Let’s face facts folks, quite often Australians get the proverbial bum rap when it comes to online gaming, particularly with dedicated servers. When THQ announced Homefront they were committed to supporting dedicated servers for Australia – so far the implementation of that grand statement hasn’t exactly gone to plan, but THQ has announced they are committing more resources in an attempt to support Australian Homefront players.
On the Homefront forums, an announcement from the Homefront team was posted, explaining the reasons for Homefront’s current poor performance online, and the plans being put in place to improve that performance.
Good morning Australia,
The Homefront team is aware of the issues you have been experiencing since release and the outage that has occurred. As such, we wanted to bring you under the hood to illustrate what has happened, what we have done, and what we plan to do moving forward.
Server Outage
A complete outage of our dedicated servers occurred around 10:45PM Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, March 21st – the cause of this is unknown and we are quickly working towards a resolution. We apologize for any disruption to your gaming and will advise as soon as this has been resolved.Dedicated Servers
The dedicated server infrastructure has experienced unprecedented demand, requiring a rapid ramp-up of server capacity. In addition to the increased server capacity we added this past weekend, as of yesterday even more additional servers made their way to the continent – they are being unboxed, racked, & stacked. What will this do? It will increase server capacity an additional 2-fold. As you can see, we are working as quickly as possible to respond to demand.Low-Ping/Red-bar
This is a 3-part issue – The first, extremely high usage on Australian Servers has resulted in Matchmaking placing players in overseas servers (US) to cope with demand. Not the ideal experience or the one that Australian user expected when choosing Homefront. The additional server capacity we implemented should help with this. The second step that’s being taken is to implement a “Ping Limit” (server-side) that should help players find themselves in geographically closer locales with much better connection times. Lastly, the in-game ping meter itself is going to have its limits changed to better reflect connectivity. At present, limits are too strict resulting in nearly every server being full of “red” connections while latency & gameplay experience dictate otherwise. This is a global fix as well and will be included in a Critical Title fix. We will inform you when this patch will go live.Finally, we want to stress again that Homefront is one of a tiny handful of titles offering dedicated server support on console, and the infrastructure and networking code required to support this is much more complex and demanding than simple peer-to-peer matchmaking you see in most other FPS games. The pay-off is larger maps, more players, and an equal playing field for all – something we believe is critical for fair, balanced online FPS gameplay. Every game that goes the extra mile to provide dedicated servers faces additional teething problems in the first few days as the kinks are ironed out, but please bear with us as we address these – the result will be worth it.
Once again, we thank you for your patience and support.
The Homefront team.
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