Free-to-play MMO survival game Once Human has taken Steam by storm, but as we know all too well by now, when a new game achieves immediate popularity, issues are bound to follow. In Once Human’s case, its servers have (understandably) taken a beating since it dropped last week, and now developer Starry Studio has apologized for wait times, revealed that improvements to its servers are on the way, and confirmed that players will soon start receiving “compensation” for lengthy queue times.
Once Human has already cemented itself as one of the most popular free Steam games of the year. It’s been consistently hovering in the top ten most-played games on the platform since it launched, and over the weekend set a new all-time peak player count of over 230,000. The survival game’s massive world, detailed base building, and surreal monster designs have gone over well, but it’s not been without some hiccups. Queue times and not being able to invite friends to crowded servers are arguably among the game’s biggest issues right now.
Starry Studio has now addressed this in an FAQ post. It admits that it has “no other choice” but to limit server player counts and put people in queues at the moment as it didn’t expect such a high volume of players. It promises that it has “personnel taking shifts and working 24 hours a day to make new servers available so that we can welcome more players to the game” and that more improvements to its servers are coming soon.
One such improvement is that it will start compensating anyone that’s been stuck in a server queue for a long period of time. This compensation will begin once an update for the open world game drops on Thursday, July 18. The FAQ is quite vague, and doesn’t explicitly say what you’ll be compensated with and what constitutes a ‘long’ wait. But I’m confident we’ll see full details on it in the update’s patch notes.
Starry Studio also teases “an invitation code feature” which will let you “invite players to join your server even when the server is already full.” However, this isn’t destined to arrive until August.
It’s good to see Once Human’s server issues not only being acknowledged but acted upon as well. The compensation will also be a bonus, should any of its short term improvements fail in reducing those annoying wait times. However, this isn’t the only launch week fire that Starry Studio has had to put out. It’s already addressed early performance issues, and has revealed that it will refund any duplicate purchases of cosmetics now that it’s changing its policy on bought items being tied to individual characters.
While you’re here, be sure to check out our list of the active Once Human codes that you can use to claim some freebies or find out how to change worlds in Once Human.
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