Servers are literally too busy
Getting into a game of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegroundsin recent days has sometimes been more of a hassle than it should be. Error message after error message pops up, each one indicating in some way that it’s having a tough time with smooth matchmaking. Most of the time, it’ll eventually connect after a few tries.
One of those messages, “servers are too busy,” is the most accurate depiction of what’s really happening. In a post on the PUBGsite, developer Bluehole explains that it’s having difficulties handling the surge of players. Essentially, this game is more popular than the developers ever imagined it’d be.
Bluehole says that it originally designed lobbies to handle a million concurrent players. That’s ambitious by most any game’s standards. Previously, Dota 2held the Steam record for most concurrents somewhere just shy of 1.3 million players. Sinking development resources into scaling that large would be a wildly irresponsible thing for a studio to do. Approximately 99.9999 percent of games will never reach the same level of popularity as Dota 2.
But PUBGis the exception to that! It’s the gaming phenomenon of 2017. Every time it seems like there’s no way it can get more popular, it does. As of writing, PUBGtopped out at 1.655 million users today and that has become routine. It’s more than three times that of CS:GOwhich is in second place around 550,000 players.
Bluehole’s working on it in whatever way it can. “It has become increasingly difficult to manage servers during peak times. To alleviate the above, our development team will prepare our servers far more in advance so that they can handle a much larger number of concurrent players. This is something that we plan to continuously improve on,” the developer says. It also addressed outages in Asia, which, again, were caused by a recent influx of players.
The PUBGparty is too big. It’s the 4’6″ 7th grader who hit a growth spurt over Christmas break and came back to school 11 feet tall. Growing pains are bound to happen with most any successful game, and PUBGis currently the most successful there is by a wide margin. It’s a fortunate problem for Bluehole, and the developer certainly has the capital to fix it.
Update on Recent Server & Connection Issues [PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds]