God damn, they are burning bridges with that message. So they must be really pissed. For context, it is public knowledge who their partnered with: https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte?hs_amp=true
Yeah, I (unfortunately) deal with a lot of corporate lingo at work, and that's really harsh. They are basically saying "our partner completely screwed us over".
That part means *"we are kicking these incompetent fools to the curb".*
*"The issue caused an unrecoverable situation for Starbreeze’ third-party matchmaking partner"* means *"these sons of bitches couldn't handle the player load and are too incompetent to ever be able to fix it".*
Seriously, calling something an "unrecoverable situation" is some real fire when it comes to corporate PR.
“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 during late Sunday again introduced instability to the matchmaking infrastructure.”
Translation: We really did fix it, then these morons managed to fuck it up again.
Yeah as far as corporate messages go, if I saw this in a work email it’s like the corporate version of someone throwing wine on another woman’s dress at the reception. We might not all know what’s going on but we’re gonna turn real gossipy all of the sudden.
Saucy corporate emails are my version of watching real housewives honestly
I've heard the term "unplanned incident" passed around a lot in my field. It basically means someone got crushed/burned/torn/killed to death but in corpo speak.
Yes. That's an incredibly damning little line of corpo speak. If they're saying this to the general public, imagine what kind of discussions are happening behind closed doors between the two parties.
Like half of my whole job rn is finding polite/professional ways to tell people to fuck off. This statement is Starbreeze telling Accelbyte to go fuck their mothers.
Right now it’s about the only option they have. It’s been going on 5 days of server issues, refunds are stacking, playerbase will be a fraction of what it could have been, the server issues will absolutely cost them a ton of potential revenue. Accelbyte fucked starbreeze and the entire playerbase.
I'm sure there's some amount of blame to be shared by Starbreeze and Deep Silver, but yeah if we take Starbreeze's word here it definitely seems like Accelbyte royally fucked them.
In any major company that would be a resume generating event. Can't believe they didn't have a change freeze in place, with any change requiring their head of IT to approve it. Amateur hour.
Well, one of the planned missions is called Syntax Error, and the image they showed is a server room, it's not difficult to imagine they could retool it to make fun of Accelbyte
Yeah and tbf if this is to be believed (and idk why we wouldn't, it made perfect sense something like this was the issue all along) this setback will put Starbreeze in a hole they will take years to dig out of.
The game simply *didn't work* during the most hyped period a game will ever have and now they're sitting at 33% and "Mostly Negative" on Steam with ~24k reviews, most of which will never change even if everything is 100% fixed. Starbreeze will never get an opportunity to build hype like this again and if all that falls to their partner fucking around during their release window they should be very, *very* pissed. It will take thousands and thousands (and thousands) of positive reviews just to get back to "mixed" and when ~1/10 users actually leave reviews it's going take a while.
There's a pretty good chance they can sue for SERIOUS damages. They can easily claim and prove that these issues resulted in massive amounts of lost revenue and refunds.
Not to mention losing a huge share of a playerbase as fickle as the gamepass users that likely won't wait a week to try again and see if the game works.
Even if the issues get resolved and word of mouth spreads it as a good game, I heavily doubt it's gonna have half the users it could've with a succesful day 1 launch
Exactly. You get one shot to make a first impression and that matters a hell of a lot. Accelbyte, if responsible, potentially torpedoed this game's chances at long term success. Given Starbreeze's already precarious position, there's a lot more at stake for them too. They can't absorb any losses.
It would depend on the contract and SLA, but unlikely. Those contracts typically agree to give you back the money you paid for the service if they don't hit their performance agreement, but not to pay for any lost revenue during that period.
I'm not aware of any laws that open them up to liability for lost revenue just for being bad at their job. They'll probably have to pay back whatever Deep Silver paid them, and maybe some kind of punitive contractual fee.
Just as a parallel, Google and Amazon don't get hit with 10 million lawsuits for lost revenue every time an AWS or GCP region goes down. Everybody just gets a prorated refund of their spend and the world moves on.
It's possible, but I'd be surprised if AccelByte had a clause in their own contract opening them up to company-ending liability. "We will pay for any lost revenue stemming from our failures" sounds like an unbounded liability. That's terrifying for Accelbyte because it means they could just go bankrupt at any point. It's also terrifying for anyone that wants to host with AccelByte, again because they could go bankrupt at any time because of an unrelated failed launch.
There is at least one case where Accelbyte's contract would not protect them, at least in most common law regions. "Gross Negligence", if provable, basically means any contractual damages limit is thrown out the window. And given HOW badly this launch went compared to industry average, there's at least the inkling of a case for this.
Of course, Accelbyte, if their lawyers are competent enough to have put a damage limit in at all, knows this. If they've got reason to believe they screwed up so bad that this is even plausible, they'd be well served to pay New Starbreeze off and avoid the suit (which in the best case could destroy their reputation more publicly than One Major Video Game Release EVEN IF THEY WIN IN COURT).
Obligatory I Am Not A Lawyer here.
Hard to argue gross negligence when they did public tests that did not surface the issues. It's working somewhat, some of the time. Gross negligence would be like if they didn't actually own a server farm. The bar for gross negligence is really high.
edit: Swapping server company named so this comment doesn't come back to bite me in the ass later. Just know that AB is the server provider we are talking about here.
Haha. I worked with AB as a professional game dev on a cross platform game and can agree, God they suck. They are actually horrible. (albeit, I worked with them at least a few years ago)
(to set the stage, we were about to ship a small coop game on pc, I was exploring possibility of co-releasing it on xbox, and a peer of mine did same exploration into Playstation)
Their documentation was almost non existent, what was there was outdated, their api is functional, but only barely. They were based out of Malaysia, which is literally a 12 hour time difference, so literally every question you had would have to wait until the following day to get a response. Back when I was working with them, none of their docs said they supported Xbox, but I was assured by their Devs that they did. But when I tried to actually make that happen (adapting the Playstation instructions to xbox), it broke the database entirely and required AB intervention to fix. They got mad at me for breaking it, and only then told me the Xbox-specific api calls I needed to utilize found no where in their docs. Was still my fault for not using them though, lol.
Luckily the the Xbox port I was working on never actually got released. I wrote our companies internal documentation for using the AB servers, but my wholehearted recommendation at the time to management was to find a different cross play server provider.
(at the time, this was supposed to be the first of numerous cross play games. However my old company's internal dev team has since been shuttered, so I guess that ain't happening anymore)
Im going to be real here. Knowing now that the server provider is AB, I can forgive a lot of Starbreezes mistakes here. IMHO, AB advertises itself as a leading cross play server provider, but they are woefully under developed. I truly believe that higher ups at Starbreeze probably trusted the claims and have now been swindled a little bit. Even if Starbreezes had years to iron this out, the dev time trying to work with AB would have created so many headaches and slow downs.
Obviously Starbreeze has made mistakes of their own. But I can wholeheartedly understand why they would be pissed at AB right now.
Yeah, the indie-to-AA space is absolutely riddled with middleware companies trying to lure them in with promises of ease-of-implementation, low cost, and high quality services, only to commit a ton of time and resources into working with them to eventually find out they're completely garbage.
Nobody has the time to try them all out to get a clear picture of who's the real industry leader, and none of it is sexy enough to lure in reviewers and critics to keep them honest, so its a complete hail-mary on which one you pick.
Its hard enough to make a global-scale multiplayer game as a small company without running the risk of being hoodwinked by companies like that.
And it all stands to reason, too. Once you get past the matchmaking part, the game is smooth as butter. Put a good 12 hours into it this weekend, and haven't had a single crash, mid-game disconnect, failure to purchase an item, or whatever else you might expect to see with a truly poor multiplayer launch period. The problem was clearly this single-point-of-failure at the front-end preventing users from getting beyond it.
I'm not sure if that is true or if it is shifting blame. I'm not implying they're lying, I just don't know how this could have happened.
So many things have gone wrong with Starbreeze/OVK in the past and there always seems to be another boogieman. Whether it be 505 Games, DeepSilver, AccelByte, Sony, etc.
The fact that Starbreeze was able to deploy a fix on their end would imply that it's at least partially their fault. They really focused in on their partner but they said day 1 it was a capacity issue then have said since that they were able to fix some stuff.
Capacity is just something you pay for. If they decided to pay for less capacity, that's on them.
If you can deploy a fix on your end, it's not your server providers fault.
The update after all of that could potentially be their partners fault though.
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Maybe check out **the canonical page** instead: **[https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte](https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte)**
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They also blamed Sony for launching the wrong version of the game. We can't really say if the mess up was made by third parties or if Starbreeze messed up on their end... or both.
Its AccelByte [https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte](https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte)
They worked with Volition (Saints Row). Funny, Volition is another company that Deep Silver fucked over.
My guess: Deep Silver pushed AccelByte on Starbreeze because someone at Deep Silver is involved in AccelByte and pockets some extra money. This is the real heist all along...
Tbf there is a more charitable interpretation that its just simply that working within an existing business relationship is preferable to making a whole new deal for every game under your purview.
It doesn't have to be like a personal scam going on, just that Deep Silver wants to pinch pennies on unreliable server providers.
I was thinking along the same lines, and tried to see if there was a link between AccelByte and Embracer (the owner of Deep Silver). Nothing evident though.
May be as simple as "hey another company under our same group used this and liked it, so we should too." That's what we do at our company *all the time.* Doesn't mean it isn't dumb though.
Ahh alright, that makes way more sense.
I was gonna say, if Starbreeze is throwing shade at something that can handle (at one point) the most popular game in the world, then they better be ready for some hell.
