Can you even believe it? I cannot believe it. Just kidding, I can totally believe it.
Ubisoft’s much anticipated online shooter The Division launched today, and its servers are not doing so hot. I’ve been trying to play the game on PC for the last hour, and have been hit with with endless “Sierra” errors, each with a different number. Sometimes I get “Romeo”. Uplay itself gives me an error that says that the service is down, and it doesn’t even seem able to sync my achievements.
The Division requires an internet connection at all times, so if your link to the servers goes down (or the servers themselves go down) you can’t play at all. Kotaku‘s Luke Plunkett was able to play in Australia for about five hours earlier today on PC, but was unable to connect when he tried at around 5:30pm. It seems safe to assume that everything went to hell when North American players were allowed on a little while ago, at midnight Eastern (4:00pm AEDT).
Users on Twitter, Reddit, NeoGAF and elsewhere are all reported server outages and a widespread inability to connect or play. Meanwhile, the hapless PlayStation Twitter account Tweeted a Q&A with some of the people who worked on the game; as expected, the responses have been enjoyable:
Given that The Division had two betas, I’d been hoping the launch would go more smoothly. I suppose this kind of thing really is to be expected at this point.
When we checked again at around 6:00pm the servers were letting more people get in. Luke and I were able to log in on PC, though plenty of others were still reporting being unable to play. As is usual with big launches like this, your mileage will probably vary for a while.
In an update on the Ubisoft forums, a Ubisoft support representative says “All services have resumed normal operation on all platforms. We are monitoring the situation.” Lots of users still reporting issues, but surely that’s a promising sign. Hopefully they get the ship righted soon and we can all go about finding out whether this game is actually any good.
In the meantime, if you have the game: What platform are you on, and are the servers working for you?
Comments
51 responses to “It’s Launch Day, And The Division’s Servers Are Having Trouble”
I have been playing the PC version and seems to be running fine for me (australian server)
Same. Got home, installed the required modules (DirectX etc) and launched the game. Got in without any errors, played the first few prologue missions and saw other players milling around in the safe zone etc.. no problems at all.
Certainly no amount of face-plant launch woes that other big titles have had in the past. To have a minor burp at the beginning of the US release, is no big thing.. and by all accounts it lasted less than an hour for a lot of people and less than 2 hours for all.
PC as well but had a few issues around 4-6pm. About to get back in again after 2 hours of no issues.
Initial thoughts lads?
Worth the coin or wait until it drops on sale?
Have barely started but am having a lot of fun with friends, bit early for me to say if it’s worth it for a solo player yet though.
My friends will be on PS, whilst I only have PC. So this is pertinent to me.
I think it is worth the coin. I promised myself not to purchase another game for a long while then bought this and am pretty damned happy with it so far. Havent tried matchmaking yet though.
Thanks @sabrescene and @benredbeard – mate of mine is graciously allowing me access to his steam account to give it a crack whilst i sit on the fence. I want this to be good – I need something to spend my hours on until Ghost Recon: Wildlands drops.
No worries hopefully this is your cup of tea.
oooh I keep forgetting about Wildlands, that looks great.
From my time with the betas (haven’t had a chance to play the full retail yet) i’d say it’s a game that will live or die by the people you play it with. I’m sure the campaign and RPG elements will be perfectly enjoyable single player but for the long game it’ll be heavily dependant on having a good group to go with.
Trying not to reference it because they are very different in feel but… same as another large online shooter.
all online games need to come with a disclaimer to be signed before purchased “For sale only to people mature enough to realise that server issues (and all related mayhem) in mass online games within the first few weeks, are all part of the experience. If you dont have a sense of humour or patience, you may not purchase this title, at this time”
It’s all uphill from here… right?
I’d like to live in a world where launch issues were the exception not the rule.
Cant they apply lessons they learned from previous titles to get it right?
Of course not, this implies thought and logic goes into these launches.
wow that is a really stupid comment. Multi million companies launching multi million dollar games, that they have spent years making, into a saturated market place, full of entitled and opinionated gamers why on earth would they possible waste time planning a good launch? its not like they have anything riding on it.
how does not giving any thought or applying logic to such launches make sense to you?
Uh, because the launches are still shit?
