Outriders has had a successful if rocky launch. The Easter Weekend launch was plagued with server issues, apparently caused by the servers using alternative data management methods (“swap disk”), instead of faster RAM to store the latest player data. A rather lengthy Reddit post put up by Square Enix on the Outriders Reddit delved deeper into the problem.
“We spent over two days and nights applying numerous changes and improvement attempts: we both doubled the database servers and vertically scaled them by approximately 50% (“scale-up and scale out”). We re-balanced user profiles and inventories to new servers. Subsequent to the scale-up and scale-out, we also increased disk IOPS on all servers by approximately 40%. We also increased the headroom on the database, multiplied the number of shards (not the Anomalous kind) and continued to do all we were able to in order to force data into RAM.
Each of these steps helped us improve the resilience of the database when under extreme loads, but none of them were the “fix” we were looking for.
At this moment in time we are still waiting for a final Root Cause Analysis (RCA) from our partners, but ultimately what really helped resolve the overloading issue was configuring our database cache cleaning, which was being run every 60 seconds. At this frequency the database cache cleaning operation demanded too many resources which in turn led to the above mentioned RAM issues and a snowball effect that resulted in the connectivity issues seen.“
Now, reports have started coming in from some players that the first big patch is wiping in-game inventories. Some of these inventories belong to players who have invested close to 100 hours into the game. If you want to commiserate with your fellow Outriders, or if you are a troll and want to revel in their misery, you can browse the Reddit thread here. Long story short, people are angry and upset with some vowing never to play the game again while others are taking a stance that they will only log back into Outriders once the bugs are squashed.
People Can Fly are aware of the bug and have said that they are working on a fix and a full restoration for all affected players.