14 DAY TRIAL // SOCOM: Confrontation is a very interesting title which appeared for the PlayStation 3 on October 14, developed by Slant Six Games and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. Promising to bring back the old SOCOM US Navy SEALs franchise which was very successful and made history on the PlayStation 2 and on the PlayStation Portable consoles, the game was eagerly anticipated by shooter fans around the world.
But the launch didn't go very smoothly as one of the key features of the game, the multiplayer aspect which promised to give PS3 users a worthwhile experience, was flawed by the servers that should have hosted it. Stressed by the big number of players who wanted to get into the multiplayer action as soon as possible, they crashed and were offline for three days. It might not sound like much, but it didn't go well with the customers who had purchased the game partly due to the multiplayer aspect which really shined in the previous titles.
Recently, Seth Luigi, Development Director at Sony, released a statement concerning the updates that would be brought to the popular game. The servers will be updated but this means that another downtime period will be scheduled in order to start the whole process. He also stated that a few patches would be released for the game, fixing some of the more severe issues like players being booted to the startup screen while playing.
“Unfortunately, the server environment is not holding up during peak loads. We've made many changes and improvements to the server to improve the issues (the first few days were really rocky) but we are still seeing server issues when we get up to around 25,000 simultaneous players during peak hours. Our primary focus at this time is to resolve these server issues. We have all available resources looking into the issues and we are trying to resolve them as quickly as possible. It is not as easy as adding more servers, we have to identify and fix the bottlenecks in the system which are preventing the servers from scaling properly. The servers should continue to get progressively better as we roll out server side updates.”
It's really nice that Sony is trying to fix all of the problems and offer gamers a decent online experience because SOCOM is a great game, with a long history, which should not be tarnished by technical aspects.