If the launch is so fucking important to them, why do they keep fucking them up?
launches for online games are far more dependent not only on their skill, equipment and programming. But from the user end. Every country has different quality internet, hell every region has a different quality, and then there are many different ways players connect. Then there are three platforms and their interaction to all the above. Then on the PC side alone there is thousands upon thousands of hardware configs.
all the tests and betas in the world can not compare with how much info they get from say a stress test to actual launch day. naturally on launch they do have legacy problems, how the servers cope with being online constantly day after day. So MMO’s I have played had to restart the world daily in the early days. Then there is a nasty people who try and corrupt and cheat the game, who strive for exploits, which in turn upset the stability.
No matter how many small betas they have nothing is like opening the flood gates to everyone, to magnify what could have possibly been small issues, now world destroying.
The problem is it’s all an estimation game. Pre-launch all you have to go off is numbers from the beta and pre-orders. But say those numbers indicate 4 million players, obviously there will be more that didn’t bother with beta/pre-ordering so we’ll say 5m estimated at launch – and just set up server support for 6m just to be safe (these numbers are completely made up btw). Then launch day hits and there are 8 million players all trying to log in, what are you really supposed to do?
It’s fine to say ‘plan for it’ but realistically (using the random numbers above) say you double the initial amount of 5m, so you have a server supporting 10 million, that would’ve ended up being 2 million players-worth of server space being wasted – i.e wasted money. Remember that within a day or two, there will be half (if not 1/4) as many players playing at any given time anyway so this massive server infrastructure will mostly be wasted anyway.
The best you can really do is plan to the best of your ability, then scramble like mad when the shit hits the fan – which it sounds like Ubi did quite well here for a change.
^ This guy gets it.
I was going to say exactly the same thing. how anyone could think that a project with millions of dollars and multiple stake holders riding on the success, would want to deliberately screw over the people who buy it, defies belief.
Server space costs money, they would have many boffins attempting to calculate how many people will likely be connecting at lunch and I’d imagine they would deliberately over estimate this figure before purchasing the required amount. There is of course, no way of actually knowing how many people will try to connect so if it’s more than calculated, you have issues.
From a business perspective, they are probably happy to deal with a small amount of connection issues on launch day anyway as it saves money on wasted server space and likely to only last a few hours. Plus they likely already have additional servers for the opening month that will be removed after that as they will no longer be necessary.
Personally, Myself and 2 other mates jumped on at 18:30 and logged off at 21:30 with no connections issues at all (PS4)
Or perhaps just “The game that we sell you may not match what we SAY we’re selling you, but we’ll get around to fixing it sooner or later.”
There are actually some really good games around that launched as duds. Personally I just wait until they’re not duds. After all, there are cases (looking at YOU, SimCity) where the big problems are never fixed.
I had that striker error happen to me once in the 3-4 hours of play. Nothing game breaking.
10 hours of gameplay during day 1 and only once I dropped. Pretty damn good day 1 imo.
I havent really played this yet but I’m on Ps4 and I love that when I push down on the tile icon it plays music from the game. I feel like everytime a game does this I like the game more instantly
I would be happier if it played Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind.
Not sure how devs would feel if you hovered over their game and the first lyrics played were: “I want something else”.
Hahaha yes!
I have been playing since it went live at Midnight, for 17 hours straight i manage to reach level 16, solo all of it sometimes had to group up for them harder missions. I dont know anyone who i could group up with for later for them Darkzone runs! add mee!! PS4: xWEEBEEx. oh and I ended my 24 hour planned run when i saw that error.
Can’t send you a request due to some settings on your end mate!
yeah can’t add you either but mine is drx913 if you want to add me.
Been playing on XBox One since game went live at 9:00pm WST yesterday and haven’t had many glitches at all. Been very smooth so far, and am absolutely loving it! Wish there were more people online on XBox for partying up, but oh well..
Oh, and for those thre guys that tried to gang me while I was on my lonesome in the Darkzone earlier this evening…you got what you deserved. 😉
Amazing how people still get shitty about this.
It’s to be expected in an online title with a launch of this size.
No matter how you prepare for launch there is NOTHING like going live and inevitably issues will arise.
Personally, I played all evening with no issues. (Australian servers)
Played for a solid 3 hours last night from 9pm had no issues with connections. I guess some people are just unlucky.
Got booted 3 different times last night in about 3 hours of playing. Was able to log straight back in and it loaded back up where I left off mission wise, and spawned me at the mission location, so wasn’t any big problem.
I took the day off work yesterday and probably got in a solid 6 hours in a couple of blocks. I wasn’t able to get on for around an hour at 2.30PM WST but honestly – it’s the launch of a major online-only title. There were always going to be issues. Compared to Sim City, Diablo 3 and any WoW expansion ever, this is smooth sailing!
