Hello,
I wanted to keep everyone up to date on where we are and what we are doing.
The consumer response to SOCOM: Confrontation has been huge. We are consistently seeing almost 100,000 people log in everyday with peaks of 25,000 simultaneous users. On average, you are playing about 3.1 hours per person with a total of 300,000 player hours everyday. I would like to thank all of you for helping to make SOCOM: Confrontation such a great success.
As I'm sure many of you are aware, the launch has not gone without its share of problems. 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.
As a reminder, our scheduled daily server maintenance is between 5am and 8am PDT (8am to 11am EDT). We bring the servers down during this time to roll out updates. The servers will usually only be down for about 20-30 minutes but some updates may take longer.
In parallel to the server updates, we are also working on a new client patch which resolves some client side stability issues. These issues include getting booted to the XMB, large number of players getting disconnected from a specific game and other issues. We've been working on and testing this since the game launched and we should have a final version ready for release in the next week or so. It is hard to provide an exact date or timeframe as we need to make sure the patch is thoroughly tested and does not introduce any new issues.
We are also working on a patch to enable trophies and address various user feedback but this will be after the stability patch. Our top priority is getting both the servers and client as stable as possible before making any changes which could possibly cause other issues. Please continue to provide feedback in the SOCOM: Confrontation PlayStation.com forum. We do read it and use the feedback to make further changes and tweaks in future updates.
Regards,
Seth Luisi
Director of Development
Sony Computer Entertainment America