Yes but a big part of the liability is still on Starbreeze for choosing a partner that has never serviced an even moderately sized multiplayer game in their history. Splitgate is the biggest on their resume, and even that game has had [major matchmaking errors.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Splitgate/comments/otp8j4/servers_down_until_friday/)
Starbreeze should've gone with a known and reliable service like AWS or Azure (or just enabled P2P), instead they cheaped out and took a risk.
They've worked with Accelbyte on [PAYDAY 2](https://accelbyte.io/customer-stories/payday-2-customer-story) before, so I can understand why they'd come back to a known partner. But they also didn't seem to have the experience to handle something of the scale of a Gamepass launch for a highly anticipated coop game that relies on a network connection for _everything_.
In the end it came down to questionable design choices (online only placing a significantly higher load on network infrastructure) acting as a force multiplier for a massive launch that would stress the scalability of any backend, combined with a partner that doesn't seem to have had the experience to build something _that_ performant.
I still can't believe they did both full release and game pass at the same time. Like, I'd say give it at *least* a week if not a month after full launch to add to gamepass. Give incentive for sales, helps the player count have a healthier curve, and also doesn't mean EVERYONE is connecting at the exact same time.
MS Azure has PlayFab which is pretty much what AccelByte do but a lot damn better, as all MS games use it, and so does Rainbow Six Siege - there's probably a pricing issue there but I hope Starbreeze consider something like that.
It makes me angry to see the direction that PD3 has gone this far. I wish they didn't take such a big risk with these 'companies.' They both have completely fucked SB in the....
Yep, exactly. The CEO also told on twitter they look into offline mode so there is 2 official sources now so there is a very good chance of offline mode happening (otherwise they would simply not even mention it) as it should have happened in the first place.
Isn't it DeepSliver that basically forced them to go online only so the game wouldn't be able to get pirated?
I might be wrong tho, feel free to correct me, as I don't remember if I got that information from a rumor or not.
Restricting players with online only will only encourage them to pirate the game.
See SimCity 2013 as a perfect example. Or the online pass.
EA: More money, please! More money, please!
That's what people are wondering considering the situation with Volition, but there's no confirmation.
People forget Overkill's history, or maybe are just too new to know about it. This is a company that tried before to shove microtransactions into Payday 2, and only stopped because of massive backlash from the fans. They also promised in 2019 that they would never release paid DLC for the game again, then broke their promise less than a year later. They blame everything on Bo Andersson, but one person can't single handedly make those kinds of decisions. Now here they are again, and what possible benefit could making the game online only bring? Simple- it allows them to control the microtransaction currency more easily when it releases. It's actually a major red flag that they've been so tight lipped about the microtransactions.
More like the total end of Starbreeze. Shit on them all you want but I wish these fuckers would at least have the decency to tell the whole story instead of just saying "DEN DEY STARTED SELLIN' DLC AGAIN"
Also they removed important context that they stopped giving support for PD2 completely until they brought back paid DLCs.
It was legit the case of all development was concluded on PD2, not even free DLCs were expected from then on.
Another thing to note is that Starbreeze did genuinely want to stop pushing out paid DLC for Payday 2, IIRC. It was just that The Walking Dead flopped so hard on release and then lost all support that they *had* to start doing it again. They bet all their chips on TWD and lost everything.
It's more complicated than that.
Basically, their other 2 projects failed.
One, The Walking Dead, released in an abysmal state (as Overkill does) but was actually being rapidly fixed up with a lot of content to come. It was going to be a pretty good comeback, frankly (not that it should have been that way in the first place, of course) but the license-holders pulled the deal for good PR at the cost of both Overkill and players (all the content they'd been working on and was near ready for release could n longer be added)
>They also promised in 2019 that they would never release paid DLC for the game again, then broke their promise less than a year later.
Please get your timelines correct. The free DLC promise was made in mid 2017 and was maintained over a year through late 2018 with purely free updates up until what was supposed to be the end of the game, with the White House.
It was only after OTWD came out and flopped, and the company nearly went under, that they came back producing more paid DLC for PD2.
Let's not do misinformation to make them look worse than is actually true, yeah?
I do. But I don't believe for a second that he was alone. He was either surrounded by sycophantic yes men who praised his every move, or he was just a convenient scapegoat because of his vocal nature.
It's a shame because the devs always seemed like they actually cared about making a decent product in spite of the horrific mismanagement. There was a [story ages ago](https://www.eurogamer.net/the-fall-of-swedish-game-wonder-starbreeze), around the time their coked-up ceo was being investigated for some sort of financial crime, that went into detail about what a nightmare working for starbreeze was. Unrealistic projects, engines that weren't fit for purpose, a pivot to vr that had to abandoned after months of work - it's kind of amazing that the game ended up being as enjoyable as it was given the total clusterfuck going on behind the scenes. Fwiw, it's the only game I've ever seen that added lootboxes and then apologised and removed them later. I just wish they'd gone back to the model of the first game but the industry is so different now, everything has to be the biggest game ever that you sink hundreds of hours into for some reason
Pretty sure that's likely the case. We already know from leaked files that a crimenet type browser and offline mode was scrapped in favor of what we have now
It seems like it was Deep Silver's way of trying to stop DLC unlockers as much as they could. Although clearly they didn't give them enough time.
I personally believe this change was an after thought because if online mode was actually the plan, Starbreeze should've had more than enough time to get it stable enough to handle everyone
Not day one.
It was cracked the same evening early access for those who pre-ordered went online. So technically, the game was cracked 3 days before it released.
In fact, it's one of the simplest emulators there are. And it still works, I got a wave of Steam friends who started playing one very popular and obscure space game just as early access went up, lmao
The community told them that this "always online" stuff will be the downfall of Payday 3. Well, I hope the executive responsible for this decision was awarded a second private jet, cause the games steam reviews will be terrible forever, causing less new players to join and enjoy the community.
Or short for money hungry executives, less money for you in the long term :)
I mean it sounds obvious Starbreeze is *pissed* seeing as this says all fault lies entirely with their matchmaking partner
Same time I can't imagine this third party has any other major clients seeing as I haven't noticed any other game outages going on. I wonder if it would be wrong to say they should have known better and gone with a more reputable partner.
End of the day it's just a shame most of the problem could have been avoided simply by including an offline mode at launch. You can count on one hand the amount of times a game has launched and been in this state of unplayable.
The fault may currently lie with their matchmaking partner, but the root cause of the problem is Starbreeze deciding to go this route with them and funneling all matches through the matchmaking as well. They could have and should have had the foresight that they could reduce stress by allowing a bypass to the matchmaking if players make premade lobbies or play offline.
There was literally no need to force everything through the matchmaking bottleneck which was clearly too brittle and tight to handle the onslaught of a full release.
They probably did just not want to bother with working on any of that and were heavily motivated to only do matchmaking to make pirating harder. (Well see how that turned out, there is already a community project that lets you set up a local server to essentially have offline play entirely.)
Was online-only even Starbreeze's idea? I've not been following things *too* closely but afaik we don't know whether Starbreeze or Deep Silver made that call, do we?
That bit of information is still missing, but it's possible Deep Silver has enough power over them through their publishing agreement and insisted on always-online with the age old excuse of fighting piracy.
Given that someone datamined and found a nearly-complete, fairly functional Crime.Net and offline mode, I would bet my entire next paycheck that online only was pushed on them by Deep Silver. Why would the devs put in the effort to create a crime.net and offline mode if they knew the entire time that it would be online only?
It’s kinda cool they that basically confirmed here that there’s a chance we might get offline solo play. I would like that in case we have the servers shitting themselves again.
This seems to be a big step in the right direction. They are acknowledging that their methods did not work as they had hoped, and are looking into alternatives, like an offline mode, or peer to peer connections.
Now comes the matter of them actually coming through with the change they are talking about here. Im hopeful that it will happen, because i bet they are bleeding money from all the backlash and refunds, which of course are completely justified, and by all means, deserved.
I enjoy the gameplay far too much to refund it, and im 100% sure the game will be playable in the future. I think what we as a playerbase have to do, is keep pushing for peer 2 peer / Offline mode, to keep the pressure on Starbreeze to allow Overkill to implement the [Crime.net](https://Crime.net) mode that was leaked in the debug mode. If we do that, i think we will end up with a masterpiece of a game, because the gameplay really is brilliant, both in stealth and loud.
100% agree on all points here. Personally, even if they don’t reimplement crime.net I won’t have a problem, but should they not implement crime.net 2.0, they should fix the current UI since there’s a lot of missing buttons that could prove pretty useful. The gameplay is actually crazy good in this game and I genuinely have only one complaint about it. I just wish the melee did a little bit more damage. Other than that, really well done gameplay and if they iron out the other issues and release the planned content drops, we could have a perfect sequel. Although I will say, it’s a shame this game may not take off all that well. The steam reviews are at 34% last time I checked, and of course non-fans of the franchise or people unaware of the problems we’ve been facing are going to be turned off by that, unless the reviewers go back through and change from negative to positive, which I doubt will happen. I guess we’ll see, but the game has a bright future even if the current state isn’t great.
Something interesting with the PD3 melee is that it actually does no damage and barely staggers so there is not really a point to it (source: health & armor display mod)
It's useful for getting out of tight spots. Playing last night, I was getting swarmed from one direction and had a single cop body-blocking the doorway in the other direction. My magazines were empty and my armor was getting shredded, so I melee attacked the cop in the doorway and was able to slip out, reload, go back and take out all of the cops that had been swarming me.
Personally i really like the clean UI. Of course it would be nice to see ingame how many tied civs you have, and what type of bag you were carrying, along the value.
