We launched Thursday the Free version, after having it in a closed beta for two weeks. We went past our launch peak in concurrent players as well as daily active users (DAU). However on Friday, when press coverage and Steam platform visibility started, the onrush was massive.

Not only did we double the number of concurrent users, most importantly we tripled Daily Active Users who were 44,619 unique users playing Sunday.

So massive was the increase we hit "glass roofs" in some services. There was no time Friday as the closed beta was supposed to show these - and we did find some.

We spent all weekend addressing these issues, and we still are. Rewriting/Refactoring some services before we bring them back online, removing those glass roofs and a client patch en route as well. Or as the ancient Chinese saying goes "Hold my beer, I got this."

Fortunately, everything else scaled accordingly. Usually, you end up in a position where you run out of game servers. We can't. We auto-scale so when more servers are needed; Amazon automatically fires up new machines. But the services were ancillary, which brought down our application servers.

Latest updates and FAQ

Here is a short overview of the outstanding issues we're working on this week.

- Some Guild Services are being refactored and disabled till then. So many guilds joined and were active that we've not seen anything like it before.

- Some World Map Service is being refactored. If you like using it this much, we can't wait to see what happens with the new World Map.

- We tested larger AWS C4.8xlarge compute servers to decrease administrative overhead on application servers, but with this many game servers on the same machine, it's affecting framerate of the servers. That means for short, "lag." We'll move back to more, regular servers if this problem persists.

- Updated: Upgrading to Squadron and Imperium from Free now works correctly. They are regular DLCs so buying Imperium gives you 50% off the RTC, and DLCs included.

- Updated: Note, we know that some DLCs didn't give all weapons and that's fixed, we are about to deploy the fix. The bundle of the 4 DLCs will come later, until then, it's the same discount buying the Imperium edition.

- Updated: Steam is now working on the giftable version of the game for all players that bought the game before we launched the free version. They are still uncertain so it might be something else you get :)

- If you haven't noticed your one-time 20,000 RTC gift, you probably spent it already. We're implementing an "Inbox" so that gifts like that and important messages are ingame in the inbox. Also implementing the Steam news feed ingame.

- You will all get 4x4000 Faction RTC as a thank you for sticking around over the weekend and the problems that you encountered. They will be distributed at the earliest safe opportunity.

We deeply appreciate this amazing interest that has been shown, as well as thank our long term supporters that still believe.

Nathan

Ps. For the hardware geeks in us wondering what a C4.8xlarge is:

C4 instances are the latest generation of Compute-optimized instances, featuring the highest performing processors and the lowest price/compute performance in EC2.

Features: C4.8xlarge

36 vPUS, 60 GB RAM, 4,000 Mbps EBS storage networking.

High-frequency Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (Haswell) processors optimized specifically for EC2

EBS-optimized by default and at no additional cost

Ability to control processor C-state and P-state configuration on the c4.8xlarge instance type

Support for Enhanced Networking and Clustering