It only takes one unexpected ingredient to make a spell or elixir go all wrong, leaving the caster with a singed beard and no eyebrows. The ingredient that caused Magicka: Wizard Wars’ open beta launch to go a bit wonky was people. Too many of them.
In an open letter to the community, Paradox North’s David Nisshagen apologised for the server problems caused by the unexpected influx of players and promised to set it right.
“It is an overwhelming experience both for the development team and for the servers,” said Nisshagen. “Yesterday, when most of you had severe problems getting into the game, we had over 2000 wizards duking it out in matches. We maxed out our capacity far quicker then we expected. So while we had, and still have, huge problems – thousands of players are actually playing. Our absolute top priority is of course to fix the problems and letting all aspiring and veteran Wizards alike experience the game!”
To solve the problem, more servers are being added and hardware is being scaled up, and the focus of the development team will now be on stabilising the servers and making sure that more players are able to make enemy wizards explode into glorious gibs.
Wizard Wars will continue to updated every Tuesday, alternating between bug fixes and new content, and the developer plans on improving gameplay when playing with higher latency or packetloss.
“There are so many fun things that we want to create together with this great community, and we’re really looking forward to getting started on social features, new game modes and content, supporting the competetive scene and improving the metagame,” continued Nisshagen. “There are a great many fun things to come in the future!”
Players will receive a special in-game thank you gift for putting up with the server issues and lag.