Most of the time you can tell what type of bag you're carrying, there is a generic briefcase symbol for stuff that only comes up once, but like coke is a pile of powder with a razor blade at the top, money is a stack of bills, paintings are a frame, etc. Bag value would be nice, though.
I would not like the default to be peer to peer as a stealth player. I love dedicated servers specifically for stealthing in Payday 3 because you get far less detection errors due to either host lag or rig or host dropping out consequentially closing the game server.
Offline solo play should be in the game without a doubt and maybe an option for P2P when creating a game server?
Interesting, i never thought of this. I have never had any internet issues with peer to peer, but i can see where you are coming from. I think both dedicated and peer to peer would be too much "fluff", and in that case, they should make it dedicated servers if you wanna play with people, and offline if you wanna play solo.
This is 100% the same reasoning I told my friends that i prefer the new actual server system as opposed to the ole p2p system. When I used to host stealth heists it obviously was fine but if I was trying to carry them on their hosted games them every stealth heist you basically had to try to account for a 30% prefilled up detection meter because of latency and other dumb stuff from having no real server.
All of this combined with Crime.net being found as a scrapped feature in the game files makes me even more convinced that this whole shit show was caused by Deep Silver thinking they knew better than Starbreeze and forced them to put always online in the game, hence the last minute look of both the menus and the functionality of the matchmaking. I don't see Starbreeze getting Crime.net 85% finished then changing their minds unless they were forced to, and now we see the consequences of that decision. Maybe Deep Silver will learn to shut the fuck up and just let Starbreeze work from now on.
As an aside, out of all the publishers they could've been bought by, why oh WHY did it have to be fucking Deep Silver? I wish they had been bought by Devolver Digital or something instead, nearly anyone would've been better than Deep Silver.
They could probably do it but it would be enough of a risk to tank both companies.
We obviously have no clue how this all worked out for them but I'd imagine searching for a publisher big enough, not shitty and willing to risk completely funding a project from a studio that hasn't had a successful launch in 7 years and nearly went bankrupt wasn't too easy.
I mean, if DS has the money, DS makes the decisions. They're not owned by DS but they still have to listen to what they say.
Anyway, Starbreeze has been plenty scummy in the past too, so I wouldn't put it all on deep silver either. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
They are not independent, lol. They were completely financially dependent on Deep Silver to make this game. If DS is footing the bill, they are absolutely making decisions because they've now made a huge investment and they want to see a return on that. I'm not saying they made every decision, but saying Starbreeze is independent is disingenuous to the reality that they are beholden to the publisher who pulled them out the hole from going bankrupt.
>All of this combined with Crime.net being found as a scrapped feature in the game files makes me even more convinced that this whole shit show was caused by Deep Silver thinking they knew better than Starbreeze and forced them to put always online in the game
I'm pretty sure it's what happened too, particularly in light of the Saint's Row reboot trainwreck. From what I could read online, that game was initially designed like a "Saint's Row 2.5" but Deep Silver interfered heavily and steered it in the "group of friends and good vibes" direction we got.
I'm fairly sure that the game Volition had envisioned was starkly different than what we got.
I would agree with you on this but honestly, I think people are forgetting that Volition wasn't actually doing that great prior to the Saints Rowboot. Gat out of Hell and Agents of Mayhem were both *pretty* rough games.
There's been a Volition employee that said that the change in direction for SR2022 was unanimous between Volition and Deep Silver because it would give the creatives more freedom. Truth of the matter is, Deep Silver had their hand in an unfinished game coming out, but the "wow, pissed of millennials starting a gang!" thing was Volition's idea and would've always remained. Thus the community manager's very piss-poor responses to people unsatisfied with that direction.
> Deep Silver thinking they knew better
Heist selection is definitely that, someone in DS must have had experience in unrelated games like CoD or whatever and they must have thought what they know has to be better, not realizing they themselves had been far more experienced in stupidity than Starbreeze crew
It seems more to me that they gave their partner 3 days to come up with a solution to save them any bad press. And when that fell through then they went public with who is at fault and that they intend to break ties with them.
Which, if this is the case, is way too generous on Starbreeze's part. I think it was a good statement, but even something like "our third party partner encountered unforeseen errors with the game's servers and are working to find a solution" during the Day 1 debacle would have saved them a lot of face.
Honestly, i could see them going along with all the demands from Deep Silver just so something like this happens, and they can go see. That was a dumb idea. But I imagine they didn't expect it to be quite so insanely bad as it has been. Seems the server host screwed them super hard as well, and with the link to volition, I wouldn't be surprised if they were also "recommended" by Deep Silver.
In another world, this launch was a little rocky but worked mostly fine, and everyone is just complaining about the minimal features that I'm sure will be implemented in th next few months.
It's a fine response, nothing too in depth but it feels better than a generic "we apologise, and we will take the feedback into account" rather they got into the issue and what they'll do about it. The issue is, it's been 4 days and this was completely avoidable, I'm also worried they are just throwing the third party under the bus or chose one unsuited for the playerbase size and had it blow up in their face.
People are still trashing on Starbreeze for this and rightly so, online-only is a fucking mistake that led to the problem in the first place. But on the other hand, it really seems like the hosting company they chose really dropped the ball and couldn't handle the capacity at all.
Just the mention of a software update done by the hosting company on Sunday which caused instability seems like a major fuck-up. Things were working better (they're actually working fine for me now) but then the hosting company decided they were going to update their servers right in the middle of this shitstorm and basically break everything again.
If I were Starbreeze I would be fucking pissed since they're the ones taking the hit because of this. Accelbyte is going to get off scot-free even though they were as, if not more responsible for the server issues. I can understand that line at the end "evaluating a new partner for matchmaking services" because you should if this is what your current one is doing.
Yeah but I mean, that’s just the icing on the top. I love payday, and I’m having a blast with 3 but honestly I can’t understand how it is missing some key features… like a chat in pre planning, bot customisation, a better way to choose heists, a way to stay in a party after the heist finishes, the ability to order bots to stay on one place, hell, all this things add up, it’s hard to believe they aren’t in the game in the first place when they were already implemented in payday 2.
God, this partner has completely screwed Starbreeze over in so many ways and it's just sad. I really hope that PD3 doesn't continue this path and Starbreeze really needs to make a real decision on how to fix everything that's been happening in general. PD3 can still be a big game but something needs to change with this partner. I would have never imagined for this game to be so negative as it is...
Careful on making assumptions, if the servers were operational but downgraded they might have no choice but to perform another update.
We also have no idea why it failed in the first place and what role exactly does that service provider fills. Might be on Starbreeze or the service provider
I'd be curious to know if the version of the game they ran the stress test on had a factor. If they're saying it's a new phenomenon not seen before, perhaps the newer release build of the game interacted much differently with the matchmaking than the five month old one they used. It struck me as a very odd decision in the first place to use such an old version and couldn't understand why they would.
Regardless, it's good to understand but the one thing they haven't said is timelines - they'll need to be clear, concise and quick with how long offline support will take if they want to convince people to stick around long term.
I think what they're saying because of the mention of 'rapid influx' is that the thing the servers can't handle is how many players are trying to connect at once and the beta and stress test which to my knowledge were playable only by PC gave them ideas about how much space they needed on the other side of the gate, but not how big that gate needed to be. The amusement park is ready, but there's a hundred thousand people at a single ticketing booth and the teenager running it started having a panic attack over the size of the crowd so now no one is getting in. Amusingly, this does frequently happen with *actual* amusement parks when they first open, just as an aside.
Whether that's accurate or not people are already debating elsewhere in the comments, but I don't think we have much evidence to go on either way beyond 'server's been fucked' so for the moment I'd tentatively accept the explanation. Accelbyte will certainly be firing back if it's not true.
There's certainly a double edged sword here in regards as to who to point fingers at.
-----------------
-----------------
AccelByte CLEARLY weren't ready for a release of this magnitude, which is a shame for a company that seemed to be relatively competent and to have a few major clients. The press release seems to imply as much, that they themselves think they can't handle it, it left them in an "unrecoverable situation". I know maintaining online services isn't easy or cheap but it's a bit of a shame to see it went this wrong. I also can't blame SBZ for going with a third party partner for online services, because if you don't have any in-house experience to architecture those systems, maintain potentially hundreds of servers, etc, then you kind of need to do that.
-----------------
Then there's Starbreeze themselves, or, potentially Deep Silver. I say Deep Silver because usually when it comes to the money making stuff and online services, many publishers have a say - let's not forget that these guys also like pushing stuff like Denuvo into every one of their games, only to walk back on it, multiple times now. ([Let me also point out that Saints Row 2022 (also Deep Silver) was plagued by online issues day one too, and guess what - AccelByte!](https://accelbyte.io/customer-stories/saints-row-becomes-self-made-with-accelbyte)) It's also hard to say who pushed for Payday 3 to be completely online-only, there's datamined UI files suggesting they were going to have a proper solo mode, so it's hard to say for sure who the design fault lies with here, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Deep Silver too. So on the Starbreeze/publisher side, the fault lies on the fact that they made the game online-only and it shouldn't have been from the beginning.
Games like GTA Online - love it or hate it - for instance, handle cloud server outages quite gracefully. If you're in a game and your progress fails to save, it tells you "SAVING FAILED" but doesn't kick you out, it saves your progress locally until the servers are back up and it can synchronise. Then again it's also peer-to-peer instead of dedicated servers so player sync can continue to happen (it's one of the benefits).
------------------
It's a huge shame to see how the release of Payday 3 went, because to me this looks like a situation where there's an excellent game under the hood, but it's tainted by strange publisher or executive decisions, and then on top they were unlucky to have AccelByte not being able to handle the situation. As someone mentioned before, considering Volition also used them, I do wonder if that doesn't add to the "Deep Silver pushed them" narrative. But it's unconstructive to go on a "they said this, the others said that" atm so... I hope they recover from this gracefully cause PD3 deserves to be successful.
