Producer's Letter - October 2018

Hello Auraxians,

It's been a while since I’ve written an official Producer’s letter, but I wanted to take a moment to address current events and our plans for the PC version of PlanetSide 2. I usually prefer to communicate with the community via less formal methods, like Twitter and Reddit. But given the recent events tied to our Halloween 2018 update, I want to address a few things about what went wrong and how we plan on making right. In addition to that, I would also like to share a little bit about the direction PlanetSide 2 is headed as we approach our 6^th anniversary. For now, we’ll leave the topic of the PS4 version of the game and issues we have been battling on that front for another day, but know that they are on our radar.

Last week we deployed our Nanite of the Living Dead V: Seeds of Terror game update to PC. Soon after, we started receiving reports of players who were either having trouble connecting to the game or being disconnected shortly after connecting to a zone. It took us several days of investigation but we have pinned down the cause to a specific type network error generated by certain client setups. Previously to the update, this type of error was handled gracefully by our system. After the update, it now causes zones enter a state where no messages will be received from clients right after connecting. We have a speculative fix ready now, but there are some ongoing complications that are currently preventing us from deploying any fixes to Live servers. We’re still hoping to patch as soon as possible, and we will have an announcement about the fix going out as soon as we’re in the clear.

We deeply apologize to those affected by the issue and plan on doing our best to make it up to everyone who plays PlanetSide 2. First off, we will be extending the Halloween Event to run through to the end of November 11^th. We also plan on working with the Customer Service team to grant month long boosts and other make-goods to the players that have been affected by this issue. Finally, we will be running a Double XP For-All week starting on October 22^nd and running through to the 26^th; that will overlap with the Friday of our Member’s double XP weekend and bring back the legendary Members Only Quad Experience day on October 26^th.

I can’t get too far into the details of how this issue was introduced into the game, other than that we have been incorporating the latest version of the Daybreak Forgelight engine from our Core Technology group. This will enable us to take advantage of many updated systems and tools and ultimately pave the way for heavier support of PlanetSide 2 in the years to come. One example might be enhanced server scripting support that enables the much more complicated and interesting game rules we have planned for the new Oshur continent. Profiling and debugging tools have also improved, which has been incredibly helpful for the team. That’s definitely not everything, and I’ll leave one of the biggest tech upgrade reveals that I’m most excited about for another day.

As always, we’d like to thank all of the players of PlanetSide 2. Without our community, this game would not be able to exist. Your energy and investment in playing makes what we do possible.

- Nick Silva

Producer, PlanetSide 2