Outriders Offers Free Community Appreciation Package for Those Affected by Launch Server Issues

Those who tried to play Outriders over its launch weekend were likely affected by the game’s many server issues. Developer People Can Fly promised specific details on what happened during that time. As well as providing those details today, they’ve also revealed a free Community Appreciation Package for those who weren’t able to play during that period.

The short version of what happened is that the game “had enough server scaling capacity but our externally hosted database was seeing issues that only appeared at extreme loads”. This is an issue that didn’t crop up during the demo so the team didn’t see it coming. There’s a full tech-heavy insight for those who are interested that goes into things like RAM caches and more, which created a number of issues. To prevent these issues from occurring again, the team is releasing a patch next week that deals with the majority of crashes and matchmaking issues. A further patch will be released in the future to mop up a few other problems. The issues to be fixed next week are:

Outriders First Update Patch Notes

PC & Console Platforms:

• Once platforms have been updated to the same patch version, cross-play across platforms will become viable again

• Overall stability improvements for the matchmaking service

• Crash Fixes

  • Will Fix a multiplayer crash that could result in client players having their inventory wiped

  • Will fix the crash when completing the “A Bad Day” side quest.

  • Will fix the crash that occurs in No Man’s Land when your language is set to Spanish (Yes, we know. Video game code is a magical thing).

  • Will fix crash on launch issues

  • Will include many more “random” crash fixes

    • We are confident that these fixes will address the majority of crashes reported, as there are only a handful of root causes but the crashes they generate appear in a number of places.

• Will fix the HUD disappearing in certain cases

• Will fix bugs that interfere with players re-spawning in multiplayer Expeditions

• Will fix bugs with players getting stuck on geometry (including when using Gravity Leap) or falling out of the world.

• Will change the default matchmaking setting from “Open” to “Closed”.

  • You will still be able to manually change this setting to “Open” through your game settings

  • This change will prevent players from joining games where the host didn’t intend to play in multiplayer. It will also cut down on AFK lobbies

  • This will also help improve matchmaking times, as the queues will be less likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of constant matchmaking requests generated by “open” games.

• Many other minor fixes and improvements

Those who have seen their inventories wiped by the issues will have them restored during a one-time mass restoration due to happen within “the coming week(s)”, with the exact timing to be confirmed at a later date. Unfortunately the team can only restore the most valuable tiers of items lost, so Epics and Legendaries. Those who had an inventory full of blue items will be unlikely to see it fully restored. Items acquired just before the game disconnected and before an autosave occurred can also not be restored; without the autosave, the item was never recorded on the server inventory. Restored items will be added to players’ inventories and won’t replace current items, but they may not have the same stats as the lost items.

The team is still working on a fix for the Accolades Wipe but they are aware of the issue. Regardless, all players affected by the launch issues will receive a Community Appreciation Package as compensation. This will be offered to all who played the game between March 31 and April 11, or those who played outside that window but have needed an automatic inventory wipe restoration. These players will get some items for their highest-leveled character, including a level appropriate Legendary Weapon, a level appropriate amount of Titanium, and the Frustration emote that’s currently unobtainable.

Finally, the team has also rebalanced some aspects of the game behind the scenes. None of these require a patch and will be added during today’s (April 8) maintenance:

Outriders April 8 Re-Balancing Notes

General Balance Notes:

• Historian, bounty hunt, and monster hunt quests no longer grant Legendary items for each subsequent completion

  • While rewarding players for completing all the Historian, bounty hunt, and monster hunt quests is still our intention, we did observe unintended results when players repeated this activity in combination with a specific multiplayer bug.

  • With this rewards adjustment we want to eliminate this exploit behaviour while still making that quest line worth the effort.

  • Players who took advantage of this exploit will not be punished.

• Adjusted loot on specific enemies: Tooka Beast, Splittooth, Sandshifter and Coldclaw

  • These particular beasts are being too generous considering the required effort to take them down.

• Chem Plant – Expedition time for Gold/Silver/Bronze adjusted to 650 / 1150 / 1500 seconds (Previously: 957 / 1303 / 1650)

• Boom Town – Expedition time for Gold/Silver/Bronze adjusted to 390 / 589 / 776 seconds (Previously: 422 / 607 / 792)

  • Some Expeditions seem to be too generous in their required completion times when compared to others.

  • We want to avoid such disproportionate discrepancies, as we believe making all expeditions viable leads to a more diverse and thus more interesting endgame.

• Critical Rating Damage Multiplier on Tactical Assault Rifle reduced to 165% (Previously: 175%)

• Critical Rating Damage Multiplier on Marksman Rifle reduced to 250% (Previously: 300%)

  • Marksman Rifles with a 300% crit rate showed up to be dominating multiple crit builds. By making the modifier the same as for a Bolt Action Rifle, we want to offer players more options when choosing what gun to use.

• Duration of the Massacre AP buff has been reduced to 3 seconds

  • This is a temporary measure until we have fixed an issue with the stacking cap.

Bullet abilities (Twisted Rounds, Blighted Rounds and Volcanic Rounds):

While we fully intend to provide the overpowered feel for the best builds out there, we are also committed to making sure that there is build diversity in the top performing builds.

Late in the demo lifecycle, we discovered a bug with regards to the bullet augmentation abilities damage calculation formula. While we fixed this bug, some unforeseen imbalances were unfortunately introduced, which has led to bullet based abilities vastly outperforming other skills. The main problem with this is that such bullet based builds require much less investment to make them “top tier”, compared to other builds.

To achieve this, we have made a couple of adjustments for the Trickster and Technomancer classes, who benefit the most from their bullet abilities power. It’s uncertain as to whether these changes will prove too strong or too weak, so please do consider this to be only the first step, as we will continue monitoring and adjusting them in the future. Just like you, we hope to see more inspiring and crazy combinations of Abilities and Mods!

• The base cooldown of the Twisted Rounds skill has increased to 25 seconds (Previously: 16 seconds)

  • While infinite uptime on bullets abilities was always our intention, it is intended to be high risk, high reward playstyle. However, given the current power of this skill, there is very little risk involved in this ability given its short cooldown, even when players fail to trigger ammo replenishment. Increasing its cooldown in combination with adjusting its damage should increase that risk and make this playstyle a more thrilling experience.

• The Trickster’s Hero Tree nodes: – Disruptive Firepower, Scion of Power, Outrider Executioner – have had their power reduced to 35% (Previously: 50%)

  • The combination of Twisted Rounds’ increase of firepower on top of the multipliers provided by the class tree lead to huge increases of damage dealt by this ability. While we do understand the satisfaction this kind of power can bring, it is currently vastly outperforming our wildest expectations and we therefore need to bring it down a notch.

• “Vulnerable” status – Power reduced to 15% (Previously: 25%)

• The Technomancer Hero Tree node -“Damage Against Poison” – has had its power reduced to 15% (Previously: 30%)

  • While the Technomancer’s Blighted Rounds do not provide any damage increase on their own other than ignoring armor as Anomaly Damage, they do provide an excellent tool for spreading the Vulnerable and Toxic statuses. which in turn can scale out of proportion.

• The Pyromancer Hero Tree Node – “Trial of Ashes” – has been reduced 15% extra damage (Previously: 30%)

[Source: Reddit]