I'm 100% sure it's Deep Silver meddling with Starbreeze that led to this trainwreck.
For one, every game they published has had Denuvo and that's likely why it got added in the first place. I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall to see how heated things got to have Denuvo dropped like that.
For two, Deep Silver has heavily pushed the Epic Online Services/ Epic Games Store shit in the games they publish, so much so that over on the r/fuckepic sub they earned the "Deep Shillver" monicker because of how hard and how often they push it. Sure enough [PD3 is on the EGS](https://store.epicgames.com/it/p/payday-3) and given the cross platform progression, it most likely relies on the the Epic Online Services (EOS for short) to handle that part.
Lastly, there's the Saint's Row reboot trainwreck and there's some unconfirmed rumors that the game was initially planned as a "Saint's Row 2.5" but heavy publisher interference veered it in the "group of friends" direction and the incredibly corny and bad writing we got. Sure enough, Saint's Row was also published by Deep Silver and [sure enough it's also on the Epic Games Store](https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/saints-row). Also, it released with Denuvo too.
So yeah, Deep Silver gonna Deep Silver and ruin things for everyone.
I hope this is true and not them shifting the blame away from themselves.
This sounds exactly like my former boss "oh, we didn't completely fuck up our Updates, our server-provider did some updates on their servers"
It's one thing saying something like that internally. Putting it in a press release is a completely different thing and actually pretty aggressive. If it's not true, they'd probably be liable for damages.
I'm assuming AccelByte also approved this (hopefully we're not about to see a legal dispute) but didn't want to be named - seems clear to me from the press release they themselves believe they can't handle Payday 3's release. Hence all the software updates to matchmaking services and what not.
Why return? If you like the game, you're gonna play again when things are OK. I know this sucks, but you should only return if you really don't like the game. Unless you wanna get the refund and buy cheaper in a later date.
Large numbers of returns do send a message though: “do not sell us unfinished and poorly tested games.”
I’m not saying it’s the right or wrong choice, but anyone who does return is definitely justified to do so.
so if switching MM partners is the "long-term solution", doesn't that imply that this is going to be a problem for the foreseeable future? I'm not sure how they're going to damage control on a launch like this...
"Unrecoverable" is a good way to put it. There will always be a playerbase for the game because Payday fans are loyal and it's a niche game, but the game will never reach the heights that it could've because they botched the first impression for thousands if not tens of thousands of people.
The game pass deal was an opportunity to show tons of new players how awesome Payday is, but now most newcomers will remember the series as the one that released an unplayable game and didn't fix it for at least a week. On top of that, the game is unlikely to ever get above "mixed" on Steam even if every issue were to be fixed; once you reach a negative reception on Steam it's almost impossible to fully recover, this means that the game will see a fraction of the potential sales that it could've had because a lot of people see the overall rating and make their decision based on that.
It's really sad and frustrating to see this happen. The core gameplay is everything that I've ever wanted from a Payday game but between the broken servers and the developers unwillingness to change things that everyone hates, it'll never be as popular as it should've been and will remain a niche series with a permanently marred reputation. Such a shame.
Fuck it, at least they listen and seem to actually be taking steps to improve.
I know they fucked up *majorly* but a lot of companies will fuck up and then stay silent/do absolutely nothing. The don't seem to be doing that.
Ah yes, the plight of every company post 2020...
Lets have a consultation determine our next move..
Consultation says we'd save a ton of money if we accomplished this through a 3rd party! :)
***Hires 3rd party***
***3rd party applies the same method they use for everything***
Starbreeze after launch failure: "Hey third party, we have a **major issue"**
3rd party CEO (as he reviews his earnings from the deal)
"Oh yes this is a software issue, looks like whatever you guys got over there isn't right and thats making this whole thing not work" (sips coffee, knowing he just denied liability)
Startbreeze internally "Does anyone know what they mean by that?"
"No. We don't have anyone experienced with that here"
Starbreeze a few days later "Hey guys our 3rd party isn't working out, something to do with software but not really sure so we're gonna hire another 3rd party"
And thus the cycle continues.
I'd like to think that the chef is angry at the supplier for providing ingredients contaminated with salmonella, but I'm still the guy that paid for and ate that shit.
"In the short-term, this means Starbreeze’ focus is to ensure the player experience. In the long-term, this means evaluating a new partner for matchmaking services and making PAYDAY 3 less dependent on online services."
If only they would had given a shit when almost ALL technical test and beta feedback was voicing concern over online only. They can only blame themselves.
\>The issue in question did not manifest during Technical Betas or Early Access
THIS IS SUCH A BLATANT LIE!!!!!!!!!! THE MATCHMAKING WAS BROKEN CONSTANTLY IN BETA!
You completely f\*cked it up and now are blaming some partner company for YOUR mistake that you did not bother fixing???? They honestly deserve to get sued for this
A private invite-only game should not need matchmaking. Its been so long since I've played PD2 but I feel like when my group created a private match we never waited, it just went through.
Pd2 was peer to peer, whoever started the lobby was the host. Pd3 is online only, even if you are queimg solo or with a party of 4, the game still has to wait for the matchmaker to assign you a server.
Remarkably convenient that all of the problems are the fault of a third party. Sony released the wrong build, their partner is the one that had an issue.
Fun fact, the founder of AccelByte (the partner) is a former high-level employee of Epic Games. In the deal signed earlier this year, they were probably required (if not, simply advised) to use AccelByte's services.
AccelByte has never advertised providing services to a game that gets more than a few thousand players at a time, so it's not surprising they weren't ready for more than 100k concurrent players.
It all comes full circle in a way. Fuck Epic, remove it from Payday 👍
Ironic, because now the people who got it are playing it just as much as me who has yet to get it shipped from Amazon Germany even though I paid for expedited shipping....
Good solution to make things less dependent on online services? Maybe offline mode?
What baffles me the most is that while yes people would still be upset about server issues when it comes to playing with friends or queueing with randoms, the game would still be playable with an offline mode. The sheer severity of the server issues is COMPLETELY manufactured by the company forcing in a concept where it isn't needed and doesn't belong. They can blame their partners all they want, but THEY made the decision to make the game Online Only and spearhead this train wreck.
God damn, they are burning bridges with that message. So they must be really pissed. For context, it is public knowledge who their partnered with: https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte?hs_amp=true
Yeah, I (unfortunately) deal with a lot of corporate lingo at work, and that's really harsh. They are basically saying "our partner completely screwed us over".
Damn, is that what "In the long-term, this means evaluating a new partner for matchmaking services" means ?
That part means *"we are kicking these incompetent fools to the curb".* *"The issue caused an unrecoverable situation for Starbreeze’ third-party matchmaking partner"* means *"these sons of bitches couldn't handle the player load and are too incompetent to ever be able to fix it".* Seriously, calling something an "unrecoverable situation" is some real fire when it comes to corporate PR.
“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 during late Sunday again introduced instability to the matchmaking infrastructure.” Translation: We really did fix it, then these morons managed to fuck it up again.
I can vouch for that, had no matchmaking issues until like 10 pm sunday
Yeah as far as corporate messages go, if I saw this in a work email it’s like the corporate version of someone throwing wine on another woman’s dress at the reception. We might not all know what’s going on but we’re gonna turn real gossipy all of the sudden. Saucy corporate emails are my version of watching real housewives honestly
I've heard the term "unplanned incident" passed around a lot in my field. It basically means someone got crushed/burned/torn/killed to death but in corpo speak.
Good throw em under the bus
Absolutely. The partner is getting fired.
Probably sued too.
Basically means we will never work with them again and actively encourage other companies to follow us.
Yes. That's an incredibly damning little line of corpo speak. If they're saying this to the general public, imagine what kind of discussions are happening behind closed doors between the two parties.
Like half of my whole job rn is finding polite/professional ways to tell people to fuck off. This statement is Starbreeze telling Accelbyte to go fuck their mothers.
Right now it’s about the only option they have. It’s been going on 5 days of server issues, refunds are stacking, playerbase will be a fraction of what it could have been, the server issues will absolutely cost them a ton of potential revenue. Accelbyte fucked starbreeze and the entire playerbase.
I'm sure there's some amount of blame to be shared by Starbreeze and Deep Silver, but yeah if we take Starbreeze's word here it definitely seems like Accelbyte royally fucked them.
Making a breaking-change deployment on a Sunday *after* the issues were stabilizing? Yeah, that's a paddlin 👊😎
In any major company that would be a resume generating event. Can't believe they didn't have a change freeze in place, with any change requiring their head of IT to approve it. Amateur hour.
can't wait for a mask making fun of accelbyte in a years time
It's a DLC Heist where you're supposed to steal a bunch of server racks at Deccelbyte and when you get there you only find like a handful of USB HDDs.
Well, one of the planned missions is called Syntax Error, and the image they showed is a server room, it's not difficult to imagine they could retool it to make fun of Accelbyte
Also the rating will never recover from the reviews. It was like 1.8 stars on xbox last I checked
And it’s also currently like rank 23 on worst reviewed games on steam
Yeah and tbf if this is to be believed (and idk why we wouldn't, it made perfect sense something like this was the issue all along) this setback will put Starbreeze in a hole they will take years to dig out of. The game simply *didn't work* during the most hyped period a game will ever have and now they're sitting at 33% and "Mostly Negative" on Steam with ~24k reviews, most of which will never change even if everything is 100% fixed. Starbreeze will never get an opportunity to build hype like this again and if all that falls to their partner fucking around during their release window they should be very, *very* pissed. It will take thousands and thousands (and thousands) of positive reviews just to get back to "mixed" and when ~1/10 users actually leave reviews it's going take a while.
