State of the Alpha: Day Two (Morning)
Hey everyone! Good morning! Just woke up and am currently catching up on all the forum posts, tweets, bug reports, etc. from last night. Thought I would write up a quick “state of the alpha” post so folks know how things are going in general.
Participation
So far we’ve been absolutely blown away by the amount of participation in the Alpha Test. I’m excited to announce that as of right now, more than 1,000 people have participated! That’s above and beyond what we expected…the most that participated in any previous test (including the pre-Kickstarter stress tests) was around 600, so we’re well on our way to doubling that. Thanks to everyone who is here kicking the tires and checking out the game, we appreciate your efforts!
Feedback
The feedback thread so far has been going quite well. Keep asking us questions and making suggestions. We love to hear from you. Only thing I would like to note is, once you’ve made your suggestion once, please trust us that we’ve read it. You don’t need to keep repeatedly saying the same thing in multiple threads, that’s just spamming the site and is not helpful. Everyone has a different opinion and that’s to be expected…believe me when I say that I read every single post and take it into consideration.
Bugs/Crashes
I’m still getting bug reports of crashes but at this point it only seems to be happening for the most part when loading/unloading levels (e.g. going into/out of your Player House). It seems like most (all?) of the “crashing while moving around” bugs are now fixed, which is great. If you are experiencing crashes please do keep sending me your crash reports using the “Report Bug” feature of the launcher, even if you have already sent them before. That’s because basically I use the ongoing number of reports as an overall indicator of “are people still crashing, or is it fixed?” So i you stop sending them I may assume the problem is solved when it’s not, haha.
If you are crashing a lot (as in, more than once an hour consistently) please also let me know in the Feedback thread if you would so I can start tracking down those issues.
Thanks for sticking with us during this Alpha test, things are already better than they were yesterday and we’ll keep working throughout the weekend to improve the client stability.
Server Status
The server has been an absolute champ, only having crashed one time thus far and auto-recovering fine. Honestly my biggest concern coming into this test was the server handling the increased load, but we peaked at 200 concurrents yesterday and we didn’t really have any problems on the server side (all the lag and crashes were caused by things on the client). So that’s really, really great news.
Overall
Overall, I’m really pleased with how the test is going, and I’m really excited to see so many new people joining us. If you are new, I hope you have felt welcomed and that you’re having fun. “Alpha is alpha,” as we like to say, so some crashes and bugs are ineveitable, but I’m really glad we have a great community around the game so far all pitching in and helping us improve. Keep on being friendly and helpful, and keep having a great time!
When does it end?
You’ve got a good chunk of time left! But just so you know, here’s a Countdown Clock to the end of the test. Enjoy!
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