Multiplayer Connectivity Issues and how we're fixing them!

Apologies for the server connection problems lately, and thank you immensely for your patience as we work to get things resolved.

The servers have had stability issues because right now we're trying to upgrade how they work.

Toward the end of last year, we hired a new server engineer who’s working hard to get everything back on track. (You may have already met them; say hi to ButterOverflow in our official discord !)

We’ve got a mix of work we’ve done, work that’s almost done, and plans to improve things in the long term.

What we’ve already done:

• FixedClearing finished matchesFixed an issue where we weren’t properly cleaning up “old” games from our list of games to connect to. This would cause you to try to connect to a game which was no longer running, which was a major cause of failing to connect to public matches in late December/early January

• AddedPrepared for futured updatesInternally, we’ve cleaned up a bunch of issues that have been making it hard to release new updates to the game as fast as we want. Hopefully, this should make it faster and easier for us to release hotfixes to address bugs in-between our feature releases.

Coming soon (next hotfix, hopefully in the next week or two):

• AddedDynamic server capacityWe’ve upgraded our game server hosting to use a new system that will auto-scale our capacity. Some of our connection issues have been due to our servers being “full”; moving forward, it will automatically spin up a new game server host as needed.

• AddedFixing Invisible EnemiesWe’ve got a tentative fix for the annoying “invisible enemies” bug that is happening due to game clients getting out of sync with the game server. Alongside that fix, we’ve also added additional logging and metrics to our backend so we can track down if/when it’s still happening and have more info about what’s broken and how to fix it.

Planned future work:

• Rebuilding our “Matchmaker”: This is the program running on our servers that helps your game client find a game server to connect to whenever you play online. It’s missing a lot of features that could make it more robust and better at handling errors. And as we want to build out more features for CDDZ, we want a more solid foundation to build upon!

• Better Error Messages: Right now, whenever you have connection issues, the error messages we present aren’t very helpful. They’ll often give some generic troubleshooting advice like “make sure you’re on the latest game version!” even if you already are. We’re planning to make them more specific, and also to include more information on the error screens so that, when you send us a screenshot asking for help, we have more info to work with so that we can provide much better help and troubleshooting.

• Better Server Metrics: (Don’t worry, we don’t mean your personal data! We’re just talking about on our servers.) We’re planning to add more logging and metrics around when server connection issues happen. That way, we can more proactively find issues that are occurring and squash those bugs. Also, this ties back into our previous point about better error messages: on our error screens, we’re hoping to include things like a “request ID” that we can use as part of our customer support to be able to look at our logs and figure out exactly what happened for you, specifically, as our player, when you run into issues. And if we