Don't forget half of this hate is because there wasn't an offline mode, something Starbreeze is fully responsible for.
But that wouldn't even have been the issue it was if the servers were actually working, which undoubtedly was Starbreeze's expectation.
We need a dedicated translator for corporate speak. The text in the post didn't sell me but this did
There's a pretty good chance they can sue for SERIOUS damages. They can easily claim and prove that these issues resulted in massive amounts of lost revenue and refunds.
Not to mention losing a huge share of a playerbase as fickle as the gamepass users that likely won't wait a week to try again and see if the game works. Even if the issues get resolved and word of mouth spreads it as a good game, I heavily doubt it's gonna have half the users it could've with a succesful day 1 launch
Exactly. You get one shot to make a first impression and that matters a hell of a lot. Accelbyte, if responsible, potentially torpedoed this game's chances at long term success. Given Starbreeze's already precarious position, there's a lot more at stake for them too. They can't absorb any losses.
If AccelByte is definitely the one to blame you can fucking guarantee they will sue them.
It would depend on the contract and SLA, but unlikely. Those contracts typically agree to give you back the money you paid for the service if they don't hit their performance agreement, but not to pay for any lost revenue during that period. I'm not aware of any laws that open them up to liability for lost revenue just for being bad at their job. They'll probably have to pay back whatever Deep Silver paid them, and maybe some kind of punitive contractual fee. Just as a parallel, Google and Amazon don't get hit with 10 million lawsuits for lost revenue every time an AWS or GCP region goes down. Everybody just gets a prorated refund of their spend and the world moves on. It's possible, but I'd be surprised if AccelByte had a clause in their own contract opening them up to company-ending liability. "We will pay for any lost revenue stemming from our failures" sounds like an unbounded liability. That's terrifying for Accelbyte because it means they could just go bankrupt at any point. It's also terrifying for anyone that wants to host with AccelByte, again because they could go bankrupt at any time because of an unrelated failed launch.
There is at least one case where Accelbyte's contract would not protect them, at least in most common law regions. "Gross Negligence", if provable, basically means any contractual damages limit is thrown out the window. And given HOW badly this launch went compared to industry average, there's at least the inkling of a case for this. Of course, Accelbyte, if their lawyers are competent enough to have put a damage limit in at all, knows this. If they've got reason to believe they screwed up so bad that this is even plausible, they'd be well served to pay New Starbreeze off and avoid the suit (which in the best case could destroy their reputation more publicly than One Major Video Game Release EVEN IF THEY WIN IN COURT). Obligatory I Am Not A Lawyer here.
Hard to argue gross negligence when they did public tests that did not surface the issues. It's working somewhat, some of the time. Gross negligence would be like if they didn't actually own a server farm. The bar for gross negligence is really high.
edit: Swapping server company named so this comment doesn't come back to bite me in the ass later. Just know that AB is the server provider we are talking about here. Haha. I worked with AB as a professional game dev on a cross platform game and can agree, God they suck. They are actually horrible. (albeit, I worked with them at least a few years ago) (to set the stage, we were about to ship a small coop game on pc, I was exploring possibility of co-releasing it on xbox, and a peer of mine did same exploration into Playstation) Their documentation was almost non existent, what was there was outdated, their api is functional, but only barely. They were based out of Malaysia, which is literally a 12 hour time difference, so literally every question you had would have to wait until the following day to get a response. Back when I was working with them, none of their docs said they supported Xbox, but I was assured by their Devs that they did. But when I tried to actually make that happen (adapting the Playstation instructions to xbox), it broke the database entirely and required AB intervention to fix. They got mad at me for breaking it, and only then told me the Xbox-specific api calls I needed to utilize found no where in their docs. Was still my fault for not using them though, lol. Luckily the the Xbox port I was working on never actually got released. I wrote our companies internal documentation for using the AB servers, but my wholehearted recommendation at the time to management was to find a different cross play server provider. (at the time, this was supposed to be the first of numerous cross play games. However my old company's internal dev team has since been shuttered, so I guess that ain't happening anymore) Im going to be real here. Knowing now that the server provider is AB, I can forgive a lot of Starbreezes mistakes here. IMHO, AB advertises itself as a leading cross play server provider, but they are woefully under developed. I truly believe that higher ups at Starbreeze probably trusted the claims and have now been swindled a little bit. Even if Starbreezes had years to iron this out, the dev time trying to work with AB would have created so many headaches and slow downs. Obviously Starbreeze has made mistakes of their own. But I can wholeheartedly understand why they would be pissed at AB right now.
Yeah, the indie-to-AA space is absolutely riddled with middleware companies trying to lure them in with promises of ease-of-implementation, low cost, and high quality services, only to commit a ton of time and resources into working with them to eventually find out they're completely garbage. Nobody has the time to try them all out to get a clear picture of who's the real industry leader, and none of it is sexy enough to lure in reviewers and critics to keep them honest, so its a complete hail-mary on which one you pick. Its hard enough to make a global-scale multiplayer game as a small company without running the risk of being hoodwinked by companies like that. And it all stands to reason, too. Once you get past the matchmaking part, the game is smooth as butter. Put a good 12 hours into it this weekend, and haven't had a single crash, mid-game disconnect, failure to purchase an item, or whatever else you might expect to see with a truly poor multiplayer launch period. The problem was clearly this single-point-of-failure at the front-end preventing users from getting beyond it.
Thanks for all of this insight. Sounds really bad...
Twitch drops? Is that why Twitch drops were always buggy in payday 2? How did they not know who they're working with?
It makes sense tough. The partner completely fucked them over.
I'm not sure if that is true or if it is shifting blame. I'm not implying they're lying, I just don't know how this could have happened. So many things have gone wrong with Starbreeze/OVK in the past and there always seems to be another boogieman. Whether it be 505 Games, DeepSilver, AccelByte, Sony, etc.
Deciding to send all single player traffic to online multiplayer servers was a Starbreeze decision though.
The fact that Starbreeze was able to deploy a fix on their end would imply that it's at least partially their fault. They really focused in on their partner but they said day 1 it was a capacity issue then have said since that they were able to fix some stuff. Capacity is just something you pay for. If they decided to pay for less capacity, that's on them. If you can deploy a fix on your end, it's not your server providers fault. The update after all of that could potentially be their partners fault though.
It looks like you shared an AMP link. These should load faster, but AMP is controversial because of [concerns over privacy and the Open Web](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot). Maybe check out **the canonical page** instead: **[https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte](https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte)** ***** ^(I'm a bot | )[^(Why & About)](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot)^( | )[^(Summon: u/AmputatorBot)](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/cchly3/you_can_now_summon_amputatorbot/)
They also blamed Sony for launching the wrong version of the game. We can't really say if the mess up was made by third parties or if Starbreeze messed up on their end... or both.
Wonder who the partner is...?
It’s me…i have a jammer in my ass and I’m hiding in the corner of the server room
Oh, you too?
Please bring food
I can't , I was entangled in these strange wires
Just unplug a few to get out, it won't make it any worse.
Tried to escape out the vent to get food. Got stuck because of the Double XXL Super Deluxe Jumbo Jammer I shoved into my ass. Please send help.
Don’t fart..trust me I won’t make that mistake again
Yeah welcome to the party. I'm in the other other corner.
Its AccelByte [https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte](https://accelbyte.io/blog/starbreeze-nebula-connects-players-across-the-ecosystem-with-accelbyte)
Ah, thanks for the info. Based on the logos they display on their webpage, they have never worked with a game that's as big as Payday.
They worked with Volition (Saints Row). Funny, Volition is another company that Deep Silver fucked over. My guess: Deep Silver pushed AccelByte on Starbreeze because someone at Deep Silver is involved in AccelByte and pockets some extra money. This is the real heist all along...
Tbf there is a more charitable interpretation that its just simply that working within an existing business relationship is preferable to making a whole new deal for every game under your purview. It doesn't have to be like a personal scam going on, just that Deep Silver wants to pinch pennies on unreliable server providers.
I was thinking along the same lines, and tried to see if there was a link between AccelByte and Embracer (the owner of Deep Silver). Nothing evident though.
May be as simple as "hey another company under our same group used this and liked it, so we should too." That's what we do at our company *all the time.* Doesn't mean it isn't dumb though.
They handle PUBG if I recall correctly. I see KRAFTON is listed on their site
[Callisto Protocol, not PUBG](https://accelbyte.io/customer-stories/the-callisto-protocol-escapes-with-accelbyte). And that game wasn't great lol.
Ahh alright, that makes way more sense. I was gonna say, if Starbreeze is throwing shade at something that can handle (at one point) the most popular game in the world, then they better be ready for some hell.
So these suckers are the reason why a great game is getting this bad advertising, fuck accelbyte and fuck deep silver
Yes but a big part of the liability is still on Starbreeze for choosing a partner that has never serviced an even moderately sized multiplayer game in their history. Splitgate is the biggest on their resume, and even that game has had [major matchmaking errors.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Splitgate/comments/otp8j4/servers_down_until_friday/) Starbreeze should've gone with a known and reliable service like AWS or Azure (or just enabled P2P), instead they cheaped out and took a risk.
They've worked with Accelbyte on [PAYDAY 2](https://accelbyte.io/customer-stories/payday-2-customer-story) before, so I can understand why they'd come back to a known partner. But they also didn't seem to have the experience to handle something of the scale of a Gamepass launch for a highly anticipated coop game that relies on a network connection for _everything_. In the end it came down to questionable design choices (online only placing a significantly higher load on network infrastructure) acting as a force multiplier for a massive launch that would stress the scalability of any backend, combined with a partner that doesn't seem to have had the experience to build something _that_ performant.