Thus far I’m really, really enjoying my time. My main concerns so far are:
– Some really funky scaling when you add extra people to a story mission
– While the missions may change in objective and setting, the mechanics haven’t so far. It’s always been “go here, hold square on the thing, shoot some guys, repeat”
But overall I’m loving it so far.
Played about 3 hours last night and it was near perfect. Noticed some slight lag for 2 minutes or so.
It’s Launch Day, And ‘s Servers Are Having Trouble
Angle bracket fail 🙁
It’s Launch Day, And _Insert Game Title_’s Servers Are Having Trouble
My partner and I managed to do hour long sprints before getting booted. But thankfully, reconnecting straight away put us back with the other to continue.
I’m enjoying it, just got up to where the Beta started.
A closed beta and an open beta, I dunno, the servers handle the beta loads fine, but so many people don’t play betas, I hardly ever play betas unless I’m on the fence for a game.
The servers were fine yesterday, I was able to play from 2 to 4pm, it was after 4pm till dunno when that there was issues. I assume other countries got access to the game. I played again later after 7pm till late and didn’t have any more server problems.
Yeah, betas and alpha’s really show them nothing for how many people will jump on day 1. Bit of a silly statement in the article really lol
Hi guys,
I am looking for people on xbox to play with. My xbox tag is brav3one, feel free to add me.
cheers
Dear Kotaku editors, maybe it’s time to redefine what is newsworthy? What if you only make an article whenever an AAA game doesn’t have issues in launch day?
Hmm, I guess you are right. An article every 10 years or so may not be enough to keep the lights on.
Maybe its just me, but does it seem a little odd that when Destiny launched there were articles coming out of Kotaku’s ears? before the game launched, launch day, and every day after that for weeks, sometimes 2 or 3 per day, I knew what to expect, how everything worked, tips for playing and levelling, lock, stock, the lot by the end of launch day. The Division (at least IMO) is attempting to achieve very similar goals to Destiny, and by all accounts has done a much better job of it thus far and yet there is only 2 article (other than cheap purchase price) and 1 is about the servers failing (even though to be fair, it has run much much better than so many other games) and how to make it run OK on your PC.
Not making a big deal of it, just saying…
Yeah, it’s been odd. I posted something similar in a TAY a few weeks ago (around the time of the closed beta).
Don’t get me wrong, Kotaku has posted a few articles. But it’s been relatively few for what has probably been the most hyped AAA game in a while. Particularly since, as you say, Destiny (a very similar game) was given absolutely blanket coverage. Especially by Jason.
I’m pretty sure I remember there even being lengthy articles on the Destiny Alpha and both betas. But with The Division, there’s been essentially nothing gameplay wise in terms of articles. Just the “how to run it on your PC”/”here’s where to buy it cheap” articles you mentioned.
But it’s okay, we have 4000 word UFC articles. /s
I’m guessing either somebody at Kotaku is not a fan of The Division/Ubisoft (Maybe no early review copy?) and/or they were getting a handshake from somebody involved in Destiny.
Cynical bastard aint I 😉
I know it’s not the second, since NOBODY got early review copies. Not even IGN, who had the exclusive media deal. Massive/Ubi wanted everyone to experience the “real” game.
Who knows, eh?
Beta’s give them very little in regards of how many people are going to be jumping on day 1, so no, I did not expect the server loads to go smoothly just because they had two beta’s
That being said, I had no issues, and me and my 4 mates were playing solid last night for a good 5hrs, and I was also playing the second it released (thank UBI for aussie release time!!) from 9pm WST, and still had no problems at all. I don’t think I know of another hyped MMO style game that has released without server troubles lol
Enjoying myself so far. Running smoothly with everything on Ultra at 90FPS.
However when I activated NVIDIA HFTS mode I fell through the world floor into the nether a couple of times, which when you eventually land it respawns you back at home base. Deactivating this mode stopped that. Dunno if anyone else has had this issue.
Played for three and a half hours last night with a couple of mates on Xbone with no issues whatsoever…
This is why I’m not a fan of online only games. It separates the online and offline gamer, and I don’t see why it can’t incorporate both.
If a game is designed solely for playing with others than sure why not, but why the fuck should I have to worry about having a decent internet connection to play in a single player story mode? That I will never understand. Nor will I ever support.