Starbreeze Speaks. Payday 3 Server Updates
I'm John from Rusty Chains, and today our chat is about Starbury's finally beginning to address the disastrous server outages with Payday 3. When I made an address, I meant to discuss it publicly because the servers were currently down at the time of writing this. Let's take a look at the big news that's come out since my article yesterday.
First up was this tweet from Star Brew CEO Tobias Sjogram in response to somebody who said they would pass on purchasing the game. A game pass is better than a hard pass. Jokes aside, as communicated by Andreas, for example, the team is looking at the possibility of adding some sort of offline mode.
That's great that's great that's a direct confirmation from the CEO that offline is being talked about. I wasn't initially sold on it, though looking at the possibility is two steps away from commitment, and some sort of offline mode scares me a bit given the community theory that an offline mode would prevent progress saving.
However, my worries about those cleared up a bit this morning when Tobias published a new statement on the Starburst Company website, which reads as follows: Payday 3 matchmaking infrastructure has not performed as tested and expected. Matchmaking software encountered an unforeseen error that made it unable to handle the massive influx of players.
The issue caused an unrecoverable situation for Starbury's third-party matchmaking partner. A new version of the matchmaking server software was gradually deployed across all regions, leading to improved performance. However, a software update made by the partner late Sunday again introduced instability to the matchmaking infrastructure.
The partner continues to work to improve and stabilize Payday 3's online systems. The issue in question did not manifest during technical betas or early access due to the specificity of rapid user influx and load balancing. Starbury's is currently evaluating all options, both short- and long-term.
In the short term, this means Starbury's focus is to ensure the player's experience. In the long term, this means evaluating a new partner for matchmaking services and making payday 3 less dependent on online services. We are disappointed in the issues our player base has faced during our launch weekend, but we are confident in our core product and the quality of Payday 3, and all available metrics point to it.
We have a lot of diligent and consistent work ahead of us to regain community trust, but we will work hard to do it. Tobias Sealgren. CEO of Starbury's Entertainment So, lots of finger pointing at the partner for the servers there makes it perfectly clear that they're responsible for the server outages due to software updates that weren't ready and just a general lack of preparedness for the unforeseen error.
The last sentence of the second to last paragraph is huge; they mention evaluating a new partner, meaning probably looking at a new server hosting company, and also making payday 3 less dependent on online services. Beautiful It's what everybody wanted the entire time. I'm just disappointed we need to reach the literal worst-case scenario to get here with literally tens of thousands of negative reviews and Starbury's stock value spending a week in free fall, but hey, we got there in the end, right?
The final sentence of the final paragraph also jumped out to me, where Tobias talks about repairing the damage to the trust of the community. I went on and on about that broken trust in my article yesterday, so this obviously means the man at the top is subscribed to Rusty Chains, just like you should be.
I'm joking, of course. I absolutely doubt he saw it, but it means they correctly identified one of the biggest issues I raised from a community standpoint. If we know anything about Starburst by now, it's that they have a real knack for escaping seemingly unwinnable situations. They seem to already have a solid plan in place this time.
After that, Almer and Andreas took to a live stream today to do a little Q&A with the community. I missed it while I was at work, but a Reddit user was kind enough to put together a summary of the big points, so thanks to you. Ryan goslings his testicle. Why is it singular? What happened to the other one?
Which one is it? Ah, I'm being insane. Boy, all right, let's go through this thing real quick. The first point is a new skill line on the way called Transporter, which allows players to move two bags at once. Awesome people have been asking about that since the early days of Payday 2. The second point was that online only was done to stop cheaters and keep parody with consoles.
The team is happy with the game outside of server issues, but, as you all know, I'm very, very not thrilled with the game outside of server issues. See my article yesterday for more details on that. Next up, the whole development team is working on the servers. I mean, I hope not the whole thing, like don't send a [__] concept artist to spend their time drawing a picture of Dallas standing next to a functioning server.
Rack or something, there is an opportunity to add a safe house to Payday 3, but there was a lackluster reception to Payday 2. I think that's entirely fair. The safe house could be cool, but it needs to be justified with reasons to go there. Besides just the safe house raid, a four-player co-op game doesn't warrant a designated social space on its own; the team is evaluating Lobby Chat Heist briefing, quick play renaming, loadouts, and weapon numbers versus stat bars.
Yes, good these are all things that I've asked for, and these are all things that should come back. I still don't know why they were removed to begin with, but I'm glad they're returning. Better late than never, but never late is even better. The team is happy with how experience works, but considering recommending challenges or adding filters, boo progression is very slow as a result of these challenges, and many Heist runs are left unsatisfying as is with no significant progress made.
It's very disappointing to me that they're doubling down on that. Every option is on the table for online support. There are no plans to go offline, but it is being considered. Now this seems to be walking back the two earlier statements from Tobias. I think at this point it is clear for the entire gaming world to see why some form of offline is needed time for it to move from consideration to priority number two just behind keeping the servers up.
There is no official mod support, but a modding policy will be implemented now. I'm sure this will disappoint a lot of people. I don't personally want to use mods in a lot of games, so I'm fine with this. With Payday 3 being on the Unreal Engine, which is notoriously easy to develop, having a policy set in stone is a very good idea.