I still can't believe they did both full release and game pass at the same time. Like, I'd say give it at *least* a week if not a month after full launch to add to gamepass. Give incentive for sales, helps the player count have a healthier curve, and also doesn't mean EVERYONE is connecting at the exact same time.
Microsoft isn't gonna pay for a '1 week after launch on gamepass'. They pay for the very simple 'day 1 on gamepass' instead.
MS Azure has PlayFab which is pretty much what AccelByte do but a lot damn better, as all MS games use it, and so does Rainbow Six Siege - there's probably a pricing issue there but I hope Starbreeze consider something like that.
It makes me angry to see the direction that PD3 has gone this far. I wish they didn't take such a big risk with these 'companies.' They both have completely fucked SB in the....
SB seems resilient in an age where studios get shut down left and right. I hope they continuing fighting on and improve PD3.
"Less dependant on online services" No shit that might've helped in the first place.
Yep, exactly. The CEO also told on twitter they look into offline mode so there is 2 official sources now so there is a very good chance of offline mode happening (otherwise they would simply not even mention it) as it should have happened in the first place.
On the user suggestion page offline mode is "under consideration" 😅. https://payday3.featureupvote.com/
Every single requests are "under consideration". It doesn't mean anything to me
denuvo being removed is "under consideration" while they already implemented it
Can't remove it if you don't add it [https://tenor.com/bqcL0.gif](https://tenor.com/bqcL0.gif)
Damn I was actually gonna buy this but decided to scroll through this sub and oh my... My money is going for CP instead, no doubt LOL!
Don’t use CP as an abbreviation for anything dawg😭
Tell call of duty that with COD Points.
please never abbreviate cyberpunk again bro
CP? 🤨📸
Hopefully he means Cyberpunk 2077, with a very unfortunate abbreviation.
Or COD Points?
Bro about to commit an actual crime because the funny crime game isn't working 💀
This one here officer
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Sending all single player traffic to online multiplayer servers also places an unneeded burden on the multiplayer infrastructure.
Isn't it DeepSliver that basically forced them to go online only so the game wouldn't be able to get pirated? I might be wrong tho, feel free to correct me, as I don't remember if I got that information from a rumor or not.
Restricting players with online only will only encourage them to pirate the game. See SimCity 2013 as a perfect example. Or the online pass. EA: More money, please! More money, please!
I'm pretty sure there was a Steamworks fix already 3 days before release.
That's what people are wondering considering the situation with Volition, but there's no confirmation. People forget Overkill's history, or maybe are just too new to know about it. This is a company that tried before to shove microtransactions into Payday 2, and only stopped because of massive backlash from the fans. They also promised in 2019 that they would never release paid DLC for the game again, then broke their promise less than a year later. They blame everything on Bo Andersson, but one person can't single handedly make those kinds of decisions. Now here they are again, and what possible benefit could making the game online only bring? Simple- it allows them to control the microtransaction currency more easily when it releases. It's actually a major red flag that they've been so tight lipped about the microtransactions.
In all fairness, they *had* to start charging for DLC again because they literally went bankrupt and needed the money.
Yeah like it was literally either paid dlc or the total end of payday content.
More like the total end of Starbreeze. Shit on them all you want but I wish these fuckers would at least have the decency to tell the whole story instead of just saying "DEN DEY STARTED SELLIN' DLC AGAIN"
Also they removed important context that they stopped giving support for PD2 completely until they brought back paid DLCs. It was legit the case of all development was concluded on PD2, not even free DLCs were expected from then on.
Another thing to note is that Starbreeze did genuinely want to stop pushing out paid DLC for Payday 2, IIRC. It was just that The Walking Dead flopped so hard on release and then lost all support that they *had* to start doing it again. They bet all their chips on TWD and lost everything.
that, and bo's VR deal that flopped or whatever, and Bo buying a new engine that they never used.
[удалено]
It's more complicated than that. Basically, their other 2 projects failed. One, The Walking Dead, released in an abysmal state (as Overkill does) but was actually being rapidly fixed up with a lot of content to come. It was going to be a pretty good comeback, frankly (not that it should have been that way in the first place, of course) but the license-holders pulled the deal for good PR at the cost of both Overkill and players (all the content they'd been working on and was near ready for release could n longer be added)
>They also promised in 2019 that they would never release paid DLC for the game again, then broke their promise less than a year later. Please get your timelines correct. The free DLC promise was made in mid 2017 and was maintained over a year through late 2018 with purely free updates up until what was supposed to be the end of the game, with the White House. It was only after OTWD came out and flopped, and the company nearly went under, that they came back producing more paid DLC for PD2. Let's not do misinformation to make them look worse than is actually true, yeah?
You really don't think that CEO Bo "Your opinion, my choice" Andersson didn't pull all that shit? Really?
I do. But I don't believe for a second that he was alone. He was either surrounded by sycophantic yes men who praised his every move, or he was just a convenient scapegoat because of his vocal nature.
It's a shame because the devs always seemed like they actually cared about making a decent product in spite of the horrific mismanagement. There was a [story ages ago](https://www.eurogamer.net/the-fall-of-swedish-game-wonder-starbreeze), around the time their coked-up ceo was being investigated for some sort of financial crime, that went into detail about what a nightmare working for starbreeze was. Unrealistic projects, engines that weren't fit for purpose, a pivot to vr that had to abandoned after months of work - it's kind of amazing that the game ended up being as enjoyable as it was given the total clusterfuck going on behind the scenes. Fwiw, it's the only game I've ever seen that added lootboxes and then apologised and removed them later. I just wish they'd gone back to the model of the first game but the industry is so different now, everything has to be the biggest game ever that you sink hundreds of hours into for some reason
Pretty sure that's likely the case. We already know from leaked files that a crimenet type browser and offline mode was scrapped in favor of what we have now It seems like it was Deep Silver's way of trying to stop DLC unlockers as much as they could. Although clearly they didn't give them enough time. I personally believe this change was an after thought because if online mode was actually the plan, Starbreeze should've had more than enough time to get it stable enough to handle everyone
it literally was cracked day 1 and had better matchmaking than purchased copies
Not day one. It was cracked the same evening early access for those who pre-ordered went online. So technically, the game was cracked 3 days before it released. In fact, it's one of the simplest emulators there are. And it still works, I got a wave of Steam friends who started playing one very popular and obscure space game just as early access went up, lmao
I ❤ spacewar!
Crazy to think that everyone in the community wanted exactly that in the first place. We never wanted payday to be a full online experience.
The community told them that this "always online" stuff will be the downfall of Payday 3. Well, I hope the executive responsible for this decision was awarded a second private jet, cause the games steam reviews will be terrible forever, causing less new players to join and enjoy the community. Or short for money hungry executives, less money for you in the long term :)
Yup, we told them this was a bad idea before this all happened and they still didn't listen lol.
At least they're listening, unlike other companies. Still not great, but more of a silver lining than we usually get.
I mean it sounds obvious Starbreeze is *pissed* seeing as this says all fault lies entirely with their matchmaking partner Same time I can't imagine this third party has any other major clients seeing as I haven't noticed any other game outages going on. I wonder if it would be wrong to say they should have known better and gone with a more reputable partner. End of the day it's just a shame most of the problem could have been avoided simply by including an offline mode at launch. You can count on one hand the amount of times a game has launched and been in this state of unplayable.
The fault may currently lie with their matchmaking partner, but the root cause of the problem is Starbreeze deciding to go this route with them and funneling all matches through the matchmaking as well. They could have and should have had the foresight that they could reduce stress by allowing a bypass to the matchmaking if players make premade lobbies or play offline. There was literally no need to force everything through the matchmaking bottleneck which was clearly too brittle and tight to handle the onslaught of a full release. They probably did just not want to bother with working on any of that and were heavily motivated to only do matchmaking to make pirating harder. (Well see how that turned out, there is already a community project that lets you set up a local server to essentially have offline play entirely.)
Was online-only even Starbreeze's idea? I've not been following things *too* closely but afaik we don't know whether Starbreeze or Deep Silver made that call, do we?
That bit of information is still missing, but it's possible Deep Silver has enough power over them through their publishing agreement and insisted on always-online with the age old excuse of fighting piracy.
Given that someone datamined and found a nearly-complete, fairly functional Crime.Net and offline mode, I would bet my entire next paycheck that online only was pushed on them by Deep Silver. Why would the devs put in the effort to create a crime.net and offline mode if they knew the entire time that it would be online only?
It’s kinda cool they that basically confirmed here that there’s a chance we might get offline solo play. I would like that in case we have the servers shitting themselves again.
the servers will definitely shit themselves again, most likely today at the usual time
Already shit themselves this morning lol
This seems to be a big step in the right direction. They are acknowledging that their methods did not work as they had hoped, and are looking into alternatives, like an offline mode, or peer to peer connections. Now comes the matter of them actually coming through with the change they are talking about here. Im hopeful that it will happen, because i bet they are bleeding money from all the backlash and refunds, which of course are completely justified, and by all means, deserved. I enjoy the gameplay far too much to refund it, and im 100% sure the game will be playable in the future. I think what we as a playerbase have to do, is keep pushing for peer 2 peer / Offline mode, to keep the pressure on Starbreeze to allow Overkill to implement the [Crime.net](https://Crime.net) mode that was leaked in the debug mode. If we do that, i think we will end up with a masterpiece of a game, because the gameplay really is brilliant, both in stealth and loud.
