Yesterday the Splitgate 2 Beta came roaring our of the gate and quickly hit a brick wall. The developers haven't given many details, but the symptoms seem to indicate they have some network bottlenecks and scaling issues. It started with in-game live updates being slow or non-existent, so transactions wouldn't show up under a player and player experience progression wasn't working either. It was just annoying at first, because every faction and weapon has a level, with each level working to unlock a new feature. No experience meant no unlocking.

To be fair, the Steam player count peaked around 12,000 players, which is probably double what was anticipated. I'm assuming console numbers were probably double or triple that at least. A Thursday morning launch probably seemed like a safe spot to get a soft launch and a chance to tweak things. Unfortunately, they had some issues hiding that soon appeared and were problematic throughout the rough day for developers. The player base has been drooling over the Beta launch date for a couple of months, but I didn't expect more than a couple of thousand players on Steam.

I did get to play the game. There was a point in the early afternoon where the player count dipped and I played 4 matches. Then late last night I was given a tip the servers were unofficially back online for some spot testing. I played another 5 matches before the servers were taken back down. The game is great! I love everything about it and can't wait for them to fix the issues so we can get back on. I really hope the player enthusiasm hasn't taken a hit, because this has been my favorite game since the 2nd Alpha test and I really want it to prosper.