle all the people who want to play on a new server is a good problem for a 21 year old game to have.