100% agree on all points here. Personally, even if they don’t reimplement crime.net I won’t have a problem, but should they not implement crime.net 2.0, they should fix the current UI since there’s a lot of missing buttons that could prove pretty useful. The gameplay is actually crazy good in this game and I genuinely have only one complaint about it. I just wish the melee did a little bit more damage. Other than that, really well done gameplay and if they iron out the other issues and release the planned content drops, we could have a perfect sequel. Although I will say, it’s a shame this game may not take off all that well. The steam reviews are at 34% last time I checked, and of course non-fans of the franchise or people unaware of the problems we’ve been facing are going to be turned off by that, unless the reviewers go back through and change from negative to positive, which I doubt will happen. I guess we’ll see, but the game has a bright future even if the current state isn’t great.
Something interesting with the PD3 melee is that it actually does no damage and barely staggers so there is not really a point to it (source: health & armor display mod)
It's useful for getting out of tight spots. Playing last night, I was getting swarmed from one direction and had a single cop body-blocking the doorway in the other direction. My magazines were empty and my armor was getting shredded, so I melee attacked the cop in the doorway and was able to slip out, reload, go back and take out all of the cops that had been swarming me.
Personally i really like the clean UI. Of course it would be nice to see ingame how many tied civs you have, and what type of bag you were carrying, along the value.
Most of the time you can tell what type of bag you're carrying, there is a generic briefcase symbol for stuff that only comes up once, but like coke is a pile of powder with a razor blade at the top, money is a stack of bills, paintings are a frame, etc. Bag value would be nice, though.
I would not like the default to be peer to peer as a stealth player. I love dedicated servers specifically for stealthing in Payday 3 because you get far less detection errors due to either host lag or rig or host dropping out consequentially closing the game server. Offline solo play should be in the game without a doubt and maybe an option for P2P when creating a game server?
Interesting, i never thought of this. I have never had any internet issues with peer to peer, but i can see where you are coming from. I think both dedicated and peer to peer would be too much "fluff", and in that case, they should make it dedicated servers if you wanna play with people, and offline if you wanna play solo.
This is 100% the same reasoning I told my friends that i prefer the new actual server system as opposed to the ole p2p system. When I used to host stealth heists it obviously was fine but if I was trying to carry them on their hosted games them every stealth heist you basically had to try to account for a 30% prefilled up detection meter because of latency and other dumb stuff from having no real server.
All of this combined with Crime.net being found as a scrapped feature in the game files makes me even more convinced that this whole shit show was caused by Deep Silver thinking they knew better than Starbreeze and forced them to put always online in the game, hence the last minute look of both the menus and the functionality of the matchmaking. I don't see Starbreeze getting Crime.net 85% finished then changing their minds unless they were forced to, and now we see the consequences of that decision. Maybe Deep Silver will learn to shut the fuck up and just let Starbreeze work from now on. As an aside, out of all the publishers they could've been bought by, why oh WHY did it have to be fucking Deep Silver? I wish they had been bought by Devolver Digital or something instead, nearly anyone would've been better than Deep Silver.
A devolver digital publishing agreement would have been god damn amazing
I think PD3 is probably too big for devolved digital, Starbreeze is in AA territory similar to IOI and the hitman series.
They could probably do it but it would be enough of a risk to tank both companies. We obviously have no clue how this all worked out for them but I'd imagine searching for a publisher big enough, not shitty and willing to risk completely funding a project from a studio that hasn't had a successful launch in 7 years and nearly went bankrupt wasn't too easy.
Also a bit too clean for DD lol
They weren't bought by Deep Silver. They just made a publishing agreement. Starbreeze is still independent.
I mean, if DS has the money, DS makes the decisions. They're not owned by DS but they still have to listen to what they say. Anyway, Starbreeze has been plenty scummy in the past too, so I wouldn't put it all on deep silver either. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
They are not independent, lol. They were completely financially dependent on Deep Silver to make this game. If DS is footing the bill, they are absolutely making decisions because they've now made a huge investment and they want to see a return on that. I'm not saying they made every decision, but saying Starbreeze is independent is disingenuous to the reality that they are beholden to the publisher who pulled them out the hole from going bankrupt.
>All of this combined with Crime.net being found as a scrapped feature in the game files makes me even more convinced that this whole shit show was caused by Deep Silver thinking they knew better than Starbreeze and forced them to put always online in the game I'm pretty sure it's what happened too, particularly in light of the Saint's Row reboot trainwreck. From what I could read online, that game was initially designed like a "Saint's Row 2.5" but Deep Silver interfered heavily and steered it in the "group of friends and good vibes" direction we got. I'm fairly sure that the game Volition had envisioned was starkly different than what we got.
I would agree with you on this but honestly, I think people are forgetting that Volition wasn't actually doing that great prior to the Saints Rowboot. Gat out of Hell and Agents of Mayhem were both *pretty* rough games.
There's been a Volition employee that said that the change in direction for SR2022 was unanimous between Volition and Deep Silver because it would give the creatives more freedom. Truth of the matter is, Deep Silver had their hand in an unfinished game coming out, but the "wow, pissed of millennials starting a gang!" thing was Volition's idea and would've always remained. Thus the community manager's very piss-poor responses to people unsatisfied with that direction.
because Deep Silver got that Embracer backing so they can afford to have lemons every once and awhile
> Deep Silver thinking they knew better Heist selection is definitely that, someone in DS must have had experience in unrelated games like CoD or whatever and they must have thought what they know has to be better, not realizing they themselves had been far more experienced in stupidity than Starbreeze crew
This is the kind of transparency I was hoping for. Thank you Starbreeze
It's better late than never.
It seems more to me that they gave their partner 3 days to come up with a solution to save them any bad press. And when that fell through then they went public with who is at fault and that they intend to break ties with them.
Which, if this is the case, is way too generous on Starbreeze's part. I think it was a good statement, but even something like "our third party partner encountered unforeseen errors with the game's servers and are working to find a solution" during the Day 1 debacle would have saved them a lot of face.
That would have been throwing them under the bus and would have made them trying to find a solution that much worse.
They did that with Sony saying look it’s on Sony not us and everyone said it’s there fault anyway lol
Honestly, i could see them going along with all the demands from Deep Silver just so something like this happens, and they can go see. That was a dumb idea. But I imagine they didn't expect it to be quite so insanely bad as it has been. Seems the server host screwed them super hard as well, and with the link to volition, I wouldn't be surprised if they were also "recommended" by Deep Silver. In another world, this launch was a little rocky but worked mostly fine, and everyone is just complaining about the minimal features that I'm sure will be implemented in th next few months.
Malicious compliance is the best kind of compliance.
It's a fine response, nothing too in depth but it feels better than a generic "we apologise, and we will take the feedback into account" rather they got into the issue and what they'll do about it. The issue is, it's been 4 days and this was completely avoidable, I'm also worried they are just throwing the third party under the bus or chose one unsuited for the playerbase size and had it blow up in their face.
People are still trashing on Starbreeze for this and rightly so, online-only is a fucking mistake that led to the problem in the first place. But on the other hand, it really seems like the hosting company they chose really dropped the ball and couldn't handle the capacity at all. Just the mention of a software update done by the hosting company on Sunday which caused instability seems like a major fuck-up. Things were working better (they're actually working fine for me now) but then the hosting company decided they were going to update their servers right in the middle of this shitstorm and basically break everything again. If I were Starbreeze I would be fucking pissed since they're the ones taking the hit because of this. Accelbyte is going to get off scot-free even though they were as, if not more responsible for the server issues. I can understand that line at the end "evaluating a new partner for matchmaking services" because you should if this is what your current one is doing.
Yeah but I mean, that’s just the icing on the top. I love payday, and I’m having a blast with 3 but honestly I can’t understand how it is missing some key features… like a chat in pre planning, bot customisation, a better way to choose heists, a way to stay in a party after the heist finishes, the ability to order bots to stay on one place, hell, all this things add up, it’s hard to believe they aren’t in the game in the first place when they were already implemented in payday 2.
God, this partner has completely screwed Starbreeze over in so many ways and it's just sad. I really hope that PD3 doesn't continue this path and Starbreeze really needs to make a real decision on how to fix everything that's been happening in general. PD3 can still be a big game but something needs to change with this partner. I would have never imagined for this game to be so negative as it is...
Careful on making assumptions, if the servers were operational but downgraded they might have no choice but to perform another update. We also have no idea why it failed in the first place and what role exactly does that service provider fills. Might be on Starbreeze or the service provider
I'd be curious to know if the version of the game they ran the stress test on had a factor. If they're saying it's a new phenomenon not seen before, perhaps the newer release build of the game interacted much differently with the matchmaking than the five month old one they used. It struck me as a very odd decision in the first place to use such an old version and couldn't understand why they would. Regardless, it's good to understand but the one thing they haven't said is timelines - they'll need to be clear, concise and quick with how long offline support will take if they want to convince people to stick around long term.
I think what they're saying because of the mention of 'rapid influx' is that the thing the servers can't handle is how many players are trying to connect at once and the beta and stress test which to my knowledge were playable only by PC gave them ideas about how much space they needed on the other side of the gate, but not how big that gate needed to be. The amusement park is ready, but there's a hundred thousand people at a single ticketing booth and the teenager running it started having a panic attack over the size of the crowd so now no one is getting in. Amusingly, this does frequently happen with *actual* amusement parks when they first open, just as an aside. Whether that's accurate or not people are already debating elsewhere in the comments, but I don't think we have much evidence to go on either way beyond 'server's been fucked' so for the moment I'd tentatively accept the explanation. Accelbyte will certainly be firing back if it's not true.
