The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a massive number of players staying indoors to practice social distancing. Overall, this is a great thing, and while it’s certainly difficult to find silver linings to anything during this crisis, it’s been great to see the gaming community respond with unity and general kindness.
Unfortunately, everyone staying home means everyone getting online, and that means the online servers for games are getting tested as they’ve never been tested before. The Age of Empires franchise just discovered that as they brought down their servers to accommodate everyone.
Age of Empires found themselves with more players than ever before as more and more players signed on to pass the time. To deal with it all, the team had to bring servers down to make a quick maintenance just to stop them from potentially crashing.
SERVER STATUS: We've hit record concurrency today and we'll be running some reactive server maintenance to make sure everyone can play. This may take at least 2 hours, during which MP for Age DE and Age 2 DE will be unavailable. We'll let you know when MP services are back up. pic.twitter.com/5B8tdDQBrb
— Age of Empires (@AgeOfEmpires) March 21, 2020
“We’ve hit record concurrency today and we’ll be running some reactive server maintenance to make sure everyone can play,” the team wrote. “This may take at least two hours, during which Multiplayer will be unavailable for Age DE and Age 2 DE.”
Those that were playing by themselves didn’t notice any difference. The game was still perfectly launchable and players could play against the AI as much as they wanted to, as well as the campaign and any other single-player content. The only thing affected was, as you would expect, the online servers.
Thankfully, the servers are already back up, as the developers didn’t need too long to make the hotfixes they needed to make. If you were disrupted by the quick maintenance, your disruptions are over!
While the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly forced plenty of people indoors, Age of Empires has been enjoying a resurgence of popularity all its own. The somewhat-recent announcement of the fourth title in the series drove a great amount of attention to the franchise.
On top of that, the release of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition has proven to be wildly successful, with more than 16,000 players online as of this moment. The new record set today was 27,319, and it’s easy to see why that might give a server a problem or two.
As the weeks stretch on, there doesn’t seem to be an end to the social distancing and quarantining that the world has slipped into during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, we in the gaming community are able to take a bit of a reprieve from the stresses of the outside world and step into games – provided the servers stay up.
