Stress Test Recap & Next Steps

The stress test was very successful! It was great to see a lot of hard work come to fruition. Watching a lot of people log in and interact with the world and with each other was an amazing experience for us, and we really appreciate everyone who took time out of their busy schedules to come hang out and play with us. I captured this video of around 11 people killing the boss we placed for the test (no sound, sorry!):

Obviously there are a lot of bugs going on there (why are there so many DoTs showing up?!) but it was just really awesome to see a "raid" of 10 people killing something in game...seeing all the attacks flying at the boss, people handling the adds and shooting down the flying pod mechanic...truly neat.

Also if you want to view more video from the test because you weren't able to make it or just want to re-live your glory moments, some other community members submitted their own screenshots and videos as well: https://community.orbusvr.com/t/stress-test-screenshot-video-thread/136

At the start of the test we had around 70 people online. Then the server crashed about 30 minutes in to the test, and again about every half hour. Every time it crashed we lost a few folks. You can see from this graph (showing our bandwidth usage on the server) the crashes followed by not as many people getting back online:

Which is totally understandable! 30 minutes can be a long time to play something in VR, and not everyone wants to stick around while things are really buggy still :-)

Even still, it was exactly the type of data we needed to see. We confirmed that our server can handle around 30 players per shard without any major issues (the crashes were due to bugs in the code not a performance bottleneck). Our plan right now is to divide the zone that you all played (which is around 1 kilometer) into 3 sub-zones. So for example we could have up to 30 people in the village + beginner forest, 30 people on the lower level (path, lake, etc.), and 30 people up near the temple where the boss fight was happening. I think those areas are small enough that 29 other players should make it feel almost crowded! And the server will spin up additional shards for each zone as needed, so if there are 90 people who all want to be fighting the boss, there would be 3 shards of 30 each. Obviously once we get guilds and parties in place we'll make sure that you can always end up on the same shard as the people you want to play with -- although to be honest I think most of the time the 30 person limit won't really even apply outside of major hotspots like cities and bosses until our population grows very large. A population of 1,000 players (which I think is a good goal for the Beta) would on average only have around 100 people online at a time...spread across the whole world. But I could be surprised, so we want to be prepared to handle it!

There's already been a lot of good feedback posted on the Community Forums, so if you haven't already please be sure to drop by and let us know what you think:

https://community.orbusvr.com/t/give-us-your-feedback-from-the-stress-test-here/135/

We're taking all the input into account and coming up with a list of things to do before the next stress test, which will probably be a few weeks from now. You can anticipate changes to the class interactions, new locomotion options, in-game communication features, and hopefully even a fishing prototype to make it into that next test. We'll keep posting on the Development Blog as we work on all those features so you can see us building them.

Thanks again and we'll see you next time!