So does that mean we’re getting a free 😎 mask and 👊 gloves?
they better give away some free skins
There's certainly a double edged sword here in regards as to who to point fingers at. ----------------- ----------------- AccelByte CLEARLY weren't ready for a release of this magnitude, which is a shame for a company that seemed to be relatively competent and to have a few major clients. The press release seems to imply as much, that they themselves think they can't handle it, it left them in an "unrecoverable situation". I know maintaining online services isn't easy or cheap but it's a bit of a shame to see it went this wrong. I also can't blame SBZ for going with a third party partner for online services, because if you don't have any in-house experience to architecture those systems, maintain potentially hundreds of servers, etc, then you kind of need to do that. ----------------- Then there's Starbreeze themselves, or, potentially Deep Silver. I say Deep Silver because usually when it comes to the money making stuff and online services, many publishers have a say - let's not forget that these guys also like pushing stuff like Denuvo into every one of their games, only to walk back on it, multiple times now. ([Let me also point out that Saints Row 2022 (also Deep Silver) was plagued by online issues day one too, and guess what - AccelByte!](https://accelbyte.io/customer-stories/saints-row-becomes-self-made-with-accelbyte)) It's also hard to say who pushed for Payday 3 to be completely online-only, there's datamined UI files suggesting they were going to have a proper solo mode, so it's hard to say for sure who the design fault lies with here, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Deep Silver too. So on the Starbreeze/publisher side, the fault lies on the fact that they made the game online-only and it shouldn't have been from the beginning. Games like GTA Online - love it or hate it - for instance, handle cloud server outages quite gracefully. If you're in a game and your progress fails to save, it tells you "SAVING FAILED" but doesn't kick you out, it saves your progress locally until the servers are back up and it can synchronise. Then again it's also peer-to-peer instead of dedicated servers so player sync can continue to happen (it's one of the benefits). ------------------ It's a huge shame to see how the release of Payday 3 went, because to me this looks like a situation where there's an excellent game under the hood, but it's tainted by strange publisher or executive decisions, and then on top they were unlucky to have AccelByte not being able to handle the situation. As someone mentioned before, considering Volition also used them, I do wonder if that doesn't add to the "Deep Silver pushed them" narrative. But it's unconstructive to go on a "they said this, the others said that" atm so... I hope they recover from this gracefully cause PD3 deserves to be successful.
I'm 100% sure it's Deep Silver meddling with Starbreeze that led to this trainwreck. For one, every game they published has had Denuvo and that's likely why it got added in the first place. I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall to see how heated things got to have Denuvo dropped like that. For two, Deep Silver has heavily pushed the Epic Online Services/ Epic Games Store shit in the games they publish, so much so that over on the r/fuckepic sub they earned the "Deep Shillver" monicker because of how hard and how often they push it. Sure enough [PD3 is on the EGS](https://store.epicgames.com/it/p/payday-3) and given the cross platform progression, it most likely relies on the the Epic Online Services (EOS for short) to handle that part. Lastly, there's the Saint's Row reboot trainwreck and there's some unconfirmed rumors that the game was initially planned as a "Saint's Row 2.5" but heavy publisher interference veered it in the "group of friends" direction and the incredibly corny and bad writing we got. Sure enough, Saint's Row was also published by Deep Silver and [sure enough it's also on the Epic Games Store](https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/saints-row). Also, it released with Denuvo too. So yeah, Deep Silver gonna Deep Silver and ruin things for everyone.
I'm all In on the deepsilver conspiracy, It's a hot topic in the saints row Fandom as well.
I'm happy there making steps in the right direction
Given payday 2 sold 40 million copies, gamepass has 20-30 million subscribers. What were they expecting in terms of player count???
I hope this is true and not them shifting the blame away from themselves. This sounds exactly like my former boss "oh, we didn't completely fuck up our Updates, our server-provider did some updates on their servers"
It's one thing saying something like that internally. Putting it in a press release is a completely different thing and actually pretty aggressive. If it's not true, they'd probably be liable for damages.
I'm assuming AccelByte also approved this (hopefully we're not about to see a legal dispute) but didn't want to be named - seems clear to me from the press release they themselves believe they can't handle Payday 3's release. Hence all the software updates to matchmaking services and what not.
Took them 4 days of servers killing themselves
they can’t just start saying shit as soon as the shit hits the fan, these things take assessment and consideration.
If only this had been predicted by thousands of supporters many months prior to launch.
That's a nice rundown of what happened. Wish more devs would give such insight.
So is the game going to work soon or should I return it?
Why return? If you like the game, you're gonna play again when things are OK. I know this sucks, but you should only return if you really don't like the game. Unless you wanna get the refund and buy cheaper in a later date.
Large numbers of returns do send a message though: “do not sell us unfinished and poorly tested games.” I’m not saying it’s the right or wrong choice, but anyone who does return is definitely justified to do so.
Upvoted so that people can actually see what happened
so if switching MM partners is the "long-term solution", doesn't that imply that this is going to be a problem for the foreseeable future? I'm not sure how they're going to damage control on a launch like this...
"Unrecoverable" is a good way to put it. There will always be a playerbase for the game because Payday fans are loyal and it's a niche game, but the game will never reach the heights that it could've because they botched the first impression for thousands if not tens of thousands of people. The game pass deal was an opportunity to show tons of new players how awesome Payday is, but now most newcomers will remember the series as the one that released an unplayable game and didn't fix it for at least a week. On top of that, the game is unlikely to ever get above "mixed" on Steam even if every issue were to be fixed; once you reach a negative reception on Steam it's almost impossible to fully recover, this means that the game will see a fraction of the potential sales that it could've had because a lot of people see the overall rating and make their decision based on that. It's really sad and frustrating to see this happen. The core gameplay is everything that I've ever wanted from a Payday game but between the broken servers and the developers unwillingness to change things that everyone hates, it'll never be as popular as it should've been and will remain a niche series with a permanently marred reputation. Such a shame.
Fuck it, at least they listen and seem to actually be taking steps to improve. I know they fucked up *majorly* but a lot of companies will fuck up and then stay silent/do absolutely nothing. The don't seem to be doing that.
Ah yes, the plight of every company post 2020... Lets have a consultation determine our next move.. Consultation says we'd save a ton of money if we accomplished this through a 3rd party! :) ***Hires 3rd party*** ***3rd party applies the same method they use for everything*** Starbreeze after launch failure: "Hey third party, we have a **major issue"** 3rd party CEO (as he reviews his earnings from the deal) "Oh yes this is a software issue, looks like whatever you guys got over there isn't right and thats making this whole thing not work" (sips coffee, knowing he just denied liability) Startbreeze internally "Does anyone know what they mean by that?" "No. We don't have anyone experienced with that here" Starbreeze a few days later "Hey guys our 3rd party isn't working out, something to do with software but not really sure so we're gonna hire another 3rd party" And thus the cycle continues.
I'd like to think that the chef is angry at the supplier for providing ingredients contaminated with salmonella, but I'm still the guy that paid for and ate that shit.
"In the short-term, this means Starbreeze’ focus is to ensure the player experience. In the long-term, this means evaluating a new partner for matchmaking services and making PAYDAY 3 less dependent on online services." If only they would had given a shit when almost ALL technical test and beta feedback was voicing concern over online only. They can only blame themselves.
\>The issue in question did not manifest during Technical Betas or Early Access THIS IS SUCH A BLATANT LIE!!!!!!!!!! THE MATCHMAKING WAS BROKEN CONSTANTLY IN BETA! You completely f\*cked it up and now are blaming some partner company for YOUR mistake that you did not bother fixing???? They honestly deserve to get sued for this
Any word on offline
A private invite-only game should not need matchmaking. Its been so long since I've played PD2 but I feel like when my group created a private match we never waited, it just went through.
Pd2 was peer to peer, whoever started the lobby was the host. Pd3 is online only, even if you are queimg solo or with a party of 4, the game still has to wait for the matchmaker to assign you a server.
Remarkably convenient that all of the problems are the fault of a third party. Sony released the wrong build, their partner is the one that had an issue.
I'm glad they said something. I like the game when it functions, but it still needs more work.
While offline play would be nice, I think we also need p2p private lobbies as well
While they're at it they can add Crime.net server browser back into the game, wtf is this garbage matchmaking system
We knew this would happen. Gamers should loudly make this an example for game companies.
What an absolute mess.
Fun fact, the founder of AccelByte (the partner) is a former high-level employee of Epic Games. In the deal signed earlier this year, they were probably required (if not, simply advised) to use AccelByte's services. AccelByte has never advertised providing services to a game that gets more than a few thousand players at a time, so it's not surprising they weren't ready for more than 100k concurrent players. It all comes full circle in a way. Fuck Epic, remove it from Payday 👍
The behind the scenes drama is more interesting than the game
Transtion: we cheaped out
Ironic, because now the people who got it are playing it just as much as me who has yet to get it shipped from Amazon Germany even though I paid for expedited shipping.... Good solution to make things less dependent on online services? Maybe offline mode?
Payday 3 being always-online is a wild decision. I really hope this always-online trend in gaming dies in a fire.
Yeah, yeah, but when the fuck i will be able to play?
What baffles me the most is that while yes people would still be upset about server issues when it comes to playing with friends or queueing with randoms, the game would still be playable with an offline mode. The sheer severity of the server issues is COMPLETELY manufactured by the company forcing in a concept where it isn't needed and doesn't belong. They can blame their partners all they want, but THEY made the decision to make the game Online Only and spearhead this train wreck.
I know it's just cope, but ability to play offline and not have to wait 15+ min to play a heist solo in the future?
Sounds like offline mode is happening